Furthermore, not sure whether it is just a coincidence, in scandinavian languages 18 is "atten" (see attometre, 10^-18 metres), and "ss-atten" could easily sound like "satan", which in scandinavian languages is one of the worst cursing words you can find.
("Å satan å gamle Erik i det røde helvete skal steiki i faen...")
...Can I ask a question here?
What octanes are used in the US? Here in Norway we have 95 and 98 octane, I've never seen anything below 95 in my life.
If you have so low octane numbers, that might just explain why american gas is cheaper (other than tax issues of course), why american cars have poorer efficiency than european ones, and why there are totally different car models even for the same manufacturer on different shores of the Atlantic; e.g., have you got Ford Ka in the US?
On the other hand, it might be that one place they use RON and the other MON to measure the ON, but their difference in value is at most a few points.
Whooops- Norwegian is not my mother language but I've been here for a few years, so there's no excuse except that I wrote the previous post in "outrage". Still, I would avoid the "anglo-" as I don't like Latin contaminations in germanic languages (it confuses my few neurons left).
And again, I've been here long enough to know that there is no such thing as correct Norwegian... I'll just claim it's nynorsk. Or trøndersk. Or innvandrerdialekt.:-)
It's actually quite funny for a non-English-native-speaker like me, to see this weird social phenomenon: smart things being mocked. I've seen it in many environments but languages for some reason are the least rational, and therefore the funniest.
Thru is smarter than through because it corresponds to its pronounciation. As writing is the process of putting words on paper or bits, an irregular spelling is an unnecessary complication.
Maybe you Americans/Brits/Aussies and so on don't notice since you got it with mom's milk, but your orthography is a nightmare. You use only 5 vowels in writing and have well over a dozen in speech. Words from different languages came unmodified into English, blending very different orthographies. Some linguists I have discussed with argue that, of all languages written with the Latin alphabet, English has the worst orthography except for Gaelic.
What is serious, though, is that I never heard of people suffering from dyslexia in Italy. Italian has a definitely more rational spelling--to the point that we don't have the verb "to spell" as we would never use it anyway (there is "compitare", but most people learn the concept of spelling along with English, and therefore most people say "fare lo spelling"; then again, Italian grammar is way more nightmarish, with zombies like the dreaded congiuntivo). Same goes for Finland, which has reportedly the most consistent orthography for a Latin-alphabet language (I'm disregarding planned languages as Esperanto as they are designed to be perfect in this regard anyway).
I wonder when the day will come that someone manages to push for a reform in English orthography. Such reforms are carried out regularly for some languages, notably German but also Norwegian. The German compound word Schifffahrt was previously spelt with just 2 f's, because a rule forbade cumulating more than 2 equal consonants; it was edited out and now Germans can write Balletttänzerin. This same rule is still present in Norwegian, and I hope they do remove it soon as Norwegians are terrible when it comes to orthography (long story and very different from the one of English) - they get it almost always wrong somehow with words like gasstrøm.
Is this a penis boast ("I've got the biggest bridge!")
It's called grandeur and it's the psychological hideout where the French still pretend they're a nation that makes the its enemies tremble in a world where French is the world language. As a (former) neighbour of France, I can say this is the attitude that generally mostly pisses off the rest of Europe. Luckily most Frenchmen are alright persons, but the fact that chauvinism* comes from a certain Chauvin should indicate that the French culture has a long line of nutty patriotic crap to digest.
an environment issue ("No automobiles in this valley!")
Hardly... this bridge is among the ugliest I've ever seen, I think it's enough to trigger a heart attack in any environmentalist's chest. It reminds me of a bridge I had seen in Abruzzo, Italy, in a very similar situation; not as high I guess, but definitely equally ugly. In that case, the most likely reason was to start an expensive series of public works, so that a lot of money would have been sent from Rome, so that politicians could "shave off" their fat share. Wonder what was the drive in France.
