Yeah, better to be made into an artificial carbon-fiber nanotubule in the Space Elevator.
Of course, any money to deBeers is blood money to an international cartel with a terrible record of exploiting powerless workers, so I'll opt for blood in my diamonds rather than on them.
I heard an interview with Jackson, who said that his idea with the Special Edition was to add in a lot of scenes that were deleted for time. He felt that 3 hours was as long as anyone wanted to sit in a movie theater. However, on DVD, where you can pause it at any time, stop, start, or watch any little bit you'd like, a 3.5 to 4 hour film is much more viable. So he's releasing the theatrical release soon, for people that want that, and the extended "director's DVD cut" (which will take more time, because they're actually going back and adding score to scenes that hadn't been fully produced and so forth) once its completed.
While it might have made some sense to wait and release both versions at the same time, the other will take longer to produce, so I don't see it as a particularly money-grubbing move. Indeed, it shows some devotion to the craft to be going to these lengths to make a really worthwhile DVD.
I'm waiting for the other, since TFotR is still at the local dollar theaters here, and I just saw it again last week.
Autopilot for cars is an inevitable development, but in the way that an ice-age is inevitable. Eventually it will happen, but not any time soon. The reason is that people have a much lower tolerance for someone else's error than they have for their own.
Aircraft are much safer than automobiles, in terms of fatalities and injuries per passenger mile. However, if anything goes wrong on a bus or a plane or a train, people get very upset. If fifteen people die in a given city in automobile accidents over (for example) the Independence Day weekend, and in another city 10 people die in a train derailment, the derailment will get a lot more press than the auto accidents.
The reason for this is that when people are in control, we expect to make the occasional mistake, but when we put our lives in someone else's hands, we expect perfection. So when we go to an automated roadway system, there will be much less tolerance of accidents than when people are controlling their own cars.
I predict that as population density rises in non-public-transit areas, like Dallas or Houston, we'll see a change in peoples housing preferences. Already in Dallas there is a big trend toward lofts and denser population centers as Dallas opens up its light-rail lines. I know of a couple of people who commute to work from the city center to their employment out in the suburbs by public transport, because they didn't like the perpetual traffic jams and construction delays that have sprung up as Dallas has grown. They haven't abandoned cars altogether, but they're cutting back.
I think that's going to be a more likely scenario than automated highways. Peoples unwillingness to put their lives in the hands of a system that could create some spectacular crashes, given the right software glitch, will prevent this coming to pass until there's a dramatic need.
What the heck is stopping us from setting up a transmitter station on the far side of the moon which beams out as powerful a message as we want without interfering with terrestrial communications one bit.
You'd be able to broadcast a hemispherical signal in all the transmission windows no problem. You could broadcast with as much power as you can provide, and the moon would sheild earth-bound and even orbital communications systems.
I've seen a fair amount of discussion about where to buy, and how to buy, but its always good to talk over some experiences with hardware, too.
If you're really looking for a homebuilt system for cheap gaming, I'd have to recomend an Athlon with a motherboard built around the nForce chipset.
First of all, while the top-end P4s are marginally faster than the top-end AthlonXPs, dollar for dollar AMD is still kicking Intel's ass. If you're not planning on spending the absolute maximum for the absolute best machine absolutely possible, then you're going to be making some compromises. So once you come down into the price-range that AMD sells their chips, theirs will always be the better performers.
The nVidia nForce chipset is pretty cool for those building a machine on a budget. For about $100 you get a motherboard with integrated 10/100 ethernet, a reasonably full-featured audio capability, and a GeForce2MX video GPU. If you had to get all those components separately, it'd probably cost a fair amount more, although of course you could also get better gear. Still, it leaves room for upgrading, as you can always add a better 3D card later once you've got some more cash. That and some more RAM would probably breathe enough life into an aging machine to keep it going another year.
You can put together everything for that from the case up with an AthlonXP 1800+ for around $600 if you shop around.
A CDR burner rather than a CDROM drive is always a good addition, but unless you're planning on watching movies on your PC, a DVD-ROM drive doesn't make a lot of sense. I've had one for two years and haven't run across anybody using DVD-ROMs for software or data that I'd be interested in, although we use DVD+RWs at work (with datasets that are over 650MB after compression). The DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD-RAM/DVD+R/DVD+RW products still seem pretty fragmented, and media are pretty expensive. So unless you've got an application that needs it, I'd save my money.
One more bit of info that might be useful. Crucial is one of the better names in memory out there, and if you go to crucial.com, they ship 2nd day air for free, with prices comparable to Kingston memory from other online places.
As always, these opinions are those of some random jackass on/. who thinks he knows more than he does:P
This is a big problem. I've built 3 machines now. When I put them together, they powered up no problem, although there was a bug in the BIOS of one of them that prevented it from recognizing any keyboard if some optional performance-enhancing setting was enabled. However, when I built my second machine, I sold my first to my roomate. Two months later, his machine started crashing, and then went down for good. At the time, I was able to swap some of the components out of my new machine for testing. Unfortunately, it was the motherboard. Since it was an early Athlon, it used the slot-A form-factor. Nobody was selling slot-a motherboards by that point, except for a few people who stock hard-to-find components for a premium price (over $150! That was $30 more than a brand-new t-bird/mobo combo at the time) Finally I found a slot-a mobo for $70, so we didn't have to shell out for a new processor.
Of course, there was no good way to be sure that it wether it was the mobo or the CPU, so I still could have been screwed after getting the new motherboard. Of course, if it had been me, I'd have spent the extra fifty bucks for the new socket t-bird/mobo combo, which would be a performance boost, and get away from an under-supported form-factor, but my roomate was on a real tight budget.
Still, if you're into it, its a fair amount of fun figuring this stuff out. I see it more as a hobby rather than a real money saver. If you're just in it for a cheap computer, this may end up being more hassle than its worth.
Yeah, but let's just be careful to avoid all the incestuous sex that particular reference is associated with. I really hope Heinlein didn't have any daughters.
Well, I've had to replace a bad mobo (with a different model mobo, but same CPU and RAM) on a machine that was dualbooting WinME and Linux. ME continued working fine (well, by ME standards, meaning it still only crashes once or twice a day) and Linux actually got more stable.
Just make sure to keep drivers and so forth current.
What with IBM making the G-4s for Mac, and making this chipset, d'you think they could finally bring Macs out of the PC100 world, and get a memory pipeline worth having?
Simple. Next time you put together a computer, buy a chipset for DDR-II, but only put pc2100 memory in. Then, six months later, buy screaming fast DDR-II memory. Sure it'll cost you more in the long run, but you'll have upgraded your RAM successfully. Or you could do like everybody else and buy more RAM rather than faster to make your upgrade.
Of course, if you had one of the early AMD t-bird chips, you could buy an XP and run it on the same motherboard, so CPUs generally are upgradeable within the same form-factor. Same is true for a Duron to XP upgrade.
If you're having tp re-install your OS for a CPU or RAM upgrade, you've got bigger problems.
Uhhh, Sure 'The Patriot' takes some historical license, but Cornwalis and Tarleton (whose name was changed so as not to malign a man with fictitious misdeeds) are fairly accurately portrayed in general attitude and action, if not in specifics.
Tarleton was refered to in the US as 'Bloody Tarleton' because (for example) when a woman refused to tell where her husband was, she and all her children were barricaded into their house, which the redcoats then set on fire. The woman and all her children burned to death. In the movie this was portrayed as a small church with 20 or so villagers in it. Yes, the event in the movie did not happen. And no, there was no British colonel named Taddington, or whatever the name in the movie was. But no matter how wonderful he was as Mayor of Liverpool after the war, he still killed a lot of innocent American civilians, and was still a brutal bloody bastard during the war. If that insults the British, I'm sorry you feel that way. But Americans portray ourselves as brutal murderers with fictitious accounts of our actions in Vietnam.
