Re:Do it yourself Linux TV
on
Linux TV
·
· Score: 2
Hi, can you give me the specs on your box. I've got a DXR3 and I've been trying to do the exact same thing - use mp1e to encode stuff from my BTTV for future viewing. When recorded at 768x576 I should get no quality loss whatsoever when spitting the MPEG video back out on my tv (NTSC is 768x576 isn't it?) I don't think my Celery 500 can handle doing that realtime though and I'm considering an upgrade. What kind of processor usage are you seeing and what are your specs. Thanks!
I saw this guy interviewed once. Trust me, he's more fucking kickass than you can possibly imagine. Think Napoleon Bonaparte meets Ghengis Khan meets Chuck Yeager. He'd beat that thing's ass. Fuckin' a.
Preface: I'd like to profess my ignorance of all things financial. Dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not am MBA (Thank God).
Now, if my calculations are correct Motorola basically just lost $4,975,000,000. Do I err in saying that they do not possess that amount of cash? Why does Motorola still exist? Why haven't they blown up? How do you lose the entire GDP of Ethiopa and still exist as an entity that can credibly function as a for-profit business? I'm serious, can someone explain this to me?
I invite you to further the decline of such companies by visiting Guidescope. Some may remember the Junkbusters, who used to put out an adfiltering proxy called, cryptically, "Internet Junkbuster". Since then they've moved that operation to this new company. Ad blocking is much improved because all proxies now turn to a centrally maintained database of ad's instead of using simple RegExs. I've had great results with Windows & Linux using it. Also they are very good about privacy. Check it out.
You answer your own question. The only thing more influential than corporations is that which corporations cannot provide - votes. He's probably the first (well, arguably Hatch was the first) politican to understand what a huge voting issue copyright reform/fair use is going to become in sebsequent months, especially if Napster really does go down in flames. Certainly he won't be the last. With something like 50 million Americans - one out of every six - having downloaded an MP3 at some point, I surmise that you will see a lot, lot more pols jumping on the bandwagon. There are only a few other issues with popular recognition of this magnitude, and chances are you've heard of them: abortion, education, healthcare, etc.
If you've spent any reasonable amount of time coding with standard fonts you've probably come to notice that standard fonts suck for coding:) { looks almost identical to ( (in monospace), ditto O and 0, : and;, etc. A guy named Jim Knoble puts out a set of fonts called "Neep" that are designed specifically to address these issues. You can get them here. I switched over to these using a high-contrast color scheme in Emacs a few months ago and my eyes love me for it. If you are having problems with squinting/eye strain you should give these a shot.
I'm not sure exactly why you would want to do that. I know some people have quibbled about the fullscreen-only nature of XFree86-DGA and hence looked to DRI, but in most every case there is no point. There isn't any throughput bottleneck for 2D graphics assuming you're using an accelerated driver. Any good video card on the market today approaches the theoretical maximum for 2D performance anyways; that's why OEMs actually marketed their 2D performance 5-6 years ago whereas today it's ignored in favor of 3D acceleration marketese... they all perform the same. The one possible 2D bottleneck is obviously video (especially fullscreen) however that is now handled nicely via through the XVideo extension. Driver support for Xv is not universal but fairly widespread. I'm able to play fullscreen video from a realtime-decompressed DivX stream on my Celeron 400 with no frame drops and.8 processor load using YUV overlays and hardware scaling. There's not much more you can do to make it go faster. I don't think there's really a need for further 2D acceleration.
Mandrake has 28% of the market because they were wise enough to sign up with Macmillan to be their publisher soon after Redhat was stupid enough to drop the same. If Redhat was available in KMart & Costco right now instead of Mandrake then they would be shipping that many units too. It really has nothing to do with their distro; it's more like Joe User sees that newfangled "Linux" thing while he's out shopping for groceries and picks it up because it costs 20 bucks. Not to mention that for awhile Mandrake had the same version numbers as RHAT and basically camoflauged their boxes so you couldn't tell you were buying a derivate distro and not the real thing itself.
