I congratulate them on daring to step beyond this little world and dare something new. It failed, but that is no reason to give up. They have an equatorial launch site, enough money and trained technicians to do more.
Humanity will never reach space unless it is attempted by multiple nations. Their technicians should be on the roll call of heroes who died to give us Space. I envy them what they did with their lives.
On the contrary, what kind of democracy is it if all the people don't vote?
The Australian system(I live in Australia) makes far more sense to me. It prevents the general apathy and indifference to politics you see in the U.S. If it takes effort to avoid voting, people will generally vote.
It certainly explains why there are actual third parties in Australia, in comparision to the jury rigged U.S system. Two parties does not make a real democracy.
Many slashdot posters seem to think Richard is just a voice crying out in the wilderness, but increasingly he seems to be a prophet.
Many years before this happened Richard pointed out the flaws of relying on non free software. Will any of the slashdot posters who called him crazy then apologize now?
Linus is wrong and Richard was right. You can't be "pragmatic" and use the best tool for the job if you want to keep your freedom.
You are quite wrong. There are many ways to generate an artificial EMP pulse. No nukes needed.
Read here for more details.
http://www.milnet.com/milnet/e-bomb.htm
The original theory for a non-nuclear EMP producing device, thought up in 1927 by Dr. Arthur Compton to study atomic particles, makes use of injection of plasma into low electron count elements. By the mid 1980s, scientists had found ways to build a high energy device that, without resorting to a nuclear blast, could emit a huge EMP. Test drops of devices using B-52s and Cruise Missile airframes demonstrated the feasibility of the technology. A one time explosive device provides kinetic energy required to rapidly build an electromagnetic field through electromagnetic induction rather than through the nuclear chemistry found in a nuclear explosion. A second, low cost technology uses a moving short in a tube fed by a charging system. This technology, known as FCG - Flux Compression Generator, turns out to require far less cash to develop and manufacture.
You are thinking in the wrong terms. For Microsoft, anything less than 100% dominance is not enough. So, a win for Linux is most certinately a loss for Microsoft.
Look up the word "Monopoly". They don't get that way by settling for 50% of the market.
It's about time that encryption was recognised as a tool to keep governments from spying on private citizens. The idea is that Goverment should have the power to spy on its citizens, but not that is should spend all of its time and resources doing so.
This is a laughable decision. The rigth to free speech is not holy. There is no RIGHT to threaten others, intimidate them or otherwise infringe on their personal liberties. Your personal rights do not supercede others.
I can't believe this is even being debated. In a civlized country(Which the US is not), people are aware of the tradeoff of liberties. There are libel and slander laws to prevent people from making false claims. Is that protected under free speech?
And for those who disagree with me and claim this website is harmless, post your addresses and real names. This is simple and obvious incitement to murder.
The film produced by this virus cannot be used in mass production yet. It is necessary to replace the virus with a conductive material in the finished product.
Interesting though. It seems we have a clear winner in the race between building smaller machines with smaller machines, or using biotech. Viruses are in!
religion is just a theory... "the theory of god" as i call it. excpet in this case, their only available proof is an ancient piece of literature that has been translated and re-translated too many times to count
That's not the point. Religion requires no objective proof. Occasionally many of the more ambitious keepers of the faith will try to find historical accuracies in the bible... but really, in the end it's not needed.
Absolutely wrong. Proof is needed. It was needed in ancient times, and it is far more necessary today. Did anyone accept Jesus as the son of God before he performed his miracles?
It's also strange that God seems to have stopped direct intervention. Conveniently, when there is science to observe/explain what happens exactly, where is the parting of the Red Sea? Where is any miracle for that matter? And what happened to destroying cities?
How do I know God exists? I just know. It's simply impossible to define matters of faith in terms of science. Science can only tell us how. Religion trys to tell us why, and to that extent they can contridict each other while both are right. I can see how this would frustrate somebody with a purly analitcal mind because faith can not be measured or displayed in any objective way.
Sheer nonsense. You seem to be claiming that religion answers any questions at all. Science answers questions. Religion merely tells you to stop thinking. There is another word for faith. Blind obedience.