Of course, most Brits have more sense than to take offense at popcorn fare about the American revolution. They see it for what it is. The Germans are our allies these days too, and neither Brits or Yanks would blink an eye at making some fictitious Nazi engage in nasty behaviour only to be defied by the upstanding young Tommies and GIs.
Seriously, though, why the hell are we even discussing U-571 in May of 2002? Surely there are better things for/. to do than dredge up crappy movies from two years ago to complain about. Aren't there?
Absolutely. From a science fiction standpoint, (as opposed to space-opera) vision and plausibility are key, while shoot'em up whizbangs are gravy if you've got 'em.
I'm a bit suprised that Contact didn't make it into the list. Its incredibly plausible. Almost nothing I saw there was too wacky to believe. The Howard Hughes figure might have been considered too over-the-top if he weren't based on the real-life characters of Howard Hughes and to a lesser extent L. Ron Hubbard, but not much else is too out there.
But consider what the story tries to do. It examines human society's responses to an alien message. It also shows the only good portrayal of a female scientist I've ever seen in a movie.
Gattaca similarly takes a narrow set of issues and examines what effects they'd have on our society, in this case genetics, and the inherent inequities of genetic engineering.
Both movies take a pretty calm approach to the exploring the subjects involved. Both take a hit from the space-opera crowd for being boring. But in the end, I can watch those two movies much more frequently than even Blade Runner (which I get pretty sleepy watching, although I like the movie).
There shouldn't be any single interface. Some interfaces work better for some things than others. Setting up search queries is faster in spoken word than with pointy-clicky. It's perhaps best to think of it this way. Things that you'd ask a secretary to do are best done by voice. 'Bring me all the files on the Jones account that deal with sales to the Smiths.' So when the computer is being your secretary, speaking in natural language with audio cues makes a lot of sense.
However, when you're doing something that in nature would be done by manipulating something with your hand, a manual/visual interface is better. But while a mouse is best for constantly reconfigured interfaces, it lacks a lot of tactile cues that help keep things spatially referenced.
One of my beefs with ST:TNG was that they removed every button on the ship and replaced them with those touch screens. That means that to find a control you have to look at the panel, and find the individual control you want. You can't feel your way to it. Its a lot easier to hit the right button if you can feel it with your fingers when you press it. I have the same problem with membrane keypads on microwaves. No tactile response.
That and those stupid pajama uniforms, but that's a different rant;P
The dubious argument about interfering with memory is pretty weak
This is actually true, at least to some extent. Its why talking on the cell phone and driving is a bad idea, even if you have a speakerphone or a ear bud. The problem is not talking itself (afaik) but rather talking to someone who's not right there. You subconsiously visualize an imagined face for the person, because we're used to seeing their responses. When we don't get any, we ramp up the amount of brain power we devote to talking and listening to make up the difference. I've got a speaker on my mobile phone, but if I use it while driving, I'm a worse driver than if I just (for example) hold a coke in my hand (which ties up one of my driving hands as much as a phone does). I'd like to see a study on the relative impairment of drivers who have.08 blood alcohol and who are talking on the phone.
Unless he's going to get the Vorlons to tweak Thabo Mbeki's mind such that he stops believing that AIDS isn't caused by HIV, and starts pursuing a policy to stop AIDS infections.
OK quick geography lesson: Ain't no Columbus in SC. Dude prolly mean Columbia (home of Kryotech, to all you overclockers out there). Also, Greenville/Spartanburg is where a good portion of the tech-sector jobs are in SC. There's been a history of some decent moderate Republican guys coming out of there. Unfortunately, there's also a big semi-rural population of heavy-duty reactionaries lurking up there in the upstate. I'm not sure that MB is really gonna eclipse the upstate for economic activity.
The bigger problem is South Carolina's weird politics. Its not a state that takes the advice of folks from the left coast on anything. If SC gets wind of anybody trying to tell them to do anything, they will quite happily cut off their own nose to spite the ferner. It also is notoriously slow to change its mind, and Hollings is quite possibly the longest serving junior senator in history (nobody forget Strom). Getting people to not vote for Hollings would mean giving up both Strom (who will retire at age 100 this term) and Hollings, both of whom have helluva seniority in the Senate, which equates to power. That would leave a small state with a dicey economy with no senatorial clout. They'd probably be afraid that no one would take them seriously (few do now) without at least one of thier elder statesmen running amok in DC. And its been a while since I've seen a Republican or Democrat in SC that I could really get behind. Gov. Campbell was the last Republican, and Bob Sheheen (former speaker of the state House) was the last Democrat. These days the parties are in too much control, and are running idiots that they can manipulate.
Uhh, the GSM/CDMA argument is wholly irrelevant here. CDMA could be just as transparent as GSM, if the cell companies implemented the technology with transparency in mind. Hell, I could roam digitally, and have better coverage, but I turned digital roaming off because it costs more. There's no technical barrier to roaming (in fact, if I'm not mistaken, all carriers are required to allow competitor's customers use thier networks free of charge for 911 calls.)
This debate over GSM/CDMA has gotten ridiculous, not because America's CDMA implimentation is better than Europes implimentation of GSM. Quite the contrary, its pretty clear that Europe does more with GSM than the US does with CDMA. But CDMA isn't the problem, and adopting GSM isn't the only way to make American cell service better. People don't understand that GSM isn't inherently better than CDMA, its just that the EU companies use it better.
Indeed, CDMA is the better technology (I work for an English wireless engineering company and although I am not an engineer, I'm quoting RF engineers I drink beer with) and has a lot of advantages over GSM. However, like VHS/Betamax, GSM is used more, and has more features, but CDMA could have all those and more.
Now, having a more uniform CDMA method in the US would be vastly superior to the current willy-nilly mish-mash we have, but insisting that we go to the EU system may not be the best idea.
Also, part of the reason a lot of the text/messaging apps haven't caught on in the US is that Americans aren't as receptive to text on cellphone. I, at least, would rather just call somebody and leave a voicemail than spend all that time fscking around with trying to type text on a numeric keypad. Who has time for that?
The US & Canada already have a significant investment in CDMA. Having the different carriers allow interoperability over thier CDMA networks would only require a software change on existing phones and towers/switches. There's no need to throw away 30 million handsets (or however many) and 10,000 ($million+ dollar a pop) cell sites just so that I can use my current phone the once every two years I find myself in Europe or Japan. I'd much rather have my current phone work better, than throw it away and spend another $200 on a phone, plus have to pay twice as much for service to cover the billion-dollar transition to all new equipment.
Spending billion-dollar sums for million-dollar fixes is far more idiotic than the current US system.
Sure, Europe and Japan use GSM, but arguing that that means we have to switch to GSM is saying that Linux and Mac users have to switch to Windows.
Well, energy is not the only use for oil. There will always be a demand for oil to feed the chemical industry. You can't make plastic from hydrogen (although plastic.com produces a lot of methane). My biggest reason for supporting a conversion to a different source of energy is that I really don't want to live in a world without plastic. Have you guys used some of the crap made from sheet metal and glass, the previous materials most of our plastic components are made of? Its crap! Brushed aluminum cases notwithstanding.
So even if we converted to a solar/hydrogen/happythoughts economy, we'd still need oil. Ever tried to lubricate something with liquid hydrogen?
I assume there have to be some checks to how much we remove, but if profit is as stake, will there really be those checks?
This would undoubtedly be a corporation doing it for the government. While there'd be the inevitable cost overruns, I have no doubt that profit motive wouldn't cause the company to overdo it. The reason is this: The government will pay the company its costs plus a reasonable (or not so reasonable) level of profit, regardless of its effectiveness. If CO2 levels get too low, the gubmint will undoubtedly be just as happy to pay them not to take C02 out as they were to pay them to do it. Just look at how profitable it is to not grow corn or pigs or tobacco!
