Except huge amounts of environmentally clean solar energy and raw materials.
There is no reason to spend billions of dollars to go there.
Except to stop the spending of billions of dollars on energy in the primitive, polluting form of fossil fuels.
Simonetta Vespucci (1454 - 1476) -- Beauty is the most subtle form of intelligence.
Your motto is that of a vain art-model, not 22 years of age, preferring external beauty over wizdom, intelligence and learning, and you wish to be taken seriously in a discussion of technological issues ? Is your post's title self-ironic ?
I disagree. I cannot see the RIAA overcome market economy at every country on earth. Unless prices are dropped so that it's cheaper to buy than to D/L, it is in the best interests of foreign countries NOT to adapt US IP laws.
The EC may be bought (or not, the question is still open), but there are a the Indian, Chinese, and Muslim worlds, about a billion large each, which, IMHO, are simply too large and anti-american to be bought.
Once, say, 10^8 Indians use P2P, it seems highly unlikely that its usage wouldn't diffuse back to the US.
OK, that was a long post, I'll try to summarize it in order to answer it point-by-point, and hope I'll succeed.
sepparation is impossible because:
1) the palestinian work-force is important to the Israelly economy 2) The topography and shape of the borders between the current jewish and arab regions makes it impossible to defend. 3) maintaining a long border will take a high social and psychological toll. 4) Separation by force is not a viable long/intermediate-term solution, peacefull coexistence is.
Now for my answers: 1) a. The palestinian work-force is today much less important for Israel. Much of it was replaced by foreign workers anyway. b. Foreign work raises demographic issues. This is a problem anywhere, but in israel this is an existential problem because the palestinians have a long-term goal of the distruction of Israel. c. Keeping a hostile people as cheap labor is not a good strategy neither morally nor pragmatically. Indeed, the current palestinian workers are a quite willing infra-structure for terror activity insided Israel.
a+b+c => The benefit from cheap palestinian labor is far outweighted by the shortcomings.
2) regarding the shape of the border: Indeed, the topographic problems can be catagorised so:
a) isolated jewish regions in mostly arab areas (settelments)
b) isolated arab regions in mostly jewish areas
c) the 67 border itself, as it is now, is long and costly to defend.
a+b means there will be no end to friction unless some jews and some arabs are deported. Note that "peace-now" and "peace-activists" are very happy with deporting jews (evacuating settelers), but are horrified by the notion of evacuating arabs. This is moral and pragmatic blindness. a double-standard so blazing to the eye it's amazing that it's actually such a widely accepted view.
In any case: I say that if you're sick with the settelements and wish for them to be evacuated for the common good (I am) intelectual honesty REQUIRES you to apply the same criterion and choice for arabs in jewish areas.
Now for c: No-one denies that guarding the border will be costly. However one must compare this cost with the direct and indirect costs of the war of attrition. Compared to this, creating and maintaining the border is really quite cheap.
3) the social and psichological costs. This is the same as 2.c: there are costs, but they are far less than the cost of the current state.
4) regarding long-term viability: peacefull coexistence we've tried. We did try it. It failed. It's failure is actually a sort of of imbalanced civil war. Unless the sides are separated, there will be no two sides able to try and coexist.
Now for your last paragraph:
The problem is, the more you oppress the Palestinians, the strong you entrech the very people we need to eliminate. Random settlements+Border wall are just too extreme---The miltary burden in maintaining that situation is just too high over the long run----The grunts on the low end 'enforcing' the peace are going to loose it, and become cruel+vicious.
Which is exactly what I say: I do not wish to oppress the palestinians. The only way that (stopping the oppression) is going to happen is by me sepparating from them. Including, like you've mentioned, evacuating settelers, but also including evacuating Arabs.
Ethnic cleansing is an ambiguous term, i.e. it has 2 possible meanings: deportation and genocide.
I am very much against genocide. But, given that I see no solution except continuing ethnic clashes or seperation, deportations are the lesser evil.
Oh, and BTW, ask yourself: if Israel withdraws from the teritories, wouldn't that mean deportation, or "ethnic cleansing" in you terms, of the jewish settelers in the bank ?
It's hypocrisy and double-standard to demand that Israel deports its own jewish citizens while denouncing any possible deportations of arabs as "ethnic cleansing"
Again, I don't like deportations, and I think that the borderline should be drawn such that as few people (both arabs and jews) get deported as possible. But since this is the alternative to this continuing war of attrition, within which much worse things than deportations happen as a matter of routine, then this is what should be done.
But I didn't ask you anything about the peace process, nor about the palestinian people. I asked you why the massacre took place, and you seem to want to evade the question.
