The USSR lost in Afghanistan, but that was against a resistance that was united against a common enemy, and very heavily supported in money, modern weapons (stingers!) and advisors.
The US lost in Vietnam, but there it was severely constrained by popular opinion and the disapproving international community, troops with low morale, and faced an enemy that was heavily supported in equipment and advisors by the USSR and China.
The Taleban don't even have the support of the majority of the Afghan population. This time they will have no foreign support at all, no modern equipment, nothing.
This time, the US have no trouble with demoralised troops, popular opinion is heavily in favour of killing as many Afghans as possible, the international community no longer has the slightest influence on American policy, and has no sympathy for the Taleban anyway. Even Pakistan has agreed to help!
I'm no expert in logistics, but imho a war against Afghanistan would be a very one directional bloodbath. The area would never be completely pacified as long as the magical mountain penetrating Kalashnikov detector hasn't been invented yet, but I doubt that an occupation of Afghanistan would need to cost more than a few dozen American lives.
That's not how NATO works. The member states don't activate the alliance without consulting washington. The treaty states that this is done after reporting an attack to the security council.
Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security (1).
In other words: if the European member states declare they are activating a clause in the NATO treaty, this means the US has reported to the NATO security council that they consider this a NATO matter. It doesn't happen automatically. NATO wasnt activated when Argentina attacked the British Falkland islands was it?
It seems likely that the Americans want moral support to take any action they deem necessary in response to these attacks, without the usual urging to be cautious, to show restraint, to attempt to mediate and negotiate and other diplomatic red tape.
I dont see what NATO can do to improve domestic air travel security in the USA.
Activating article 5 in NATO is probably Washingtons way of saying to their allies "we do not expect a peep about 'restraint' or 'respecting rights of poor middle eastern countries' if/when we decide to retalliate in any way we see fit".
If any of the European countries disagree with this, they'll have to leave NATO. I don't think that will happen.
They probably meant they potentially have access to everything. That doesn't mean they actually intercept and process everything... As any student can tell you: a large part of information gathering is a) knowing where to look, and b) separating the useful data from the fluff.
They probably only tap the usual suspects: arabs, commies, foreigners, blacks, homosexuals, environmentalists, pacifists. Probably in that order.
I can't imagine they bother to screen slashdot posts:)
If i recall correctly, one of the main performance enhancements RISC promised over CISC was that the lower complexity architecture allowed it to be run at higher clock frequencies, where CISC technology was expected to reach a ceiling soon.
The current advertisement claim that the G4 is better because its RISC technology allows it to run at a lower clock frequency is therefor a little strange...
Am I the only geek who doesn't like Tolkien?
on
Lord of the Geeks
·
· Score: 2
I've tried to read it several times, a book that is recommended to you by many of your friends can't be all bad, right?
I found it just a childrens story, full of elves and dwarves and other twee little fantasy creatures, and it bored my socks off.
So maybe it had some hidden meaning? Dwarves represent the heroic oppressed masses, and the ring evil corporate power? Naa.. it's just elves and dwarves.... page after page of twee little creatures on an adventure of sorts, written in a language and style that would have been considered old and dusty in the 19th century.
I couldn't bare to turn another page of that tome, so I have no idea how the story ends... not do I care.
Where did you get PC hardware that is this stable? My parents own a 386 that has survived more than 10 years of dayly use. With PC's nowadays, this is unthinkable.
Well we at the Communist Jihad never plan our terrorist attacks through ICQ. Although we are foreigners, and therefor a little slow and backward, even we can see that you need more secure methods for this. We encrypt our data with software that we illegally downloaded from a USA based server.
Milk advertising is a massive success story in PR. When I was a kid, we were force fed milk at school, because society believes it is healthy. I hated the stuff with a vengeance.
I was always looking for tricks to avoid having to drink that horrible fatty goo (dropping it, spitting in it, hiding in the playground, pretending to be ill, just so I wouldnt have to go to kindergarten and drink milk).
I was ready to kill the teachers or the other toddlers if I thought that would spare me the fate of having to drink milk for just one day.
Nothing worked. Society saw the product as some sort of essential medicine or vitamin, without which a child wouldn't grow.
Full of calcium? Bollocks. There's just as much calcium in tap water. The white colour is caused by microscopic droplets of fat. Milk is full of fat. It's full of sugars only a baby can digest. Feed your kid fruit juice, it's healthy, full of vitamins, no fat, less sugar than there is in milk, and it tastes nice and sweet.
I'm not a vegetarian by the way, just someone who has hated milk all his life:)
Do you live in Japan? I know they farm kelp there.