In all they heady corporate growth of the '90s, people of lost sight of that other great motivator of foolishness, bureaucratic inertia. The bureaucrats will have us paying for this long after its served its purpose, but they probably won't make it run amok.
Still, we shouldn't go all the way back to 1750 CO2 levels, since that would probably leave us back in 'mini-ice-age' CO2 levels, which might not be optimal.
By the way, if they're looking for a barren, lifeless desert to put it in, I nominate the Los Angeles Basin. There's nothing there that anybody would miss that much, and it would cut back tremendously on the work the CO2 scrubbers would have to do. Everybody wins!
Re:What's the physics behind this?
on
Quark Stars
·
· Score: 2
Uhh, I'm a geophysicist, so I haven't studied much that was smaller than a crystal, but if I recall my quantum mechanics (9 years ago) and what little I know of general relativity (I only formally studied special relativity) it seems like gravity/black holes would not be quantum effects. I'd kind of been of the belief that nobody'd managed to make a good theoretical connection between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
So if the black hole is an outgrowth of curvature of space going to infinity (or zero, depending on how its measured) then how does that have any bearing on the energy states of the neutrons? Or is it just that there's no way to pack that many neutrons together to get enough gravity to curve space back on itself and create a black hole without taking into acount the quantum interactions. When they go to those wierd other particles, do they then drop back into the gravity well and start really compacting the matter til they produce a singularity?
I guess I need to read up on modern black hole theory some, and come back:)
What's the reason behind this? Is it the technology, the pricing, or the software? Halo is cool, but its no GTA3. Is there some break-out, gotta-have-it game waiting in the wings to make x-box take the lead? With PS2 getting Everquest, the logical response might be an Asheron's Call port to X-Box, but is there anything in the wings that makes X-Box look better?
Well, Layers are not humans, although I don't think they're technically orcs either. They use trolls pretty extensively though...
Re:You need a clue/There's a lot of that going aro
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
I assert that the reality is that we aren't that terribly different and that while the U.S. government is rigorous in it's defense of the freedoms of your average American, it really couldn't care less about anyone outside it's borders regardless of what the propaganda machine claims.
I didn't say ask Americans about the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians. I said ask them. They have their own ideas about the relative merits of the Soviets and Americans. As for how much we care about folks outside our borders, sure its less than we care for our citizens. Duh. But we really could care less. It'd be easy to care less. What exactly were we doing in Somalia? Or Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo? You can argue wether we should have been there, but we weren't there to protect ourselves, that's for sure.
bombings of Dresden and Hamburg [fpp.co.uk] (~175-200,000 dead), use of Atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki [northpark.edu] (~350,000 dead)
Yeah, we killed a lot of people in WWII. Maybe we should have stayed out. That would have helped a lot. Seriously, though, if you're so keen to grant us the dead from the sanctions on Iraq, can't you also grant us the lives saved from not invading Japan? If we had, at least a million Japanese would have died. Based on their actions on Okinawa, women and children would have been issued weapons, and perhaps as many as 100,000 would have commited suicide rather than accept defeat. By convincing the emperor that surrender was preferable to resistance, we saved at least two lives for every one that we ended. And that's not counting American casualties that most people use to justify the bombings of Hiroshima. As for firebombing civilian targets, yep, but you have to grant at least half those casualties to the British. Just piling up every single casualty in every single conflict that we were ever involved with on our doorstep is just not justified, unless you do similar analysis for other countries. Its really hard to argue that all of these deaths wouldn't have been replaced twofold by others if the US had just remained isolationist and been a nice little Switzerland.
blind eye to the large numbers of deaths of these exact same Kurds in Turkey [bullatomsci.org] (~40,000 dead).
I'm well aware that Turkey is not captain wonderful. I'd just as soon they were the worst country we had to deal with. That would suit me just fine.
and significant loss of life for Iraqi children [ngos.net] (~200-500,000 over 5-10 years).
That's what happens when you try to use peaceful means to end a conflict. Are they killed by bombs? No. Logically there are two alternatives. Let Iraq re-arm, in which case it will most likely re-start the Iran-Iraq war or the Gulf War (Between them those wars killed between 1 and 1.5 million, between 3 and 12 times more than you claim 'we' have killed through the sanctions program). Or attack Iraq again, this time obliterating all resistance and begining yet another foriegn occupation of Arab lands. Or there's a third possibility. Iraq could destroy its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. That's it. Hussein doesn't even have to leave power. Just let the inspectors in, prove they've decided not to use nerve gas on anyone else, and re-join the human race.
When other countries do this it's called terrorism.
Not by me. I call it violent or brutal repression. Notice that I never used the word "terrorist" with respect to Hussein. I reserve use of that word for blowing up cafes without warning or flying planes into buildings when the perpetrators are not obviously associated with a specific government. I'm not trying to pick nits, I just want you to know that I don't have a double standard. The Turks, Israelis, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Myanmarese, Indonesians, Chinese, N. Koreans, Iranians, Iranian Shah (back in the day), Taliban, Algerians, Iraqis, etc are brutally repressive regimes, some of whom are guilty of genocide. Others, such as the Russians, Chinese, (in some peoples opinions) Americans, French, British, Iraqis, etc are agressive regimes that often attack outside thier borders. The ETA, IRA, Hezzbollah, al Queda, Jihad, Hamas, and (in some peoples opinions) Fatah, are terrorists. Some states, and I won't do another stupid list:), covertly sponsor outside terrorist organizations. These are called terrorist sponsor states. I'm just trying to illustrate that I am not ignorantly spouting breathless claims of "terrorist" against anyone who opposes the US.
do a careful analysis of the actual facts or to use sources beyond those provided by the mainstream media.
I have some sources beyond the mainstream media, but I'm a scientist, so I have limited education in that field (ask me about elastic wave propagation in solids, I know more). However, I try, and I talk to people who read even more than me. Most notably, my brother and another friend whose degrees in international relations probably trump most/.ers. However, I can understand assumptions of ignorance. Still just getting the facts won't grant immunity to foolishness. Two people can read the same report and come away with totally different opinions about the meaning.
How many people died crossing the Berlin wall? Was it any where near the roughly 1 million civilians (from above) that the U.S. has directly or indirectly killed?
Are we to ignore the millions dead in Soviet purges, the Great Leap Forward, and the Culural Revolution? The roughly 1 million - and that number is small by most estimates so let's use the more pessimistic 3 million figure - is dwarfed by the numbers killed by the USSR and China (estimated between 5 and 10 million apeice). You claim that we're not any better than the enemies, but numbers don't back that up.
[following a statement regarding Muslim conspiracy theories and propaganda] Prove it.
OK, now that's just childish. Come on, this has been widely reported in the months since Sept. 11th. You don't belive me? 30 seconds on google should back me up. Or find a Muslim American and ask him. Hell, even horrid mainstream-media-outlet NPR could do that much (they interviewed a Palestinian living in New Jersey who'd heard the Mossad conspiracy reported on Arabic-language news, and thought it sounded reasonable). Just saying 'prove it' on this kind of discussion list I can only interpret as either "you're lying" "you're ignorant" or "I'm pissed that you're right, but I don't want to admit it". You're the one who's all about finding things out from outside the mainstream media. Put those skills to work. Try and get the pulse of the world outside. Or do you only go to 'independent sources' that are talking about how bad America is and ignore anything else? If I'm so ignorant, and just parroting a party line, it shouldn't be hard to prove me wrong.
Dead is dead. I'm not really clear why it should matter what the mechanism is.
