> The end result? Two and a half hours of badly edited and occasionally intelligible dialogue punctuated by random acts of violence, sex, and a lot of background nudity.
Maybe I'm new here, but I'm really failing to see the problem...
> Oh, and just because I want to fsck with your head for a minute, who says that "God" is not an extra-dimensional being that is responsible for the multiverses colliding? We don't know what the laws of physics might look like in another multiverse! Not to mention that we still don't have a clue what caused the "bang" in the first place. The multiverse theory helps in that it at least gives a trigger for the initial bang.
I'm an evolutionist. I'm also a theist. Carl Sagan was an atheist, and put it best:
How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science
and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is
much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more
elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god,
and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that
stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern
science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and
awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
- Carl Sagan
Most creationists believe in a piddly little micromanager of a God who slacked off for six days and pulled an all-nighter 6000 years ago. I'm not even sure I'd want to have a beer with that God, let alone worship it.
But a hypothetical being capable of fiddling with M-branes and bouncing them off each other to see what sorts of universes pop out - is not only consistent with a cursory reading of Genesis (hey, sheep farmers 6000 years ago had enough trouble coming up with words to describe the Big Bang, the freezing-out of electromagnetism from the strong and the weak forces, the formation of the Earth, the condensing-out of water vapor, and the evolution of life from plant to animal to primate)... That's the kind of God who sounds like something worth worshipping. Mad props to you, sir.
(And when we fully understand string theory, or find another way to reconcile GR with QCD, maybe I'll have to upwardly revise my estimation of this "God" dude again:)
Another mindfsck - Genesis only purports to describe the creation of our universe. If God exists, He's probably chuckling to himself over that. "Hey, the shepherd didn't ask if there were other universes, so why tell him? The humans wanna learn about the rest of My creation, they can bloody well go learn themselves some high-energy particle physics! I gave 'em a hint when I said the heavens displayed My glory, but I ain't gonna do all the work for 'em! Why the hell do they think I ignored their planet for the 13 billion years it took for them to evolve big brains? What do they think their brains are for, anyways?":)
> > Has SCO gone completely mad? What the fuck? ? > > Is SCO completely, utterly, loony? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?!
Oh, right. That as me, quoting myself from Septempter, and then from October.
So, to bring you all up to date. It's November. The proper question is now:
"Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit and batshit, half-a-gig-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck fuck [ several dozen instances of the word "fuck" deleted for brevity ] fuck?!?!"
You would not believe the bad luck I've had today. Some punk with a BB gun shot a hole in the gas tank, so I had to set down. I must have landed it on the only frozen-over lake in the entire friggin' Middle East. (Well, at least I'm not surprised the ice was thin!) Your mind-controlled Mach-5 stealth helicopter drone will be delivered to you as soon as I escape from the basement of this bagel shop, dig out the drone from under the ice, and dry it off with some hair dryers. See you in Norway!
(The sequel to the Firefox novel, Firefox Down, Craig Thomas:)
> Did that: History surrounding the U.S. war with Iraq: Four short stories. Here's a quote: "The least sophisticated way of relating to other people is killing them."
Everything I ever needed to know I learned in Kindergarten. The KISS principle, for instance. "Keep It Simple, Stupid!"
> Well, of course they're taking an incremental approach! What did you expect? A light speed trip to Alpha Centauri, then the moon landing?
Which is why the incrememntal approach is faster, 'cuz, like, even if they launched for Alpha Centauri last week, they still wouldn't be on the Moon by 2010!
> Sir I take particular offense to your statement
>
> > b) a very short attention span.
> I am very well capable of keeping my attention fixated on a point that is well worth my....Hey! Another article on Microsoft doing something bad!
What? Did you just say SCO's manipulating voting terminals? Holy crap! I gotta write my congr... well, lemme finish this round GTA3 first.
> A stolen UAV prototype!
>you kinda wonder who and why.
>It doesn't get weirder.
"Oy vey, vat you theenk off our new toy, Mister Gant?"
("Rabbi, if he runs west he'll run out of fuel long before he reaches the rock of Gibraltar, and only a fool would turn east and risk the US air defences around Iraq! He is headed north, north I say!")