The reason why it is not used more in foods, is because of tradition. The decision as to what is edible and what is not appears to mainly be a cultural one. In parts of Africa for instance, the locust is considered a delicacy.
In europe the majority of the population would not be capable of putting a living locust in their mouth and chewing on it, no matter what you offer to pay them.
I've read somewhere that in Japan the idea of drinking milk from an animal is considered a disgusting idea, but I don't know if this is true.
Space exporation can't be privatised because no direct financial gain can be expected from studying pluto's atmosphere:(
I'd love to sponsor the mission though. I am not rich, and I'm not good at organising things, but I'd absolutely pay a few hundred dollars or so to help save the mission to Pluto.
Well you do use the school's hardware, the school's internet connection. Some schools don't use censorware as such, but block IRC and napster ports and the popular gaming sites with a firewall. They don't want the kids to waste the school's resources on things that have nothing to do with education, and could even get them in trouble with concerned parents.
If they didn't use censorware, some concerned parents could say: you are doing nothing to prevent our children from being exposed to porn, we are going to sue to get the computers removed from school. Now at least the school are doing their best, which isn't that good, as censorware doesn't really work.
As for monitoring surfing habits:
As long as they don't log your identity along with the surfing habits, it's the legal equivalent of standing in a store and taking notes on kids' purchasing habits. Nothing you can do.
Spam their logs with thousands upon thousands of visits to sites selling religious and educational books, health food, geriatric healthcare sites, www.whitehouse.gov etc, and make the data useless.
In what legal system is that. AFAIK over here (Netherlands) copyright is infringed as soon as you start distributing unauthorised copies.
That makes you guilty if you distribute copies someone else made (napster?) but not guilty if you receive an unauthorised copy, or make a copy for your own personal use.
The again, I could be wrong. If the police cautions you to stop using napster or face jail, arguing with them or ignoring them does not seem sensible
The CO2 has to be dissolved in water for the bacteria to metabolise it. A normal smoke stack ejects the CO2 into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming, before it dissolves in the oceans and is eaten by algae.
By bubbling it through a large artificial lake, a part of the CO2 might, at least by day be converted back into useful biomass.
But you are right, the USA could contribute a lot more by reducing energy consumption. American industry (and other parts of society) use so much more energy per productivity than other industrialised nations because political pressure has always managed to keep energy prices low. In Europe and Japan, where energy was expensive, the industry had no choice but to invest heavily in increasing energy efficiency.
No need to stack the barrels of dead bacteria. It can be used to make cattle feed, fertilizer, a myriad of things. You could even simply burn it as fuel for the powerplant. The plant would thus become a neat partial solar plant, light from the sun (at least I assume) is used to make new fuel.
Other factors are the changing energy emission from the sun. Two Danish scientists demonstrated that a change in solar activity had caused most (but not all) of the temperature rise over the last century (I cba to find a link).
The theory of CO2-caused global warming is not just disputed by hardline-creationists (who assume the earth must have been created as it is now and cannot change) and other crackpots.
The radiation band which is absorbed by atmospheric CO2 is already absorbed for just about 100%. It is dwarved by the absorbtion by for instance water (oceans, clouds). It is therefor not by default undisputable that more CO2 will lead to more absorbtion. Covering your umbrella with plastic does not nessessarily help keep you dryer.
I'm no longer as convinced as I used to be that CO2 is unjustly blamed, but I still have strong doubts.
Cyanobacteria already produce the majority of our oxygen. There are unbelievable, unmeasurably large quantities of them in the upper few meters of our oceans. They form a significant fraction of all bio mass on earth. I wouldn't be surprised if they formed the majority of all biomass, but I'm not sure about that. Cyano bacteria are the very reason why our atmosphere contains so little CO2 and so much oxygen.
The 'harm' CO2 is said to cause is not through toxicity, not even because of it's infra red absorbing qualities. What people are worried about is a CHANGING CO2 concentration.
By running the emissions of smokestacks through a bubblebath with cyano bacteria, the CO2 is fixed by these algae before it enters the atmosphere, instead of first having to enter the atmosphere, and then the ocean before it is fixed. Thus the CO2 doesn't change the concentration in the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
The army of Iraq was far bigger, better equipped, dug in and actually organised. It was destroyed with negigeable losses.
Perhaps you recall all those opinion articles that predicted that war would last for years and cost thousands of american lives?
The achievements of the soviets in Afghanistan during the 80s just aren't relevant. The situation is completely different this time.
Past achievements are no guarantee for success.