Read back and see I've raised the Hebron massacre not as a part of the conspiracy or fraud discussion, but as a counter-example for the notion that personal respect is a deterrent for collective violence between ethnic/national groups (in that case, pre-national). Hence I wasn't evading the question, it's simply a different (although not totaly unrelated) discussion.
If one believes that the only levels are the national and the individual, one will similarly fall prey to much misunderstanding. It is my view that a country can also for greater understanding be seen to be composed of cliques and subcultures, who often have contrasting ideaologies and methodologies.
This truism holds for every complex system. However, if one wants to get anything done at all, it is costumary to use Ocaam's razor: i.e. use the simplest model which explains your system for a certain purpose.
Why do you insist on dealing with the Palestinians only as a monolithic entity?... You're not making sense.
Again, Ocaam's razor. To (miss)paraphrase Freud: Sometimes a cigar, no matter how intricate a fluid-dynamics model can be constructed dor it, is just a cigar.
Note that this post represents my own personal view, which is contrary to most Israellies':
My taxes should be spent elsewhere.
That is for you to decide. Not me. However, I actually agree: I believe that Israel should gradually grow-up and stop being dependant on US foreign aid.
If you want to play nice...You can have my money.
That is indeed the costumary position of the US state-dedpartment, which is only too happy to maintain this state of Israelly addiction to foreign-aid funds. I think Israel should say "no thanks". The US should be a partner and an ally, if it so chooses, not a financier or employer, as too many Israellies had come to believe: The US has its own agenda and interests. Although the survival of Israel as a democratic ally may be one of them (again: that is for YOU- the US tax-payer to decide) it is by no means the most important one (like it is, naturally, for us).
If you can't figure out how to have peace, then screw you.
Kind thanks for the warm sentiment. I'll answer your polite remark seriously anyway: My belief is that for the next several generations no-one can figure out how to have peace. Israel should concentrate on surviving and prosperring w/o it. And IMHO that means separation from the Palestinians.
I note that you still have not addressed the question as to the reason for the massacre of the Israeli Jewish settlers in 1929.
That is because, w.r.t. the 1929 massacre, there was no "peace-process" at the time. Or a palestinian people as a defined entity like today.
The views and actions of Palestinians seem to range the normal gamut from saintly to criminal. You seem to wish to tar them all with the same brush; this does not seem logical or evidence-based.
The phenomena is a national one; i.e. it involves collective behaviour of many individuals. With such phenomena, indeed the average is much more important than a single-individual's actions. If one sees phenomena only at the scale of the individual, one will not understand much of the world.
And BTW, the Palestinians are a people, because they define themselves as such. In their society, genocided-murderers are idolized and considered martyrs. What is that if not tarring themselves with the same brush ?
Such demonisation is the first step taken by those who wish to justify racism and genocide. Palestinian bombers doubtless think the same way about Israeli Jews.
I don't need to demonize Palestinians. They do it by themselves with their actions. And as for racism, this is a racist and ethnic conflict. Putting on pink glasses will not change that. The difference between most israellies and most palestinians is that israellies don't want genocide, just separation, while palestinians want (and indeed encorage and engage in small-scale practice of) genocide.
Palestinians got to know Israelis during that time as bosses, and Israelis got to know Palestinians as cheap labour, or a place to shop on shabat. I don't know what would have worked.
It won't, and (IMHO) it shouldn't. I think that the thing to do is seperation: all palestinians to their own palestinian state in the Bank, all jews to their own Jewish state in the rest. This means that I don't want a single palestinian in the borders of Israel and a single Jew in the borders of Palestine.
Maybe the natural order of things is for Jews to rule over Arabs, whites over blacks, whites over reds. Was that your point?
Exactly the opposite: I do not want to be the master of the palestinians. I specificly do NOT want Israellies to be their bosses. I want to leave them alone, and for them to leave me alone. Grow up and take care of yourselves, by yourselves, is what I say.
Yes, the Palestinians didn't manage to stop all the suicide bombers
The PA (as well as their main opposition, the Hamas) was and is directly and indirectly, financially and militarily involved with the attacks.
There is, both in the law and with common sense, the issue of bad faith. When a person, or body, says one thing and actively porsues the opposite, then there is bad-faith: he/it did not intend to fulfil his statements from the start. That is blatant fraud, and claiming that the con-man "couldn't mannage" to stop the acts is naieve at best.
It was this willful-blindness, this sort of double-standard and hypocrisy that made me, and many Israellies, furious with both the Israelly left and the Clinton administration.
But don't pretend that Isreal didn't use every shred of opportunity it got to strike back at the Palestinians as well, closing borders
Actually, with the Avoda-government, Israel did not strike back, and the result was the much worse violence of 2000-03. And as for closing borders, what would you have done if your country was invaded by a flock of genocide-bombers ?
replenishing the jewish settlement, creating new ones.
