Same way as we can have 128 comments without even one reference to Captain Harlock -- despite mentioning glamorization of pirates by Disney, attempts to escape the suckage of society, and other closely related stuff.
...balance between the need for profits and the lure of offshore outsourcing.
I guess, this is the case when "interpreting" is closer to the truth than the actual speech -- the only "balance" that can be achieved is between desire to outsource for greater profits and outsourcing for greater profits, nothing else can be taken into account.
Instead of trying to throw more hay along the railroad to mitigate the trainwrecks, it's better to prevent them in the first place. There is no "free market" mechanism that makes outsourcing (that involves additional logistics) cheaper than domestic production, the only mechanisms that cause this are ones that come from international trade being screwed up through the use of dollar as international currency. I have mentioned this before, and it's still the same -- US exploited its ability to issue and throw dollars abroad for the last half a century. If it's not clear yet, I hope, it's easy to see: if when some Chinese or Indian (or Saudi) makes a product, then automatically some American bank/company/government/group-of-rich-people gets from Federal Reserve some "free" newly-issued money sufficient to buy it (after all, the amount of money corresponds to the amount of products), something in this system is extremely screwy, and it encourages companies to throw money abroad until the countries outside US are paved with dollars (by then, obviously minted/printed in China). It's economy that is based on a single historical accident, a loophole, and unless a real, stable base will be placed under it before it will collapse, the companies will just milk it until everyone, inside or outside US (of course, with the exception of various oligarchies), will be sucked dry.
It's a reality that people are more or less the same everywhere, and that the activity that is at most 40-50 years old, and does not heavily depend on traditions other than general knowledge of math and physics, can be equally performed by people of any nation, in any place on Earth. Americans expected that by some miracle they will always have an advantage, and, not surprisingly, miracle didn't happen. People who repeat again and again that the quality of foreign engineers is worse, probably didn't look recently enough, what is already outsourced. Of course, first thing that was outsourced was cheap, trivial shit, that any monkey can make. This is not because foreigners have inferior intellect and better tolerance for grunt work, it's because this kind of work is the most predictable, and therefore imposes less risks, less difficulty with evaluation and quality control, and allows for low but stable profit margins. However companies quickly discovered that the nature of all work, unless it's a kind of "service" that (for now) requires personal presence in front of the customer, does not fundamentally depend on the location or nationality of the worker once the the worker overcame the language barrier -- be it car assembly, microchips production, writing in VB, sophisticated applications programming, Linux kernel development, financial planning, writing movie scripts, or development of new concepts in philosophy. And they act accordingly, taking this into account, and trying to exploit "free money"/"products osmosis" mentioned above in all those areas. They, as opposed to you, are well aware of financial mechanisms even if no one there admits that what they are doing amounts to trivial scams based around currency.
All that "trusted" platform does is preventing things that were developed over decades of technology development, and replaces them with things that no one thought about because they are useless.
1. Make sure that the user is typing at the keyboard, and not another program is doing it. That means, no remote access, no automation, no pretty much any feature that allows users to use interactive software unless it's sitting on the box behind his desk. Yes, one can try to send locally encrypted data blindly over the network -- then where is going the server to stuff it to be decrypted? And if it will be able to, why someone else won't be do the same with his own keystrokes, even if it will take a bunch of mechanical relays "typing" on a "secure" physical keyboard?
2. Trust the software application to provide the "safe" data. That means, no scripts, pipes, interpreted languages, or anything else that combines multiple "products" into an application. Because anything combined will have to be trusted as every component, ane every component (including "data" that is the interpreted program and the interpreter that runs it) will be trusted just as much as the complete system.
3. No virtual machines and emulators. Does not even deserve an explanation.
4. No user-created OS-level software, no matter in what language. Same.
Any of those features, if can be overriden by the user, undermines the system in its very core -- user may have a big red switch, but unless he can discern which particular software is running at the moment he is flipping it, he can not distinguish between bypassing the controls for his own program, for someone else's legitimate software, or for a worm/virus/malware/... Same applies even to self-signing system, with a nice addition of a problem in a networked environment, when one can not physically sign the application on all computers that should be able to run it, and all other methods will mean the ability to transfer and modify secret keys by the user.
So basically we will get a nice computer with all the features expected from ZX Spectrum, but in a "secure" environment. Obviously there should be something that will provide a replacement for those things. And there certainly will be -- there will be a remote access program that will be "trusted" that it already checked the validity of input on the client end, and can be "trusted" on the server. Single application signing service that will "let" the user run some software. Long explanations that emulators are only used by pirates, and that OS authors smell bad, so no self-respecting user would want to do any of those things, ever.
And the company that will bring it to you.... No, not _that_ company, the other one.