Thanks. Of course it would work well on any nation. If you neutralise high tech, you neutralise high tech. The anti-sat measures are worthless against nations with none of their own, only leased capacity, because presumably you do not want war with the leasing countries.
That sandbag tactic is not great. Nuisance value only currently, but when picosats go into orbit this would be a serious threat.
The sandbags run the risk of bringing every technology advanced nation down on you. I would not care to fight Russia, US, EU, India, Japan, China, South Korea simultatenously. They will come after any nation that targets sats indiscriminately.
Death To America
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Death to America
It ain't gonna be easy, says Bruce Sterling, but that won't stop enemies from trying. Thirteen strategies they might use to knock the eagle out of the sky.
1. BUILD YOUR OWN
Method: Duplicate American space assets: surveillance, navigation, telecom, the works.
Upside: Legal. Can be accomplished largely using commercial products and services. American contractors might even build a lot of it for you.
Downside: Cripplingly costly; Russians tried it and went broke. Looks suspicious. Takes years. Yankees in good position to blow your assets to smithereens.
Already pursued by many other nations, India, China, Russia, Japan and the EU to name but a few. All of these countries have far cheaper launch costs. They can replace a satellite for far less than it costs the US (currently) to replace its own satellites. A huge military advantage. Also, due to the location of US lauch sites, not that hard to shoot down sats launched from the US.
It's also possible to combine launching your own satellites with leasing/buying satellites from other nations.
2. DECAPITATION
Method: Never mind fancy space assets. Obliterate Washington with a truck nuke.
Upside: Massively destructive, highly destabilizing. Heavy casualties among governing elite. Deadly shock to US national morale. Can be repeated in other cities.
Downside: Nukes hard to build. Sets dangerous precedent that puts your own cities at risk. US space assets still up there, available to US allies even if US no longer exists. Loss of Congress and Washington bureaucrats might be dangerous tonic to US military.
Not a likely strategy. Any nation that does this is asking for nuclear war. The safest way to implement this strategy is to give nukes to a terrorist group (NNAQ - short for NNAQ Not's AL Qaida ). Let them take the heat.
Bruce omitted chemical/biological warfare. Especially with biological, great built in denial. Your heroes die carrying the disease to the US. No trail to lead back to you. Chemical also has great potential. Imagine the release of sarin in a football stadium.
3. ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE
Method: Detonate nuclear warhead in upper atmosphere, disabling spacecraft circuitry.
Upside: Inexpensive, quick, ruthless. Disables civilian assets, including pagers and TV, by stripping circuits on ground. To evade detection, bomb can be disguised as something benign, like a commercial satellite.
Downside: Some military sats hardened against radiation. Might destroy your own space hardware, if you have any. Unlikely to destroy distant sats; might destroy very little, in which case you've gone nuclear against a superpower.
This would be a very valuable tactic. Combined with the other tactics 4-11, it makes it possible to annihilate US forces.
4. SPACE PARASITES
Method: Infest space with armed mobile nanosatellites. Sneak them up to expensive American space machines. Attach like limpets. Detonate on signal.
Upside: Sneaky, insidious, inscrutable.
Downside: Hard to test. Americans likely to build fleet of nanosats teensier and sneakier than yours.
Very easy to test. Take out an American satellite or one of your own. The countermeasure is very weak. Considering the Americans will build nanosats anyway, this is no deterrent.
5. SANDBAGGING
Method: Spew sand into paths of orbiting Yankee assets, turning them into Swiss cheese.
Upside: Ultracheap. Slowly suffocates space power. Might be done persistently in tiny quantities by some unorthodox launch method, say electromagnetic rail-gun launch or Jules Verne space cannon.
Downside: Space too big to pollute. Armor countermeasures possible. Retaliation by all space users likely. Sand sifts down into atmosphere after a while.
If you're careful about targetting, potentially useful. A nuisance tactic at best. High risk of making every space faring nation come after you.
6. SPOOFING
Method: Mimic American datastream. Hack satellites, own them.
