Technology has been in an arms race between arms and armor since the first man picked up a stick. One thing that stands out is that armor always is playing catch up. I don't see that changing. Even a mythical force shield would just create the atmosphere for a weapon designed to pierce it.
The issue here isn't to go after the weapons. Nor is the issue to develop defenses against the weapons. The issue is to go after the men and the mentality that would use them for ill. If this sounds like racial profiling and pro-active anti-terror ops, you're right. I'm not debating the morality of them, I'm just saying I see no other option.
The truly scary time will come when the same is true of more serious weapons, like chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. As technology progresses these may become more accessible to individuals as well. It will be an interesting world when the disgruntled kid at school can just blow up the city instead of shooting up the school.
Agreed. And the worst part is, I don't see a way to defend against it in a passive sense. Imagine, if you will, a scenario were a single bad guy could personally possess and use a weapon with the capability of killing tens of thousands of people. It's not a big stretch to see that coming to pass in the next half century. If such a weapon were easily portable, easily concealable...what can you do to stop it? The answer is, you can't. At least not once the weapon is in his possession and close to the target.
As offensive as it may seem to civil libertarians, isolationists, and non-interventionists, the only way to stop such an attack would be to pre-emptively seek out such plots and terminate them in their infancy. Waiting until they're actualized is too late. How can civil liberties be preserved in such a scenario? I honestly don't know. People won't tolerate a government that won't protect them. Nor will they tolerate an external entity -- state or non-state -- that incubates such activities. The world is going to be a much more dangerous place sooner than anyone thinks.
No, if a cop/soldier shoots and kills someone, it's much better PR for the government if that person is armed.
The best martyrs are unarmed and offer only passive resistance.
But you miss the point. If I'm unarmed, the government has no need to use deadly force to remove me. A few flashbangs and a SWAT team and there's very little I could do about it without my own stash of firepower.
I think this minimum spec idea misses the point. We're talking about an operating system, not an application. The OS should provide a platform (and, to a certain extent, services) upon which users will run the applications that actually get things done. The OS shouldn't have huge minimum specs because it's supposed to be relatively unobtrusive. When we start trying to load the OS down with all kinds of things that ought to be done with apps, we end up with a bloated mess, a one-size-fits-none concept that inconveniences everyone equally. I'd much rather they kept the specs low and pared some of the fluff from the OS instead.
I think your post, while well thought out, misses the point of an armed citizenry. No one is realistically thinking a lightly-armed, poorly-trained citizenry can effectively wage war against a well-equipped, well-trained professional military force. Nor do I think anyone is suggesting a straight up guerrilla-style campaign for asymmetric warfare.
No, the point of an armed citizenry is to give the government pause. An unarmed populace can be brought to heel without much in the way of bloodshed. But an armed populace? Even a lightly-armed one means the government can't just march in and round up potential dissidents. There is the strong possibility of a firefight. Sure, the little guys will probably lose. But it means the government must escalate to lethal force just to get started on whatever nefarious course it may be planning for its citizens.
In a way, it's little like conventional vs. nuclear combat between nation-states. When both sides were purely conventional, wars were fairly common (call this analogous to both sides being armed with swords). When one side has nukes and the other does not, the side with nukes gets its way pretty much whenever it wants without ever having to drop a nuke (analogous to a police state with a disarmed citizenry). But when both sides are equally armed with dangerous weapons that require either side to really think about whether they want to invite a deeply damaging and dangerous conflict...you get very few actual wars (analogous to an armed state and armed citizenry).
If I'm unarmed and the government (for whatever reason) decides I need to be removed, not only can I not stop them, but I probably can't even inflict significant harm on them. They will most likely even take me alive, without a protracted fight. The risk to them in this case, both in blood and bad PR, is minimal.