1. Moscow State University also now offers 4-year Bachelors. I guess "Specialist" or "Bachelor" just sounds better than "University Diploma" and so they've adopted the title.
If they did, it's something very recent -- when I have studied, there was no such thing.
2. Who said they have no idea? I imagine you've said "I don't know much about X, but I'd like to." and pursued that interest, or late in your training "I think physical chemistry is pretty cool, but inorganic chemistry is kind of dull." or something comparable for your field. In America, once you've got the core requirements done you can go on and get a little bit more training for your Bachelor's on that subspecialty of your choice.
This only works when the core is small enough, and everything is designed for mix and match. Russian education is designed for completeness -- if you decide to specialize in some area, you will get a certain set of courses over the basic "core", but you can't mix and match most of them. However I was talking about unrelated things, like physicist taking art.
3. So we finally agree. We are talking about full-blown papers that are published, and that the (more stringent) American M.S., American Ph.D., Russian Candidate, and Russian Doctorate all then have to write a thesis based on those full-blown published papers and then defend it against a panel of professors. You are making my point for me. The more stringent American M.S. is roughly equivalent to a Russian Candidate, and likewise an American Ph.D. is roughly equivalent to a Russian Doctorate.
Great, even if unimpressive, example of sophism (that you, without any doubt, taken from some incomplete set of courses in philisophy or psychology). Where did I agree that MS requirements are anywhere near Candidate? Where "(more stringent) American M.S" comes from, other than from your imagination, of course? Have you actually compared the kinds of work involved, and level that is required to pass? Or are you under impression that the differences between "degree" and "diploma" are exactly the same everywhere, just because all you have seen is US universities boasting their quality and slightly humble, by Americn standards, Russians working there?
4. Besides being irrelevant it runs counter to our respective statements. It is you who declared that an American Ph.D. is equal to Russian highschool or "incomplete highest" while I have stated repeatedly that the American Ph.D. and Russian Doctorate degrees are roughly equivalent.
Read what I have said before, and don't put your words into my mouth (see above about sophism). What I have said is, the level of many American Ph.D's would be considered to be below the completion of University in Russia. This is not the same as saying that the requirements for Ph.D are intended to be below the completion of university in Russia, or that all Ph.D taken the shortest way possible, merely that the result is that Ph.D is often granted to people with education and accomplishments far below ones that are required to complete University in Russia. Because American system is lax, and Russian one is strict and inflexible when it comes to the ways how a degree can be obtained.
1. Whatever it is, it is not a degree -- the lowest degree in Russia is Candidate.
2. There is little need to choose courses in the areas that students have no idea about anyway.
3. No, I am talking about full-blown papers that are published -- and in addition to that Candidate, just like Doctor, requires a paper that not only published but also should be defended against the opponent in a special session. Just a published paper won't do.
4. I have no idea with whom did you work, however I have never seen an American admitting that some foreigner got better education, or accomplished more than he did.
1. There is no "Specialist" degree in Russia. Only a university diploma (unless someone renamed that while I was away).
2. In Russian universities almost all courses are required -- and "well-roundedness" is already included into those. The idea of pick-and-choose courses makes it harder to plan courses that depend on small pieces included into other courses, so unless courses have a lot of redundancy included into them, it ends up with most of courses required to graduate, this way or another. So just declaring the required courses to be what they are, allows to provide a better education in the same time than "dependency tree" of courses that Americans are so fond of.
3. The _Candidate_ degree already means that someone made an original contribution in his field. The papers written for graduation from university (that also exist in Russia, and pretty much everywhere) are not the nearly at the same level as Candidate dissertation.
Ukraine, other nations were part of the USSR for almost a century. Why do they get to be independant and Chechnya doesn't?
Ukraine was a part of Russian Empire for >300 years, with Russian Czar as its ruler, and became a separate "republic" (just like states in US are separate entities in various ways, though under federal power) when USSR was formed. Chechnya was a part of _Russia_ for >100 years, and remained so when USSR was formed. To be honest, even "independence" of Ukraine didn't do it much good, and Ukraine at least has a theoretical possibility of developing some economy that is not completely tied to Russia. The only economy Chechnya can develop on its own is armed robbery of neighbors.
You forgot to take into account the quality of education and work that follows it. Standardized secondary school curriculum allows universities to drop the courses that overlap with it, and having most of university courses mandatory reduces the wiggle room for students, so even if it becomes less "fun" and "individually-oriented", education is deeper and more consistent over the same amount of time. And please don't compare single dissertation with two of them that are necessary to get the Doctor degree in Russia -- Candidate there is at least an equivalent to Ph.D, even if all other differences are discounted, and both actually did all the work without any shortcuts.