Upside: Bloodless, sexy, wired. Gains huge military advantage.
Downside: Requires vulnerable ground stations plus better hacking, crypto, and dongle skills than NSA and Air Force. Still can't launch, repair, or replace space assets.
That's not hard. Many of the US potential adversaries posess all three. And the US ground stations are very vulnerable. There are many unmanned and poorly guarded ground stations for US satellites here in Australia and NZ begging for just such a tactic. One man who was a demo/sniper could easily take them out.
All it needs is one weak link. If the encryption is weak, all the other skills do not matter. If the admins securing machines lack the necessary skills, it is also easy to compromise hardware.
It's also not necessary to have vulnerable ground stations. If you can crack encryption, you can spoof a ground station easily, without ever having been near it.
7. JAMMING
Method: Deploy huge electromagnetic noisemakers that thwart US communications.
Upside: Disables guided missiles, turns smart bombs into dumb bombs. Good for locals who communicate via fiber optics.
Downside: Ineffective beyond theater. Noisemakers make obvious targets.
A tactic that will be used by almost all opponents. Not enough by itself, but in combination very deadly. Only terrorist groups will possibly lack the ability to use this.
8. ATTACK GROUND STATIONS
Method: Use mortars, bombs, or missiles against satellite ground stations.
Upside: Kills highly trained analysts, destroys specialized equipment. Bases generally easy to find, not well fortified.
Downside: Secret mobile backup facilities likely to exist. US has large techie population, can train more space geeks.
Can they train them instantly? The crucial element is time. If you can open a window of vulnerability where the US has no space assets, you can decimate the US forces by the time they recover.
9. DENIAL AND DECEPTION
Method: Hide facilities underground. Scatter armadas of fakes on surface. Broadcast phony transmissions to fool spy sats. Camouflage everything.
Upside: Effective during wartime. Forces US to waste expensive munitions.
Downside: Windowless cave quarters bad for soldier morale. Constant, consistent deception hard to maintain. Avoiding surveillance increases cost of all operations.
This tactic will be used by everyone, including the US.
10. ESPIONAGE
Method: Bribe or coopt Yankee sat personnel, obtain manuals, secrets.
Upside: Cheap, traditional. Proven success with Pollard, Walker, Falcon and Snowman.
Downside: Satellites return to US control once mole is discovered.
If used to create a window of weakness, where the US has no functioning sats for a short period of time, means mega death for US soldiers.
By the time the US recovers, there might be no army/air force/carrier group left in the region.
11. DEATH RAY
Method: Build laser or particle beam. Blind or cook satellites from ground.
Upside: Unexpected, shocking, repeatable. Appealing to Aum Shinrikyo-style tech-literate madmen.
Downside: Ambitious, expensive, hard to conceal. Requires huge power source. Works only in clear weather. Invites swift conventional retaliation.
Much easier/cheaper to use ballistic missile for the same job. The laser beam tactic will only be used by advanced nations, US allies and India, China, Russia.
12. WAR BY OTHER MEANS
Method: Abandon conventional warfare. Go nuclear, descend into terrorism, or both.
Upside: Everybody's doing it.
Downside: Going nuclear is expensive, destabilizing, dangerous. Terrorists lack secure bases, logistics, traditions, esprit de corps; "masterminds" hard to distinguish from deranged amateurs. American social, economic, cultural pressures irresistible. Your war may devolve into reading Noam Chomsky while sipping Coke.
By far the best tactic for every opponent of the US. Is already used, and has proved very successful. So far, no terrorist has yet started to read Chomsky. Has already beaten the US in Somalia. Will be used extensively by China when the war over Taiwan begins.
13. WAIT IT OUT
Method: Wait for US to get careless, go broke, forget, sell out, and/or collapse from inherent contradictions of postindustrial capitalism.
Upside: Easy. Basically indistinguishable from giving up.
Downside: Capitalist democracy has buried many competing systems. Top challenger blatantly suicidal and feared by all. Huge American sums spent on space strengthen US economy by creating Tang instant orange drink and heat-trapping pizza delivery bags. US will commodify your discontent, sell it back to you on DVD.