The USSR lost in Afghanistan, but that was against a resistance that was united against a common enemy, and very heavily supported in money, modern weapons (stingers!) and advisors.
The US lost in Vietnam, but there it was severely constrained by popular opinion and the disapproving international community, troops with low morale, and faced an enemy that was heavily supported in equipment and advisors by the USSR and China.
The Taleban don't even have the support of the majority of the Afghan population. This time they will have no foreign support at all, no modern equipment, nothing.
This time, the US have no trouble with demoralised troops, popular opinion is heavily in favour of killing as many Afghans as possible, the international community no longer has the slightest influence on American policy, and has no sympathy for the Taleban anyway. Even Pakistan has agreed to help!
I'm no expert in logistics, but imho a war against Afghanistan would be a very one directional bloodbath. The area would never be completely pacified as long as the magical mountain penetrating Kalashnikov detector hasn't been invented yet, but I doubt that an occupation of Afghanistan would need to cost more than a few dozen American lives.
To ensure our safety, all nuclear research should be banned until we know enough about it to know what the risks are.
That's not how NATO works. The member states don't activate the alliance without consulting washington. The treaty states that this is done after reporting an attack to the security council. Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security (1). In other words: if the European member states declare they are activating a clause in the NATO treaty, this means the US has reported to the NATO security council that they consider this a NATO matter. It doesn't happen automatically. NATO wasnt activated when Argentina attacked the British Falkland islands was it? It seems likely that the Americans want moral support to take any action they deem necessary in response to these attacks, without the usual urging to be cautious, to show restraint, to attempt to mediate and negotiate and other diplomatic red tape.
I dont see what NATO can do to improve domestic air travel security in the USA.
Activating article 5 in NATO is probably Washingtons way of saying to their allies "we do not expect a peep about 'restraint' or 'respecting rights of poor middle eastern countries' if/when we decide to retalliate in any way we see fit".
If any of the European countries disagree with this, they'll have to leave NATO. I don't think that will happen.
They probably meant they potentially have access to everything. That doesn't mean they actually intercept and process everything... As any student can tell you: a large part of information gathering is a) knowing where to look, and b) separating the useful data from the fluff.
:)
They probably only tap the usual suspects: arabs, commies, foreigners, blacks, homosexuals, environmentalists, pacifists. Probably in that order.
I can't imagine they bother to screen slashdot posts
If i recall correctly, one of the main performance enhancements RISC promised over CISC was that the lower complexity architecture allowed it to be run at higher clock frequencies, where CISC technology was expected to reach a ceiling soon. The current advertisement claim that the G4 is better because its RISC technology allows it to run at a lower clock frequency is therefor a little strange...
I've tried to read it several times, a book that is recommended to you by many of your friends can't be all bad, right?
I found it just a childrens story, full of elves and dwarves and other twee little fantasy creatures, and it bored my socks off.
So maybe it had some hidden meaning? Dwarves represent the heroic oppressed masses, and the ring evil corporate power? Naa.. it's just elves and dwarves.... page after page of twee little creatures on an adventure of sorts, written in a language and style that would have been considered old and dusty in the 19th century.
I couldn't bare to turn another page of that tome, so I have no idea how the story ends... not do I care.
Where did you get PC hardware that is this stable? My parents own a 386 that has survived more than 10 years of dayly use. With PC's nowadays, this is unthinkable.
1st of april already?
Well we at the Communist Jihad never plan our terrorist attacks through ICQ. Although we are foreigners, and therefor a little slow and backward, even we can see that you need more secure methods for this. We encrypt our data with software that we illegally downloaded from a USA based server.
Milk advertising is a massive success story in PR. When I was a kid, we were force fed milk at school, because society believes it is healthy. I hated the stuff with a vengeance. I was always looking for tricks to avoid having to drink that horrible fatty goo (dropping it, spitting in it, hiding in the playground, pretending to be ill, just so I wouldnt have to go to kindergarten and drink milk). I was ready to kill the teachers or the other toddlers if I thought that would spare me the fate of having to drink milk for just one day. Nothing worked. Society saw the product as some sort of essential medicine or vitamin, without which a child wouldn't grow. Full of calcium? Bollocks. There's just as much calcium in tap water. The white colour is caused by microscopic droplets of fat. Milk is full of fat. It's full of sugars only a baby can digest. Feed your kid fruit juice, it's healthy, full of vitamins, no fat, less sugar than there is in milk, and it tastes nice and sweet. I'm not a vegetarian by the way, just someone who has hated milk all his life :)
Do you live in Japan? I know they farm kelp there.