* Chauvinism is the exhaltation of the Motherland beyond any reason. The project for a new American century is, for example, chauvinistic. It has nothing to do with discrimination of women, even though some hundred millions English speakers got it totally wrong.
I think speeding is a lot worse than sharing files. whats the fine for speeding in italy?
In Italy, as we say, Laws are applied for foes and interpreted for friends. This is one of the reasons I left that crappy country.
Basically, all political parties are nominally against this law and want to change it (but then, why they voted it is beyond me--except they're idiots, but no news then). What the government let know is that they won't enforce it seriously. Since Mr. Berlusconi does not (yet) have a major interest in p2p-swapped material, I expect their fancazzismo (~laziness) to be likely.
(Yes, this is Italy. The lawmakers make laws they don't really want, the government says they won't apply it, and the judges had better shut up as they're all a bunch of stalinists plotting against Berlusconi)
If you want to know what the fine is for speeding, it's basically nothing considering you rarely get caught. Nowadays things have got a little bit better with the point-subtraction mechanism (lose 20 points and you have to take the licence exam again), but it's still nowhere near civilisation, especially in other traffic subjects like stopping at zebra crossings or parking in double line. Should you pass by Milano, be sure to check out via Lambrate, a secondary road close to piazzale Loreto, with quadruple-line parking on both sides! (No, I don't have the slightest idea about how they get out)
Go to this link if you want to know something more about Italy... as an Italian I can guarantee it's all true!
No, the U.S. observes the Geneva Convention to the best of its ability.
...which appears to be quite limited.
The U.S. officially calls these guys a few things (such as "detainees") rather than "prisoners of war"
Which proves how limited their ability to follow the Geneva convention is. Wars with "regular armed forces", with "identifiable uniforms or markings", are more an exception than a rule today.
For the information of your only Proud American neuron in that empty thing you insist calling head, the American war of indipendence was also fought by people you stigmatise as "thugs, murderers and criminals" (at least the Red Coats called them so, and they were indeed a proper regular army).
It's very convenient for the US military to call these POWs with euphemisms such as detainees to deny them any basic right. If they are, as you say, a
little more than a step up from street gangs
they should be entitled at least to the rights a gangster has, which comprises that thing that used to be called "fair trial", which in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib has not been especially followed. Or do these rights apply only to American citizens?
And please don't start saying that it was just "a few cases", the only thing Rumsfeld did was to put on trial the ones that had taken pictures and forbidding cameras. So much for the commitment to human rights.
I've seen this worrying development in the US mentality, everybody seems to justify anything the military does. General Kimmit had yesterday the guts to say that bad people have parties too, after a movie showing the bombing of a wedding in Iraq was found. That guy would really deserve being tried for war crimes.
Mod me down as you wish, I could not care less. But remember that a country heading this way is heading to no good.
I have experienced that debates on nuclear tend to go over to irrationality quite fast. According to Godwin's law Lovelock has already lost the argument, but whatever.
First, oil use produces waste that causes moderate, gradual modification of the environment. Nuclear can cause much worse effects. Ok, I know, this side of the world we have super-duper-safer reactors; but the main consumer of energy will sometime soon be China. I personally don't trust anyone with nuclear power anyway.
However bad an accident is in a refinery, there's no way a city can be obliterated by it, or a continent poisoned. The damage is intrinsecally limited. A nuclear reactor (maybe supercritical?) can do much worse, and these things do happen at some point--No matter how good security can be, there is no such thing as 100% safety.
Right now only a fraction of world energy is being produced by nuclear, and thus you hear people boasting about "hundreds of years" before depletion of the sources. Of course what many forget is that, if all energy were to be produced by nuclear, this time would shorten to a few decades. This also means that less economical fissile fuel sources would have to be used, driving up the already high prices of nuclear power.
Many nuclear plants means more people working on nuclear tech. Many planes in the air means also more people training to become pilots, and some might get by unobserved studying only how to fly, and not how to land. See where it's going?