This is hardly a tactic. US culture helps to create enemies as well as allies.
Serving on the company's board are Pradeep Sindhu, founder, vice chairman, and chief technology officer of Juniper Networks; Dan Maydan, president of Applied Materials; T.J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor; Alex Balkanski, a general partner at Benchmark; and Vinod Khosla, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins.
I can't help wondering what they could have achieved in India, instead of coming to the US and helping make an already rich country richer.
With Ogg everywhere,there is no more need for Fraunhoffer. No one needs to pay royalties or deal with stupid patent issues. This helps beat those proprietary companies*cough* Microsoft*cough*.
I haven't read such sheer unadulterated nonsense in a long time.
Unistalling is a complete red herring. Why would I want to uninstall something that doesn't harm me (and in some cases is actually benficial)?
Why should I pay for the development of IE? IE takes up valuable space, slows down the processor, and makes windows install slower. This is quite a huge set of disadvantages. It is not for Microsoft to decide what kind of OS I run. Everything else in Windows can be removed/added. I see no need for clearly optional components like IE/Media player.
Slashdot Mirror
Sun has paid Sco a quarter million. Why on Earth is it helping bankroll an attempt to destroy Free Software?
It's time to boycott Sun. It's about time it learned you can't bite the hand that feeeds you.
Microsoft, of course, is no surprise. I'm slightly amazed they didn't give Sco more money.
I congratulate them on daring to step beyond this little world and dare something new. It failed, but that is no reason to give up. They have an equatorial launch site, enough money and trained technicians to do more.
Humanity will never reach space unless it is attempted by multiple nations. Their technicians should be on the roll call of heroes who died to give us Space. I envy them what they did with their lives.
It certainly won't be American.
Come on? Is there no bitchiness? Can't we at least hear if these guys deserved their Nobels, or did their grad students deserve it instead?
I would like to hear physicists comment if Physics nominees at least were deserving. From a layman's viewpoint it seems so.
On the contrary, what kind of democracy is it if all the people don't vote? The Australian system(I live in Australia) makes far more sense to me. It prevents the general apathy and indifference to politics you see in the U.S. If it takes effort to avoid voting, people will generally vote. It certainly explains why there are actual third parties in Australia, in comparision to the jury rigged U.S system. Two parties does not make a real democracy.
Many slashdot posters seem to think Richard is just a voice crying out in the wilderness, but increasingly he seems to be a prophet.
Many years before this happened Richard pointed out the flaws of relying on non free software. Will any of the slashdot posters who called him crazy then apologize now?
Linus is wrong and Richard was right. You can't be "pragmatic" and use the best tool for the job if you want to keep your freedom.
You are quite wrong. There are many ways to generate an artificial EMP pulse. No nukes needed.
Read here for more details.
http://www.milnet.com/milnet/e-bomb.htm
The original theory for a non-nuclear EMP producing device, thought up in 1927 by Dr. Arthur Compton to study atomic particles, makes use of injection of plasma into low electron count elements. By the mid 1980s, scientists had found ways to build a high energy device that, without resorting to a nuclear blast, could emit a huge EMP. Test drops of devices using B-52s and Cruise Missile airframes demonstrated the feasibility of the technology. A one time explosive device provides kinetic energy required to rapidly build an electromagnetic field through electromagnetic induction rather than through the nuclear chemistry found in a nuclear explosion. A second, low cost technology uses a moving short in a tube fed by a charging system. This technology, known as FCG - Flux Compression Generator, turns out to require far less cash to develop and manufacture.
A group of people decided to show respect for someone's death online. Did it deserve this much hoopla?
It is neither more or less shocking than writing a letter to show your regreat over the death of your pen friend.
There are no issues or amazing stuff to discover here. The world has changed. Deal with it.
I can't get it to update packages. My proxy(SOCKS 5)
just doesn't play well. Anyone got a socks proxy working with gentoo?
You are thinking in the wrong terms. For Microsoft, anything less than 100% dominance is not enough. So, a win for Linux is most certinately a loss for Microsoft.