One stolen thought-controlled Mach-5 stealth helicopter available to anyone who spots the reference.
> I am all for getting 3rd world countries on the internet. I've grown bored of the current 'nature videos' and would like to see the 'nature videos' from places like Sri Lanka, Yemen, and Belize. I can only imagine what can be done with a nose ring, a walking stick, a camel, and a 2 liter pop bottle. (errr...... did I just type that? shit.)
Given the UN's track record in the third world, I suspect the videos will consist of h0t n00d w0m3n and ch1ld43n being forced to shear the flesh from each other's bones using shards of torn-up 2-liter pop bottles, while having any nose rings removed by attaching the rings to camels prodded into movement through beatings with walking sticks.
In the background, Kofi Annan will be seen wringing his hands and making bleating noises about how absolutely awful it all is, and encouraging a bunch of unelected bureaucrats to declare for all the world that the UN shall remain siezed of the matter on its awfulness, and then in the next breath, insist that anyone who actually, oh, I don't know, does something to stop the slaughter should be immediately subject to sanctions and global condemnation for imposing the cultural values of the West on an otherwise morally-equivalent system of values being practiced by those committing the genocide.
This is the same UN that considers Chad, Libya, Cuba, and pre-invasion Iraq fit to speak as the moral authority for the entire fucking planet on matters of freedom of the press and on human rights, is it not?
Or are you talking about some other UN of which I was previously unaware?
> Aren't you dependant on your employer for your basic needs? If so, how is your standard of
living any different than that of a medieval serf? Oh, wait: you have more "stuff" so that makes it better...
If I lived in the middle ages, I would be one of the oldest living people in my village. I'd likely be regarded with suspicion of witchcraft because I still have all my teeth, and despite my advanced age, both my mother and my grandmother, are still alive. The Devil Himself must be protecting them, for how else would they live past the unearthly ages fifty - sixty - seventy - eighty - years?
My humble apartment affords me better protection from the elements than that of any Lord, and I pay for it with about a week's work. The food I cook every night with the help of my $12.99 spice rack would be something the King himself could only fantasize about. That's less than a day's wages, after tax, even at minimum wage.
In the palm of my hand, in the form of a $49.99 flash ROM, I can hold a library rivaling that of Alexandria, for it contains not only every book that had been printed until 1200, but every book that would ever be printed for the next five centuries.
So in answer to your question, having more "stuff" really does make it better.
> Thank you for admitting that Belkin spams and steals. That made it very easy to remvoed Belkin from our Corporate purchase program.
I just showed this to our admin, who was about to buy some cables. Total funds diverted from Belkin to other vendors: $119.70 today. More in the months to come.
Wanna advertise? Go ahead. Stick a URL/hotlink into your driver install CD, or a printed flyer in the box.
Wanna hijack an HTTP session every eight hours just for the hell of it? I suppose you can do that too, but you won't be doing it on our fucking network.
Re:Space elevator makes *everything* easier...
on
The Case for the Moon
·
· Score: 1
> nobody has demonstrated a macroscopic-size sample of a material that is strong enough to make a space elevator, let alone the ability to churn out thousands of tonnes of the stuff.
Agreed. Would you space elevator types get off your materials-science high horse for a year or two and settle for a friggin' suspension bridge across a body of water on your campus?
Maybe then the space elevator will be worth serious consideration.
> And just think of the damage to our celebrity-based economy when OJ Simpson style chases no longer command our blistering attention several times a week. Why, those news anchors would actually have to focus on real news!
Huh? Are you nuts? This is a Godsend!
"Live and direct on KTLA, we have a tanker truck full of TNT, it's been stolen and it's on a rampage! We have word from the authorities that the GPS failsafe is on board and ready for activation, causing the truck to careen out of control and roll down a cliff, culminating in a spectacular explosion! And since we know when it'll happen, we can safely pause for a few words from our sponsor! Stay tuned for the choadsome explosion and screaming fiery death after the break! Get your VCRs ready!"