The contaminated area around Chernobyl is relatively small, and mostly consists of swamps. Politicians used inflated figures of consequences to promote their own agendas and to show how they are "soing something about it" not unlike the recent anthrax/terrorism scare in US, however most of people whose death is caused by the disaster were, not surprisingly, firefighters and cleanup workers on the power plant itself.
Also all talk about "shutting down" a nuclear power plant as a way to make it safe, can only come from a person without a very basic understanding of the matter. When "shut down", a reactor is just as much a pile of radioactive material as when it is operating -- with the difference that operating power plant can support itself, and when "shut down", it can not.
The probability of another disaster at the Chernobyl plant became at least the same as on any other nuclear power plant, so the only reason to shut anything down could be to sabotage the energy supply in Ukraine and Belarus, and cause higher energy production on coal power plants that are pretty much the only alternative to the nuclear power in that region. I hope, someone can remember that coal, in the amounts necessary to operate a power plant, produces large amount radioactive dust that in the normal operation of the coal power plant is thrown into the atmosphere, and I am not even going into listing the other chemicals. So the last thing "shutting down" the Chernobyl power plant could possibly do is reducing the health risk in the surrounding areas.
As for the nature of the disaster, I am sure, the same problems can escalate to the same level of magnitude pretty much anywhere, and then "experts" from the countries, other than one where it happened will fill the airwaves and printed pages with their "explanation" why it had to happen because of some technical flaw that they "knew" about.
No. After 5-7 years (with a lot of mandatory courses and strict requirements for passing exams) you still can't get a degree, only a University diploma with the "highest" education. After that postgraduates should complete and defend _two_ dissertations to get a Doctor degree, that takes a lot of time, and there is no way to skip on any of that. The requirements in US are not nearly as high -- though some in US do similar amount of study and work to get a Ph.D as it takes for Candidate or even Doctor in Russia, most definitely aren't on that level.
There is no such thing as a bachelor degree in Russia. You either take 5-7 years in university and get "highest education"/University diploma (what is not even called a degree in Russia), or you get nothing at all. Only postgraduate students can get Candidate and Doctor degrees, after one and two dissertations correspondingly. So please, don't diss things that you have no freaking idea about, most of American "Ph.D" would have their education level listed as "Secondary school" or "Incomplete highest" in Russia.
Chechnya never was a real country, and is a part of Russia for over a century. Tibet is a part of China, and before becoming that, it was, contrary to a popular belief, a quite shitty place. And Afghanistan was constantly messed with by UK and US for longer than any modern weapons existed. One may find the actions of China, Russia and India questionable, however their opponents are on at least a very shaky ground ethically -- there are shitloads of "national liberation movements" around the world, and most of them are basically large gangs that want to become official rulers of their historical stomping grounds, and use nationalistic slogans to back up their ambitions.
However my point is, in none of those cases the use of nuclear weapons is an option, no country wants to nuke something that it recognizes as its own territory, so nuclear weapons are irrelevant in "national liberation"/secession conflicts. Compare that to, say, US threatening to use nuclear weapons in its Middle East "adventures".
Military facilities, usually anti-air weapons, are placed in residential areas because those areas are being attacked in the first place. And those facilities are usually some flimsy mobile guns and missiles, not heavily protected bunkers. Look at the history of all wars since the bombers were invented.
As for Saddam's "strategy", it did not require any effort on his part to make everyone see that it was a completely unprovoked attack, with no excuse to kill anyone, civilians or military.
But I very much doubt that anyone in the military actually *intends* to kill civilians. They're out there to kill the enemy as efficiently as possible with the least risk to themselves, and that means battering the sh1t out of military (ie anything that has a role in shooting back) targets.
Germans: London.
US/UK: Munich, Dresden
US: from Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki in WWII to Baghdad in Gulf War I, Belgrade in "Kosovo" war (including Chinese Embassy, TV station and houses), to Baghdad again (at lesser extent, though with targets like hotels packed with journalists and abandoned government buildings) in Gulf War II
In all those examples targets are either civilian cities with no military whatsoever, or cities with very dubious military value at the moment of bombing, yet packed with civilians. At least in WWII it was made clear that they are targeted to "frighten" the enemy, or as a "revenge" for something. Post-WWII examples are usually covered with layers of bullshit, however it's pretty clear that civilians were targeted. <SARCASM>In fact, if the US military was that incompetent in its actions, it would certainly at least once in half a century mistakenly attack a city in US or Germany, yet surprisingly all "mistakes" are made in countries that are incapable of responding to such attacks.</SARCASM>
The V2 was effectively an intermediate range ballistic missile. It is still a better technology than at least 50% of the world has (i.e. the 3rd world), although with enough money you can buy SCUDs which are slightly better.