Look up the word "Monopoly". They don't get that way by settling for 50% of the market.
We do have some decent graphics for Freeciv. There is the Cevo tileset, which looks quite good. Head
and shoulders above the rest.
It's about time that encryption was recognised as a tool to keep governments from spying on private citizens. The idea is that Goverment should have the power to spy on its citizens, but not that is should spend all of its time and resources doing so.
There is absolutely no BSD networking code in the kernel. Contrary to any of the claims you have made, there is no BSD licensed code in the kernel.
Thanks for the tip. You've saved me countless hours of valuable time. And to think I thought the Kama Sutra woulld contain sex scenes.
;).
Don't believe this guy. There are many classics with excellent sex scenes
If you're not safe, you have no liberties. What price free speech if you can be killed for it?
This is a laughable decision. The rigth to free speech is not holy. There is no RIGHT to threaten others, intimidate them or otherwise infringe on their personal liberties. Your personal rights do not supercede others.
I can't believe this is even being debated. In a civlized country(Which the US is not), people are aware of the tradeoff of liberties. There are libel and slander laws to prevent people from making false claims. Is that protected under free speech?
And for those who disagree with me and claim this website is harmless, post your addresses and real names. This is simple and obvious incitement to murder.
Only two filesystems, XFS and JFS, seem to really
work with larger than 2 TB in size hard disks.
Alan, after all your years in the field, what do you think is the biggest problem in Unix,and linux in general that is still unaddressed?
The film produced by this virus cannot be used in mass production yet. It is necessary to replace the virus with a conductive material in the finished product.
Interesting though. It seems we have a clear winner in the race between building smaller machines with smaller machines, or using biotech. Viruses are in!
religion is just a theory... "the theory of god" as i call it. excpet in this case, their only available proof is an ancient piece of literature that has been translated and re-translated too many times to count That's not the point. Religion requires no objective proof. Occasionally many of the more ambitious keepers of the faith will try to find historical accuracies in the bible... but really, in the end it's not needed. Absolutely wrong. Proof is needed. It was needed in ancient times, and it is far more necessary today. Did anyone accept Jesus as the son of God before he performed his miracles? It's also strange that God seems to have stopped direct intervention. Conveniently, when there is science to observe/explain what happens exactly, where is the parting of the Red Sea? Where is any miracle for that matter? And what happened to destroying cities? How do I know God exists? I just know. It's simply impossible to define matters of faith in terms of science. Science can only tell us how. Religion trys to tell us why, and to that extent they can contridict each other while both are right. I can see how this would frustrate somebody with a purly analitcal mind because faith can not be measured or displayed in any objective way. Sheer nonsense. You seem to be claiming that religion answers any questions at all. Science answers questions. Religion merely tells you to stop thinking. There is another word for faith. Blind obedience.
Thanks. Of course it would work well on any nation.
If you neutralise high tech, you neutralise high tech. The anti-sat measures are worthless against
nations with none of their own, only leased capacity, because presumably you do not want war with the leasing countries.
That sandbag tactic is not great. Nuisance value only currently, but when picosats go into orbit this would be a serious threat.
The sandbags run the risk of bringing every technology advanced nation down on you. I would not care to fight Russia, US, EU, India, Japan, China, South Korea simultatenously. They will come after any nation that targets sats indiscriminately.
Death to America
It ain't gonna be easy, says Bruce Sterling, but that won't stop enemies from trying. Thirteen strategies they might use to knock the eagle out of the sky.
1. BUILD YOUR OWN
Method: Duplicate American space assets: surveillance, navigation, telecom, the works.
Upside: Legal. Can be accomplished largely using commercial products and services. American contractors might even build a lot of it for you.
Downside: Cripplingly costly; Russians tried it and went broke. Looks suspicious. Takes years. Yankees in good position to blow your assets to smithereens.
Already pursued by many other nations, India, China, Russia, Japan and the EU to name but a few.