> On an unrelated note, I don't think that mass armored invasion was the goal of USSR. Since Stalin era, Soviet Union has pretty much lost its expansionist momentum, and by the 1970s, its
government was comprised from old farts mostly happy with status quo. And even during late 40s, when USSR had overwhelming military advantage in Europe and US had too few nukes and no missile delivery, there was no attempt at that.
> > (It's not that I think it'll change your mind on the issue, but maybe the opinion from the other side of fence is interesting for you:)
20 years ago you wouldn't have changed my mind. By now, however, I think history has shown you to be right. The USSR may have been an evil empire, but it wasn't anywhere near as expansionist an evil empire as we Westerners thought it was. (I'm sure Red Dawn provided Soviet generals with hours of side-splitting amusement:) Both sides were fundamentally civilized nations, albeit with significant ideological differences. When massive retaliation stopped being a viable doctrine, both civilized nations quite rationally adopted the MAD doctrine and changed their strategy to fighting WW3 through proxy or client states. Long and the short of it was that the West won and the Soviets lost. Both sides' doctrine made any issue of nuclear warfighting strategy moot.
For what it's worth, the Soviet strategy of surviving an US nuclear assault with sufficient ground troups to take over Europe - contrasted with the US strategy of "what good are ground forces when the world's just ended" would have put them in good stead to "win" any nuclear conflict short of a civilization-ending global thermonuclear spasm. I'm damn glad it didn't happen, but it would have been very interesting to see it played out.
Some day, maybe 30-50 years from now, I'd like to walk into my retirement home to find a very large wargaming simulator on a laptop, a few retired American and Soviet 4-stars, a 40-oz bottle of whiskey, a 40-oz bottle of Vodka, and two very large piles of declassified documents, and let hilarity ensue.
> > Does NAV2004 have some kind of feature where certain sites can be exempt from ad blocking (in the case you do wish to support a site with ads) > > So what, Slashdot is now Symantec technical support?
Reading between the lines, it's even funnier: "So what, Slashdot is now the support mechanism for some webmaster who's pissed that his customers block ads?"
Not just "What the fuck?", thats "What the fuck, what the fucking fuck fuck?"
> "The first few Matrices failed, because humans needed to have a way out. Every few years, we let all the humans who've gotten out die, and that extra special human, with the help of the Oracle, will end up thinking he's won, but in reality he loses and has to go start a new Zion with a hot chick in leather pants."
OMG OMG OMG! J00 have Unlocked teh J3d1 in Star Wars Galaxies!!1!!
> No, it will be great. Now your girlfriend can change size, shape and feel of her implants at will using This
Metal >She can even form a knife to cut pizza with.
Man who cannot cut mustard, can always lick jar.
(Though a chick with boobies that can cut pizzas would be pretty cool.)
> > Each of us has to decide what the right balance between being effective
and being honest." (emphasis added) >Dr. Stephen Schneider
Professor of Biological Sciences >
Stanford University >
Author of Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Cenutry
Dr. Schneider, if you're in a business where you have to "balance" being "effective" (pushing your personal agenda) and being "honest" (maintaining your scientific integrity), kindly stop dignifying what you do as science.
If the truth conflicts with your agenda, and you make any concessions to truth whatsoever, you are a politician and a propagandist, barely worthy of the title "professor", and what you profess is not science.
> > But enhanced radiation weapons were actually one of the best options available to commanders of
either side during the Cold War. It's a shame that the FUD surrounding them went so out of hand.
> > The "FUD" was that USSR made it clear that any use of any type of nuclear weapon on the
battlefield will ensure prompt and massive nuclear counterstrike (and it clearly makes sense from game-theoretic point of view). So no, neutron munitions were not any better response than 'conventional' nukes.
Naw, that was MAD, not FUD:)
I should have been more specific when I said "FUD". The FUD I was trying to dispel was the bogus notion that neutron bombs were somehow "[more] inhumane [than other nuclear weapons]" because they were built to "kill the people but leave the buildings standing", because having such as a design goal implies that one believes buildings are more important than people, and consequently, the user of such a weapon is somehow "more" evil than the user of a conventional nuke on a city, and that consequently, enhanced radiation weapons should not have been part of the US arsenal.