Here, I agree, was a mistake maded by Israel (not because it affected Oslo: Oslo was doomed by the Palestinians from the start, but because it is insane demographically). However, Israel never (untill recently) comitted not to expand the jewish settelments, dedfinately not in Oslo: there was no fraud involved, just stupidity.
There was no real desire for peace from the Israeli either, just peaceful assimilation.
Yes there was. That was exactly the Oslo deal, the Oslo dream: you (the PA) will eventually get independance on a part of the land, we will get security. This was the lie that was sold to the Israelly people. The true desire for peace was so strong it led Israel to make insane choices even when evidence clearly indicated fraud.
To reduce the Palestinians to a bunch of small reservations with no real power, much like what happened to the native indians in the US.
That was never a realistic goal. And anyway, if this was so, why did the IDF withdraw from the areas of the PA ? Did the US army withdraw from a quarter of the area of the US in order to allow the N.A. self rule ?
Now they want to wall them in and isolate them by force. While it may keep them apart, it'll also stigmatize the entire situation more.
You know what, many Israellies don't care about stigmas any more. We want to seperate from a nation that has made civilian-killing more than a strategy: a value by itself. A nation that, by their own words, will not agree to anything but the full anihilation of their opponents.
I think the Palestinians should get their freedom, in the west bank and Gaza, and manage for themselves. We don't wish to use them; no more jobs in Israel. We (most of us) don't wish to interact with them; No more settelers to kill and hate. Just grow up and take care of themselves. If they can't manage by themselves, tough shit. Don't decieve us, kill and maim us, and expect us to care.
(1) Are you claiming that the murders were part of a Palestinian conspiracy? Because usually, the people promising peace are not the people doing the murdering. Is that the case here? "The Palestinians" are no more a united, homogenous group than are "The Israeli Jews".
I assume this is w.r.t. the murders since Oslo, not Hebron 1929. And yes that is exactly what I'm claiming; in fact, the PA's own Fatah troops are very active in genocide-bombings and other kinds of terror acts. And BTW, although Arafat is at the head of the organization, like I've said, I don't believe this deception and murder is a personal decision or act; It is a collective Palestinian behaviour.
(2) Why were the Hebron settlers murdered, and were their murderers brought to justice by any common, civilised sense of the term?
Here, I assume you are refering to the 1929 massacre. It should be noted that the then British mandate in Israel was far from adamant in protecting the lives of the occupied people. Not that there was much evidence to identify the lynchers individually anyway. In any case, the country was then far from what is today called "civilized".
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother.
This already happens. Israel's group of inux users mailing list has at least one Iranian participant. He is indeed respected personnaly.
... sniped somewhat biassed discription of Israel's politics...
The ONLY hope of peace is for enough people on all sides of the conflict to get to know eachother and develop personal respect. They don't have to respect eachothers' governments... But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this. FOSS is one venue for collaboration.
You know, that mantra just doesn't work. In 1929, in Hebron, the jewish settelers were very well known and respected by their arab neighbours, which massacered them one day w/o any warning.
It is not the political system in israel which is responsible for the right's ascent, but a recognition that the peace process was nothing more than a national-scale con-job. The palestinians decieved israel, by promissing peace, while maintaining a constant, low intensity, level of murdering Israelly civilians.
The Oslo agreements and the resulting violence were nothing more than a result of the Israelly left's stupidity and blind-optimism whenever the word peace is involved, while confronted with a clever, hateful and murderous opponent (the PLO, later PA).
As for personal respect: the conflict is national, ethnic and religious. In other words, it is a collective (social) phenomena. It will, IMHO, no more be solved by personal respect of single people than any other war in the history of mankind (please show me a counter example...)
This was one of the false arguments laid by the Oslo people: let us reach for a temporary solution, the two people will get to know each other, and surely will respect each other so much that war will not be possible.
Hmm, Truth by Democracy... sounds like a rather dubious value at best
But you do know that, to a large extent, this is how scientific oppinions are made... thru the prestiege and image of the scientist by his peers before judgement of the work itself to significant details.
I'm not complaining, mind you: one has to have filters due to the large volume (and variance in quality...) of published work.
It's just that science, which is, IMHO, a democratic system of sorts, has more accurate metrics for falsehood than political democracy, and so can eventually fix itself better.
I am not sure the indirect drive(you mean laser driven right?)
No, It appears I have been too concise, and therefore misleading.
The scheme I was refering to is using Z-Pinch as an initial X-Ray source to create a symetrized X-Ray radiation in a chamber (hohlraum).
In the middle of the chamber the fuel pellet absorbs symmetrized X-ray radiation, and therefore its implosion is expected to be much less affected by instabilities than with laser- or ion-beams-driven implosions.
