Actually, there were no statistical increase in deformities or birth defects among children in the region following the Chernobyl accident.
Yeah right, as if I could not see a steaming pile of bullshit this big. Extraordinary claims claim extraordinary proof: where's yours?
it was predicted that somewhere around 4000 people may die prematurely due to cancer from radiation exposure released by the reactor.
That's a study by the IAEA (and they would never-ever have an economic interest in promoting nuclear energy, would they?), and has been criticised for being cherry-picking: among other things, they considered only Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, whereas most of the fallout fell on the rest of Europe (see the EU parliament's report); also, the figure in their report is actually 9,000, not 4,000 as in the press releases they gave, because they, well, are lying liars.
2.4 million people may have been "affected" by the radiation, but this ranges from low to negligible doses that have no statistical link to cancer or birth defects.
You are counting only deaths, as if debilitating conditions were not to be put into the equation. 2.4 million affected people in Ukraine only is an enormous number, it's over 5% of the entire population. And that's "affected" as in "got a disease or a medical condition", not "received some radioactivity dose they never noticed".
Many people around the world live in areas of high natural background radiation, far higher then those exposed by fallout from Chernobyl, and suffer no increase cancer risk.
Really, come up with a source on that one. Far higher than Chernobyl and no cancer risk? You've got to be trolling.
Betcha Stephen Hawking might argue that... that is, if he was allowed to be born.
Ahem, since you draw the guy into the debate, are you aware of Hawking's position? Because that might surprise you. He is way more radical than just selecting the healthy ones, he goes straight for actively tampering with the DNA. He's in favour of stem-cell research too.
These climatologists you speak of think they understand and can control a complex system like the world's climate.
Well, what would have given them all that hubris? Possibly scientific education and specialisation? Years spent studying the planet's climate?
Crichton is correct that complex systems are not simple [...]
Well no shit Sherlock.
[...] and [Crichton is correct that complex systems] cannot controlled.
As a PhD in control theory, I can solemnly declare you a charlatan. Space shuttles are controlled. Nuclear fission reactions are controlled (and they are both nonlinear and unstable). Hell even chaotic systems are controlled. And I am supposed to believe a Sci-Fi writer that has been called a moron by every competent climatologist that hey, you can't help complex stuff? I don't believe in penis-enlargement pills, therefore I don't believe in Michael Crichton.
Your foolish statement may be reworded as "Since you cannot understand a system as complex as the human body, you cannot possibly cure people".
Watch the video, he explains it better than I can: [...]
You know, I have this sick, sad habit of looking at politically incorrect sites. Nazis, racists, holocaust deniers—it's a little philosophical exercise, to think how the would would be absurd if these retards actually were right. There is however a line to draw, and Crichton, in that video, passed it after five minutes, when he said that Chernobyl was not really that much of a disaster because only "50 people died". Such a claim indicates a spectacular level of intellectual dishonesty: he's counting only the firefighters who died in the accident, and since nobody traced the isotopes, well, all those malformed children born in Belarus, all those cases of thyroid cancer, they could all just be a statistical anomaly, right? And that's only counting deaths, the really alarming numbers are the people who develop conditions because of the poisoning: in the Ukraine alone, the authorities estimate that 2.4 millions people were affected by the radiation. Note that Ukraine did not even get most of the fallout, Belarus did.
Well, that's enough to make up my mind for now: he's a shill paid by industry lobbyists to deliver lies. Call me up when they actually find a climatologist backing him up.
For example, if you declare even one virtual member function, you HAVE to declare your destructor virtual. Ummm, what? Don't I get some help from the compiler?
You get a warning from the compiler. If you choose not to heed the warning, well you get what you deserve, mister.
That's because Italy, rather than Fascism, is going towards Cleptocracy. As I would define it, Fascism is when those in power pass laws blatantly biased in favour of the elite. In Cleptocracy, the elites do not change the laws, they only make sure a different set of laws applies to them in practice.