Please go to a university library and look up this article: Paine, Jeffrey R., "Will nuclear power pay for itself?", The social science journal, vol. 33, n. 4, pages 459-473, 1996, JAI press. Paine analysed the real (as opposed to speculated) data about nuclear power production, to conclude that nuclear power may at best be economically marginal, paying back for itself only after large times and only in the most optimistic conditions. RTFA before saying it's crap; it's also available on ScienceDirect if you have access to it. I have heard often, in the academic environment, that nuclear in some cases is not even producing enough energy to pay for its cycle: what you get out at the power plant can be less than what you put in extraction, purification, enrichment, transport and security.
And, after this
happened (Fish for non-Italian speakers, but there are surely plenty of English articles, I'm only being lazy), the very last thing we need is more fissile material going around.
IMHO, until someone cracks fusion, nuclear is a very interesting technology that had however better not be applied. It's immature, expensive, easily misused. Maybe the positive attitude towards nuclear power by many Americans is due never being hit by something like the Chernobyl cloud. Yet, I read somewhere that new reactors have not been built in the US since 79.
Short term: natural gas.
Mid term: solar, wind, tide, hydro, other renewables.
Long term: fusion.
That's how I see it at least. All these sources can be converted to hydrogen.
I had a similar booting problem when installing Gentoo. As Gentoo is very hands-on, and has quite a community, it was easy to find the fix.
First, the fault is Microsoft's. (Seriously, did you expect anything else?). The point is that Windows XP is a hog which believes that it is the one and only system on the computer. Therefore, if it is not on hda, it will put its hands on its ears and start singing aloud "La-la-la-la I can't hear you!". I have Linux on my hda, and WXP getting dustier and dustier on hdb. It would not start until I added the following lines in grub.conf:
I'm not aware of how much Fedora lets the user write their grub.conf, but if they have a GUI tool, it might just not be programmed for this. After all, on my office machine, where Windows has been left on hda1, things works well out-of-the-box. Maybe they assumed everybody would use this configuration.
Otherwise, you might as well select dandelions on their ability to speak French...
Hate to be such a fussy nazi sciento-freak, but there cannot be such a thing as a French-language gene. Languages are acquired culture (= can be learnt) and are not related to genes (though the ability to learn them is indeed).
I agree with your point of course, though I would have selected "the ability of a dandelion to develop a scaled retractile trunk and pterodactyl-like wings".
... you are making people in your country look incredibly stupid. The US has already been dropping mines like toys, take a trip to Cambodia in the Ho Chi Minh trail region. Yesterday a US chopper has bombed a wedding killing anything between 20 and 40. I guess it will be forgotten in a week's time.
You don't have the slightest idea of what a war is like, and you have seen way too many sci-fi movies if you think that the US (or any other) army is going to shift out 2-penny landmines with multi-thousand-buck AIs.
The political fallout of a US landmine mutilating innocent civilians would be great.
If the victim ended on CNN, or were pictured and shown at the Congress. Do you realise that people die on US (or Italian, soviet-build, or chinese, or whatever) mines every damn day? Do you think it's a small issue? There are places where you see people on one day, and regularly some of them will be seen the next day with a limb less--Cambodia, that we already mentioned, is an example of US mines still killing people.
In Afghanistan many soviet mines are actually US-made copies, since the CIA would not pass american mines to the Mujaheedeen; that's also why it's not easy to assess how many mines come from Russia (which has laid likely the most of them anyway) and how many from the US. I read somewhere the copies were manufactured in Cairo, though I don't really know why there.
The fact that mines (not just US mines) are made to mutilate is obvious and common knowledge. And for that sake it's a fact that many mines resemble toys. Ever heard of "green parrots"? They don't look dangerous. Thousands and thousands of them were used in Afghanistan. Children pick them up, start to play, and... nothing happens. They go on playing, bring the thing home, and when they have shaken it just enough or touched the right spot, BANG. So you can mutilate the whole family if you're lucky. Someone tell me why this should not qualify as terrorism.
Finland's defense plan has for years been to make fighting exhausting and slow against enemy forces and landmines serve that purpose.