Now for efficiency: it apears that for Z-Pinches as an X-Ray source, If the pinch is not broken by instabilities, the greater the income power, the greater the yield. IIRC yields as high as 30% (!) were measured, but I'm away from the lab and need to recheck this.
In fact, what inabled all this was the 1995 discovery that using dense wire-arrays greatly reduced instabilities and greatly increased X-Ray yield.
The Z-machine is no more modern than 10 years more modern than the tokamak and it sure as hell isn't efficient (in terms of fusion production) by any means
IMHO, it is not the machines' efficiencies which should be compared at this stage, but the (projected) upward-scaling of the technologies.
Indeed, the Z-machine is currently not very efficient, but the indirect-drive ICF approach is, AFAIK, quite promising.
(Of course, my biased opinion, as one considering a PHD in plasma, is that the world should try both in parallel and see what works... )
I think the real threat to our planet is ourselves, not our sun.
I think you ment biosphere, not planet...
Thus, I hope we do not find a backup planet. I hope this is it. If we foul our planet to the point it is unlivable, we deserve our fate.
First, IMHO this is utterly wrong factually: once a society colonizes space, all it'll need is energy and materials. I suggest that actually
there may be few solar systems which are completely uninhabitable.
Second, from the pragmatic POV, this sounds to me like morality gone completely insane: are you truly sugesting that you'd willfully risk total genocide for humanity (and its surrounding biological system, BTW)
just because you think we "deserve it" ?
That's the largest-scale suicidal philosophy I have ever seen.
Not, of course, that I am in any position to affect change on this issue. Either a habitable planet is in range or not. Either we find it, or not.
Wrong. In fact, for a single individual, a researcher may be in one of the best positions to affect humanity's future course.
Certainly we should try.
To this I agree;-)
I just hope it is not too easy to leave Earth for the rich and powerful.
Why not ? if it'll easy for them in several decades, it'll probably be easy for others later.
And anyway, don't worry. Space travel is going to be risky buisness for a long time. If a rich and powerful person is willing to take on personal risks to explore a new fronteer, he/she'll probably be exactly the kind of person needed up there.
the solar wind would send it right back and we'd end up with tons of radioactive plutonium in the upper atmosphere.
I think you're a bit confused: the probability for anything coming out of the sun to hit earth is rather low (considering that the magnetosphere is 6-10 Earth radii, ie ~5*10^4 km, while the sun is 1.5*10^8 km, the solid-angle is quite small...)
And just to make sure, one can always use an orbit to the sun which is above the solar-system plane, and thats it.
No, reverse pollution is not a problem. Findig the energy to send all the material to the sun is...
(Ironically, the only concievable option is an Orion...;-) )
Byproducts like barium-140, cesium-134, cesium-137, and iodine-131 have half-lives in the days to only a few years
AFAICR, a short lifetime is actually a good thing when considering environmental concerns: with a HL of, say, 10 days, in less than a year there'll be practically nothing to worry about.
I don't believe the mystical elements of the bible either, But I do believe the codes and laws in the bible to reflect certain social situation, or at least a certain collective state of mind.
Why should this directive be included, if there was no need ? If there were no slaves wishing to stay enslaved ?
If you find that so hard to believe, consider the closest (legal) thing that western societies have to slavery: military service.
A soldier, in a reasonable army at least, is not a slave, but the situations are quite akin. And still there are people choosing
this situation of lack of freedom. Not all due to idealism.
I know you were joking, but in ancient times, there indeed were slaves which were happy in their slavery and did not want to be released, even when they could have been by law (Yovel).
The bible specificly mentions a degrading ceremony done to such a reluctant slave, within which he was branded (at his ear).
This was done by the ancient hebrews to detter people from opting into slavery.
And I don't think fear of freedom is so different today.
Technology is the application of your knowledge of nature to modify it.
Magic, wether by people or "supernatural beings" (lovely oxymoron, that) is exactly the same, only with modified laws of nature.
The difference, I believe, is that science and tech are more democratic: A normal person can, with a lot of work and help, understand and apply some of the basic principles. On the contrary, muggles and squibs just can't perform magic no matter How hard they'll work.
Slashdot Mirror
This thing (will) must have quite impressive normal modes
There is nothing in space.
Except huge amounts of environmentally clean solar energy and raw materials.
There is no reason to spend billions of dollars to go there.
Except to stop the spending of billions of dollars on energy in the primitive, polluting form of fossil fuels.
Simonetta Vespucci (1454 - 1476) -- Beauty is the most subtle form of intelligence.