SCUD missiles, and anything else medium range, are not ICBMs, a bomber can deliver the nuclear charge at the same distance, and wherever they actually were used, no one could use nuclear weapons anyway. Same applies to V2.
Priced any ICBMs lately? You couldn't be more wrong. You cannot buy ICBMs off of the shelf. If that were the case, N. Korea would have them. Hell, Iraq would have had them. You are using technological logic to debate something that you have no relevant facts about. ICBMs are not transistors. They are not mass produced ICs. You cannot just go by some off the shelf of your local arms dealer.
ICBMs are not being sold, they are only built by whoever needs them. And building them is cheap. It's not a question of price, merely practicality of building them, especially considering that once they are built they can't be sold if useless for its owner, so resources spent on building it can't be easily recovered. Same applies to, say, bridges.
They are giant heavy pieces of machinery that are DAMNED difficult to make correctly. Hell, even the US, which has the best space industry in the world still loses between 10-30% of their unmanned payload launches due to the complexity of making a rocket that works perfectly.
More like due to $deity-awful quality of work, monopolistic suppliers, price gouging and simultaneous attempts to reduce cost beyond the reasonable level.
Later rather than sooner. Like most people who have no experience in this area you underrate the difficulty of the task. But also like most people, you don't let that stop you. No, you still have an uninformed opinion just like everyone else.
Actually I have an informed opinion about this. Missiles are "expensive" for the same reason why diamonds or drugs are expensive -- because of successful attempts of preventing trade of them. However whenever there is no trade involved, people can cheaply produce diamonds (if they are located in the proximity of a diamond mine, or have artificial diamonds production equipment) or drugs (using simple equipment). Certainly, any government that has a foot to stand on, can produce missiles as long as they are commited to make all components with their resources and under their own control -- and in that case they are cheap.
Really? You don't think he considered the United States a target? Or Great Britain?
Absolutely not. There is nothing that indicates that he ever intended to attack any of those countries, with or without nuclear weapons.
He certainly hated them enough
Billions of people happen to hate US and UK for various reasons or without ones. None of them did anything at all to start a nuclear war with those countries, and only few actually attacked anything because of that hatred.
to try to assasinate George Bush.
This is absolutely unrelated to the intention to attack the country. Whoever assassinated Kennedy did not start a war with US, and it's not even clear if Hussein was behind any assassination attempt.
If he'd have had access to highly accurate ICBMs, or the technology to create them, why use highly INACCURATE SCUD and Frog missiles instead of these accurate SRMs which you continue to mistakenly state that everyone has access to, huh?
Iraq was in no condition to build anything at all -- even basic pieces of infrastructure in its economy. This is why the border conflict with Kuwait over a small amount of oil had such an importance for Iraq in the first place, and lead to the poorly planned and politically stupid invasion of Kuwait. And without nuclear weapons to deliver the accuracy of ICBM is wasted anyway.
I have to admit, the fact that you are completely ignorant of the world arms
You are allowed to kill people that fight with you, however once you have captured them instead of killing, they are either POW (and protected by Geneva convention), or local peaceful population, and must be either released immediately, or charged with a crime according to the local law, in whatever court that has jurisdiction there -- their or yours if you have annexed the territory. Certainly a military kangaroo court in Guantanamo Bay has no jurisdiction over alleged crimes in Afghanistan, and neither Afghanistan, nor US (and not even Cuba) allow torture to be used on criminal suspects.
Therefore the whole thing is illegal, no matter what verbal structures are used to describe it.
1. Collateral damage is usually NOT produced by bunker-busting bombs that actually hit the bunkers. First of all, there usually isn't much to damage around the bunker, that does not happen to be another target. Second, it's usually produced by things that _miss_ the target -- what in this case will cause the same effect.
2. Last time I have checked, most of bombs that produced huge amount of damage to civilians, were dropped on civilian targets, or poorly protected military ones, to begin with. Often with the primary goal to cause massive damage to civilians.
Yeah. I AM A BAD CHINESE, I WANT TO NUKE.... Tibet! I will spend a lot of effort, will end up filling the Chinese territory with fallout, Tibet mountains will slightly change shape, and there will be less people there.
This would be the greatest thing ever, especially compared to giving Tibet independence, so it will, with no industry or agriculture, and with their "great" theocratic leadership, become a shithole, with a bit less people, and mountains will remain the same. Yers, that's the ticket -- with nuclear weapons mountains will be different.
Same model of thinking probably should apply to Russians nuking Chechnya, and Indians nuking Kashmir.
Slashdot Mirror
Same way as we can have 128 comments without even one reference to Captain Harlock -- despite mentioning glamorization of pirates by Disney, attempts to escape the suckage of society, and other closely related stuff.
And someone said that Slashdot is a nerds site...
"Plain text" option doesn't convert "<" into "<".