As far as I remember, Finland's tactic in case of a WW3 was to let the Russians bypass the norwegian border at Kirkenes, pass through northern Finland, and invading Norway (NATO country) through Finnmark. The documents of the Soviet-Finnish deal were declassified a couple of years ago and made quite a sensation here in Norway. Can't find the article though.
AFAIK the US are not really interested in more "humanitarian" behaviour of landmines. The Ottawa convention has not been signed by a few "rogue states", including the US, Russia, China, India, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. If you don't like that company, write to your representative.
Landmines are not really meant to kill soldiers after all, they know what they look like and where they might be - they are often even designed not to kill, but to mutilate. A dead is buried, a mutilated child will be a burden for society for all his life. Fill a country with landmines, as both Soviets and US-backed Mujaheeddins did in Afghanistan, and you have cursed the country for generations.
Self-destructing mines are not going to be accepted - these days the Geneva convention is used to wipe Rumsfeld's arse, and frankly a proposal for a more expensive and on-purpose less effective weapon is not going to get through.
I'm told that mine production is not even that lucrative business. They have children mutilated with landmines that look purposefully like toys, only to make a few pennies more. Some motherfuckers.
Speaking of Cambodia, these people know something.
Well, even your passport shows in which countries you've been, and can be used in court. As long as you know there's a black box recording your speed and that thing is not broadcasting, there's no privacy issue in my opinion, as the information is not disclosed until needed.
No one can come and "have a look" at your black box just to break your privacy: they must have a reason and the authority to do that.
Besides, it's ludicrous how the lawyer calls the sentence "very, very severe": 18 month for killing a man speeding at 157 km/h? 5 to 10 years seems a more reasonable range to me, other than driving-licence barring for life.
Live your life well, try to bring more love than hate into the world. That's all. No big stuff -- no Revolution, no Topple the State, no Stop the Corporations. Work to your scale, as an individual; the rest is History.
Reasonable men try to adapt themselves to the world; unreasonable men try to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore, all progress is due to unreasonable men.
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Furthermore, not sure whether it is just a coincidence, in scandinavian languages 18 is "atten" (see attometre, 10^-18 metres), and "ss-atten" could easily sound like "satan", which in scandinavian languages is one of the worst cursing words you can find.
("Å satan å gamle Erik i det røde helvete skal steiki i faen...")
...Can I ask a question here?
What octanes are used in the US? Here in Norway we have 95 and 98 octane, I've never seen anything below 95 in my life.
If you have so low octane numbers, that might just explain why american gas is cheaper (other than tax issues of course), why american cars have poorer efficiency than european ones, and why there are totally different car models even for the same manufacturer on different shores of the Atlantic; e.g., have you got Ford Ka in the US?
On the other hand, it might be that one place they use RON and the other MON to measure the ON, but their difference in value is at most a few points.
This is for-pay, just below 50 euros. I guess you cannot take OOo sources and license it proprietary...
Kudos to the poster for having finally posted a direct link to a NYT article.
You name it, we've got it.
Whooops- Norwegian is not my mother language but I've been here for a few years, so there's no excuse except that I wrote the previous post in "outrage". :-)
Still, I would avoid the "anglo-" as I don't like Latin contaminations in germanic languages (it confuses my few neurons left).
And again, I've been here long enough to know that there is no such thing as correct Norwegian... I'll just claim it's nynorsk. Or trøndersk. Or innvandrerdialekt.
...Sorry next time I'll double-check before posting - they are moving to SuSE.
The municipality of Bergen has recently decided to move to Skolelinux (Sorry, Norwegian) and throwing out Windows and other UNIXes (Sorry, Norwegian again).
Du får nok lære norsk, din selvopptatte engelsksentrige tulling!
This is all the Norwegian you need to know (download the wav file!).
It's actually quite funny for a non-English-native-speaker like me, to see this weird social phenomenon: smart things being mocked. I've seen it in many environments but languages for some reason are the least rational, and therefore the funniest.