Your motto is that of a vain art-model, not 22 years of age, preferring external beauty over wizdom, intelligence and learning, and you wish to be taken seriously in a discussion of technological issues ? Is your post's title self-ironic ?
the RIAA will ultimately win this battle
I disagree. I cannot see the RIAA overcome market economy at every country on earth. Unless prices are dropped so that it's cheaper to buy than to D/L, it is in the best interests of foreign countries NOT to adapt US IP laws.
The EC may be bought (or not, the question is still open), but there are a the Indian, Chinese, and Muslim worlds, about a billion large each, which, IMHO, are simply too large and anti-american to be bought.
Once, say, 10^8 Indians use P2P, it seems highly unlikely that its usage wouldn't diffuse back to the US.
OK, that was a long post, I'll try to summarize it in order to answer it point-by-point, and hope I'll succeed.
sepparation is impossible because:
1) the palestinian work-force is important to the Israelly economy
2) The topography and shape of the borders between the current jewish and arab regions makes it impossible to defend.
3) maintaining a long border will take a high social and psychological toll.
4) Separation by force is not a viable long/intermediate-term solution, peacefull coexistence is.
Now for my answers:
1)
a. The palestinian work-force is today much less important for Israel. Much of it was replaced by foreign workers anyway.
b. Foreign work raises demographic issues. This is a problem anywhere, but in israel this is an existential problem because the palestinians have a long-term goal of the distruction of Israel.
c. Keeping a hostile people as cheap labor is not a good strategy neither morally nor pragmatically. Indeed, the current palestinian workers are a quite willing infra-structure for terror activity insided Israel.
a+b+c => The benefit from cheap palestinian labor is far outweighted by the shortcomings.
2) regarding the shape of the border:
Indeed, the topographic problems can be catagorised so:
a) isolated jewish regions in mostly arab areas (settelments)
b) isolated arab regions in mostly jewish areas
c) the 67 border itself, as it is now, is long and costly to defend.
a+b means there will be no end to friction unless some jews and some arabs are deported.
Note that "peace-now" and "peace-activists" are very happy with deporting jews (evacuating settelers), but are horrified by the notion of evacuating arabs. This is moral and pragmatic blindness. a double-standard so blazing to the eye it's amazing that it's actually such a widely accepted view.
In any case: I say that if you're sick with the settelements and wish for them to be evacuated for the common good (I am) intelectual honesty REQUIRES you to apply the same criterion and choice for arabs in jewish areas.
Now for c:
No-one denies that guarding the border will be costly. However one must compare this cost with the direct and indirect costs of the war of attrition. Compared to this, creating and maintaining the border is really quite cheap.
3) the social and psichological costs.
This is the same as 2.c: there are costs, but they are far less than the cost of the current state.
4) regarding long-term viability:
peacefull coexistence we've tried. We did try it. It failed. It's failure is actually a sort of of imbalanced civil war.
Unless the sides are separated, there will be no two sides able to try and coexist.
Now for your last paragraph:
The problem is, the more you oppress the Palestinians, the strong you entrech the very people we need to eliminate. Random settlements+Border wall are just too extreme---The miltary burden in maintaining that situation is just too high over the long run----The grunts on the low end 'enforcing' the peace are going to loose it, and become cruel+vicious.
Which is exactly what I say: I do not wish to oppress the palestinians. The only way that (stopping the oppression) is going to happen is by me sepparating from them. Including, like you've mentioned, evacuating settelers, but also including evacuating Arabs.
Ethnic cleansing is an ambiguous term, i.e. it has 2 possible meanings: deportation and genocide.
I am very much against genocide. But, given that I see no solution except continuing ethnic clashes or seperation, deportations are the lesser evil.
Oh, and BTW, ask yourself: if Israel withdraws from the teritories, wouldn't that mean deportation, or "ethnic cleansing" in you terms, of the jewish settelers in the bank ?
It's hypocrisy and double-standard to demand that Israel deports its own jewish citizens while denouncing any possible deportations of arabs as "ethnic cleansing"
Again, I don't like deportations, and I think that the borderline should be drawn such that as few people (both arabs and jews) get deported as possible. But since this is the alternative to this continuing war of attrition, within which much worse things than deportations happen as a matter of routine, then this is what should be done.
IOW: war is much worse than moving an appartment.
But I didn't ask you anything about the peace process, nor about the palestinian people. I asked you why the massacre took place, and you seem to want to evade the question.
... You're not making sense.
Read back and see I've raised the Hebron massacre not as a part of the conspiracy or fraud discussion, but as a counter-example for the notion that personal respect is a deterrent for collective violence between ethnic/national groups (in that case, pre-national). Hence I wasn't evading the question, it's simply a different (although not totaly unrelated) discussion.