In the last few years many white collar crimes made the news after wiretaps transcriptions were leaked the the newspapers.
Just to correct you a little bit: they were not "leaked" to the newspapers, they were legitimately published, as they should be, after investigations were closed and the instantiation of the trial was approved. Only the parts relevant to the trial were published. With the proposed law, journalists would serve 3 or 5 years in jail only for telling people what is the evidence presented against someone in a court of law.
We can't say this anymore because now it involves religious fanaticism. As evil as the Soviet Union was, at least they valued life more than their dogma.
And, during the Cold War, they used to say that it was madness to rely on rational decision-making from the Kremlin.
I for one trust more the rationality of the Iranian administration than the American one's. Sure Ahmadinejad is a big-mouthed, antisemitic religious fanatic, but, hey, at least he's a pragmatist and has not gotten his country into some useless war, even if most of its borders are now "hot", with Afghanistan and Iraq under American occupation: a blind fanatic could have "taken advantage" of the difficulties of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to start a regional war, he did not. The American administration has instead proven they can and will get stuck in a fight they cannot win.
The reason is simple: he cannot win a war with America or Israel and he knows it. Having one nuke or two will not change the state of affairs, but on the other hand may force the Western powers to be a bit less bullying in the Middle East.
I think you have a benign case of doublethink. Patriotism is just another word for nationalism, or more literally "fatherlandism", as "patriot" derives from the Latin "patria", in turn from "pater", i.e. "father".
You seem to be sure that "patriotism" means something good, and don't want to associate it to nationalism, which you think is bad. Now I am not sure what you associate with patriotism, but I think you mean something similar to "civic responsibility", "love for freedom", "sense of justice", "Spirit of 1776". All these seem to me fairly independent from the country of origin. So just do yourself a favor and use one of those expressions (or another at your choice), just pick the one closest to what you meant.
Really, patriotism is a bad thing just like nationalism. If they sold you the word with a different packaging, be sure that the content is however the same. Remember 2003, when everybody had to be "patriotic"? How much dissent was tolerated then? I remember one school teacher who was fired for "spreading anti-war ideas among students"... and I who thought that was part of his job.
When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.
And it shall be, if it make thee answer of peace, and open unto thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.
And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it:
And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword:
But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath given thee.
Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from thee, which are not of the cities of these nations.
But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:
But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee: [...]
Ok, you get the point: imperialism, enslavement, plunder, genocide, all in one single chapter of the Deuteronomy; of course there is a lot more if you care to read on. Googling around I found a pretty site that might help you understand that the Bible is just as nuts as any other religious text.
Tobacco users have a disease, if that's what you want to call it, because they made a stupid decision.
Your argument seems to be that since they made a stupid decision, they should not be helped and left to fend for themselves. What about AIDS victims? Are you going to argue that since they had risky sex they should not be helped? Or what about people sick with malaria, they should have known better and settled where the mosquitoes don't fly? And what about the child that falls into a pit, should he have known better too? Where are you going to draw the line?
An addiction to nicotine is no different than one to alcohol or heroine or cocaine or any other addicting toxic drug: addicted people must be helped out of it, because that's the decent thing to do and because you also save society a few pennies by doing so. Making mistakes is a fairly common part of human life, and in the case of addictions such as smoking the main problem is in fact that people do not have complete control of their behaviour.
not to mention the Italians which switched sides in both world wars to avoid being the losing side.
Now, don't get me started on the absolute imbecility of Italian generals, but just to set the record straight, we did not switch sides in WWI: before the war we had a defensive agreement with Austria and Germany that had no reason to be obliged to, since Austria had started the war invading Serbia. In WWII we did not surrender, we defected (we kept fighting on the side of the Allies). And lots of our people did fight the good fight, with half of our country liberating itself with no support from Allied armies.