7|-|i5 iz n0+ +41kin9 1ik3 4 pir8, +hi5 iz 741|i|\|9 1ik3 4 14/v\0r!
Explanation is here -- people were making those predictions for at least 20 years already, though with different reasons to support it.
http://www.fhttpd.org/pub/qcwebcam/README.html
Can be easily modified to use v4l
I guess, this is the case when "interpreting" is closer to the truth than the actual speech -- the only "balance" that can be achieved is between desire to outsource for greater profits and outsourcing for greater profits, nothing else can be taken into account.
Instead of trying to throw more hay along the railroad to mitigate the trainwrecks, it's better to prevent them in the first place. There is no "free market" mechanism that makes outsourcing (that involves additional logistics) cheaper than domestic production, the only mechanisms that cause this are ones that come from international trade being screwed up through the use of dollar as international currency. I have mentioned this before, and it's still the same -- US exploited its ability to issue and throw dollars abroad for the last half a century. If it's not clear yet, I hope, it's easy to see: if when some Chinese or Indian (or Saudi) makes a product, then automatically some American bank/company/government/group-of-rich-people gets from Federal Reserve some "free" newly-issued money sufficient to buy it (after all, the amount of money corresponds to the amount of products), something in this system is extremely screwy, and it encourages companies to throw money abroad until the countries outside US are paved with dollars (by then, obviously minted/printed in China). It's economy that is based on a single historical accident, a loophole, and unless a real, stable base will be placed under it before it will collapse, the companies will just milk it until everyone, inside or outside US (of course, with the exception of various oligarchies), will be sucked dry.
It's a reality that people are more or less the same everywhere, and that the activity that is at most 40-50 years old, and does not heavily depend on traditions other than general knowledge of math and physics, can be equally performed by people of any nation, in any place on Earth. Americans expected that by some miracle they will always have an advantage, and, not surprisingly, miracle didn't happen. People who repeat again and again that the quality of foreign engineers is worse, probably didn't look recently enough, what is already outsourced. Of course, first thing that was outsourced was cheap, trivial shit, that any monkey can make. This is not because foreigners have inferior intellect and better tolerance for grunt work, it's because this kind of work is the most predictable, and therefore imposes less risks, less difficulty with evaluation and quality control, and allows for low but stable profit margins. However companies quickly discovered that the nature of all work, unless it's a kind of "service" that (for now) requires personal presence in front of the customer, does not fundamentally depend on the location or nationality of the worker once the the worker overcame the language barrier -- be it car assembly, microchips production, writing in VB, sophisticated applications programming, Linux kernel development, financial planning, writing movie scripts, or development of new concepts in philosophy. And they act accordingly, taking this into account, and trying to exploit "free money"/"products osmosis" mentioned above in all those areas. They, as opposed to you, are well aware of financial mechanisms even if no one there admits that what they are doing amounts to trivial scams based around currency.
All that "trusted" platform does is preventing things that were developed over decades of technology development, and replaces them with things that no one thought about because they are useless.
1. Make sure that the user is typing at the keyboard, and not another program is doing it. That means, no remote access, no automation, no pretty much any feature that allows users to use interactive software unless it's sitting on the box behind his desk. Yes, one can try to send locally encrypted data blindly over the network -- then where is going the server to stuff it to be decrypted? And if it will be able to, why someone else won't be do the same with his own keystrokes, even if it will take a bunch of mechanical relays "typing" on a "secure" physical keyboard?
2. Trust the software application to provide the "safe" data. That means, no scripts, pipes, interpreted languages, or anything else that combines multiple "products" into an application. Because anything combined will have to be trusted as every component, ane every component (including "data" that is the interpreted program and the interpreter that runs it) will be trusted just as much as the complete system.
3. No virtual machines and emulators. Does not even deserve an explanation.
4. No user-created OS-level software, no matter in what language. Same.
Any of those features, if can be overriden by the user, undermines the system in its very core -- user may have a big red switch, but unless he can discern which particular software is running at the moment he is flipping it, he can not distinguish between bypassing the controls for his own program, for someone else's legitimate software, or for a worm/virus/malware/... Same applies even to self-signing system, with a nice addition of a problem in a networked environment, when one can not physically sign the application on all computers that should be able to run it, and all other methods will mean the ability to transfer and modify secret keys by the user.
So basically we will get a nice computer with all the features expected from ZX Spectrum, but in a "secure" environment. Obviously there should be something that will provide a replacement for those things. And there certainly will be -- there will be a remote access program that will be "trusted" that it already checked the validity of input on the client end, and can be "trusted" on the server. Single application signing service that will "let" the user run some software. Long explanations that emulators are only used by pirates, and that OS authors smell bad, so no self-respecting user would want to do any of those things, ever.