All of these countries have far cheaper launch costs. They can replace a satellite for far less than it costs the US (currently) to replace its own satellites. A huge military advantage. Also, due to the location of US lauch sites, not that hard to shoot down sats launched from the US.
It's also possible to combine launching your own satellites with leasing/buying satellites from
other nations.
2. DECAPITATION
Method: Never mind fancy space assets. Obliterate Washington with a truck nuke.
Upside: Massively destructive, highly destabilizing. Heavy casualties among governing elite. Deadly shock to US national morale. Can be repeated in other cities.
Downside: Nukes hard to build. Sets dangerous precedent that puts your own cities at risk. US space assets still up there, available to US allies even if US no longer exists. Loss of Congress and Washington bureaucrats might be dangerous tonic to US military.
Not a likely strategy. Any nation that does this is asking for nuclear war. The safest way to implement this strategy is to give nukes to a terrorist group (NNAQ - short for NNAQ Not's AL Qaida ). Let them take the heat.
Bruce omitted chemical/biological warfare. Especially with biological, great built in denial.
Your heroes die carrying the disease to the US. No trail to lead back to you. Chemical also has great potential. Imagine the release of sarin in a football stadium.
3. ELECTROMAGNETIC PULSE
Method: Detonate nuclear warhead in upper atmosphere, disabling spacecraft circuitry.
Upside: Inexpensive, quick, ruthless. Disables civilian assets, including pagers and TV, by stripping circuits on ground. To evade detection, bomb can be disguised as something benign, like a commercial satellite.
Downside: Some military sats hardened against radiation. Might destroy your own space hardware, if you have any. Unlikely to destroy distant sats; might destroy very little, in which case you've gone nuclear against a superpower.
This would be a very valuable tactic. Combined with the other tactics 4-11, it makes it possible to annihilate US forces.
4. SPACE PARASITES
Method: Infest space with armed mobile nanosatellites. Sneak them up to expensive American space machines. Attach like limpets. Detonate on signal.
Upside: Sneaky, insidious, inscrutable.
Downside: Hard to test. Americans likely to build fleet of nanosats teensier and sneakier than yours.
Very easy to test. Take out an American satellite or one of your own. The countermeasure is very
weak. Considering the Americans will build nanosats anyway, this is no deterrent.
5. SANDBAGGING
Method: Spew sand into paths of orbiting Yankee assets, turning them into Swiss cheese.
Upside: Ultracheap. Slowly suffocates space power. Might be done persistently in tiny quantities by some unorthodox launch method, say electromagnetic rail-gun launch or Jules Verne space cannon.
Downside: Space too big to pollute. Armor countermeasures possible. Retaliation by all space users likely. Sand sifts down into atmosphere after a while.
If you're careful about targetting, potentially useful. A nuisance tactic at best. High risk
of making every space faring nation come after you.
6. SPOOFING
Method: Mimic American datastream. Hack satellites, own them.
Upside: Bloodless, sexy, wired. Gains huge military advantage.
Downside: Requires vulnerable ground stations plus better hacking, crypto, and dongle skills than NSA and Air Force. Still can't launch, repair, or replace space assets.
That's not hard. Many of the US potential adversaries posess all three. And the US ground
stations are very vulnerable. There are many unmanned and poorly guarded ground stations
for US satellites here in Australia and NZ begging for just such a tactic. One man who was a demo/sniper could easily take them out.
All it needs is one weak link. If the encryption is weak, all the other skills do not matter.
If the admins securing machines lack the necessary skills, it is also easy to compromise hardware.
It's also not necessary to have vulnerable ground stations. If you can crack encryption, you
can spoof a ground station easily, without ever having been near it.
7. JAMMING
Method: Deploy huge electromagnetic noisemakers that thwart US communications.
Upside: Disables guided missiles, turns smart bombs into dumb bombs. Good for locals who communicate via fiber optics.
Downside: Ineffective beyond theater. Noisemakers make obvious targets.
A tactic that will be used by almost all opponents. Not enough by itself, but in combination very deadly. Only terrorist groups will possibly lack the ability to use this.