I am (not the only) responsible for a database-driven Web site for KDE translators to Italian. We use the database to keep track of statistics and generate some meaningful numbers such as what has a certain translator to do and how much work is left to the next release.
According to my experience, read-only access cannot trash the data, but can trash the server. Once I tested a non-trivial query, and it seemed it would take forever to complete. So I Ctrl-C'ed and went away. Next thing I know, the admin contacts me a few hours later and tells me that the query was still running and brought the server (which is very graciously hosted by the Pisan LUG) to a halt. I would guess this is the main problem the original poster was thinking of.
You and that court have a different appreciation of the term "Prestige": you think that a state has prestige when it respects human rights and allows freedom of speech. They think that prestige means that everybody is so scared of the state that no one dares to speak against it.
Anyway, in my country a journalist just got media-lynched because he pointed out that the new leader of the upper house of the Parliament was a business associate of convicted mafiosi. I suppose Power always has a way to get rid of inconvenient trouble-makers, every country in its own way.
Real-time translation is impossible as much as redefining pi to be 3. Different languages present different information, and even when they present the same information they can give it at different times. The part that is lost in translation can carry critically important information, such as irony, cultural quotations, idiomatic expressions, or simply words that do not have an appropriate equivalent.
So, if you are dealing with a critical situation, such as an hostage situation as in the Iron Man movie, you had better use a human interpreter, because machine translator is just too error-prone.
I think language is by a long shot the most complex tool people use. Using it everyday we do not realise how insanely complex it is and how skilled we are at using it, constantly keeping track of tens of thousands of words and their combinations. Try to live for some time in a foreign country where you have to learn the local language in order to be understood, and you'll rapidly see why real-time translation will never work.
I for one think that using a planned, easy-to-learn language all over the world and teach it to everybody (did anyone say Esperanto?) would be far more economical than developing accurate real-time machine translation—not that it is very likely to happen anytime soon.
[...] there's certainly no way to prove that there's not a god, so aren't they also believing in something independent of scientific proof?
There is also no way to disprove that the universe was created by a tea pot orbiting Venus. There is no readily available tool to scientifically disprove that.
We atheists simply think that it is plain silly to believe in the tea pot because some ancient scrolls written by some guru says so. Now, if someone were to find the tea pot, or any trace of it, it would be interesting.
It is unbelievable the ratio of how many people are calling Tibetans liars and cheering on the Chinese. These are recent posts calling the Dalai Lama a terrorist ringleader.
One of the reasons I am wary of this whole Tibet issue is that China happens to be the West's main economic rival, and now it is convenient for Western governments to support the Dalai Lama's cause. The Dalai Lama is not a democratically elected leader, and pre-1949 Tibet was not exactly the merry free independent country you see in Hollywood depictions. Most of the Tibetans were serfs and enslaved in all but name, serving the religious aristocracy of the Lamas.
As long as China was an ally of the US against the Soviet Union, you did not hear much about Tibet or the Dalai Lama. Gone the Soviet Union, grown the Chinese economy, and hey presto! Here is a flurry of Hollywood movies designed to show just how ugly and mean the Estasians are, since Eurasia has always been our ally—right?
See, one of the downsides of reading "Manufacturing consent" by Chomsky is that I start to see unsettling patterns like this one: a piece of news is convenient for the government, that piece is spun in the best possible way for the government by the same press that should be the government's watchdog. Of course it happens as well in China: I read some CCTV Web pages with the predictable pro-China spin.
Now, where is the truth anyway? Well, obviously some Tibetans are quite angry. Some Tibetans have been assaulting Han Chinese (so much for the Buddhists who never raise a finger in violence), because of the rivalry between ethnic groups. So, as far as I can see, this is an issue of a group of people not liking another group of people, spun by every external party in their favour: the US say the Chinese are evil and the Tibetans are peaceful protesters, the Chinese say they are only criminals, and everyone else says whatever is most convenient for them.