I think you have the IQ of a trout if you can't distinguish between fact and fiction. What's next - are you going to contend that Lucas is Leni Riefenstahl, back from the grave?
To quote my somewhat famous CS professor, "Learning a language is something you do over the weekend. If that's not the case, you're in the wrong field." After programming, albeit on and off, for almost 30 years you should have mastered the key areas of computer programming - abstraction, specification, modularity, abstraction, procedural programming, and more abstraction. All the rest is just details. OOP might be a bit of a leap but you'll probably find that it's just a cleaner way of doing things you would be doing anyways. Memory management is a really easy task to grasp - or just learn Java! It's far more marketable than C or C++ nowadays. Strong typing, etc - a 15 minutes lesson. Good luck!
Isn't that sort of the whole premise of Cingular? Something about this company has really rubbed me the same way. Lemme see if I can spell it out.
SBC and BellSouth say: we aren't making enough money! How can we trick people into forking over more of it to us?
Marketroid responds: let's merge and hire one of those big naming firms so come up with something distinctive that will stick in people's minds. Well pay them $2 million dollars in return for a 6-11 letter word. Just like Agilent! Yeah!
Dumb, naive, MBA-educated, spoon-fed presidents of SBC & BellSouth respond: Yeah! This should help us maximize market capitalization through strategic synergizing while at the same time optimizing and streamlining our labor pool to eliminate duplicity (read: layoffs). Yeah!
Marketroid responds: also, since the product we are trying to sell is about as common as, say, air, in the United States, we need to implement a new, metaphorical marketing campaign based on freedom of expression and personal liberty. This should help potential customers to forget that 3 out of every 5 of them already have a cellular phone. Yeah!
MBAs: Yeah!
Marketroid: one more thing: we're going to concoct some touching shorts using a gifted artist afflicted with multiple sclerosis. In their minds, people will equate this man's triumph of passion & communication over enormous physical difficulties with our cell-phones. Then they'll want to buy more cell-phones. Yeah!
MBAs: Word!... so who's up for steak?
Everything about this company screams of "profit-motive, profit-motive, profit-motive." It's like, how dumb do they think we are?
You've got to be kidding me. That Cingular ad was ludicrous, bordering on offensive. It really sickened me to see them take what was a very cool and eye-opening short and parlay it into a sales-pitch for fucking cellular phones. I hate their name, I hate their logo, and now, I hate their advertising department as well. You've got to wonder what kind of "genious" overpaid, MBA-type moronic PHBs would sign off on not only that stupid, annoying name, but then pick that stupid paint-splotch of a logo, and then, come back for thirds and sign off on such a stupid, frivolous, and sometimes insulting advertising campaign. I for one think that whoever the guilty party is should be promptly fired or demoted to the mail room.
I'm not quite sure about that. Konqueror isn't even close to being stable, ditto Mozilla. If you're looking for how to pull off a lot of complicated things, they would be the place to go. If you are looking for actual elegance and educational value, to say nothing of things that actually work, there are better places to look. For example, Scheme is a very simple language through which a lot of high-level, fascinating concepts can be demonstrated quite easily. I find some of the more intricate parts of Abelson & Sussman's SICP more enlightening than chugging through 10,000 lines of Konqueror, but to each his own...
Donald Knuth's Tex certainly qualifies. Not only was it written, from the ground up, by arguably the greatest computer scientist of our time, but it's so good that it's bug free. Literally, there are no bugs in it. Stop and think about what that means for a minute. Can you come up with any software program on the planet of equal size and complexity (several megs of source code - not huge, but still formidable) that can make that claim? I can't. Granted, I may be incorrect, but nevertheless I find that amazing. You can view the parts of Tex that Knuth actually wrote here. They're written in (I think) CWEB, which is some literate programming language he has a real hard-on for. That probably means it fscking rules all, but personally I don't have the time/patience to pick it up. If you're sufficiently motivated, though, I'd imagine the Tex sources would prove very enlightening.