And the company that will bring it to you.... No, not _that_ company, the other one.
Murder! arson! theft!.
The enerrgy consumed by a 250W computer over a year is an equivalent of 87.6 micrograms.
in the reply in an almost identical discussion. The answer remains the same.
1. Moscow State University also now offers 4-year Bachelors. I guess "Specialist" or "Bachelor" just sounds better than "University Diploma" and so they've adopted the title.
If they did, it's something very recent -- when I have studied, there was no such thing.
2. Who said they have no idea? I imagine you've said "I don't know much about X, but I'd like to." and pursued that interest, or late in your training "I think physical chemistry is pretty cool, but inorganic chemistry is kind of dull." or something comparable for your field. In America, once you've got the core requirements done you can go on and get a little bit more training for your Bachelor's on that subspecialty of your choice.
This only works when the core is small enough, and everything is designed for mix and match. Russian education is designed for completeness -- if you decide to specialize in some area, you will get a certain set of courses over the basic "core", but you can't mix and match most of them. However I was talking about unrelated things, like physicist taking art.
3. So we finally agree. We are talking about full-blown papers that are published, and that the (more stringent) American M.S., American Ph.D., Russian Candidate, and Russian Doctorate all then have to write a thesis based on those full-blown published papers and then defend it against a panel of professors. You are making my point for me. The more stringent American M.S. is roughly equivalent to a Russian Candidate, and likewise an American Ph.D. is roughly equivalent to a Russian Doctorate.
Great, even if unimpressive, example of sophism (that you, without any doubt, taken from some incomplete set of courses in philisophy or psychology). Where did I agree that MS requirements are anywhere near Candidate? Where "(more stringent) American M.S" comes from, other than from your imagination, of course? Have you actually compared the kinds of work involved, and level that is required to pass? Or are you under impression that the differences between "degree" and "diploma" are exactly the same everywhere, just because all you have seen is US universities boasting their quality and slightly humble, by Americn standards, Russians working there?
4. Besides being irrelevant it runs counter to our respective statements. It is you who declared that an American Ph.D. is equal to Russian highschool or "incomplete highest" while I have stated repeatedly that the American Ph.D. and Russian Doctorate degrees are roughly equivalent.
Read what I have said before, and don't put your words into my mouth (see above about sophism). What I have said is, the level of many American Ph.D's would be considered to be below the completion of University in Russia. This is not the same as saying that the requirements for Ph.D are intended to be below the completion of university in Russia, or that all Ph.D taken the shortest way possible, merely that the result is that Ph.D is often granted to people with education and accomplishments far below ones that are required to complete University in Russia. Because American system is lax, and Russian one is strict and inflexible when it comes to the ways how a degree can be obtained.
1. Whatever it is, it is not a degree -- the lowest degree in Russia is Candidate.
2. There is little need to choose courses in the areas that students have no idea about anyway.
3. No, I am talking about full-blown papers that are published -- and in addition to that Candidate, just like Doctor, requires a paper that not only published but also should be defended against the opponent in a special session. Just a published paper won't do.
4. I have no idea with whom did you work, however I have never seen an American admitting that some foreigner got better education, or accomplished more than he did.
1. There is no "Specialist" degree in Russia. Only a university diploma (unless someone renamed that while I was away).
2. In Russian universities almost all courses are required -- and "well-roundedness" is already included into those. The idea of pick-and-choose courses makes it harder to plan courses that depend on small pieces included into other courses, so unless courses have a lot of redundancy included into them, it ends up with most of courses required to graduate, this way or another. So just declaring the required courses to be what they are, allows to provide a better education in the same time than "dependency tree" of courses that Americans are so fond of.
3. The _Candidate_ degree already means that someone made an original contribution in his field. The papers written for graduation from university (that also exist in Russia, and pretty much everywhere) are not the nearly at the same level as Candidate dissertation.
Ukraine, other nations were part of the USSR for almost a century. Why do they get to be independant and Chechnya doesn't?
Ukraine was a part of Russian Empire for >300 years, with Russian Czar as its ruler, and became a separate "republic" (just like states in US are separate entities in various ways, though under federal power) when USSR was formed. Chechnya was a part of _Russia_ for >100 years, and remained so when USSR was formed. To be honest, even "independence" of Ukraine didn't do it much good, and Ukraine at least has a theoretical possibility of developing some economy that is not completely tied to Russia. The only economy Chechnya can develop on its own is armed robbery of neighbors.
You forgot to take into account the quality of education and work that follows it. Standardized secondary school curriculum allows universities to drop the courses that overlap with it, and having most of university courses mandatory reduces the wiggle room for students, so even if it becomes less "fun" and "individually-oriented", education is deeper and more consistent over the same amount of time. And please don't compare single dissertation with two of them that are necessary to get the Doctor degree in Russia -- Candidate there is at least an equivalent to Ph.D, even if all other differences are discounted, and both actually did all the work without any shortcuts.