China has encouraged immigration of Han Chinese into Tibet for a long time, and the privileged Han are an obvious target for racial hatred for the underprivileged Tibetans. What the Chinese should have done is to follow the good old way to deal with separatism: throw money at the problem. Tibet has a ludicrously small population compared to China (not even three millions), and China could afford to subsidize separatism to death. That's what Italy did to fix the terrorism problem in South Tyrol, and, guess what, it worked just fine.
What's next? Study finds people who paint their walls white decrease their risk of brain cancer by 20%?
In fact I think that such a study would find an increase in death rates. No kidding: today the white colour in paint is usually made with titanium dioxide, but some decades ago lead compounds were used. As a result, lead poisoning would correlate with white walls.
If you lived through it, you must have done so with a blindfold.
The U.S. wasn't beaten in a military sense; and even the so-called TET offensive was a military failure for the North.
The Tet offensive was a decisive strategic victory for Vietnam: US troops had to be recalled from the countryside to fight back in the cities. The fact that the offensive was tactically repulsed in the cities is of little significance, because the countryside fell to the Viet Cong, and the US would never reattain the same level of control of the territory they had before Tet.
But when it became obvious that the war wouldn't end soon, the US public got tired of it, primarily because of the draft.
Hey, you don't need to read von Clausewitz to know that an action that demoralises the enemy counts as a victory too.
But militarily, Iraq is nothing like Vietnam.
Except, duh, being an unpopular war leading nowhere, discrediting the US administration and generating more support for enemies of the US?
Obligatory Monty Python quote: "We didn't lose Vietnam! It was a tie!"
Re-read you own post. Particularly points 2.1 thru 2.4. Point 6 does not apply at all.
What do you not understand of "one of the following categories"? It is an OR connection. Even if Taliban do not fit points 2.*, they fit points 1, 3, and 6. So, they are prisoners of war.
Captured Taliban are not legally 'Prisoners of war'. By your own citation of the Geneva convention.
In that case, they should either be indicted for any crimes they may have committed, or otherwise immediately released. You cannot just kidnap people because you do not like them. Well, unless you are an oppressive regime, that is, but that does not make it right.
Finally. Abortion is a civil right? You are nuts.
Sorry for belonging to a culturally more advanced section of society, Mr. Taliban with a cross. Where I live, people have still the right of deciding over their own body.
Of course for the taliban, there really is only one recourse, give up. Either they will lose gradually, or they will cause massive casualties, [...]
What about dragging the war on until the US gets beaten, like in Vietnam? I would suppose that is their goal, and they are winning at that: attacks in the north are increasing, my country has soldiers in Herat and only in recent months they have started to come under fire.
which will provoke a really big attack on the population of pakistan (did you know, in reality as opposite moonbat's mindsets, that in the geneva conventions civilians amongst whom non-uniformed enemy fighters are located, are fair game and can be killed. The decision whether or not terrorists are amongst them can (only) be made by a field commander, in short, every bomb short of a nuke would be perfectly legal to shoot into a mass of afghan civilians), and the commander giving that order would go completely free under international law.
Aside from the fact that you are suggesting practices typical of the SS divisions (I don't care about Goodwin: they were the last ones in the West to do anything like that, it's the only example available), the Geneva conventions is only about war prisoners, and makes no mention of civilians only because of that. That a US commander would walk out freely I have no doubt, they are pretty much untouchable no matter what crimes they may commit; what is sure is that, no matter what, any attack directed against civilians is a war crime. Surely, Nazi officers who practiced retaliation on civilians were jailed for decades when they could be tried in the countries where they committed their atrocities.
Only civilian prisoners and UNIFORMED enemy prisoners cannot be killed.
Such utter disrespect of the life of a person who is not a threat is really appalling. Of course, other than being brainwashed by war-time propaganda, you are also wrong: the Geneva convention, article four, states very clearly:
Prisoners of war, in the sense of the present Convention, are persons belonging to one of the following categories, who have fallen into the power of the enemy:
Members of the armed forces of a Party to the conflict, as well as members of militias or volunteer corps forming part of such armed forces.