Overall, the Left moves in the direction of a lot of personal Liberty in the areas of Morality, but a lot of centralized power/money in the government. The Right, of course, moves in the direction of a lot of centralized control of the nation's Morality in the government, and a lot of personal freedom/liberty/power, thus reducing that of the government. Please don't argue this with me unless you are sure you know what you're talking about, I've researched extensively without listnening [sic] to anyone's propoganda.
Through "extensive research" you've managed to glean a 9th-grade understanding of American party politics. Congratulations.
I feel that it is vitally important that if we want our Hacker ways to get out to the world, we have to stop the concentration of power and money in the government. We also need to stop the execessive restrictions on our freedoms.
There are two places money and power congregate: in business, and in the government. Taking away from one will inevitably cause it to flow into the other; it's not a conincidence that Bush is rabidly pro-business and simultaneously against a large Federal government. With that in mind, do you really read Slashdot that much? How could you have possibly missed the continual flow of tales of large businesses trying to impede the free flow of information, and hence infringing on the "personal liberties" that you clearly seem to hold in such high regard. RIAA? UCITA? DMCA? MPAA? Do these mean anything to you? You have completely failed to convince me that somehow electing into power a party who cuddles up to big business will in any way, shape, or form will somehow increase your personal liberties.
If Sony/RCA/Universal had its way, there wouldn't be a way to distribute music online, legally or not. Ditto movies. If the book publishing industry had its way, you wouldn't be able to buy used books on Amazon, because it cuts into their bottom line. These companies have a vested interest in stripping you of your ability to timeshift TV shows, record things, copy software, or any other sort of technological liberty you might think of, and it's called "money." Put bluntly, business is the science of ripping off the common man, and as long as they can, they will. This isn't true just for media companies, but if there's one thing this crowd can relate to, it's that.
On the other hand there is the government, which has no profit motive, and is beholden to the people. Now ask yourself, which entity would better serve as vanguard of our rights? I always thought the choice was pretty clear, yet somehow you've come to the diametrically opposite conclusion - that a party so betrothen to corporate donors and their interests that, as Katz said, threw out matching funds - that that party somehow cares about your liberty?! Bollucks. They care about who can write them the biggest check, and the people writing those checks care about making money, and nowhere in that equation does a discussion of your "liberties" ever come about.
What graphics libraries are you talking about? The biggies are either freely distributable (SVGAlib, Xlib) or allow you to link to their libraries, OSS or not (Mesa [XFree86 license], GTK et al [LGPL]). Granted, Qt's licensing scheme is a little retarded, but GTK is superior in many ways anyways.
Full disclosure: I just started hang gliding, so the chances that I'll be in the market for a Linux-supported vario in the near future seems to be rather high; I'd love some graphics support:)
Huh? I really must question whatever thought process it was that led you to this conclusion. I'm writing this on my USB keyboard, and I'm going to click the "submit" button with my USB mouse. Then my computer is going to shoot packets to slashdot.org via my DLink DSB, USB-based Ethernet adapter. But alas, you've interrupted me from my previous activity, which was downloading MP3s into my Diamond Rio 500 MP3 player. Via USB.
Did I forget to mention I'm running Linux 2.4, which because of it's even minor # is by definition "production quality"? Also, did I remember to say that I've not had USB, or any other part of Linux, crash on me since the 2.0 series? Oh well, it's on the table now.
If you do not call the USB code in the current stable version of the kernel "production quality", then a.) you have not downloaded the latest kernel, and b.) your expectations are so ridiculously high that you really don't have any business running a computer anyways. Lack of drivers is one thing. Flaws in the actual basic USB code itself are an entire other issue, and here Windows has no edge over Linux as far as I can tell. I would advise you to revert back to the venerable IBM typewriter, circa 1981. Mine is still running and definitely hasn't crashed, ever, so I think after 20 years I can conclude it's bug free. For the rest of us, living with bugs in software is a necessary evil. Linux isn't bug free, but as far as USB support goes, it hasn't ever failed me yet. I'd even go so far as to say that it's "production quality".