If I've futzed up the logic behind the FUD, sorry. (I never understood the argument, but I think I've captured the gist of it.:)
Considering the main source of the FUD about the "evil" neutron bomb was "peace" groups that spent most of the 70s pressing for unilateral Western disarmament, and considering that many of those groups have since been revealed to have been receiving (covertly - the rank-and-file peaceniks and even most of the groups' leaders were unaware of it) organizational, ideological, and financial support from the KGB - it's not surprising that the "peace movement"'s position was, although logically suspect and inconsistent with the facts, highly consistent with the Soviet goal of eliminating from the US arsenal one of the few weapons that could have countered a mass armored invasion of Eastern Europe.
> Nuetron bombs are effective because those they don't kill immediately, they kill slowly. Many soldiers could survive the initial blast, just to become a burden on the rest as they lay dying of radiation poisoning.
You've (both) missed the point of "neutron bombs" (a.k.a. enhanced radiation weapons).
The goal was never to drop the things on cities to "kill the people and save the buildings". The lethal radius from the burst of neutrons is on the same order of magnitude of the lethal blast radius, typically a few hundred meters. Wrong weapon for wiping out a city. (Which is fine, because wiping out cities isn't what they were designed for.)
Where neutron bombs would have had great effect would have been in wiping out large columns of tanks, presumably Russian, clustered together as they were funnelled through places like the Fulda Gap in an invasion of Eastern Europe.
In those scenarios, NATO forces didn't have sufficient conventional weapons to deliver on the tanks to make a difference. And because tanks are pretty blast-resistant things (crunchy shell, soft center), the only way to wipe them out en masse would have been to nuke them.
With 100,000 tanks bearing down on you, you've got two options:
(0) Surrender. Not an option.
(0) Fight conventionally, die anyway, because you're outnumbered and outgunned. Not an option.
(1) Blow 'em up. Carpet-bomb the countryside with 20-megaton blasts spaced 2-3 kilometers apart, because that's the kind of blast power it's going to take to crack the hard crunchy steel shells. Then discover your own troops are up to their armpits in icky long-term fallout, to say nothing of the fact that you've killed 20-30% of the civilian population living downwind, and that whoever wins the war can forget about farming for, oh, I dunno, the next decade or two.
(2) Fry 'em. Drop kiloton-yielding neutron bombs over the same area. Low explosive yield, low collateral damage, low fallout, just instant bursts of neutrons that rip through the crunchy steel shell and (in the space of minutes) incapacitate and kill the soft juicy tank crews at the center.
Once the burst of neutrons is over - literally a period of milliseconds - the mess is largely gone. (Yes, you have some neutron-activated substances near the blast site, but we're not talking huge quantities of fission daughter products, which are the real bad news to the survivors of a nuclear conflict).
Meantime, the Russian advance is stuck dead (literally:) in a traffic jam of tank-shaped coffins. Casualties in the area are pretty severe, but the affected area is pretty small. Most of the casualties are military, not civilian. Your troops can move through the bombarded area in relatively short order, and whoever wins the war can feed the surviving population, because you haven't blanketed half the arable land in Europe with long-term fallout.
None of the options in a nuclear conflict are that great. But enhanced radiation weapons were actually one of the best options available to commanders of either side during the Cold War. It's a shame that the FUD surrounding them went so out of hand. (Then again, maybe not. Deterrence turned out to be the best nuclear policy option of them all:)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe I'm new here, but I'm really failing to see the problem...
I'm an evolutionist. I'm also a theist. Carl Sagan was an atheist, and put it best:
Most creationists believe in a piddly little micromanager of a God who slacked off for six days and pulled an all-nighter 6000 years ago. I'm not even sure I'd want to have a beer with that God, let alone worship it.
But a hypothetical being capable of fiddling with M-branes and bouncing them off each other to see what sorts of universes pop out - is not only consistent with a cursory reading of Genesis (hey, sheep farmers 6000 years ago had enough trouble coming up with words to describe the Big Bang, the freezing-out of electromagnetism from the strong and the weak forces, the formation of the Earth, the condensing-out of water vapor, and the evolution of life from plant to animal to primate)... That's the kind of God who sounds like something worth worshipping. Mad props to you, sir.