If one believes that the only levels are the national and the individual, one will similarly fall prey to much misunderstanding. It is my view that a country can also for greater understanding be seen to be composed of cliques and subcultures, who often have contrasting ideaologies and methodologies.
This truism holds for every complex system. However, if one wants to get anything done at all, it is costumary to use Ocaam's razor: i.e. use the simplest model which explains your system for a certain purpose.
Why do you insist on dealing with the Palestinians only as a monolithic entity?
Again, Ocaam's razor. To (miss)paraphrase Freud: Sometimes a cigar, no matter how intricate a fluid-dynamics model can be constructed dor it, is just a cigar.
Note that this post represents my own personal view, which is contrary to most Israellies':
My taxes should be spent elsewhere.
That is for you to decide. Not me. However, I actually agree: I believe that Israel should gradually grow-up and stop being dependant on US foreign aid.
If you want to play nice...You can have my money.
That is indeed the costumary position of the US state-dedpartment, which is only too happy to maintain this state of Israelly addiction to foreign-aid funds.
I think Israel should say "no thanks". The US should be a partner and an ally, if it so chooses, not a financier or employer, as too many Israellies had come to believe: The US has its own agenda and interests. Although the survival of Israel as a democratic ally may be one of them (again: that is for YOU- the US tax-payer to decide) it is by no means the most important one (like it is, naturally, for us).
If you can't figure out how to have peace, then screw you.
Kind thanks for the warm sentiment. I'll answer your polite remark seriously anyway:
My belief is that for the next several generations no-one can figure out how to have peace. Israel should concentrate on surviving and prosperring w/o it. And IMHO that means separation from the Palestinians.
I note that you still have not addressed the question as to the reason for the massacre of the Israeli Jewish settlers in 1929.
That is because, w.r.t. the 1929 massacre, there was no "peace-process" at the time. Or a palestinian people as a defined entity like today.
The views and actions of Palestinians seem to range the normal gamut from saintly to criminal. You seem to wish to tar them all with the same brush; this does not seem logical or evidence-based.
The phenomena is a national one; i.e. it involves collective behaviour of many individuals. With such phenomena, indeed the average is much more important than a single-individual's actions. If one sees phenomena only at the scale of the individual, one will not understand much of the world.
And BTW, the Palestinians are a people, because they define themselves as such. In their society, genocided-murderers are idolized and considered martyrs. What is that if not tarring themselves with the same brush ?
Such demonisation is the first step taken by those who wish to justify racism and genocide. Palestinian bombers doubtless think the same way about Israeli Jews.
I don't need to demonize Palestinians. They do it by themselves with their actions.
And as for racism, this is a racist and ethnic conflict. Putting on pink glasses will not change that.
The difference between most israellies and most palestinians is that israellies don't want genocide, just separation, while palestinians want (and indeed encorage and engage in small-scale practice of) genocide.
Palestinians got to know Israelis during that time as bosses, and Israelis got to know Palestinians as cheap labour, or a place to shop on shabat. I don't know what would have worked.
It won't, and (IMHO) it shouldn't.
I think that the thing to do is seperation: all palestinians to their own palestinian state in the Bank, all jews to their own Jewish state in the rest.
This means that I don't want a single palestinian in the borders of Israel and a single Jew in the borders of Palestine.
Maybe the natural order of things is for Jews to rule over Arabs, whites over blacks, whites over reds. Was that your point?
Exactly the opposite: I do not want to be the master of the palestinians. I specificly do NOT want Israellies to be their bosses. I want to leave them alone, and for them to leave me alone.
Grow up and take care of yourselves, by yourselves, is what I say.
Yes, the Palestinians didn't manage to stop all the suicide bombers
The PA (as well as their main opposition, the Hamas) was and is directly and indirectly, financially and militarily involved with the attacks.
There is, both in the law and with common sense, the issue of bad faith. When a person, or body, says one thing and actively porsues the opposite, then there is bad-faith: he/it did not intend to fulfil his statements from the start.
That is blatant fraud, and claiming that the con-man "couldn't mannage" to stop the acts is naieve at best.
It was this willful-blindness, this sort of double-standard and hypocrisy that made me, and many Israellies, furious with both the Israelly left and the Clinton administration.
But don't pretend that Isreal didn't use every shred of opportunity it got to strike back at the Palestinians as well, closing borders
Actually, with the Avoda-government, Israel did not strike back, and the result was the much worse violence of 2000-03.
And as for closing borders, what would you have done if your country was invaded by a flock of genocide-bombers ?
replenishing the jewish settlement, creating new ones.
Here, I agree, was a mistake maded by Israel (not because it affected Oslo: Oslo was doomed by the Palestinians from the start, but because it is insane demographically). However, Israel never (untill recently) comitted not to expand the jewish settelments, dedfinately not in Oslo: there was no fraud involved, just stupidity.