I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have a firm grasp on C++ & OO theory yet not know Java. Why not just learn it? It seems like it would take you all of a weekend. Java is just C++ minus a lot of stupidity (and performance); at least that how it always looked to me.
Yes, because of MAD. I thought I addressed that. Not 15 years ago, Russia was a "rogue state". Why didn't they attack us? China purportedly hates the United States. They are a nuclear power. Why haven't they attacked us? The answer is always the same. I don't think there exists a head of state in the world today crazy enough to sacrifice his own life and the very existence of his country for the chance of saying, "I finally nuked America."
MAD doesn't work if one of the two parties is insane.
Really? Then kindly explain to me why China has not launched a full-scale nuclear attack against the United States.
Second, you know as well as I do that there definitely aren't measures in place to detect low-yield nuclear devices. What are they going to do, place a Geiger counter onn every street corner? Or are you so naive as to presume that the US really does control the flow of people into and out of this country, and hence what they bring into it as well? Apparently you do not live in the southern parts of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, or California, nor have you ever attempted to purchase drugs in the US.
Third, somewhere in there the fact that missile defense isn't the only way to protect democratic nations from tyrannical hegemons seems to have been lost on you. You'll recall (I hope) that China has not in fact invaded Taiwan, thanks much in part to the hard diplomatic tack that the United States has taken against any and all aggressive movements from the former towards the latter. The same goes for Iraq and surrounding countries, post-Gulf war. NMD is just a diplomatic tool, and a flawed one at that. It's clear, to me, that the its costs - namely precipating a regression in foreign relations with Russa & China to pre-Cold War levels - far outweighs whatever benefits it might offer.
Yes and the good (?) thing about water attacks is that they kick up a whole bunch of... you guessed it, water. Given proper wind direction this would create a deadly cloud of radioactive steam which could conceivably move hundreds of miles inland and do even more damage. Khrushchev supposedly was presented with a plan in the early 60s that would essentially create a doomsday device using this principle. Even he didn't have the balls to do it, but basically it involved filling the whole bottom of a oil tanker with plutonium or uranium and parking it at sea. In essence you've just created the largest nuclear bomb in the history of the world. Detonating it supposedly would kick up enough radioactive water vapor to kill everything on the planet. Luckily he was having an unusually good day, so I guess he didn't sign off on it.
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Hi, can you give me the specs on your box. I've got a DXR3 and I've been trying to do the exact same thing - use mp1e to encode stuff from my BTTV for future viewing. When recorded at 768x576 I should get no quality loss whatsoever when spitting the MPEG video back out on my tv (NTSC is 768x576 isn't it?) I don't think my Celery 500 can handle doing that realtime though and I'm considering an upgrade. What kind of processor usage are you seeing and what are your specs. Thanks!
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I saw this guy interviewed once. Trust me, he's more fucking kickass than you can possibly imagine. Think Napoleon Bonaparte meets Ghengis Khan meets Chuck Yeager. He'd beat that thing's ass. Fuckin' a.
--
Now, if my calculations are correct Motorola basically just lost $4,975,000,000. Do I err in saying that they do not possess that amount of cash? Why does Motorola still exist? Why haven't they blown up? How do you lose the entire GDP of Ethiopa and still exist as an entity that can credibly function as a for-profit business? I'm serious, can someone explain this to me?
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Escuse me, 9600bps. I have trouble readjusting to a world where bps are actually a useful measure. That was like 1995 for me :)
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9600kbps. Don't waste your time.
--
I invite you to further the decline of such companies by visiting Guidescope. Some may remember the Junkbusters, who used to put out an adfiltering proxy called, cryptically, "Internet Junkbuster". Since then they've moved that operation to this new company. Ad blocking is much improved because all proxies now turn to a centrally maintained database of ad's instead of using simple RegExs. I've had great results with Windows & Linux using it. Also they are very good about privacy. Check it out.