Most of the world has clearly stated that nukes, gas, and germs are different from other things. If you want to unilaterally say that its not, go right ahead. Still, an anecdote will illustrate that gas attacks are worse than conventional attacks.
Again back to the Kurds (and yes I'm still aware of Turkey). There was a village in northern Iraq which the Iraqis were trying to subdue. For weeks they'd been hitting it with daily artillery barrages. Every time they started, the Kurds went into thier trenches, basements and other shelters. So most people were surviving. Their homes were getting annihilated, but the people were surviving. So the Iraqis decided to use their chemical weapons. They started with conventional artillery. The Kurds went into their shelters. Then they started the gas attack. The gas was heavier than air, so it flowed down into the shelters. The entire population of the village was wiped out in minutes.
That's the difference between conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. You ask if using more tonnes of bombs on Vietnam than was used in WWII was not a weapon of mass destruction. No it wasn't. Vietnam survived. They were able to take the losses. For the most part, we carpetbombed jungle. Hanoi, Haiphong, and the other major NV cities recieved only minor damage throughout the campaign. If we'd used gas, or nukes, we might have wiped out the entire North Vietnamese population.
That's not to say that bombs are good. I'd like to see a ban on landmines, and maybe even cluster bombs. They're all horrible. But none of those equals the horrific destructive power of chemical and nuclear weapons.
Regardless, you haven't really made any arguments that prove that the U.S. tries to be a force for good.
It cannot be proven. Can you really deny that you would always say "They're just doing that to push other people around and maintain their dominance!"? Why were we in Somalia or Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo? What political reason did we have to be in those places. I'm sure you could come up with one, but you can't prove it any more than I can. Emotions and motives cannot be proved. Gravity can. Feelings can't.
We haven't done as much for the world as we could sometimes. In Myanmar, we've got no bases to operate from, and we've got a bad track record of success in SE Asia, so we've not sent the fleet out. In Indonesia, the international community did act. East Timor is now pretty much free though, or at least as good as we can do. And we did that multilaterally.
One final question. Were we right to do nothing about Rwanda? Did America make the right decision in not throwing its weight around there, or did we duck our responsibility to save the innocent where possible?
You need a clue/There's a lot of that going around
on
Globalism Post 9/11
·
· Score: 2
While most of this is a troll, there are some nuggets of info there that bear some analysis.
The Cold War is a symptom of something else. It's the result of power struggles. Power struggles and the control for dominance is just that. And, IMHO, it's hardly ever justified. It's basically a form of mental masturbation and usually performed by insecure little boys who haven't figured out how to deal with their own personal problems. The reasons, however, are usually couched in some kind of rah-rah about protecting the world or some other such trite crap.
It's a little more than mental masturbation. Ask the Poles. Ask the Czechs and Hungarians. To believe that the Cold War was about nothing, or about ideology that really didn't matter is to ignore the massive differential in the numbers of people who were killed going over the Berlin Wall from east-to-west and vice versa. Its to ignore the relative freedom of the Tiawanese and South Koreans compared to the North Koreans and the Chinese mainlanders.
The US has a lot to answer for in its conduct of the Cold War. We didn't take nearly enough account of the wants and needs of the countries we interfered with. Often, to keep the enemy out (and yes, the Soviet Union and Communist China were our enemies) we backed people we shouldn't have. Still, there's an anecdote that perhaps sheds some perspective on events such as the Cuban revolution.
(I'm paraphrasing from memory here, so details may be incorrect, but I think the overall gist is accurate) During meetings with the Soviets in the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevera was advocating launching the missiles from Cuba. The Soviet representative asked Guevera if he understood that the US would undoubtedly react by hitting the launch sites with nuclear weapons, and that there would be no one left alive in Cuba afterwards. Guevera said that would be a price he was willing to pay. Unlike Che Guevera, the Russians really did love their children too, so it didn't happen. I believe this was recounted in an interview between Castro and an American reporter. If somebody remembers the details and can back me up, I'd appreciate it.
So if the United States opposed the various revolutions that Guevera and his friends were involved in, (remembering that Che Guevera was not Cuban but Argentine, and made a career of fomenting leftist revolution throughout Latin America) that's hardly a masturbatory excercise.
C) you have totally ignored that where there is a propaganda machine in place it's probably a small flame next to the might mechanisms of the American mass media which affect the globe.
Sort of, but at least in Arab countries, there's still a very pervasive and very effective propaganda machine. The percentage of the population that believes that the attacks of Sept 11 were orchestrated by Mossad (Israeli intelligence service), not by Muslim terrorists is pretty large.
you are operating on the basis of emotions for your deductive reasoning. In a huge number of cases the "dictator" in question that you refer to was backed by the U.S.
He's not the one who started trolling, dude. Something about pots calling kettles black.
However, as a logical argument, you're right that sometimes that dictator has recieved some support from the US, but lets take the example that everyone is fighting about now, Iraq. When Hussein was a ruthless but not overtly vicious dictator, we supported him. His regime was politcally repressive, but religiously tolerant, and suprisingly open for an Arab regime of the early eighties. The majority of the Iraqi population were freer than their counterparts in other countries.
Then came his war with Iran. This was his first agressive war, started by Hussein to get the oil terminals at the end of the Gulf. Early on, the US did not oppose (lack of opposition != support) him, because he was opposed to the brutally repressive Iranian regime which was at the time just as bad and openly hostile to America and openly supporting international terrorism. Hussein seemed the least evil of the actors in that region. We still did some business with him, but his main military support came from France and the USSR, with some from China.
Then the war dragged on, and the Iraqis began opposing his regime in earnest. Ethnic minorities, especially Shia muslims in the south and Kurds in the north began resistance movements. Hussien responded with military reprisals, shelling, and when that didn't work, shelling with chemical weapons. As far as I know this was only the second use of weapons of mass destruction since the end of WWII (the other being Soviet gas attacks in Afghanistan). These were carried out against civilian targets and horribly effective. At this point the US began open opposition to Hussein's regime.
After he decided in 1990 that it was OK to use his military to expand his power by taking over weak neighbors and their oil supplies, the US realized that Hussein needed stopping. Yes, that war was about oil. It was about how no one can take over another country just because he wants to sell more of it and gain more power from it. Especially someone who'd shown that he felt no compunction about slaughtering innocents with nerve gas. This is not the type of person you appease.
If the US were not involved, would the results be better? The US has largely ignored Myanmar, but they're in bad shape. The US tries to be a force for good. Sometimes we fail. Others not so much. Nicaragua is a good example. Democracy is taking hold there, after years of bloody Communist dictatorship.
At this stage, the best thing the US can do to bring democracy to Latin America, and southern Asia as well, would be to end drug prohibition. Nothing undermines those democracies like the massive monetary resources that are getting pumped into their criminal and insurgent groups. Judges get whacked if they try and impose order. End the flow of illegal drug money, and South America could really take off.
I must really be bored with my job if I'm willing to post a response this long to a Katz article.
The folks who have been saying "Broadband" are on the right track. I can think of two more factors which have cut my home web surfing time.
Work Connections At work, I've got a lot of time for web surfing while waiting for processes to finish (they won't buy me a second processor:( ) which means when I get home, I'm in the mood for something else. I only surf from home when I'm looking for something specific, which brings me to my second point.
Google Google has cut the time it takes me to find the exact info I'm looking for. I don't spend so much time dealing with extraneous crap, and find exactly what I want.
Of course, I don't create web pages any more either, so I'm not out there looking for ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, better to be made into an artificial carbon-fiber nanotubule in the Space Elevator.
Of course, any money to deBeers is blood money to an international cartel with a terrible record of exploiting powerless workers, so I'll opt for blood in my diamonds rather than on them.