The reason why it is not used more in foods, is because of tradition. The decision as to what is edible and what is not appears to mainly be a cultural one. In parts of Africa for instance, the locust is considered a delicacy.
In europe the majority of the population would not be capable of putting a living locust in their mouth and chewing on it, no matter what you offer to pay them.
I've read somewhere that in Japan the idea of drinking milk from an animal is considered a disgusting idea, but I don't know if this is true.
My PC is noisy. I can't sleep if I leave it on overnight.
Maybe Pepsi or Coke would pay for the whole mission in exchange for having their logo painted on the rocket at launch time?
Space exporation can't be privatised because no direct financial gain can be expected from studying pluto's atmosphere :(
I'd love to sponsor the mission though. I am not rich, and I'm not good at organising things, but I'd absolutely pay a few hundred dollars or so to help save the mission to Pluto.
I can't quite picture a superconducting semiconductor in my head. Would such a chip just have superconducting interconnections? How does it work?
Why censorware isn't nessesarily bad:
Well you do use the school's hardware, the school's internet connection. Some schools don't use censorware as such, but block IRC and napster ports and the popular gaming sites with a firewall. They don't want the kids to waste the school's resources on things that have nothing to do with education, and could even get them in trouble with concerned parents.
If they didn't use censorware, some concerned parents could say: you are doing nothing to prevent our children from being exposed to porn, we are going to sue to get the computers removed from school. Now at least the school are doing their best, which isn't that good, as censorware doesn't really work.
As for monitoring surfing habits:
As long as they don't log your identity along with the surfing habits, it's the legal equivalent of standing in a store and taking notes on kids' purchasing habits. Nothing you can do.
Spam their logs with thousands upon thousands of visits to sites selling religious and educational books, health food, geriatric healthcare sites, www.whitehouse.gov etc, and make the data useless.
In what legal system is that. AFAIK over here (Netherlands) copyright is infringed as soon as you start distributing unauthorised copies.
That makes you guilty if you distribute copies someone else made (napster?) but not guilty if you receive an unauthorised copy, or make a copy for your own personal use.
The again, I could be wrong. If the police cautions you to stop using napster or face jail, arguing with them or ignoring them does not seem sensible
No, just a bigoted and ignorant post like that is an almost dead giveaway of an English or American identity.
The CO2 has to be dissolved in water for the bacteria to metabolise it. A normal smoke stack ejects the CO2 into the atmosphere, where it contributes to global warming, before it dissolves in the oceans and is eaten by algae.
By bubbling it through a large artificial lake, a part of the CO2 might, at least by day be converted back into useful biomass.
But you are right, the USA could contribute a lot more by reducing energy consumption. American industry (and other parts of society) use so much more energy per productivity than other industrialised nations because political pressure has always managed to keep energy prices low. In Europe and Japan, where energy was expensive, the industry had no choice but to invest heavily in increasing energy efficiency.
No need to stack the barrels of dead bacteria. It can be used to make cattle feed, fertilizer, a myriad of things. You could even simply burn it as fuel for the powerplant. The plant would thus become a neat partial solar plant, light from the sun (at least I assume) is used to make new fuel.
Other factors are the changing energy emission from the sun. Two Danish scientists demonstrated that a change in solar activity had caused most (but not all) of the temperature rise over the last century (I cba to find a link).
The theory of CO2-caused global warming is not just disputed by hardline-creationists (who assume the earth must have been created as it is now and cannot change) and other crackpots.
The radiation band which is absorbed by atmospheric CO2 is already absorbed for just about 100%. It is dwarved by the absorbtion by for instance water (oceans, clouds). It is therefor not by default undisputable that more CO2 will lead to more absorbtion. Covering your umbrella with plastic does not nessessarily help keep you dryer.
I'm no longer as convinced as I used to be that CO2 is unjustly blamed, but I still have strong doubts.
Basically you didnt read the article.
Cyanobacteria already produce the majority of our oxygen. There are unbelievable, unmeasurably large quantities of them in the upper few meters of our oceans. They form a significant fraction of all bio mass on earth. I wouldn't be surprised if they formed the majority of all biomass, but I'm not sure about that. Cyano bacteria are the very reason why our atmosphere contains so little CO2 and so much oxygen.
The 'harm' CO2 is said to cause is not through toxicity, not even because of it's infra red absorbing qualities. What people are worried about is a CHANGING CO2 concentration.
By running the emissions of smokestacks through a bubblebath with cyano bacteria, the CO2 is fixed by these algae before it enters the atmosphere, instead of first having to enter the atmosphere, and then the ocean before it is fixed. Thus the CO2 doesn't change the concentration in the atmosphere.