--
You answer your own question. The only thing more influential than corporations is that which corporations cannot provide - votes. He's probably the first (well, arguably Hatch was the first) politican to understand what a huge voting issue copyright reform/fair use is going to become in sebsequent months, especially if Napster really does go down in flames. Certainly he won't be the last. With something like 50 million Americans - one out of every six - having downloaded an MP3 at some point, I surmise that you will see a lot, lot more pols jumping on the bandwagon. There are only a few other issues with popular recognition of this magnitude, and chances are you've heard of them: abortion, education, healthcare, etc.
--
If you've spent any reasonable amount of time coding with standard fonts you've probably come to notice that standard fonts suck for coding :) { looks almost identical to ( (in monospace), ditto O and 0, : and ;, etc. A guy named Jim Knoble puts out a set of fonts called "Neep" that are designed specifically to address these issues. You can get them here. I switched over to these using a high-contrast color scheme in Emacs a few months ago and my eyes love me for it. If you are having problems with squinting/eye strain you should give these a shot.
--
I'm not sure exactly why you would want to do that. I know some people have quibbled about the fullscreen-only nature of XFree86-DGA and hence looked to DRI, but in most every case there is no point. There isn't any throughput bottleneck for 2D graphics assuming you're using an accelerated driver. Any good video card on the market today approaches the theoretical maximum for 2D performance anyways; that's why OEMs actually marketed their 2D performance 5-6 years ago whereas today it's ignored in favor of 3D acceleration marketese... they all perform the same. The one possible 2D bottleneck is obviously video (especially fullscreen) however that is now handled nicely via through the XVideo extension. Driver support for Xv is not universal but fairly widespread. I'm able to play fullscreen video from a realtime-decompressed DivX stream on my Celeron 400 with no frame drops and .8 processor load using YUV overlays and hardware scaling. There's not much more you can do to make it go faster. I don't think there's really a need for further 2D acceleration.
--
Mandrake has 28% of the market because they were wise enough to sign up with Macmillan to be their publisher soon after Redhat was stupid enough to drop the same. If Redhat was available in KMart & Costco right now instead of Mandrake then they would be shipping that many units too. It really has nothing to do with their distro; it's more like Joe User sees that newfangled "Linux" thing while he's out shopping for groceries and picks it up because it costs 20 bucks. Not to mention that for awhile Mandrake had the same version numbers as RHAT and basically camoflauged their boxes so you couldn't tell you were buying a derivate distro and not the real thing itself.
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It's a MOVIE.
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I've had the humorist poster on my wall for over a year...
--
To quote my somewhat famous CS professor, "Learning a language is something you do over the weekend. If that's not the case, you're in the wrong field." After programming, albeit on and off, for almost 30 years you should have mastered the key areas of computer programming - abstraction, specification, modularity, abstraction, procedural programming, and more abstraction. All the rest is just details. OOP might be a bit of a leap but you'll probably find that it's just a cleaner way of doing things you would be doing anyways. Memory management is a really easy task to grasp - or just learn Java! It's far more marketable than C or C++ nowadays. Strong typing, etc - a 15 minutes lesson. Good luck!
--
- SBC and BellSouth say: we aren't making enough money! How can we trick people into forking over more of it to us?
- Marketroid responds: let's merge and hire one of those big naming firms so come up with something distinctive that will stick in people's minds. Well pay them $2 million dollars in return for a 6-11 letter word. Just like Agilent! Yeah!
- Dumb, naive, MBA-educated, spoon-fed presidents of SBC & BellSouth respond: Yeah! This should help us maximize market capitalization through strategic synergizing while at the same time optimizing and streamlining our labor pool to eliminate duplicity (read: layoffs). Yeah!