Members of other militias and members of other volunteer corps, including those of organized resistance movements, belonging to a Party to the conflict and operating in or outside their own territory, even if this territory is occupied, provided that such militias or volunteer corps, including such organized resistance movements, fulfill the following conditions:
that of being commanded by a person responsible for his subordinates;
that of having a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance;
that of carrying arms openly;
that of conducting their operations in accordance with the laws and customs of war.
Members of regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.
Persons who accompany the armed forces without actually being members thereof, such as civilian members of military aircraft crews, war correspondents, supply contractors, members of labour units or of services responsible for the welfare of the armed forces, provided that they have received authorization, from the armed forces which they accompany, who shall provide them for that purpose with an identity card similar to the annexed model.
Members of crews, including masters, pilots and apprentices, of the merchant marine and the crews of civil aircraft of the Parties to the conflict, who do not benefit
But apparently you're willing to use this advanced technology even though it is the product of something that goes against your principles.
The modern rocket was a product of the Nazi regime and was applied for terror bombing. The first man into space was a Soviet. That did not stop Kennedy from starting the Apollo program (headed, by the way, by the same guy who was working for the Nazis and built his rockets with Jewish slaves).
There are lots of useful technologies developed by assholes. For instance, there is a great deal of knowledge about how to deal with modern chemical weapons in Iran, because someone sold their enemies lots of chemical weapons. Going back in time, the Interstate system in the US is inspired by Hitler's Autobahn system that Eisenhower saw during the war; the Fischer-Tropsch process (coal to petrol) was used to drive Germany in its last year of war; and I could go on.
Technologies are things, and as such they cannot have an opinion on politics.
Slashdot Mirror
"The Legitimate Businessmen's Social Website."
That will be 4,741,926 rods to the hogshead for you, Sir.
Yeah right, as if I could not see a steaming pile of bullshit this big. Extraordinary claims claim extraordinary proof: where's yours?
That's a study by the IAEA (and they would never-ever have an economic interest in promoting nuclear energy, would they?), and has been criticised for being cherry-picking: among other things, they considered only Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, whereas most of the fallout fell on the rest of Europe (see the EU parliament's report); also, the figure in their report is actually 9,000, not 4,000 as in the press releases they gave, because they, well, are lying liars.
You are counting only deaths, as if debilitating conditions were not to be put into the equation. 2.4 million affected people in Ukraine only is an enormous number, it's over 5% of the entire population. And that's "affected" as in "got a disease or a medical condition", not "received some radioactivity dose they never noticed".
Really, come up with a source on that one. Far higher than Chernobyl and no cancer risk? You've got to be trolling.
Ahem, since you draw the guy into the debate, are you aware of Hawking's position? Because that might surprise you. He is way more radical than just selecting the healthy ones, he goes straight for actively tampering with the DNA. He's in favour of stem-cell research too.
Well, what would have given them all that hubris? Possibly scientific education and specialisation? Years spent studying the planet's climate?
Well no shit Sherlock.
As a PhD in control theory, I can solemnly declare you a charlatan. Space shuttles are controlled. Nuclear fission reactions are controlled (and they are both nonlinear and unstable). Hell even chaotic systems are controlled. And I am supposed to believe a Sci-Fi writer that has been called a moron by every competent climatologist that hey, you can't help complex stuff? I don't believe in penis-enlargement pills, therefore I don't believe in Michael Crichton.
Your foolish statement may be reworded as "Since you cannot understand a system as complex as the human body, you cannot possibly cure people".