Says who?
The contaminated area around Chernobyl is relatively small, and mostly consists of swamps. Politicians used inflated figures of consequences to promote their own agendas and to show how they are "soing something about it" not unlike the recent anthrax/terrorism scare in US, however most of people whose death is caused by the disaster were, not surprisingly, firefighters and cleanup workers on the power plant itself.
Also all talk about "shutting down" a nuclear power plant as a way to make it safe, can only come from a person without a very basic understanding of the matter. When "shut down", a reactor is just as much a pile of radioactive material as when it is operating -- with the difference that operating power plant can support itself, and when "shut down", it can not.
The probability of another disaster at the Chernobyl plant became at least the same as on any other nuclear power plant, so the only reason to shut anything down could be to sabotage the energy supply in Ukraine and Belarus, and cause higher energy production on coal power plants that are pretty much the only alternative to the nuclear power in that region. I hope, someone can remember that coal, in the amounts necessary to operate a power plant, produces large amount radioactive dust that in the normal operation of the coal power plant is thrown into the atmosphere, and I am not even going into listing the other chemicals. So the last thing "shutting down" the Chernobyl power plant could possibly do is reducing the health risk in the surrounding areas.
As for the nature of the disaster, I am sure, the same problems can escalate to the same level of magnitude pretty much anywhere, and then "experts" from the countries, other than one where it happened will fill the airwaves and printed pages with their "explanation" why it had to happen because of some technical flaw that they "knew" about.
No. After 5-7 years (with a lot of mandatory courses and strict requirements for passing exams) you still can't get a degree, only a University diploma with the "highest" education. After that postgraduates should complete and defend _two_ dissertations to get a Doctor degree, that takes a lot of time, and there is no way to skip on any of that. The requirements in US are not nearly as high -- though some in US do similar amount of study and work to get a Ph.D as it takes for Candidate or even Doctor in Russia, most definitely aren't on that level.
There is no such thing as a bachelor degree in Russia. You either take 5-7 years in university and get "highest education"/University diploma (what is not even called a degree in Russia), or you get nothing at all. Only postgraduate students can get Candidate and Doctor degrees, after one and two dissertations correspondingly. So please, don't diss things that you have no freaking idea about, most of American "Ph.D" would have their education level listed as "Secondary school" or "Incomplete highest" in Russia.
Chechnya never was a real country, and is a part of Russia for over a century. Tibet is a part of China, and before becoming that, it was, contrary to a popular belief, a quite shitty place. And Afghanistan was constantly messed with by UK and US for longer than any modern weapons existed. One may find the actions of China, Russia and India questionable, however their opponents are on at least a very shaky ground ethically -- there are shitloads of "national liberation movements" around the world, and most of them are basically large gangs that want to become official rulers of their historical stomping grounds, and use nationalistic slogans to back up their ambitions.
However my point is, in none of those cases the use of nuclear weapons is an option, no country wants to nuke something that it recognizes as its own territory, so nuclear weapons are irrelevant in "national liberation"/secession conflicts. Compare that to, say, US threatening to use nuclear weapons in its Middle East "adventures".
Military facilities, usually anti-air weapons, are placed in residential areas because those areas are being attacked in the first place. And those facilities are usually some flimsy mobile guns and missiles, not heavily protected bunkers. Look at the history of all wars since the bombers were invented.
As for Saddam's "strategy", it did not require any effort on his part to make everyone see that it was a completely unprovoked attack, with no excuse to kill anyone, civilians or military.
But I very much doubt that anyone in the military actually *intends* to kill civilians. They're out there to kill the enemy as efficiently as possible with the least risk to themselves, and that means battering the sh1t out of military (ie anything that has a role in shooting back) targets.
Germans: London.
US/UK: Munich, Dresden
US: from Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki in WWII to Baghdad in Gulf War I, Belgrade in "Kosovo" war (including Chinese Embassy, TV station and houses), to Baghdad again (at lesser extent, though with targets like hotels packed with journalists and abandoned government buildings) in Gulf War II
In all those examples targets are either civilian cities with no military whatsoever, or cities with very dubious military value at the moment of bombing, yet packed with civilians. At least in WWII it was made clear that they are targeted to "frighten" the enemy, or as a "revenge" for something. Post-WWII examples are usually covered with layers of bullshit, however it's pretty clear that civilians were targeted. <SARCASM>In fact, if the US military was that incompetent in its actions, it would certainly at least once in half a century mistakenly attack a city in US or Germany, yet surprisingly all "mistakes" are made in countries that are incapable of responding to such attacks.</SARCASM>
The V2 was effectively an intermediate range ballistic missile. It is still a better technology than at least 50% of the world has (i.e. the 3rd world), although with enough money you can buy SCUDs which are slightly better.