- Marketroid responds: also, since the product we are trying to sell is about as common as, say, air, in the United States, we need to implement a new, metaphorical marketing campaign based on freedom of expression and personal liberty. This should help potential customers to forget that 3 out of every 5 of them already have a cellular phone. Yeah!
- MBAs: Yeah!
- Marketroid: one more thing: we're going to concoct some touching shorts using a gifted artist afflicted with multiple sclerosis. In their minds, people will equate this man's triumph of passion & communication over enormous physical difficulties with our cell-phones. Then they'll want to buy more cell-phones. Yeah!
- MBAs: Word!
... so who's up for steak?
Everything about this company screams of "profit-motive, profit-motive, profit-motive." It's like, how dumb do they think we are?--
You've got to be kidding me. That Cingular ad was ludicrous, bordering on offensive. It really sickened me to see them take what was a very cool and eye-opening short and parlay it into a sales-pitch for fucking cellular phones. I hate their name, I hate their logo, and now, I hate their advertising department as well. You've got to wonder what kind of "genious" overpaid, MBA-type moronic PHBs would sign off on not only that stupid, annoying name, but then pick that stupid paint-splotch of a logo, and then, come back for thirds and sign off on such a stupid, frivolous, and sometimes insulting advertising campaign. I for one think that whoever the guilty party is should be promptly fired or demoted to the mail room.
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I'm not quite sure about that. Konqueror isn't even close to being stable, ditto Mozilla. If you're looking for how to pull off a lot of complicated things, they would be the place to go. If you are looking for actual elegance and educational value, to say nothing of things that actually work, there are better places to look. For example, Scheme is a very simple language through which a lot of high-level, fascinating concepts can be demonstrated quite easily. I find some of the more intricate parts of Abelson & Sussman's SICP more enlightening than chugging through 10,000 lines of Konqueror, but to each his own...
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Donald Knuth's Tex certainly qualifies. Not only was it written, from the ground up, by arguably the greatest computer scientist of our time, but it's so good that it's bug free. Literally, there are no bugs in it. Stop and think about what that means for a minute. Can you come up with any software program on the planet of equal size and complexity (several megs of source code - not huge, but still formidable) that can make that claim? I can't. Granted, I may be incorrect, but nevertheless I find that amazing. You can view the parts of Tex that Knuth actually wrote here. They're written in (I think) CWEB, which is some literate programming language he has a real hard-on for. That probably means it fscking rules all, but personally I don't have the time/patience to pick it up. If you're sufficiently motivated, though, I'd imagine the Tex sources would prove very enlightening.
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Through "extensive research" you've managed to glean a 9th-grade understanding of American party politics. Congratulations.
I feel that it is vitally important that if we want our Hacker ways to get out to the world, we have to stop the concentration of power and money in the government. We also need to stop the execessive restrictions on our freedoms.
There are two places money and power congregate: in business, and in the government. Taking away from one will inevitably cause it to flow into the other; it's not a conincidence that Bush is rabidly pro-business and simultaneously against a large Federal government. With that in mind, do you really read Slashdot that much? How could you have possibly missed the continual flow of tales of large businesses trying to impede the free flow of information, and hence infringing on the "personal liberties" that you clearly seem to hold in such high regard. RIAA? UCITA? DMCA? MPAA? Do these mean anything to you? You have completely failed to convince me that somehow electing into power a party who cuddles up to big business will in any way, shape, or form will somehow increase your personal liberties.
If Sony/RCA/Universal had its way, there wouldn't be a way to distribute music online, legally or not. Ditto movies. If the book publishing industry had its way, you wouldn't be able to buy used books on Amazon, because it cuts into their bottom line. These companies have a vested interest in stripping you of your ability to timeshift TV shows, record things, copy software, or any other sort of technological liberty you might think of, and it's called "money." Put bluntly, business is the science of ripping off the common man, and as long as they can, they will. This isn't true just for media companies, but if there's one thing this crowd can relate to, it's that.