I heard an interview with Jackson, who said that his idea with the Special Edition was to add in a lot of scenes that were deleted for time. He felt that 3 hours was as long as anyone wanted to sit in a movie theater. However, on DVD, where you can pause it at any time, stop, start, or watch any little bit you'd like, a 3.5 to 4 hour film is much more viable. So he's releasing the theatrical release soon, for people that want that, and the extended "director's DVD cut" (which will take more time, because they're actually going back and adding score to scenes that hadn't been fully produced and so forth) once its completed.
While it might have made some sense to wait and release both versions at the same time, the other will take longer to produce, so I don't see it as a particularly money-grubbing move. Indeed, it shows some devotion to the craft to be going to these lengths to make a really worthwhile DVD.
I'm waiting for the other, since TFotR is still at the local dollar theaters here, and I just saw it again last week.
Autopilot for cars is an inevitable development, but in the way that an ice-age is inevitable. Eventually it will happen, but not any time soon. The reason is that people have a much lower tolerance for someone else's error than they have for their own.
Aircraft are much safer than automobiles, in terms of fatalities and injuries per passenger mile. However, if anything goes wrong on a bus or a plane or a train, people get very upset. If fifteen people die in a given city in automobile accidents over (for example) the Independence Day weekend, and in another city 10 people die in a train derailment, the derailment will get a lot more press than the auto accidents.
The reason for this is that when people are in control, we expect to make the occasional mistake, but when we put our lives in someone else's hands, we expect perfection. So when we go to an automated roadway system, there will be much less tolerance of accidents than when people are controlling their own cars.
I predict that as population density rises in non-public-transit areas, like Dallas or Houston, we'll see a change in peoples housing preferences. Already in Dallas there is a big trend toward lofts and denser population centers as Dallas opens up its light-rail lines. I know of a couple of people who commute to work from the city center to their employment out in the suburbs by public transport, because they didn't like the perpetual traffic jams and construction delays that have sprung up as Dallas has grown. They haven't abandoned cars altogether, but they're cutting back.
I think that's going to be a more likely scenario than automated highways. Peoples unwillingness to put their lives in the hands of a system that could create some spectacular crashes, given the right software glitch, will prevent this coming to pass until there's a dramatic need.
What the heck is stopping us from setting up a transmitter station on the far side of the moon which beams out as powerful a message as we want without interfering with terrestrial communications one bit.
You'd be able to broadcast a hemispherical signal in all the transmission windows no problem. You could broadcast with as much power as you can provide, and the moon would sheild earth-bound and even orbital communications systems.
I've seen a fair amount of discussion about where to buy, and how to buy, but its always good to talk over some experiences with hardware, too.
/. who thinks he knows more than he does :P
If you're really looking for a homebuilt system for cheap gaming, I'd have to recomend an Athlon with a motherboard built around the nForce chipset.
First of all, while the top-end P4s are marginally faster than the top-end AthlonXPs, dollar for dollar AMD is still kicking Intel's ass. If you're not planning on spending the absolute maximum for the absolute best machine absolutely possible, then you're going to be making some compromises. So once you come down into the price-range that AMD sells their chips, theirs will always be the better performers.
The nVidia nForce chipset is pretty cool for those building a machine on a budget. For about $100 you get a motherboard with integrated 10/100 ethernet, a reasonably full-featured audio capability, and a GeForce2MX video GPU. If you had to get all those components separately, it'd probably cost a fair amount more, although of course you could also get better gear. Still, it leaves room for upgrading, as you can always add a better 3D card later once you've got some more cash. That and some more RAM would probably breathe enough life into an aging machine to keep it going another year.
You can put together everything for that from the case up with an AthlonXP 1800+ for around $600 if you shop around.
A CDR burner rather than a CDROM drive is always a good addition, but unless you're planning on watching movies on your PC, a DVD-ROM drive doesn't make a lot of sense. I've had one for two years and haven't run across anybody using DVD-ROMs for software or data that I'd be interested in, although we use DVD+RWs at work (with datasets that are over 650MB after compression). The DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD-RAM/DVD+R/DVD+RW products still seem pretty fragmented, and media are pretty expensive. So unless you've got an application that needs it, I'd save my money.
One more bit of info that might be useful. Crucial is one of the better names in memory out there, and if you go to crucial.com, they ship 2nd day air for free, with prices comparable to Kingston memory from other online places.
As always, these opinions are those of some random jackass on
This is a big problem. I've built 3 machines now. When I put them together, they powered up no problem, although there was a bug in the BIOS of one of them that prevented it from recognizing any keyboard if some optional performance-enhancing setting was enabled. However, when I built my second machine, I sold my first to my roomate. Two months later, his machine started crashing, and then went down for good. At the time, I was able to swap some of the components out of my new machine for testing. Unfortunately, it was the motherboard. Since it was an early Athlon, it used the slot-A form-factor. Nobody was selling slot-a motherboards by that point, except for a few people who stock hard-to-find components for a premium price (over $150! That was $30 more than a brand-new t-bird/mobo combo at the time) Finally I found a slot-a mobo for $70, so we didn't have to shell out for a new processor.
Of course, there was no good way to be sure that it wether it was the mobo or the CPU, so I still could have been screwed after getting the new motherboard. Of course, if it had been me, I'd have spent the extra fifty bucks for the new socket t-bird/mobo combo, which would be a performance boost, and get away from an under-supported form-factor, but my roomate was on a real tight budget.
Still, if you're into it, its a fair amount of fun figuring this stuff out. I see it more as a hobby rather than a real money saver. If you're just in it for a cheap computer, this may end up being more hassle than its worth.
Yeah, but let's just be careful to avoid all the incestuous sex that particular reference is associated with. I really hope Heinlein didn't have any daughters.
Well, I've had to replace a bad mobo (with a different model mobo, but same CPU and RAM) on a machine that was dualbooting WinME and Linux. ME continued working fine (well, by ME standards, meaning it still only crashes once or twice a day) and Linux actually got more stable.
Just make sure to keep drivers and so forth current.
What with IBM making the G-4s for Mac, and making this chipset, d'you think they could finally bring Macs out of the PC100 world, and get a memory pipeline worth having?
Simple. Next time you put together a computer, buy a chipset for DDR-II, but only put pc2100 memory in. Then, six months later, buy screaming fast DDR-II memory. Sure it'll cost you more in the long run, but you'll have upgraded your RAM successfully. Or you could do like everybody else and buy more RAM rather than faster to make your upgrade.
Of course, if you had one of the early AMD t-bird chips, you could buy an XP and run it on the same motherboard, so CPUs generally are upgradeable within the same form-factor. Same is true for a Duron to XP upgrade.
If you're having tp re-install your OS for a CPU or RAM upgrade, you've got bigger problems.
Uhhh, Sure 'The Patriot' takes some historical license, but Cornwalis and Tarleton (whose name was changed so as not to malign a man with fictitious misdeeds) are fairly accurately portrayed in general attitude and action, if not in specifics.
/. to do than dredge up crappy movies from two years ago to complain about. Aren't there?
Tarleton was refered to in the US as 'Bloody Tarleton' because (for example) when a woman refused to tell where her husband was, she and all her children were barricaded into their house, which the redcoats then set on fire. The woman and all her children burned to death. In the movie this was portrayed as a small church with 20 or so villagers in it. Yes, the event in the movie did not happen. And no, there was no British colonel named Taddington, or whatever the name in the movie was. But no matter how wonderful he was as Mayor of Liverpool after the war, he still killed a lot of innocent American civilians, and was still a brutal bloody bastard during the war. If that insults the British, I'm sorry you feel that way. But Americans portray ourselves as brutal murderers with fictitious accounts of our actions in Vietnam.
Of course, most Brits have more sense than to take offense at popcorn fare about the American revolution. They see it for what it is. The Germans are our allies these days too, and neither Brits or Yanks would blink an eye at making some fictitious Nazi engage in nasty behaviour only to be defied by the upstanding young Tommies and GIs.