(And when we fully understand string theory, or find another way to reconcile GR with QCD, maybe I'll have to upwardly revise my estimation of this "God" dude again :)
Another mindfsck - Genesis only purports to describe the creation of our universe. If God exists, He's probably chuckling to himself over that. "Hey, the shepherd didn't ask if there were other universes, so why tell him? The humans wanna learn about the rest of My creation, they can bloody well go learn themselves some high-energy particle physics! I gave 'em a hint when I said the heavens displayed My glory, but I ain't gonna do all the work for 'em! Why the hell do they think I ignored their planet for the 13 billion years it took for them to evolve big brains? What do they think their brains are for, anyways?" :)
"...at best, a cubic kilometre of lunar soil would have to be processed to extract just a cubic metre of water..."
As long as we distribute him like that, I'm all for it.
>
> Is SCO completely, utterly, loony? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck?!
Oh, right. That as me, quoting myself from Septempter, and then from October.
So, to bring you all up to date. It's November. The proper question is now:
"Is SCO completely, utterly, apeshit and batshit, half-a-gig-short-of-a-Debian-ISO, stark, slavering, buggo?!? What the fuck? What the fucking fuck fuck fuck [ several dozen instances of the word "fuck" deleted for brevity ] fuck?!?!"
You would not believe the bad luck I've had today. Some punk with a BB gun shot a hole in the gas tank, so I had to set down. I must have landed it on the only frozen-over lake in the entire friggin' Middle East. (Well, at least I'm not surprised the ice was thin!) Your mind-controlled Mach-5 stealth helicopter drone will be delivered to you as soon as I escape from the basement of this bagel shop, dig out the drone from under the ice, and dry it off with some hair dryers. See you in Norway!
(The sequel to the Firefox novel, Firefox Down, Craig Thomas
Everything I ever needed to know I learned in Kindergarten. The KISS principle, for instance. "Keep It Simple, Stupid!"
Which is why the incrememntal approach is faster, 'cuz, like, even if they launched for Alpha Centauri last week, they still wouldn't be on the Moon by 2010!
>
> > b) a very short attention span.
> I am very well capable of keeping my attention fixated on a point that is well worth my....Hey! Another article on Microsoft doing something bad!
What? Did you just say SCO's manipulating voting terminals? Holy crap! I gotta write my congr... well, lemme finish this round GTA3 first.
>you kinda wonder who and why.
>It doesn't get weirder.
"Oy vey, vat you theenk off our new toy, Mister Gant?"
("Rabbi, if he runs west he'll run out of fuel long before he reaches the rock of Gibraltar, and only a fool would turn east and risk the US air defences around Iraq! He is headed north, north I say!")
One stolen thought-controlled Mach-5 stealth helicopter available to anyone who spots the reference.
Given the UN's track record in the third world, I suspect the videos will consist of h0t n00d w0m3n and ch1ld43n being forced to shear the flesh from each other's bones using shards of torn-up 2-liter pop bottles, while having any nose rings removed by attaching the rings to camels prodded into movement through beatings with walking sticks.
In the background, Kofi Annan will be seen wringing his hands and making bleating noises about how absolutely awful it all is, and encouraging a bunch of unelected bureaucrats to declare for all the world that the UN shall remain siezed of the matter on its awfulness, and then in the next breath, insist that anyone who actually, oh, I don't know, does something to stop the slaughter should be immediately subject to sanctions and global condemnation for imposing the cultural values of the West on an otherwise morally-equivalent system of values being practiced by those committing the genocide.
This is the same UN that considers Chad, Libya, Cuba, and pre-invasion Iraq fit to speak as the moral authority for the entire fucking planet on matters of freedom of the press and on human rights, is it not?
Or are you talking about some other UN of which I was previously unaware?
If I lived in the middle ages, I would be one of the oldest living people in my village. I'd likely be regarded with suspicion of witchcraft because I still have all my teeth, and despite my advanced age, both my mother and my grandmother, are still alive. The Devil Himself must be protecting them, for how else would they live past the unearthly ages fifty - sixty - seventy - eighty - years?