If I'm armed and the government (for whatever reason) decides I need to be removed, they will most likely succeed. I will, however, most likely succeed in causing casualties and/or making a big PR spectacle of being taken down. I might even achieve martyr status if I'm killed, causing a PR debacle for the government. The government will want to avoid these things, thus they will try to find means other than brute force of arms to remove me. Or they might not remove me at all, deeming the political risk too high. This is why we need to be armed. Not as a credible army-in-waiting, but as a deterrent.
And I want a week long orgy with the Victoria's Secret supermodels, but I'm intelligent to know the likelihood of that happening is pretty damned small. Linus should be exhorbitantly happy Linux has made the inroads it has in the server and mobile markets. Desktop, if it ever does follow, will probably not resemble "desktop" as we now know it.
Why would they need to create a new hate conflict? There's plenty of that to go around as is. Arab vs. Jew, black vs. white, East vs. West...it's not like conflict wasn't around before banking cartels, you know.
Fusion would break the stranglehold of petro-exporting countries in the Middle East as well as belligerent exporters like Russia and Iran.
You're assuming said fusion plants would be radically cheaper to construct and operate than existing fission plants...something the anti-nuclear activists would probably complicate despite the obvious benefits of fusion over fission. Never underestimate the public fear of the word "nuclear" even if the processes involved are ridiculously different.
I can hear the rallying cry now: "They want to build a plant that works the same way as a thermonuclear bomb! Do you want a nuclear bomb IN YOUR BACKYARD???"
People are still terrified of fluoride in their water. Can you imagine their reponse to the above?
Fusion power is roughly 20 years away from being viable...and has been for the last 40 years LOL.
Seriously, I'll start worrying about proliferation risks when a commercially viable fusion reactor DESIGN is created. Building one -- assuming it's ever viable to begin with -- would take years, which is plenty of time to address proliferation concerns before it came online.
To put this in perspective, 5,000 sq. mi. is a square about 71 miles on a side. Compare this to the total area of the Gulf (615,000 sq. mi) and you'll see this "dead zone" occupies just 0.8% of the Gulf. Is this something that needs addressing? Absolutely. But it's not some horrific cauldron of death like the headline tries to make it out to be.
It seems that the launch site has been rather precisely determined. Perhaps you missed that memo.
And no matter how much evidence the US or Ukrainian government produces, no matter how detailed and annotated, Russia will dismiss it with a wave of a hand as fabricated, slanted, biased...whatever they want. They'll never admit responsibility.
What they need to do is to organize UN peacekeeper mission there, not wage proxy war with US.
Yes, because UN peacekeepers have such a long, sterling reputation on stopping stuff like this from happening.
But regardless, the UN will never do anything in this conflict. Russia holds a veto in the Security Council, and they will stop any such measures from ever happening.
Imagine long range trucking where the vehicle didn't need a driver and wasn't subject to driving limits. It would make trucking a lot more competitive against trains.
It would also make automated trucking a lot more competitive against human driven transport services...thus the unions will immediately be against it.
I oppose the very idea of "professional entertainment", be it musicians, athletes, actors or games programmers.
Let me get this straight: you oppose all forms of compensated entertainment? So you consume no music, no movies, no fictional books, no games of any kind (electronic or otherwise), view no works of art...nothing at all? Or do you consume these things but just presume that people should never be paid for providing them to you?
I'm not about to shill for the copyright-manipulating media conglomerates, but IMO your viewpoint is either hopelessly extreme or ridiculously hypocritical. If people choose to entertain someone else, that effort has intrinsic value. Now exactly what that value might be is debatable and purely subjective based upon the value it has to those consuming said entertainment, but it surely has value to those who consume it, otherwise they wouldn't. You pay for people to fix your food at restaurants, or to build your computer components, or any number of other trades that require someone with a particular skill to perform a particular service. Why should entertainment alone be considered a pro bono profession?