There was no real desire for peace from the Israeli either, just peaceful assimilation.
Yes there was. That was exactly the Oslo deal, the Oslo dream: you (the PA) will eventually get independance on a part of the land, we will get security. This was the lie that was sold to the Israelly people. The true desire for peace was so strong it led Israel to make insane choices even when evidence clearly indicated fraud.
To reduce the Palestinians to a bunch of small reservations with no real power, much like what happened to the native indians in the US.
That was never a realistic goal. And anyway, if this was so, why did the IDF withdraw from the areas of the PA ? Did the US army withdraw from a quarter of the area of the US in order to allow the N.A. self rule ?
Now they want to wall them in and isolate them by force. While it may keep them apart, it'll also stigmatize the entire situation more.
You know what, many Israellies don't care about stigmas any more. We want to seperate from a nation that has made civilian-killing more than a strategy: a value by itself. A nation that, by their own words, will not agree to anything but the full anihilation of their opponents.
I think the Palestinians should get their freedom, in the west bank and Gaza, and manage for themselves. We don't wish to use them; no more jobs in Israel. We (most of us) don't wish to interact with them; No more settelers to kill and hate. Just grow up and take care of themselves. If they can't manage by themselves, tough shit. Don't decieve us, kill and maim us, and expect us to care.
(1) Are you claiming that the murders were part of a Palestinian conspiracy? Because usually, the people promising peace are not the people doing the murdering. Is that the case here? "The Palestinians" are no more a united, homogenous group than are "The Israeli Jews".
I assume this is w.r.t. the murders since Oslo, not Hebron 1929.
And yes that is exactly what I'm claiming; in fact, the PA's own Fatah troops are very active in genocide-bombings and other kinds of terror acts.
And BTW, although Arafat is at the head of the organization, like I've said, I don't believe this deception and murder is a personal decision or act; It is a collective Palestinian behaviour.
(2) Why were the Hebron settlers murdered, and were their murderers brought to justice by any common, civilised sense of the term?
Here, I assume you are refering to the 1929 massacre.
It should be noted that the then British mandate in Israel was far from adamant in protecting the lives of the occupied people. Not that there was much evidence to identify the lynchers individually anyway. In any case, the country was then far from what is today called "civilized".
This is not a bad thing. In the end, Israeli engineers may work side-by-side Iranian engineers on open source projects, and these engineers may develop personal respect for eachother.
... sniped somewhat biassed discription of Israel's politics ...
... But in the end, personal respect is the way towards peace. Collaboration is one way to do this. FOSS is one venue for collaboration.
...)
This already happens. Israel's group of inux users mailing list has at least one Iranian participant. He is indeed respected personnaly.
The ONLY hope of peace is for enough people on all sides of the conflict to get to know eachother and develop personal respect. They don't have to respect eachothers' governments
You know, that mantra just doesn't work. In 1929, in Hebron, the jewish settelers were very well known and respected by their arab neighbours, which massacered them one day w/o any warning.
It is not the political system in israel which is responsible for the right's ascent, but a recognition that the peace process was nothing more than a national-scale con-job. The palestinians decieved israel, by promissing peace, while maintaining a constant, low intensity, level of murdering Israelly civilians.
The Oslo agreements and the resulting violence were nothing more than a result of the Israelly left's stupidity and blind-optimism whenever the word peace is involved, while confronted with a clever, hateful and murderous opponent (the PLO, later PA).
As for personal respect: the conflict is national, ethnic and religious.
In other words, it is a collective (social) phenomena.
It will, IMHO, no more be solved by personal respect of single people than any other war in the history of mankind (please show me a counter example
This was one of the false arguments laid by the Oslo people: let us reach for a temporary solution, the two people will get to know each other, and surely will respect each other so much that war will not be possible.
Well, guess what, it didn't work.
Hmm, Truth by Democracy
But you do know that, to a large extent, this is how scientific
oppinions are made
by his peers before judgement of the work itself to significant
details.
I'm not complaining, mind you: one has to have filters due to the
large volume (and variance in quality
It's just that science, which is, IMHO, a democratic system of sorts,
has more accurate metrics for falsehood than political democracy,
and so can eventually fix itself better.
I am not sure the indirect drive(you mean laser driven right?)
No, It appears I have been too concise, and therefore misleading.
The scheme I was refering to is using Z-Pinch as an initial X-Ray source
to create a symetrized X-Ray radiation in a chamber (hohlraum).
In the middle of the chamber the fuel pellet absorbs symmetrized X-ray
radiation, and therefore its implosion is expected to be much less
affected by instabilities than with laser- or ion-beams-driven
implosions.