My humble apartment affords me better protection from the elements than that of any Lord, and I pay for it with about a week's work. The food I cook every night with the help of my $12.99 spice rack would be something the King himself could only fantasize about. That's less than a day's wages, after tax, even at minimum wage.
In the palm of my hand, in the form of a $49.99 flash ROM, I can hold a library rivaling that of Alexandria, for it contains not only every book that had been printed until 1200, but every book that would ever be printed for the next five centuries.
So in answer to your question, having more "stuff" really does make it better.
I just showed this to our admin, who was about to buy some cables. Total funds diverted from Belkin to other vendors: $119.70 today. More in the months to come.
Wanna advertise? Go ahead. Stick a URL/hotlink into your driver install CD, or a printed flyer in the box.
Wanna hijack an HTTP session every eight hours just for the hell of it? I suppose you can do that too, but you won't be doing it on our fucking network.
Agreed. Would you space elevator types get off your materials-science high horse for a year or two and settle for a friggin' suspension bridge across a body of water on your campus? Maybe then the space elevator will be worth serious consideration.
Huh? Are you nuts? This is a Godsend!
"Live and direct on KTLA, we have a tanker truck full of TNT, it's been stolen and it's on a rampage! We have word from the authorities that the GPS failsafe is on board and ready for activation, causing the truck to careen out of control and roll down a cliff, culminating in a spectacular explosion! And since we know when it'll happen, we can safely pause for a few words from our sponsor! Stay tuned for the choadsome explosion and screaming fiery death after the break! Get your VCRs ready!"
>
> (It's not that I think it'll change your mind on the issue, but maybe the opinion from the other side of fence is interesting for you
20 years ago you wouldn't have changed my mind. By now, however, I think history has shown you to be right. The USSR may have been an evil empire, but it wasn't anywhere near as expansionist an evil empire as we Westerners thought it was. (I'm sure Red Dawn provided Soviet generals with hours of side-splitting amusement :) Both sides were fundamentally civilized nations, albeit with significant ideological differences. When massive retaliation stopped being a viable doctrine, both civilized nations quite rationally adopted the MAD doctrine and changed their strategy to fighting WW3 through proxy or client states. Long and the short of it was that the West won and the Soviets lost. Both sides' doctrine made any issue of nuclear warfighting strategy moot.
For what it's worth, the Soviet strategy of surviving an US nuclear assault with sufficient ground troups to take over Europe - contrasted with the US strategy of "what good are ground forces when the world's just ended" would have put them in good stead to "win" any nuclear conflict short of a civilization-ending global thermonuclear spasm. I'm damn glad it didn't happen, but it would have been very interesting to see it played out.
Some day, maybe 30-50 years from now, I'd like to walk into my retirement home to find a very large wargaming simulator on a laptop, a few retired American and Soviet 4-stars, a 40-oz bottle of whiskey, a 40-oz bottle of Vodka, and two very large piles of declassified documents, and let hilarity ensue.
>
> So what, Slashdot is now Symantec technical support?
Reading between the lines, it's even funnier: "So what, Slashdot is now the support mechanism for some webmaster who's pissed that his customers block ads?"
Not just "What the fuck?", thats "What the fuck, what the fucking fuck fuck?"
Huh?
Isn't interstellar space, by definition, completely devoid of stars?
But that means Neo and Trinit-eeeewwww!
OMG OMG OMG! J00 have Unlocked teh J3d1 in Star Wars Galaxies!!1!!
>She can even form a knife to cut pizza with.
Man who cannot cut mustard, can always lick jar.
(Though a chick with boobies that can cut pizzas would be pretty cool.)
>Dr. Stephen Schneider Professor of Biological Sciences
> Stanford University
> Author of Global Warming: Are We Entering the Greenhouse Cenutry
Dr. Schneider, if you're in a business where you have to "balance" being "effective" (pushing your personal agenda) and being "honest" (maintaining your scientific integrity), kindly stop dignifying what you do as science.
If the truth conflicts with your agenda, and you make any concessions to truth whatsoever, you are a politician and a propagandist, barely worthy of the title "professor", and what you profess is not science.