Seriously, though, why the hell are we even discussing U-571 in May of 2002? Surely there are better things for
Absolutely. From a science fiction standpoint, (as opposed to space-opera) vision and plausibility are key, while shoot'em up whizbangs are gravy if you've got 'em.
I'm a bit suprised that Contact didn't make it into the list. Its incredibly plausible. Almost nothing I saw there was too wacky to believe. The Howard Hughes figure might have been considered too over-the-top if he weren't based on the real-life characters of Howard Hughes and to a lesser extent L. Ron Hubbard, but not much else is too out there.
But consider what the story tries to do. It examines human society's responses to an alien message. It also shows the only good portrayal of a female scientist I've ever seen in a movie.
Gattaca similarly takes a narrow set of issues and examines what effects they'd have on our society, in this case genetics, and the inherent inequities of genetic engineering.
Both movies take a pretty calm approach to the exploring the subjects involved. Both take a hit from the space-opera crowd for being boring. But in the end, I can watch those two movies much more frequently than even Blade Runner (which I get pretty sleepy watching, although I like the movie).
There shouldn't be any single interface. Some interfaces work better for some things than others. Setting up search queries is faster in spoken word than with pointy-clicky. It's perhaps best to think of it this way. Things that you'd ask a secretary to do are best done by voice. 'Bring me all the files on the Jones account that deal with sales to the Smiths.' So when the computer is being your secretary, speaking in natural language with audio cues makes a lot of sense.
;P
.08 blood alcohol and who are talking on the phone.
However, when you're doing something that in nature would be done by manipulating something with your hand, a manual/visual interface is better. But while a mouse is best for constantly reconfigured interfaces, it lacks a lot of tactile cues that help keep things spatially referenced.
One of my beefs with ST:TNG was that they removed every button on the ship and replaced them with those touch screens. That means that to find a control you have to look at the panel, and find the individual control you want. You can't feel your way to it. Its a lot easier to hit the right button if you can feel it with your fingers when you press it. I have the same problem with membrane keypads on microwaves. No tactile response.
That and those stupid pajama uniforms, but that's a different rant
The dubious argument about interfering with memory is pretty weak
This is actually true, at least to some extent. Its why talking on the cell phone and driving is a bad idea, even if you have a speakerphone or a ear bud. The problem is not talking itself (afaik) but rather talking to someone who's not right there. You subconsiously visualize an imagined face for the person, because we're used to seeing their responses. When we don't get any, we ramp up the amount of brain power we devote to talking and listening to make up the difference. I've got a speaker on my mobile phone, but if I use it while driving, I'm a worse driver than if I just (for example) hold a coke in my hand (which ties up one of my driving hands as much as a phone does). I'd like to see a study on the relative impairment of drivers who have
He's going to modify the deflector array to emit a quasi-symmetric graviton polarity beam
All of this sounds like applying a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem
Unless he's going to get the Vorlons to tweak Thabo Mbeki's mind such that he stops believing that AIDS isn't caused by HIV, and starts pursuing a policy to stop AIDS infections.
Of course, the way we figured it out is we went to the CIA and DOD and said,
"Are you guys planning to attack Chinese computer systems?"
"Of course."
So the thinking goes, if we're planning on how to do it, so are they. Ergo:
CHINESE MAY BE PLANNING ATTACK ON US & TIAWAN COMPUTER SYSTEMS!
Awake! Awake! Fear - Fire - Foes! Awake!
The Russians are also planning on retaliating against a major nuclear attack from the US by launching thier own massive nuclear attack.
Ain't none of it actually likely to happen.
OK quick geography lesson: Ain't no Columbus in SC. Dude prolly mean Columbia (home of Kryotech, to all you overclockers out there). Also, Greenville/Spartanburg is where a good portion of the tech-sector jobs are in SC. There's been a history of some decent moderate Republican guys coming out of there. Unfortunately, there's also a big semi-rural population of heavy-duty reactionaries lurking up there in the upstate. I'm not sure that MB is really gonna eclipse the upstate for economic activity.
The bigger problem is South Carolina's weird politics. Its not a state that takes the advice of folks from the left coast on anything. If SC gets wind of anybody trying to tell them to do anything, they will quite happily cut off their own nose to spite the ferner. It also is notoriously slow to change its mind, and Hollings is quite possibly the longest serving junior senator in history (nobody forget Strom). Getting people to not vote for Hollings would mean giving up both Strom (who will retire at age 100 this term) and Hollings, both of whom have helluva seniority in the Senate, which equates to power. That would leave a small state with a dicey economy with no senatorial clout. They'd probably be afraid that no one would take them seriously (few do now) without at least one of thier elder statesmen running amok in DC. And its been a while since I've seen a Republican or Democrat in SC that I could really get behind. Gov. Campbell was the last Republican, and Bob Sheheen (former speaker of the state House) was the last Democrat. These days the parties are in too much control, and are running idiots that they can manipulate.
But don't dare vote for the wrong lizard.
Uhh, the GSM/CDMA argument is wholly irrelevant here. CDMA could be just as transparent as GSM, if the cell companies implemented the technology with transparency in mind. Hell, I could roam digitally, and have better coverage, but I turned digital roaming off because it costs more. There's no technical barrier to roaming (in fact, if I'm not mistaken, all carriers are required to allow competitor's customers use thier networks free of charge for 911 calls.)
This debate over GSM/CDMA has gotten ridiculous, not because America's CDMA implimentation is better than Europes implimentation of GSM. Quite the contrary, its pretty clear that Europe does more with GSM than the US does with CDMA. But CDMA isn't the problem, and adopting GSM isn't the only way to make American cell service better. People don't understand that GSM isn't inherently better than CDMA, its just that the EU companies use it better.
Indeed, CDMA is the better technology (I work for an English wireless engineering company and although I am not an engineer, I'm quoting RF engineers I drink beer with) and has a lot of advantages over GSM. However, like VHS/Betamax, GSM is used more, and has more features, but CDMA could have all those and more.
Now, having a more uniform CDMA method in the US would be vastly superior to the current willy-nilly mish-mash we have, but insisting that we go to the EU system may not be the best idea.
Also, part of the reason a lot of the text/messaging apps haven't caught on in the US is that Americans aren't as receptive to text on cellphone. I, at least, would rather just call somebody and leave a voicemail than spend all that time fscking around with trying to type text on a numeric keypad. Who has time for that?
The US & Canada already have a significant investment in CDMA. Having the different carriers allow interoperability over thier CDMA networks would only require a software change on existing phones and towers/switches. There's no need to throw away 30 million handsets (or however many) and 10,000 ($million+ dollar a pop) cell sites just so that I can use my current phone the once every two years I find myself in Europe or Japan. I'd much rather have my current phone work better, than throw it away and spend another $200 on a phone, plus have to pay twice as much for service to cover the billion-dollar transition to all new equipment.
Spending billion-dollar sums for million-dollar fixes is far more idiotic than the current US system.
Sure, Europe and Japan use GSM, but arguing that that means we have to switch to GSM is saying that Linux and Mac users have to switch to Windows.
Well, energy is not the only use for oil. There will always be a demand for oil to feed the chemical industry. You can't make plastic from hydrogen (although plastic.com produces a lot of methane). My biggest reason for supporting a conversion to a different source of energy is that I really don't want to live in a world without plastic. Have you guys used some of the crap made from sheet metal and glass, the previous materials most of our plastic components are made of? Its crap! Brushed aluminum cases notwithstanding.
So even if we converted to a solar/hydrogen/happythoughts economy, we'd still need oil. Ever tried to lubricate something with liquid hydrogen?