Now for efficiency: it apears that for Z-Pinches as an X-Ray source,
If the pinch is not broken by instabilities, the greater the income
power, the greater the yield. IIRC yields as high as 30% (!) were
measured, but I'm away from the lab and need to recheck this.
In fact, what inabled all this was the 1995 discovery that using
dense wire-arrays greatly reduced instabilities and greatly
increased X-Ray yield.
The Z-machine is no more modern than 10 years more modern than the tokamak and it sure as hell isn't efficient (in terms of fusion production) by any means
... )
IMHO, it is not the machines' efficiencies which should be compared
at this stage, but the (projected) upward-scaling of the technologies.
Indeed, the Z-machine is currently not very efficient, but
the indirect-drive ICF approach is, AFAIK, quite promising.
(Of course, my biased opinion, as one considering a PHD in plasma,
is that the world should try both in parallel and see what works
I think the real threat to our planet is ourselves, not our sun.
I think you ment biosphere, not planet
Thus, I hope we do not find a backup planet. I hope this is it.
If we foul our planet to the point it is unlivable, we deserve our fate.
First, IMHO this is utterly wrong factually: once a society colonizes
space, all it'll need is energy and materials. I suggest that actually
there may be few solar systems which are completely uninhabitable.
Second, from the pragmatic POV, this sounds to me like morality gone
completely insane: are you truly sugesting that you'd willfully risk
total genocide for humanity (and its surrounding biological system, BTW)
just because you think we "deserve it" ?
That's the largest-scale suicidal philosophy I have ever seen.
Not, of course, that I am in any position to affect change on this issue. Either a habitable planet is in range or not. Either we find it, or not.
Wrong. In fact, for a single individual, a researcher may be in one
of the best positions to affect humanity's future course.
Certainly we should try.
To this I agree
I just hope it is not too easy to leave Earth for the rich and powerful.
Why not ? if it'll easy for them in several decades, it'll probably
be easy for others later.
And anyway, don't worry. Space travel is going to be risky buisness
for a long time. If a rich and powerful person is willing to take on
personal risks to explore a new fronteer, he/she'll probably be
exactly the kind of person needed up there.
Israel has got some of the best politicians money can buy
On sale for sure, but good ?
I must have been blind and deaf since
Are you telling me that PKD didn't go to Heaven ?
Of course he did. And didn't.
should have been:
while the sun is 1.5*10^8 km away, of course.
the solar wind would send it right back and we'd end up with tons of radioactive plutonium in the upper atmosphere.
I think you're a bit confused: the probability for anything coming
out of the sun to hit earth is rather low (considering that the
magnetosphere is 6-10 Earth radii, ie ~5*10^4 km,
while the sun is 1.5*10^8 km, the solid-angle is quite small
And just to make sure, one can always use an orbit to the sun which is
above the solar-system plane, and thats it.
No, reverse pollution is not a problem. Findig the energy to send all
the material to the sun is
(Ironically, the only concievable option is an Orion
is that it's a hard-to-detect hazard
Huh ? It's one of the easiest to detect hazards. Just take
a Geiger, and you're done.
Chemicals are much more scary, IMHO: there are so bloody many of them,
and one cannot perform all tests for all chemicals.
Byproducts like barium-140, cesium-134, cesium-137, and iodine-131 have half-lives in the days to only a few years
AFAICR, a short lifetime is actually a good thing when considering
environmental concerns: with a HL of, say, 10 days, in less than a year
there'll be practically nothing to worry about.
It's the mid-range isotopes that are problematic.
Ocaam's razor.
I don't believe the mystical elements of the bible either,
But I do believe the codes and laws in the bible to reflect certain
social situation, or at least a certain collective state of mind.
Why should this directive be included, if there was no need ? If there
were no slaves wishing to stay enslaved ?
If you find that so hard to believe, consider the closest (legal)
thing that western societies have to slavery: military service.
A soldier, in a reasonable army at least, is not a slave, but
the situations are quite akin. And still there are people choosing
this situation of lack of freedom. Not all due to idealism.
I know you were joking, but in ancient times, there indeed were
slaves which were happy in their slavery and did not want to be
released, even when they could have been by law (Yovel).
The bible specificly mentions a degrading ceremony done to such
a reluctant slave, within which he was branded (at his ear).
This was done by the ancient hebrews to detter people from opting
into slavery.
And I don't think fear of freedom is so different today.
always was.
Technology is the application of your knowledge of nature to modify it.
Magic, wether by people or "supernatural beings" (lovely oxymoron, that) is exactly the same, only with modified laws of nature.
The difference, I believe, is that science and tech are more democratic:
A normal person can, with a lot of work and help, understand and apply
some of the basic principles.
On the contrary, muggles and squibs just can't perform magic no matter
How hard they'll work.