You know, I have this sick, sad habit of looking at politically incorrect sites. Nazis, racists, holocaust deniers—it's a little philosophical exercise, to think how the would would be absurd if these retards actually were right. There is however a line to draw, and Crichton, in that video, passed it after five minutes, when he said that Chernobyl was not really that much of a disaster because only "50 people died". Such a claim indicates a spectacular level of intellectual dishonesty: he's counting only the firefighters who died in the accident, and since nobody traced the isotopes, well, all those malformed children born in Belarus, all those cases of thyroid cancer, they could all just be a statistical anomaly, right? And that's only counting deaths, the really alarming numbers are the people who develop conditions because of the poisoning: in the Ukraine alone, the authorities estimate that 2.4 millions people were affected by the radiation. Note that Ukraine did not even get most of the fallout, Belarus did.
Well, that's enough to make up my mind for now: he's a shill paid by industry lobbyists to deliver lies. Call me up when they actually find a climatologist backing him up.
You get a warning from the compiler. If you choose not to heed the warning, well you get what you deserve, mister.
In Scandinavia, there are no "federal pound-in-the-ass" prisons. The prisons are top-notch, just google around: here is a couple of articles.
That's because Italy, rather than Fascism, is going towards Cleptocracy. As I would define it, Fascism is when those in power pass laws blatantly biased in favour of the elite. In Cleptocracy, the elites do not change the laws, they only make sure a different set of laws applies to them in practice.
Just to correct you a little bit: they were not "leaked" to the newspapers, they were legitimately published, as they should be, after investigations were closed and the instantiation of the trial was approved. Only the parts relevant to the trial were published. With the proposed law, journalists would serve 3 or 5 years in jail only for telling people what is the evidence presented against someone in a court of law.
And, during the Cold War, they used to say that it was madness to rely on rational decision-making from the Kremlin.
I for one trust more the rationality of the Iranian administration than the American one's. Sure Ahmadinejad is a big-mouthed, antisemitic religious fanatic, but, hey, at least he's a pragmatist and has not gotten his country into some useless war, even if most of its borders are now "hot", with Afghanistan and Iraq under American occupation: a blind fanatic could have "taken advantage" of the difficulties of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan to start a regional war, he did not. The American administration has instead proven they can and will get stuck in a fight they cannot win.
The reason is simple: he cannot win a war with America or Israel and he knows it. Having one nuke or two will not change the state of affairs, but on the other hand may force the Western powers to be a bit less bullying in the Middle East.
I think you have a benign case of doublethink. Patriotism is just another word for nationalism, or more literally "fatherlandism", as "patriot" derives from the Latin "patria", in turn from "pater", i.e. "father".
You seem to be sure that "patriotism" means something good, and don't want to associate it to nationalism, which you think is bad. Now I am not sure what you associate with patriotism, but I think you mean something similar to "civic responsibility", "love for freedom", "sense of justice", "Spirit of 1776". All these seem to me fairly independent from the country of origin. So just do yourself a favor and use one of those expressions (or another at your choice), just pick the one closest to what you meant.
Really, patriotism is a bad thing just like nationalism. If they sold you the word with a different packaging, be sure that the content is however the same. Remember 2003, when everybody had to be "patriotic"? How much dissent was tolerated then? I remember one school teacher who was fired for "spreading anti-war ideas among students"... and I who thought that was part of his job.
Funny, I think I remember stuff like that. Try Deuteronomy 20:10-16:
Ok, you get the point: imperialism, enslavement, plunder, genocide, all in one single chapter of the Deuteronomy; of course there is a lot more if you care to read on. Googling around I found a pretty site that might help you understand that the Bible is just as nuts as any other religious text.
Your argument seems to be that since they made a stupid decision, they should not be helped and left to fend for themselves. What about AIDS victims? Are you going to argue that since they had risky sex they should not be helped? Or what about people sick with malaria, they should have known better and settled where the mosquitoes don't fly? And what about the child that falls into a pit, should he have known better too? Where are you going to draw the line?