>
> The "FUD" was that USSR made it clear that any use of any type of nuclear weapon on the battlefield will ensure prompt and massive nuclear counterstrike (and it clearly makes sense from game-theoretic point of view). So no, neutron munitions were not any better response than 'conventional' nukes.
Naw, that was MAD, not FUD :)
I should have been more specific when I said "FUD". The FUD I was trying to dispel was the bogus notion that neutron bombs were somehow "[more] inhumane [than other nuclear weapons]" because they were built to "kill the people but leave the buildings standing", because having such as a design goal implies that one believes buildings are more important than people, and consequently, the user of such a weapon is somehow "more" evil than the user of a conventional nuke on a city, and that consequently, enhanced radiation weapons should not have been part of the US arsenal.
If I've futzed up the logic behind the FUD, sorry. (I never understood the argument, but I think I've captured the gist of it. :)
Considering the main source of the FUD about the "evil" neutron bomb was "peace" groups that spent most of the 70s pressing for unilateral Western disarmament, and considering that many of those groups have since been revealed to have been receiving (covertly - the rank-and-file peaceniks and even most of the groups' leaders were unaware of it) organizational, ideological, and financial support from the KGB - it's not surprising that the "peace movement"'s position was, although logically suspect and inconsistent with the facts, highly consistent with the Soviet goal of eliminating from the US arsenal one of the few weapons that could have countered a mass armored invasion of Eastern Europe.
It sure does.
I'm not in the aerospace industry, but I'm damn glad to see the DC-X concept getting a second shot at life.
You've (both) missed the point of "neutron bombs" (a.k.a. enhanced radiation weapons).
The goal was never to drop the things on cities to "kill the people and save the buildings". The lethal radius from the burst of neutrons is on the same order of magnitude of the lethal blast radius, typically a few hundred meters. Wrong weapon for wiping out a city. (Which is fine, because wiping out cities isn't what they were designed for.)
Where neutron bombs would have had great effect would have been in wiping out large columns of tanks, presumably Russian, clustered together as they were funnelled through places like the Fulda Gap in an invasion of Eastern Europe.
In those scenarios, NATO forces didn't have sufficient conventional weapons to deliver on the tanks to make a difference. And because tanks are pretty blast-resistant things (crunchy shell, soft center), the only way to wipe them out en masse would have been to nuke them.
With 100,000 tanks bearing down on you, you've got two options:
(0) Surrender. Not an option.
(0) Fight conventionally, die anyway, because you're outnumbered and outgunned. Not an option.
(1) Blow 'em up. Carpet-bomb the countryside with 20-megaton blasts spaced 2-3 kilometers apart, because that's the kind of blast power it's going to take to crack the hard crunchy steel shells. Then discover your own troops are up to their armpits in icky long-term fallout, to say nothing of the fact that you've killed 20-30% of the civilian population living downwind, and that whoever wins the war can forget about farming for, oh, I dunno, the next decade or two.
(2) Fry 'em. Drop kiloton-yielding neutron bombs over the same area. Low explosive yield, low collateral damage, low fallout, just instant bursts of neutrons that rip through the crunchy steel shell and (in the space of minutes) incapacitate and kill the soft juicy tank crews at the center.
Once the burst of neutrons is over - literally a period of milliseconds - the mess is largely gone. (Yes, you have some neutron-activated substances near the blast site, but we're not talking huge quantities of fission daughter products, which are the real bad news to the survivors of a nuclear conflict).
Meantime, the Russian advance is stuck dead (literally :) in a traffic jam of tank-shaped coffins. Casualties in the area are pretty severe, but the affected area is pretty small. Most of the casualties are military, not civilian. Your troops can move through the bombarded area in relatively short order, and whoever wins the war can feed the surviving population, because you haven't blanketed half the arable land in Europe with long-term fallout.
None of the options in a nuclear conflict are that great. But enhanced radiation weapons were actually one of the best options available to commanders of either side during the Cold War. It's a shame that the FUD surrounding them went so out of hand. (Then again, maybe not. Deterrence turned out to be the best nuclear policy option of them all :)
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