And this, ladies and gents, is why the free market works when it's allowed to work unhampered by meddling from politicians. AT&T is a shit company. I hate their service and product offerings, but even more I hate their flippant attitude towards their customers. Along comes Google to kick them out of their complacency. If AT&T gets on the ball and delivers good service at good prices, it's good for me. If AT&T drops the ball and Google displaces them, it's good for me. Competition, folks. It's a win-win.
What? And destroy the current lucrative system of kickbacks, cronyism, and propping up otherwise unprofitable, unaffordable, unworkable systems and businesses? How will Senators and members ever get elected properly without the subtle system of bribes that currently grease the wheels of professional politics? Don't you know *anything* about how to get stuff done inside the Beltway?
Sheesh...you people need to get a grip and understand how power works in this country.
Isn't it funny how NASA -- the agency that for *decades* screamed that the shuttle's reusability was the *key* to why America should depend upon it for our *primary* launch platform -- is now willing to admit the whole "reusable" thing was crap and everybody *knew* it was crap. We'd have done far better to keep using things like Saturn V's.
Now I sincerely *hope* SpaceX has somehow learned from NASA's failure and perhaps *can* make the economics of a reusable engine work. One thing at least: if SpaceX *can't* make it work, you can be sure it can't just make up the difference with taxpayer money and call it a success. As a private enterprise, it can't.
The F-22 was inferior in almost every important metric to its competitor, the YF-23.
That's not entirely true, and I say that as fan of the YF-23. The F-22 was less stealthy but more maneuverable. The Air Force valued the latter somewhat more than the former at the time, and here we are today.
That said, the real farce was that Lockheed was allowed to submit *two* proposals. The first one clearly would have lost to the YF-23, so Lockheed was allowed to go back to the drawing board and submit a second...*after* the USAF told them what they needed to change in order to win over their hearts and minds. Northrop was given no such second chance.
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Technology has been in an arms race between arms and armor since the first man picked up a stick. One thing that stands out is that armor always is playing catch up. I don't see that changing. Even a mythical force shield would just create the atmosphere for a weapon designed to pierce it.
The issue here isn't to go after the weapons. Nor is the issue to develop defenses against the weapons. The issue is to go after the men and the mentality that would use them for ill. If this sounds like racial profiling and pro-active anti-terror ops, you're right. I'm not debating the morality of them, I'm just saying I see no other option.
The truly scary time will come when the same is true of more serious weapons, like chemical, biological, or even nuclear weapons. As technology progresses these may become more accessible to individuals as well. It will be an interesting world when the disgruntled kid at school can just blow up the city instead of shooting up the school.
Agreed. And the worst part is, I don't see a way to defend against it in a passive sense. Imagine, if you will, a scenario were a single bad guy could personally possess and use a weapon with the capability of killing tens of thousands of people. It's not a big stretch to see that coming to pass in the next half century. If such a weapon were easily portable, easily concealable...what can you do to stop it? The answer is, you can't. At least not once the weapon is in his possession and close to the target.
As offensive as it may seem to civil libertarians, isolationists, and non-interventionists, the only way to stop such an attack would be to pre-emptively seek out such plots and terminate them in their infancy. Waiting until they're actualized is too late. How can civil liberties be preserved in such a scenario? I honestly don't know. People won't tolerate a government that won't protect them. Nor will they tolerate an external entity -- state or non-state -- that incubates such activities. The world is going to be a much more dangerous place sooner than anyone thinks.
No, if a cop/soldier shoots and kills someone, it's much better PR for the government if that person is armed.
The best martyrs are unarmed and offer only passive resistance.
But you miss the point. If I'm unarmed, the government has no need to use deadly force to remove me. A few flashbangs and a SWAT team and there's very little I could do about it without my own stash of firepower.
I think this minimum spec idea misses the point. We're talking about an operating system, not an application. The OS should provide a platform (and, to a certain extent, services) upon which users will run the applications that actually get things done. The OS shouldn't have huge minimum specs because it's supposed to be relatively unobtrusive. When we start trying to load the OS down with all kinds of things that ought to be done with apps, we end up with a bloated mess, a one-size-fits-none concept that inconveniences everyone equally. I'd much rather they kept the specs low and pared some of the fluff from the OS instead.