Thru is smarter than through because it corresponds to its pronounciation. As writing is the process of putting words on paper or bits, an irregular spelling is an unnecessary complication.
Maybe you Americans/Brits/Aussies and so on don't notice since you got it with mom's milk, but your orthography is a nightmare. You use only 5 vowels in writing and have well over a dozen in speech. Words from different languages came unmodified into English, blending very different orthographies. Some linguists I have discussed with argue that, of all languages written with the Latin alphabet, English has the worst orthography except for Gaelic.
What is serious, though, is that I never heard of people suffering from dyslexia in Italy. Italian has a definitely more rational spelling--to the point that we don't have the verb "to spell" as we would never use it anyway (there is "compitare", but most people learn the concept of spelling along with English, and therefore most people say "fare lo spelling"; then again, Italian grammar is way more nightmarish, with zombies like the dreaded congiuntivo). Same goes for Finland, which has reportedly the most consistent orthography for a Latin-alphabet language (I'm disregarding planned languages as Esperanto as they are designed to be perfect in this regard anyway).
I wonder when the day will come that someone manages to push for a reform in English orthography. Such reforms are carried out regularly for some languages, notably German but also Norwegian. The German compound word Schifffahrt was previously spelt with just 2 f's, because a rule forbade cumulating more than 2 equal consonants; it was edited out and now Germans can write Balletttänzerin. This same rule is still present in Norwegian, and I hope they do remove it soon as Norwegians are terrible when it comes to orthography (long story and very different from the one of English) - they get it almost always wrong somehow with words like gasstrøm.
It's called grandeur and it's the psychological hideout where the French still pretend they're a nation that makes the its enemies tremble in a world where French is the world language. As a (former) neighbour of France, I can say this is the attitude that generally mostly pisses off the rest of Europe. Luckily most Frenchmen are alright persons, but the fact that chauvinism* comes from a certain Chauvin should indicate that the French culture has a long line of nutty patriotic crap to digest.
Hardly... this bridge is among the ugliest I've ever seen, I think it's enough to trigger a heart attack in any environmentalist's chest. It reminds me of a bridge I had seen in Abruzzo, Italy, in a very similar situation; not as high I guess, but definitely equally ugly. In that case, the most likely reason was to start an expensive series of public works, so that a lot of money would have been sent from Rome, so that politicians could "shave off" their fat share. Wonder what was the drive in France.
* Chauvinism is the exhaltation of the Motherland beyond any reason. The project for a new American century is, for example, chauvinistic. It has nothing to do with discrimination of women, even though some hundred millions English speakers got it totally wrong.
In Italy, as we say, Laws are applied for foes and interpreted for friends. This is one of the reasons I left that crappy country.
Basically, all political parties are nominally against this law and want to change it (but then, why they voted it is beyond me--except they're idiots, but no news then). What the government let know is that they won't enforce it seriously. Since Mr. Berlusconi does not (yet) have a major interest in p2p-swapped material, I expect their fancazzismo (~laziness) to be likely.
(Yes, this is Italy. The lawmakers make laws they don't really want, the government says they won't apply it, and the judges had better shut up as they're all a bunch of stalinists plotting against Berlusconi)
If you want to know what the fine is for speeding, it's basically nothing considering you rarely get caught. Nowadays things have got a little bit better with the point-subtraction mechanism (lose 20 points and you have to take the licence exam again), but it's still nowhere near civilisation, especially in other traffic subjects like stopping at zebra crossings or parking in double line. Should you pass by Milano, be sure to check out via Lambrate, a secondary road close to piazzale Loreto, with quadruple-line parking on both sides! (No, I don't have the slightest idea about how they get out)
Go to this link if you want to know something more about Italy... as an Italian I can guarantee it's all true!
...which appears to be quite limited.
Which proves how limited their ability to follow the Geneva convention is. Wars with "regular armed forces", with "identifiable uniforms or markings", are more an exception than a rule today.