On the other hand there is the government, which has no profit motive, and is beholden to the people. Now ask yourself, which entity would better serve as vanguard of our rights? I always thought the choice was pretty clear, yet somehow you've come to the diametrically opposite conclusion - that a party so betrothen to corporate donors and their interests that, as Katz said, threw out matching funds - that that party somehow cares about your liberty?! Bollucks. They care about who can write them the biggest check, and the people writing those checks care about making money, and nowhere in that equation does a discussion of your "liberties" ever come about.
--
Full disclosure: I just started hang gliding, so the chances that I'll be in the market for a Linux-supported vario in the near future seems to be rather high; I'd love some graphics support :)
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Anyone interested in this might want to check out a prior /. article entitled "Longest Open TCP Connection?".
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Did I forget to mention I'm running Linux 2.4, which because of it's even minor # is by definition "production quality"? Also, did I remember to say that I've not had USB, or any other part of Linux, crash on me since the 2.0 series? Oh well, it's on the table now.
If you do not call the USB code in the current stable version of the kernel "production quality", then a.) you have not downloaded the latest kernel, and b.) your expectations are so ridiculously high that you really don't have any business running a computer anyways. Lack of drivers is one thing. Flaws in the actual basic USB code itself are an entire other issue, and here Windows has no edge over Linux as far as I can tell. I would advise you to revert back to the venerable IBM typewriter, circa 1981. Mine is still running and definitely hasn't crashed, ever, so I think after 20 years I can conclude it's bug free. For the rest of us, living with bugs in software is a necessary evil. Linux isn't bug free, but as far as USB support goes, it hasn't ever failed me yet. I'd even go so far as to say that it's "production quality".
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I'm having a hard time understanding how you could have a firm grasp on C++ & OO theory yet not know Java. Why not just learn it? It seems like it would take you all of a weekend. Java is just C++ minus a lot of stupidity (and performance); at least that how it always looked to me.
--
Yes, because of MAD. I thought I addressed that. Not 15 years ago, Russia was a "rogue state". Why didn't they attack us? China purportedly hates the United States. They are a nuclear power. Why haven't they attacked us? The answer is always the same. I don't think there exists a head of state in the world today crazy enough to sacrifice his own life and the very existence of his country for the chance of saying, "I finally nuked America."
--
MAD doesn't work if one of the two parties is insane.
Really? Then kindly explain to me why China has not launched a full-scale nuclear attack against the United States.
Second, you know as well as I do that there definitely aren't measures in place to detect low-yield nuclear devices. What are they going to do, place a Geiger counter onn every street corner? Or are you so naive as to presume that the US really does control the flow of people into and out of this country, and hence what they bring into it as well? Apparently you do not live in the southern parts of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, or California, nor have you ever attempted to purchase drugs in the US.
Third, somewhere in there the fact that missile defense isn't the only way to protect democratic nations from tyrannical hegemons seems to have been lost on you. You'll recall (I hope) that China has not in fact invaded Taiwan, thanks much in part to the hard diplomatic tack that the United States has taken against any and all aggressive movements from the former towards the latter. The same goes for Iraq and surrounding countries, post-Gulf war. NMD is just a diplomatic tool, and a flawed one at that. It's clear, to me, that the its costs - namely precipating a regression in foreign relations with Russa & China to pre-Cold War levels - far outweighs whatever benefits it might offer.
--
Yes and the good (?) thing about water attacks is that they kick up a whole bunch of... you guessed it, water. Given proper wind direction this would create a deadly cloud of radioactive steam which could conceivably move hundreds of miles inland and do even more damage. Khrushchev supposedly was presented with a plan in the early 60s that would essentially create a doomsday device using this principle. Even he didn't have the balls to do it, but basically it involved filling the whole bottom of a oil tanker with plutonium or uranium and parking it at sea. In essence you've just created the largest nuclear bomb in the history of the world. Detonating it supposedly would kick up enough radioactive water vapor to kill everything on the planet. Luckily he was having an unusually good day, so I guess he didn't sign off on it.
--