An addiction to nicotine is no different than one to alcohol or heroine or cocaine or any other addicting toxic drug: addicted people must be helped out of it, because that's the decent thing to do and because you also save society a few pennies by doing so. Making mistakes is a fairly common part of human life, and in the case of addictions such as smoking the main problem is in fact that people do not have complete control of their behaviour.
Now, don't get me started on the absolute imbecility of Italian generals, but just to set the record straight, we did not switch sides in WWI: before the war we had a defensive agreement with Austria and Germany that had no reason to be obliged to, since Austria had started the war invading Serbia. In WWII we did not surrender, we defected (we kept fighting on the side of the Allies). And lots of our people did fight the good fight, with half of our country liberating itself with no support from Allied armies.
I am (not the only) responsible for a database-driven Web site for KDE translators to Italian. We use the database to keep track of statistics and generate some meaningful numbers such as what has a certain translator to do and how much work is left to the next release.
According to my experience, read-only access cannot trash the data, but can trash the server. Once I tested a non-trivial query, and it seemed it would take forever to complete. So I Ctrl-C'ed and went away. Next thing I know, the admin contacts me a few hours later and tells me that the query was still running and brought the server (which is very graciously hosted by the Pisan LUG) to a halt. I would guess this is the main problem the original poster was thinking of.
If he does not exist, how could he play dice? Seems consistent to me...
You and that court have a different appreciation of the term "Prestige": you think that a state has prestige when it respects human rights and allows freedom of speech. They think that prestige means that everybody is so scared of the state that no one dares to speak against it.
Anyway, in my country a journalist just got media-lynched because he pointed out that the new leader of the upper house of the Parliament was a business associate of convicted mafiosi. I suppose Power always has a way to get rid of inconvenient trouble-makers, every country in its own way.
Real-time translation is impossible as much as redefining pi to be 3. Different languages present different information, and even when they present the same information they can give it at different times. The part that is lost in translation can carry critically important information, such as irony, cultural quotations, idiomatic expressions, or simply words that do not have an appropriate equivalent.
So, if you are dealing with a critical situation, such as an hostage situation as in the Iron Man movie, you had better use a human interpreter, because machine translator is just too error-prone.
I think language is by a long shot the most complex tool people use. Using it everyday we do not realise how insanely complex it is and how skilled we are at using it, constantly keeping track of tens of thousands of words and their combinations. Try to live for some time in a foreign country where you have to learn the local language in order to be understood, and you'll rapidly see why real-time translation will never work.
I for one think that using a planned, easy-to-learn language all over the world and teach it to everybody (did anyone say Esperanto?) would be far more economical than developing accurate real-time machine translation—not that it is very likely to happen anytime soon.
There is also no way to disprove that the universe was created by a tea pot orbiting Venus. There is no readily available tool to scientifically disprove that.
We atheists simply think that it is plain silly to believe in the tea pot because some ancient scrolls written by some guru says so. Now, if someone were to find the tea pot, or any trace of it, it would be interesting.
One of the reasons I am wary of this whole Tibet issue is that China happens to be the West's main economic rival, and now it is convenient for Western governments to support the Dalai Lama's cause. The Dalai Lama is not a democratically elected leader, and pre-1949 Tibet was not exactly the merry free independent country you see in Hollywood depictions. Most of the Tibetans were serfs and enslaved in all but name, serving the religious aristocracy of the Lamas.
As long as China was an ally of the US against the Soviet Union, you did not hear much about Tibet or the Dalai Lama. Gone the Soviet Union, grown the Chinese economy, and hey presto! Here is a flurry of Hollywood movies designed to show just how ugly and mean the Estasians are, since Eurasia has always been our ally—right?
See, one of the downsides of reading "Manufacturing consent" by Chomsky is that I start to see unsettling patterns like this one: a piece of news is convenient for the government, that piece is spun in the best possible way for the government by the same press that should be the government's watchdog. Of course it happens as well in China: I read some CCTV Web pages with the predictable pro-China spin.