I assume there have to be some checks to how much we remove, but if profit is as stake, will there really be those checks?
This would undoubtedly be a corporation doing it for the government. While there'd be the inevitable cost overruns, I have no doubt that profit motive wouldn't cause the company to overdo it. The reason is this: The government will pay the company its costs plus a reasonable (or not so reasonable) level of profit, regardless of its effectiveness. If CO2 levels get too low, the gubmint will undoubtedly be just as happy to pay them not to take C02 out as they were to pay them to do it. Just look at how profitable it is to not grow corn or pigs or tobacco!
In all they heady corporate growth of the '90s, people of lost sight of that other great motivator of foolishness, bureaucratic inertia. The bureaucrats will have us paying for this long after its served its purpose, but they probably won't make it run amok.
Still, we shouldn't go all the way back to 1750 CO2 levels, since that would probably leave us back in 'mini-ice-age' CO2 levels, which might not be optimal.
By the way, if they're looking for a barren, lifeless desert to put it in, I nominate the Los Angeles Basin. There's nothing there that anybody would miss that much, and it would cut back tremendously on the work the CO2 scrubbers would have to do. Everybody wins!
Uhh, I'm a geophysicist, so I haven't studied much that was smaller than a crystal, but if I recall my quantum mechanics (9 years ago) and what little I know of general relativity (I only formally studied special relativity) it seems like gravity/black holes would not be quantum effects. I'd kind of been of the belief that nobody'd managed to make a good theoretical connection between general relativity and quantum mechanics.
:)
So if the black hole is an outgrowth of curvature of space going to infinity (or zero, depending on how its measured) then how does that have any bearing on the energy states of the neutrons? Or is it just that there's no way to pack that many neutrons together to get enough gravity to curve space back on itself and create a black hole without taking into acount the quantum interactions. When they go to those wierd other particles, do they then drop back into the gravity well and start really compacting the matter til they produce a singularity?
I guess I need to read up on modern black hole theory some, and come back
What's the reason behind this? Is it the technology, the pricing, or the software? Halo is cool, but its no GTA3. Is there some break-out, gotta-have-it game waiting in the wings to make x-box take the lead? With PS2 getting Everquest, the logical response might be an Asheron's Call port to X-Box, but is there anything in the wings that makes X-Box look better?
Well, Layers are not humans, although I don't think they're technically orcs either. They use trolls pretty extensively though...
I assert that the reality is that we aren't that terribly different and that while the U.S. government is rigorous in it's defense of the freedoms of your average American, it really couldn't care less about anyone outside it's borders regardless of what the propaganda machine claims.
:), covertly sponsor outside terrorist organizations. These are called terrorist sponsor states. I'm just trying to illustrate that I am not ignorantly spouting breathless claims of "terrorist" against anyone who opposes the US.
/.ers. However, I can understand assumptions of ignorance. Still just getting the facts won't grant immunity to foolishness. Two people can read the same report and come away with totally different opinions about the meaning.
I didn't say ask Americans about the Poles, Czechs and Hungarians. I said ask them. They have their own ideas about the relative merits of the Soviets and Americans. As for how much we care about folks outside our borders, sure its less than we care for our citizens. Duh. But we really could care less. It'd be easy to care less. What exactly were we doing in Somalia? Or Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo? You can argue wether we should have been there, but we weren't there to protect ourselves, that's for sure.
bombings of Dresden and Hamburg [fpp.co.uk] (~175-200,000 dead), use of Atomic weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki [northpark.edu] (~350,000 dead)
Yeah, we killed a lot of people in WWII. Maybe we should have stayed out. That would have helped a lot. Seriously, though, if you're so keen to grant us the dead from the sanctions on Iraq, can't you also grant us the lives saved from not invading Japan? If we had, at least a million Japanese would have died. Based on their actions on Okinawa, women and children would have been issued weapons, and perhaps as many as 100,000 would have commited suicide rather than accept defeat. By convincing the emperor that surrender was preferable to resistance, we saved at least two lives for every one that we ended. And that's not counting American casualties that most people use to justify the bombings of Hiroshima. As for firebombing civilian targets, yep, but you have to grant at least half those casualties to the British. Just piling up every single casualty in every single conflict that we were ever involved with on our doorstep is just not justified, unless you do similar analysis for other countries. Its really hard to argue that all of these deaths wouldn't have been replaced twofold by others if the US had just remained isolationist and been a nice little Switzerland.
blind eye to the large numbers of deaths of these exact same Kurds in Turkey [bullatomsci.org] (~40,000 dead).
I'm well aware that Turkey is not captain wonderful. I'd just as soon they were the worst country we had to deal with. That would suit me just fine.
and significant loss of life for Iraqi children [ngos.net] (~200-500,000 over 5-10 years).
That's what happens when you try to use peaceful means to end a conflict. Are they killed by bombs? No. Logically there are two alternatives. Let Iraq re-arm, in which case it will most likely re-start the Iran-Iraq war or the Gulf War (Between them those wars killed between 1 and 1.5 million, between 3 and 12 times more than you claim 'we' have killed through the sanctions program). Or attack Iraq again, this time obliterating all resistance and begining yet another foriegn occupation of Arab lands. Or there's a third possibility. Iraq could destroy its chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. That's it. Hussein doesn't even have to leave power. Just let the inspectors in, prove they've decided not to use nerve gas on anyone else, and re-join the human race.
When other countries do this it's called terrorism.
Not by me. I call it violent or brutal repression. Notice that I never used the word "terrorist" with respect to Hussein. I reserve use of that word for blowing up cafes without warning or flying planes into buildings when the perpetrators are not obviously associated with a specific government. I'm not trying to pick nits, I just want you to know that I don't have a double standard. The Turks, Israelis, South Africans, Zimbabweans, Myanmarese, Indonesians, Chinese, N. Koreans, Iranians, Iranian Shah (back in the day), Taliban, Algerians, Iraqis, etc are brutally repressive regimes, some of whom are guilty of genocide. Others, such as the Russians, Chinese, (in some peoples opinions) Americans, French, British, Iraqis, etc are agressive regimes that often attack outside thier borders. The ETA, IRA, Hezzbollah, al Queda, Jihad, Hamas, and (in some peoples opinions) Fatah, are terrorists. Some states, and I won't do another stupid list
do a careful analysis of the actual facts or to use sources beyond those provided by the mainstream media.
I have some sources beyond the mainstream media, but I'm a scientist, so I have limited education in that field (ask me about elastic wave propagation in solids, I know more). However, I try, and I talk to people who read even more than me. Most notably, my brother and another friend whose degrees in international relations probably trump most
How many people died crossing the Berlin wall? Was it any where near the roughly 1 million civilians (from above) that the U.S. has directly or indirectly killed?
Are we to ignore the millions dead in Soviet purges, the Great Leap Forward, and the Culural Revolution? The roughly 1 million - and that number is small by most estimates so let's use the more pessimistic 3 million figure - is dwarfed by the numbers killed by the USSR and China (estimated between 5 and 10 million apeice). You claim that we're not any better than the enemies, but numbers don't back that up.
[following a statement regarding Muslim conspiracy theories and propaganda] Prove it.
OK, now that's just childish. Come on, this has been widely reported in the months since Sept. 11th. You don't belive me? 30 seconds on google should back me up. Or find a Muslim American and ask him. Hell, even horrid mainstream-media-outlet NPR could do that much (they interviewed a Palestinian living in New Jersey who'd heard the Mossad conspiracy reported on Arabic-language news, and thought it sounded reasonable). Just saying 'prove it' on this kind of discussion list I can only interpret as either "you're lying" "you're ignorant" or "I'm pissed that you're right, but I don't want to admit it". You're the one who's all about finding things out from outside the mainstream media. Put those skills to work. Try and get the pulse of the world outside. Or do you only go to 'independent sources' that are talking about how bad America is and ignore anything else? If I'm so ignorant, and just parroting a party line, it shouldn't be hard to prove me wrong.