8. ATTACK GROUND STATIONS
Method: Use mortars, bombs, or missiles against satellite ground stations.
Upside: Kills highly trained analysts, destroys specialized equipment. Bases generally easy to find, not well fortified.
Downside: Secret mobile backup facilities likely to exist. US has large techie population, can train more space geeks.
Can they train them instantly? The crucial element is time. If you can open a window of vulnerability
where the US has no space assets, you can decimate the US forces by the time they recover.
9. DENIAL AND DECEPTION
Method: Hide facilities underground. Scatter armadas of fakes on surface. Broadcast phony transmissions to fool spy sats. Camouflage everything.
Upside: Effective during wartime. Forces US to waste expensive munitions.
Downside: Windowless cave quarters bad for soldier morale. Constant, consistent deception hard to maintain. Avoiding surveillance increases cost of all operations.
This tactic will be used by everyone, including the US.
10. ESPIONAGE
Method: Bribe or coopt Yankee sat personnel, obtain manuals, secrets.
Upside: Cheap, traditional. Proven success with Pollard, Walker, Falcon and Snowman.
Downside: Satellites return to US control once mole is discovered.
If used to create a window of weakness, where the US has no functioning sats for a short
period of time, means mega death for US soldiers.
By the time the US recovers, there might be no
army/air force/carrier group left in the region.
11. DEATH RAY
Method: Build laser or particle beam. Blind or cook satellites from ground.
Upside: Unexpected, shocking, repeatable. Appealing to Aum Shinrikyo-style tech-literate madmen.
Downside: Ambitious, expensive, hard to conceal. Requires huge power source. Works only in clear weather. Invites swift conventional retaliation.
Much easier/cheaper to use ballistic missile for the same job. The laser beam tactic will only be used by advanced nations, US allies and India, China, Russia.
12. WAR BY OTHER MEANS
Method: Abandon conventional warfare. Go nuclear, descend into terrorism, or both.
Upside: Everybody's doing it.
Downside: Going nuclear is expensive, destabilizing, dangerous. Terrorists lack secure bases, logistics, traditions, esprit de corps; "masterminds" hard to distinguish from deranged amateurs. American social, economic, cultural pressures irresistible. Your war may devolve into reading Noam Chomsky while sipping Coke.
By far the best tactic for every opponent of the US. Is already used, and has proved very successful. So far, no terrorist has yet started to read Chomsky. Has already beaten the US in Somalia. Will be used extensively by China when the war over Taiwan begins.
13. WAIT IT OUT
Method: Wait for US to get careless, go broke, forget, sell out, and/or collapse from inherent contradictions of postindustrial capitalism.
Upside: Easy. Basically indistinguishable from giving up.
Downside: Capitalist democracy has buried many competing systems. Top challenger blatantly suicidal and feared by all. Huge American sums spent on space strengthen US economy by creating Tang instant orange drink and heat-trapping pizza delivery bags. US will commodify your discontent, sell it back to you on DVD.
This is hardly a tactic. US culture helps to create enemies as well as allies.
Serving on the company's board are Pradeep Sindhu, founder, vice chairman, and chief technology officer of Juniper Networks; Dan Maydan, president of Applied Materials; T.J. Rodgers, president and CEO of Cypress Semiconductor; Alex Balkanski, a general partner at Benchmark; and Vinod Khosla, a general partner at Kleiner Perkins.
I can't help wondering what they could have achieved in India, instead of coming to the US and helping make an already rich country richer.
With Ogg everywhere,there is no more need for Fraunhoffer. No one needs to pay royalties or deal with stupid patent issues. This helps beat those proprietary companies*cough* Microsoft*cough*.
I haven't read such sheer unadulterated nonsense in a long time.
Unistalling is a complete red herring. Why would I want to uninstall something that doesn't harm me (and in some cases is actually benficial)?
Why should I pay for the development of IE? IE takes up valuable space, slows down the processor, and makes windows install slower. This is quite a huge set of disadvantages. It is not for Microsoft to decide what kind of OS I run. Everything else in Windows can be removed/added. I see no need for clearly optional components like IE/Media player.