For the information of your only Proud American neuron in that empty thing you insist calling head, the American war of indipendence was also fought by people you stigmatise as "thugs, murderers and criminals" (at least the Red Coats called them so, and they were indeed a proper regular army).
It's very convenient for the US military to call these POWs with euphemisms such as detainees to deny them any basic right. If they are, as you say, a
they should be entitled at least to the rights a gangster has, which comprises that thing that used to be called "fair trial", which in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib has not been especially followed. Or do these rights apply only to American citizens?And please don't start saying that it was just "a few cases", the only thing Rumsfeld did was to put on trial the ones that had taken pictures and forbidding cameras. So much for the commitment to human rights.
I've seen this worrying development in the US mentality, everybody seems to justify anything the military does. General Kimmit had yesterday the guts to say that bad people have parties too, after a movie showing the bombing of a wedding in Iraq was found. That guy would really deserve being tried for war crimes.
Mod me down as you wish, I could not care less. But remember that a country heading this way is heading to no good.
I have experienced that debates on nuclear tend to go over to irrationality quite fast. According to Godwin's law Lovelock has already lost the argument, but whatever.
First, oil use produces waste that causes moderate, gradual modification of the environment. Nuclear can cause much worse effects. Ok, I know, this side of the world we have super-duper-safer reactors; but the main consumer of energy will sometime soon be China. I personally don't trust anyone with nuclear power anyway.
However bad an accident is in a refinery, there's no way a city can be obliterated by it, or a continent poisoned. The damage is intrinsecally limited. A nuclear reactor (maybe supercritical?) can do much worse, and these things do happen at some point--No matter how good security can be, there is no such thing as 100% safety.
Right now only a fraction of world energy is being produced by nuclear, and thus you hear people boasting about "hundreds of years" before depletion of the sources. Of course what many forget is that, if all energy were to be produced by nuclear, this time would shorten to a few decades. This also means that less economical fissile fuel sources would have to be used, driving up the already high prices of nuclear power.
Many nuclear plants means more people working on nuclear tech. Many planes in the air means also more people training to become pilots, and some might get by unobserved studying only how to fly, and not how to land. See where it's going?
Please go to a university library and look up this article: Paine, Jeffrey R., "Will nuclear power pay for itself?", The social science journal, vol. 33, n. 4, pages 459-473, 1996, JAI press. Paine analysed the real (as opposed to speculated) data about nuclear power production, to conclude that nuclear power may at best be economically marginal, paying back for itself only after large times and only in the most optimistic conditions. RTFA before saying it's crap; it's also available on ScienceDirect if you have access to it. I have heard often, in the academic environment, that nuclear in some cases is not even producing enough energy to pay for its cycle: what you get out at the power plant can be less than what you put in extraction, purification, enrichment, transport and security.
And, after this happened (Fish for non-Italian speakers, but there are surely plenty of English articles, I'm only being lazy), the very last thing we need is more fissile material going around.
IMHO, until someone cracks fusion, nuclear is a very interesting technology that had however better not be applied. It's immature, expensive, easily misused. Maybe the positive attitude towards nuclear power by many Americans is due never being hit by something like the Chernobyl cloud. Yet, I read somewhere that new reactors have not been built in the US since 79.
Short term: natural gas.
Mid term: solar, wind, tide, hydro, other renewables.
Long term: fusion.
That's how I see it at least. All these sources can be converted to hydrogen.
I had a similar booting problem when installing Gentoo. As Gentoo is very hands-on, and has quite a community, it was easy to find the fix.
First, the fault is Microsoft's. (Seriously, did you expect anything else?). The point is that Windows XP is a hog which believes that it is the one and only system on the computer. Therefore, if it is not on hda, it will put its hands on its ears and start singing aloud "La-la-la-la I can't hear you!". I have Linux on my hda, and WXP getting dustier and dustier on hdb. It would not start until I added the following lines in grub.conf:
title=Windows Xp
rootnoverify (hd1,0)
map (hd1,0) (hd0,0)
map (hd0,0) (hd1,0)
chainloader (hd1,0)+1
I'm not aware of how much Fedora lets the user write their grub.conf, but if they have a GUI tool, it might just not be programmed for this. After all, on my office machine, where Windows has been left on hda1, things works well out-of-the-box. Maybe they assumed everybody would use this configuration.