Dead is dead. I'm not really clear why it should matter what the mechanism is.
Most of the world has clearly stated that nukes, gas, and germs are different from other things. If you want to unilaterally say that its not, go right ahead. Still, an anecdote will illustrate that gas attacks are worse than conventional attacks.
Again back to the Kurds (and yes I'm still aware of Turkey). There was a village in northern Iraq which the Iraqis were trying to subdue. For weeks they'd been hitting it with daily artillery barrages. Every time they started, the Kurds went into thier trenches, basements and other shelters. So most people were surviving. Their homes were getting annihilated, but the people were surviving. So the Iraqis decided to use their chemical weapons. They started with conventional artillery. The Kurds went into their shelters. Then they started the gas attack. The gas was heavier than air, so it flowed down into the shelters. The entire population of the village was wiped out in minutes.
That's the difference between conventional weapons and weapons of mass destruction. You ask if using more tonnes of bombs on Vietnam than was used in WWII was not a weapon of mass destruction. No it wasn't. Vietnam survived. They were able to take the losses. For the most part, we carpetbombed jungle. Hanoi, Haiphong, and the other major NV cities recieved only minor damage throughout the campaign. If we'd used gas, or nukes, we might have wiped out the entire North Vietnamese population.
That's not to say that bombs are good. I'd like to see a ban on landmines, and maybe even cluster bombs. They're all horrible. But none of those equals the horrific destructive power of chemical and nuclear weapons.
Regardless, you haven't really made any arguments that prove that the U.S. tries to be a force for good.
It cannot be proven. Can you really deny that you would always say "They're just doing that to push other people around and maintain their dominance!"? Why were we in Somalia or Bosnia-Herzegovina, or Kosovo? What political reason did we have to be in those places. I'm sure you could come up with one, but you can't prove it any more than I can. Emotions and motives cannot be proved. Gravity can. Feelings can't.
We haven't done as much for the world as we could sometimes. In Myanmar, we've got no bases to operate from, and we've got a bad track record of success in SE Asia, so we've not sent the fleet out. In Indonesia, the international community did act. East Timor is now pretty much free though, or at least as good as we can do. And we did that multilaterally.
One final question. Were we right to do nothing about Rwanda? Did America make the right decision in not throwing its weight around there, or did we duck our responsibility to save the innocent where possible?
While most of this is a troll, there are some nuggets of info there that bear some analysis.
The Cold War is a symptom of something else. It's the result of power struggles. Power struggles and the control for dominance is just that. And, IMHO, it's hardly ever justified. It's basically a form of mental masturbation and usually performed by insecure little boys who haven't figured out how to deal with their own personal problems. The reasons, however, are usually couched in some kind of rah-rah about protecting the world or some other such trite crap.
It's a little more than mental masturbation. Ask the Poles. Ask the Czechs and Hungarians. To believe that the Cold War was about nothing, or about ideology that really didn't matter is to ignore the massive differential in the numbers of people who were killed going over the Berlin Wall from east-to-west and vice versa. Its to ignore the relative freedom of the Tiawanese and South Koreans compared to the North Koreans and the Chinese mainlanders.
The US has a lot to answer for in its conduct of the Cold War. We didn't take nearly enough account of the wants and needs of the countries we interfered with. Often, to keep the enemy out (and yes, the Soviet Union and Communist China were our enemies) we backed people we shouldn't have. Still, there's an anecdote that perhaps sheds some perspective on events such as the Cuban revolution.
(I'm paraphrasing from memory here, so details may be incorrect, but I think the overall gist is accurate) During meetings with the Soviets in the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevera was advocating launching the missiles from Cuba. The Soviet representative asked Guevera if he understood that the US would undoubtedly react by hitting the launch sites with nuclear weapons, and that there would be no one left alive in Cuba afterwards. Guevera said that would be a price he was willing to pay. Unlike Che Guevera, the Russians really did love their children too, so it didn't happen. I believe this was recounted in an interview between Castro and an American reporter. If somebody remembers the details and can back me up, I'd appreciate it.
So if the United States opposed the various revolutions that Guevera and his friends were involved in, (remembering that Che Guevera was not Cuban but Argentine, and made a career of fomenting leftist revolution throughout Latin America) that's hardly a masturbatory excercise.
C) you have totally ignored that where there is a propaganda machine in place it's probably a small flame next to the might mechanisms of the American mass media which affect the globe.
Sort of, but at least in Arab countries, there's still a very pervasive and very effective propaganda machine. The percentage of the population that believes that the attacks of Sept 11 were orchestrated by Mossad (Israeli intelligence service), not by Muslim terrorists is pretty large.
you are operating on the basis of emotions for your deductive reasoning. In a huge number of cases the "dictator" in question that you refer to was backed by the U.S.
He's not the one who started trolling, dude. Something about pots calling kettles black.
However, as a logical argument, you're right that sometimes that dictator has recieved some support from the US, but lets take the example that everyone is fighting about now, Iraq. When Hussein was a ruthless but not overtly vicious dictator, we supported him. His regime was politcally repressive, but religiously tolerant, and suprisingly open for an Arab regime of the early eighties. The majority of the Iraqi population were freer than their counterparts in other countries.
Then came his war with Iran. This was his first agressive war, started by Hussein to get the oil terminals at the end of the Gulf. Early on, the US did not oppose (lack of opposition != support) him, because he was opposed to the brutally repressive Iranian regime which was at the time just as bad and openly hostile to America and openly supporting international terrorism. Hussein seemed the least evil of the actors in that region. We still did some business with him, but his main military support came from France and the USSR, with some from China.
Then the war dragged on, and the Iraqis began opposing his regime in earnest. Ethnic minorities, especially Shia muslims in the south and Kurds in the north began resistance movements. Hussien responded with military reprisals, shelling, and when that didn't work, shelling with chemical weapons. As far as I know this was only the second use of weapons of mass destruction since the end of WWII (the other being Soviet gas attacks in Afghanistan). These were carried out against civilian targets and horribly effective. At this point the US began open opposition to Hussein's regime.
After he decided in 1990 that it was OK to use his military to expand his power by taking over weak neighbors and their oil supplies, the US realized that Hussein needed stopping. Yes, that war was about oil. It was about how no one can take over another country just because he wants to sell more of it and gain more power from it. Especially someone who'd shown that he felt no compunction about slaughtering innocents with nerve gas. This is not the type of person you appease.
If the US were not involved, would the results be better? The US has largely ignored Myanmar, but they're in bad shape. The US tries to be a force for good. Sometimes we fail. Others not so much. Nicaragua is a good example. Democracy is taking hold there, after years of bloody Communist dictatorship.
At this stage, the best thing the US can do to bring democracy to Latin America, and southern Asia as well, would be to end drug prohibition. Nothing undermines those democracies like the massive monetary resources that are getting pumped into their criminal and insurgent groups. Judges get whacked if they try and impose order. End the flow of illegal drug money, and South America could really take off.
I must really be bored with my job if I'm willing to post a response this long to a Katz article.
The folks who have been saying "Broadband" are on the right track. I can think of two more factors which have cut my home web surfing time.
:( ) which means when I get home, I'm in the mood for something else. I only surf from home when I'm looking for something specific, which brings me to my second point.
Work Connections
At work, I've got a lot of time for web surfing while waiting for processes to finish (they won't buy me a second processor
Google
Google has cut the time it takes me to find the exact info I'm looking for. I don't spend so much time dealing with extraneous crap, and find exactly what I want.
Of course, I don't create web pages any more either, so I'm not out there looking for ideas.