I think your post, while well thought out, misses the point of an armed citizenry. No one is realistically thinking a lightly-armed, poorly-trained citizenry can effectively wage war against a well-equipped, well-trained professional military force. Nor do I think anyone is suggesting a straight up guerrilla-style campaign for asymmetric warfare.
No, the point of an armed citizenry is to give the government pause. An unarmed populace can be brought to heel without much in the way of bloodshed. But an armed populace? Even a lightly-armed one means the government can't just march in and round up potential dissidents. There is the strong possibility of a firefight. Sure, the little guys will probably lose. But it means the government must escalate to lethal force just to get started on whatever nefarious course it may be planning for its citizens.
In a way, it's little like conventional vs. nuclear combat between nation-states. When both sides were purely conventional, wars were fairly common (call this analogous to both sides being armed with swords). When one side has nukes and the other does not, the side with nukes gets its way pretty much whenever it wants without ever having to drop a nuke (analogous to a police state with a disarmed citizenry). But when both sides are equally armed with dangerous weapons that require either side to really think about whether they want to invite a deeply damaging and dangerous conflict...you get very few actual wars (analogous to an armed state and armed citizenry).
If I'm unarmed and the government (for whatever reason) decides I need to be removed, not only can I not stop them, but I probably can't even inflict significant harm on them. They will most likely even take me alive, without a protracted fight. The risk to them in this case, both in blood and bad PR, is minimal.
If I'm armed and the government (for whatever reason) decides I need to be removed, they will most likely succeed. I will, however, most likely succeed in causing casualties and/or making a big PR spectacle of being taken down. I might even achieve martyr status if I'm killed, causing a PR debacle for the government. The government will want to avoid these things, thus they will try to find means other than brute force of arms to remove me. Or they might not remove me at all, deeming the political risk too high. This is why we need to be armed. Not as a credible army-in-waiting, but as a deterrent.
...somebody forgot to mail their bribe check to the appropriate official. Or perhaps a competitor mailed a bigger check.
And I want a week long orgy with the Victoria's Secret supermodels, but I'm intelligent to know the likelihood of that happening is pretty damned small. Linus should be exhorbitantly happy Linux has made the inroads it has in the server and mobile markets. Desktop, if it ever does follow, will probably not resemble "desktop" as we now know it.
Why would they need to create a new hate conflict? There's plenty of that to go around as is. Arab vs. Jew, black vs. white, East vs. West...it's not like conflict wasn't around before banking cartels, you know.
Fusion would break the stranglehold of petro-exporting countries in the Middle East as well as belligerent exporters like Russia and Iran.
You're assuming said fusion plants would be radically cheaper to construct and operate than existing fission plants...something the anti-nuclear activists would probably complicate despite the obvious benefits of fusion over fission. Never underestimate the public fear of the word "nuclear" even if the processes involved are ridiculously different.
I can hear the rallying cry now: "They want to build a plant that works the same way as a thermonuclear bomb! Do you want a nuclear bomb IN YOUR BACKYARD???"
People are still terrified of fluoride in their water. Can you imagine their reponse to the above?
Fusion power is roughly 20 years away from being viable...and has been for the last 40 years LOL.
Seriously, I'll start worrying about proliferation risks when a commercially viable fusion reactor DESIGN is created. Building one -- assuming it's ever viable to begin with -- would take years, which is plenty of time to address proliferation concerns before it came online.
To put this in perspective, 5,000 sq. mi. is a square about 71 miles on a side. Compare this to the total area of the Gulf (615,000 sq. mi) and you'll see this "dead zone" occupies just 0.8% of the Gulf. Is this something that needs addressing? Absolutely. But it's not some horrific cauldron of death like the headline tries to make it out to be.