SCUD missiles, and anything else medium range, are not ICBMs, a bomber can deliver the nuclear charge at the same distance, and wherever they actually were used, no one could use nuclear weapons anyway. Same applies to V2.
Priced any ICBMs lately? You couldn't be more wrong. You cannot buy ICBMs off of the shelf. If that were the case, N. Korea would have them. Hell, Iraq would have had them. You are using technological logic to debate something that you have no relevant facts about. ICBMs are not transistors. They are not mass produced ICs. You cannot just go by some off the shelf of your local arms dealer.
ICBMs are not being sold, they are only built by whoever needs them. And building them is cheap. It's not a question of price, merely practicality of building them, especially considering that once they are built they can't be sold if useless for its owner, so resources spent on building it can't be easily recovered. Same applies to, say, bridges.
They are giant heavy pieces of machinery that are DAMNED difficult to make correctly. Hell, even the US, which has the best space industry in the world still loses between 10-30% of their unmanned payload launches due to the complexity of making a rocket that works perfectly.
More like due to $deity-awful quality of work, monopolistic suppliers, price gouging and simultaneous attempts to reduce cost beyond the reasonable level.
Later rather than sooner. Like most people who have no experience in this area you underrate the difficulty of the task. But also like most people, you don't let that stop you. No, you still have an uninformed opinion just like everyone else.
Actually I have an informed opinion about this. Missiles are "expensive" for the same reason why diamonds or drugs are expensive -- because of successful attempts of preventing trade of them. However whenever there is no trade involved, people can cheaply produce diamonds (if they are located in the proximity of a diamond mine, or have artificial diamonds production equipment) or drugs (using simple equipment). Certainly, any government that has a foot to stand on, can produce missiles as long as they are commited to make all components with their resources and under their own control -- and in that case they are cheap.
Really? You don't think he considered the United States a target? Or Great Britain?
Absolutely not. There is nothing that indicates that he ever intended to attack any of those countries, with or without nuclear weapons.
He certainly hated them enough
Billions of people happen to hate US and UK for various reasons or without ones. None of them did anything at all to start a nuclear war with those countries, and only few actually attacked anything because of that hatred.
to try to assasinate George Bush.
This is absolutely unrelated to the intention to attack the country. Whoever assassinated Kennedy did not start a war with US, and it's not even clear if Hussein was behind any assassination attempt.
If he'd have had access to highly accurate ICBMs, or the technology to create them, why use highly INACCURATE SCUD and Frog missiles instead of these accurate SRMs which you continue to mistakenly state that everyone has access to, huh?
Iraq was in no condition to build anything at all -- even basic pieces of infrastructure in its economy. This is why the border conflict with Kuwait over a small amount of oil had such an importance for Iraq in the first place, and lead to the poorly planned and politically stupid invasion of Kuwait. And without nuclear weapons to deliver the accuracy of ICBM is wasted anyway.
I have to admit, the fact that you are completely ignorant of the world arms
You are allowed to kill people that fight with you, however once you have captured them instead of killing, they are either POW (and protected by Geneva convention), or local peaceful population, and must be either released immediately, or charged with a crime according to the local law, in whatever court that has jurisdiction there -- their or yours if you have annexed the territory. Certainly a military kangaroo court in Guantanamo Bay has no jurisdiction over alleged crimes in Afghanistan, and neither Afghanistan, nor US (and not even Cuba) allow torture to be used on criminal suspects.
Therefore the whole thing is illegal, no matter what verbal structures are used to describe it.
1. Collateral damage is usually NOT produced by bunker-busting bombs that actually hit the bunkers. First of all, there usually isn't much to damage around the bunker, that does not happen to be another target. Second, it's usually produced by things that _miss_ the target -- what in this case will cause the same effect.
2. Last time I have checked, most of bombs that produced huge amount of damage to civilians, were dropped on civilian targets, or poorly protected military ones, to begin with. Often with the primary goal to cause massive damage to civilians.
Yeah. I AM A BAD CHINESE, I WANT TO NUKE.... Tibet! I will spend a lot of effort, will end up filling the Chinese territory with fallout, Tibet mountains will slightly change shape, and there will be less people there.
This would be the greatest thing ever, especially compared to giving Tibet independence, so it will, with no industry or agriculture, and with their "great" theocratic leadership, become a shithole, with a bit less people, and mountains will remain the same. Yers, that's the ticket -- with nuclear weapons mountains will be different.
Same model of thinking probably should apply to Russians nuking Chechnya, and Indians nuking Kashmir.