Now, where is the truth anyway? Well, obviously some Tibetans are quite angry. Some Tibetans have been assaulting Han Chinese (so much for the Buddhists who never raise a finger in violence), because of the rivalry between ethnic groups. So, as far as I can see, this is an issue of a group of people not liking another group of people, spun by every external party in their favour: the US say the Chinese are evil and the Tibetans are peaceful protesters, the Chinese say they are only criminals, and everyone else says whatever is most convenient for them.
China has encouraged immigration of Han Chinese into Tibet for a long time, and the privileged Han are an obvious target for racial hatred for the underprivileged Tibetans. What the Chinese should have done is to follow the good old way to deal with separatism: throw money at the problem. Tibet has a ludicrously small population compared to China (not even three millions), and China could afford to subsidize separatism to death. That's what Italy did to fix the terrorism problem in South Tyrol, and, guess what, it worked just fine.
In fact I think that such a study would find an increase in death rates. No kidding: today the white colour in paint is usually made with titanium dioxide, but some decades ago lead compounds were used. As a result, lead poisoning would correlate with white walls.
If you lived through it, you must have done so with a blindfold.
The Tet offensive was a decisive strategic victory for Vietnam: US troops had to be recalled from the countryside to fight back in the cities. The fact that the offensive was tactically repulsed in the cities is of little significance, because the countryside fell to the Viet Cong, and the US would never reattain the same level of control of the territory they had before Tet.
Hey, you don't need to read von Clausewitz to know that an action that demoralises the enemy counts as a victory too.
Except, duh, being an unpopular war leading nowhere, discrediting the US administration and generating more support for enemies of the US?
Obligatory Monty Python quote: "We didn't lose Vietnam! It was a tie!"
What do you not understand of "one of the following categories"? It is an OR connection. Even if Taliban do not fit points 2.*, they fit points 1, 3, and 6. So, they are prisoners of war.
In that case, they should either be indicted for any crimes they may have committed, or otherwise immediately released. You cannot just kidnap people because you do not like them. Well, unless you are an oppressive regime, that is, but that does not make it right.
Sorry for belonging to a culturally more advanced section of society, Mr. Taliban with a cross. Where I live, people have still the right of deciding over their own body.
What about dragging the war on until the US gets beaten, like in Vietnam? I would suppose that is their goal, and they are winning at that: attacks in the north are increasing, my country has soldiers in Herat and only in recent months they have started to come under fire.
Aside from the fact that you are suggesting practices typical of the SS divisions (I don't care about Goodwin: they were the last ones in the West to do anything like that, it's the only example available), the Geneva conventions is only about war prisoners, and makes no mention of civilians only because of that. That a US commander would walk out freely I have no doubt, they are pretty much untouchable no matter what crimes they may commit; what is sure is that, no matter what, any attack directed against civilians is a war crime . Surely, Nazi officers who practiced retaliation on civilians were jailed for decades when they could be tried in the countries where they committed their atrocities.
Such utter disrespect of the life of a person who is not a threat is really appalling. Of course, other than being brainwashed by war-time propaganda, you are also wrong: the Geneva convention, article four, states very clearly:
The modern rocket was a product of the Nazi regime and was applied for terror bombing. The first man into space was a Soviet. That did not stop Kennedy from starting the Apollo program (headed, by the way, by the same guy who was working for the Nazis and built his rockets with Jewish slaves).
There are lots of useful technologies developed by assholes. For instance, there is a great deal of knowledge about how to deal with modern chemical weapons in Iran, because someone sold their enemies lots of chemical weapons. Going back in time, the Interstate system in the US is inspired by Hitler's Autobahn system that Eisenhower saw during the war; the Fischer-Tropsch process (coal to petrol) was used to drive Germany in its last year of war; and I could go on.
Technologies are things, and as such they cannot have an opinion on politics.