It seems that the launch site has been rather precisely determined. Perhaps you missed that memo.
And no matter how much evidence the US or Ukrainian government produces, no matter how detailed and annotated, Russia will dismiss it with a wave of a hand as fabricated, slanted, biased...whatever they want. They'll never admit responsibility.
What they need to do is to organize UN peacekeeper mission there, not wage proxy war with US.
Yes, because UN peacekeepers have such a long, sterling reputation on stopping stuff like this from happening.
But regardless, the UN will never do anything in this conflict. Russia holds a veto in the Security Council, and they will stop any such measures from ever happening.
Imagine long range trucking where the vehicle didn't need a driver and wasn't subject to driving limits. It would make trucking a lot more competitive against trains.
It would also make automated trucking a lot more competitive against human driven transport services...thus the unions will immediately be against it.
Wait...Blackberry? These guys are still in business?
And these are the people we want to trust making decisions about our healthcare?
They should just contact the NSA. I'm sure they've got copies.
I oppose the very idea of "professional entertainment", be it musicians, athletes, actors or games programmers.
Let me get this straight: you oppose all forms of compensated entertainment? So you consume no music, no movies, no fictional books, no games of any kind (electronic or otherwise), view no works of art...nothing at all? Or do you consume these things but just presume that people should never be paid for providing them to you?
I'm not about to shill for the copyright-manipulating media conglomerates, but IMO your viewpoint is either hopelessly extreme or ridiculously hypocritical. If people choose to entertain someone else, that effort has intrinsic value. Now exactly what that value might be is debatable and purely subjective based upon the value it has to those consuming said entertainment, but it surely has value to those who consume it, otherwise they wouldn't. You pay for people to fix your food at restaurants, or to build your computer components, or any number of other trades that require someone with a particular skill to perform a particular service. Why should entertainment alone be considered a pro bono profession?
"After my election I have more flexibility." -- Obama to Medvedev
And this, ladies and gents, is why the free market works when it's allowed to work unhampered by meddling from politicians. AT&T is a shit company. I hate their service and product offerings, but even more I hate their flippant attitude towards their customers. Along comes Google to kick them out of their complacency. If AT&T gets on the ball and delivers good service at good prices, it's good for me. If AT&T drops the ball and Google displaces them, it's good for me. Competition, folks. It's a win-win.
What? And destroy the current lucrative system of kickbacks, cronyism, and propping up otherwise unprofitable, unaffordable, unworkable systems and businesses? How will Senators and members ever get elected properly without the subtle system of bribes that currently grease the wheels of professional politics? Don't you know *anything* about how to get stuff done inside the Beltway?
Sheesh...you people need to get a grip and understand how power works in this country.
Isn't it funny how NASA -- the agency that for *decades* screamed that the shuttle's reusability was the *key* to why America should depend upon it for our *primary* launch platform -- is now willing to admit the whole "reusable" thing was crap and everybody *knew* it was crap. We'd have done far better to keep using things like Saturn V's.
Now I sincerely *hope* SpaceX has somehow learned from NASA's failure and perhaps *can* make the economics of a reusable engine work. One thing at least: if SpaceX *can't* make it work, you can be sure it can't just make up the difference with taxpayer money and call it a success. As a private enterprise, it can't.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence." -- Hanlon's Razor
But who would kill all the Martian spiders for these women? Hook up their TV and stereo? Change the oil in their Martian sand buggy?
The F-22 was inferior in almost every important metric to its competitor, the YF-23.
That's not entirely true, and I say that as fan of the YF-23. The F-22 was less stealthy but more maneuverable. The Air Force valued the latter somewhat more than the former at the time, and here we are today.
That said, the real farce was that Lockheed was allowed to submit *two* proposals. The first one clearly would have lost to the YF-23, so Lockheed was allowed to go back to the drawing board and submit a second...*after* the USAF told them what they needed to change in order to win over their hearts and minds. Northrop was given no such second chance.