Hate to be such a fussy nazi sciento-freak, but there cannot be such a thing as a French-language gene. Languages are acquired culture (= can be learnt) and are not related to genes (though the ability to learn them is indeed).
I agree with your point of course, though I would have selected "the ability of a dandelion to develop a scaled retractile trunk and pterodactyl-like wings".
... you are making people in your country look incredibly stupid. The US has already been dropping mines like toys, take a trip to Cambodia in the Ho Chi Minh trail region. Yesterday a US chopper has bombed a wedding killing anything between 20 and 40. I guess it will be forgotten in a week's time.
You don't have the slightest idea of what a war is like, and you have seen way too many sci-fi movies if you think that the US (or any other) army is going to shift out 2-penny landmines with multi-thousand-buck AIs.
If the victim ended on CNN, or were pictured and shown at the Congress. Do you realise that people die on US (or Italian, soviet-build, or chinese, or whatever) mines every damn day? Do you think it's a small issue? There are places where you see people on one day, and regularly some of them will be seen the next day with a limb less--Cambodia, that we already mentioned, is an example of US mines still killing people.
In Afghanistan many soviet mines are actually US-made copies, since the CIA would not pass american mines to the Mujaheedeen; that's also why it's not easy to assess how many mines come from Russia (which has laid likely the most of them anyway) and how many from the US. I read somewhere the copies were manufactured in Cairo, though I don't really know why there.
The fact that mines (not just US mines) are made to mutilate is obvious and common knowledge. And for that sake it's a fact that many mines resemble toys. Ever heard of "green parrots"? They don't look dangerous. Thousands and thousands of them were used in Afghanistan. Children pick them up, start to play, and... nothing happens. They go on playing, bring the thing home, and when they have shaken it just enough or touched the right spot, BANG. So you can mutilate the whole family if you're lucky. Someone tell me why this should not qualify as terrorism.
As far as I remember, Finland's tactic in case of a WW3 was to let the Russians bypass the norwegian border at Kirkenes, pass through northern Finland, and invading Norway (NATO country) through Finnmark. The documents of the Soviet-Finnish deal were declassified a couple of years ago and made quite a sensation here in Norway. Can't find the article though.
AFAIK the US are not really interested in more "humanitarian" behaviour of landmines. The Ottawa convention has not been signed by a few "rogue states", including the US, Russia, China, India, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan. If you don't like that company, write to your representative.
Landmines are not really meant to kill soldiers after all, they know what they look like and where they might be - they are often even designed not to kill, but to mutilate. A dead is buried, a mutilated child will be a burden for society for all his life. Fill a country with landmines, as both Soviets and US-backed Mujaheeddins did in Afghanistan, and you have cursed the country for generations.
Self-destructing mines are not going to be accepted - these days the Geneva convention is used to wipe Rumsfeld's arse, and frankly a proposal for a more expensive and on-purpose less effective weapon is not going to get through.
I'm told that mine production is not even that lucrative business. They have children mutilated with landmines that look purposefully like toys, only to make a few pennies more. Some motherfuckers.
Speaking of Cambodia, these people know something.
Not so long ago.
Tried, but the lameness filter is DMCA-enforcing.
Well, even your passport shows in which countries you've been, and can be used in court. As long as you know there's a black box recording your speed and that thing is not broadcasting, there's no privacy issue in my opinion, as the information is not disclosed until needed.
No one can come and "have a look" at your black box just to break your privacy: they must have a reason and the authority to do that.
Besides, it's ludicrous how the lawyer calls the sentence "very, very severe": 18 month for killing a man speeding at 157 km/h? 5 to 10 years seems a more reasonable range to me, other than driving-licence barring for life.
Therefore, all progress is due to unreasonable men.