I'm sure the military bases in Mississippi and Louisiana were properly secured and evacuated, and after the storm they were quickly cleaned up and back in an operational state. Part of that planning probably included not putting any bases below sea level.
Cleaning up the rest of the world after storms isn't really in their mandate. I'm sure the military was also involved in all the testing that showed that the city would be turned into a toilet bowl after a major hurricane - Congress just decided not to fund any solutions to the problem.
And the military could have helped out quite a bit more if they were permitted to treat the war-zone that followed just like any other war zone - with looters shot by snipers on sight. Ditto for those who fail to disperse on command when rescue personnel are being harassed. This is the stuff that the military is actually good at. It just doesn't fit in with the modern litigous society.
The solution to hurricanes is to not provide government funds of any kind for the rebuilding of costal or below-sea-level housing. The only relief that should be provided is the purchase of property for the conversion into parks, and the granting of relocation funding. Ditto for homes destroyed in recurring floods of any kind. If the rich want to build mansions on the shoreline, that is fine, but they shouldn't go looking for handouts when a storm comes along. The poor don't belong there at all - those who are already there should be allowed to stay, but when their homes are knocked down they should be granted relief funds to move out.
Personally, I think the answer is to form a league of democracies that meet strict standards of human rights and political freedom. Set the standards high and stick to them. It might be that Israel for instance wouldn't be able to join.
What about China? They're going to be mighty ticked at being excluded, and if they are included there goes your pristine genetleman's club. They're not as bad as Iraq was under Sadaam, but they're definitely up there with the secret police keeping people under their thumbs. Then again, maybe democracies of the world shouldn't worry as much about ticking off China and they should learn not to depend on dictatorships for all their raw labor.
Ditto with Israel - the US is going to be ticked if they're left out (maybe).
I agree it is a good idea in theory - probably the closest existing organization to this is NATO. In practice, however, I can see this being quite messy...
In other words why don't you present some evidence that lack of social services leads to a more prosperous evidence.
I'm not arguing that a lack of ANY social services leads to a more prosperous society. Even if this were so, there are no nations to look at out there which have first-world economies that lack social services. Perhaps a good contrast would be the US/Europe - where social services exist to varying degrees. Overall, the US is clearly more prosperous despite spending 1000 times as much on its military.
Comparing the modern US to that of the early 1900s is not possible - besides the creation of social security we've also had tremendous reforms of employment law, securities law, and the general advancement of education, technology, and medicine.
Yes, that's a nice opinion. Congratulations on having such a nice opinion. Really, I admire your opinion.
However, it is an opinion that has the potential to create better lives for everybody - including those who are down and out. The opinion that homeless folks are better off with jobs than living on the street might be resented by some homeless people, but it doesn't change the fact that they would be much more comfortable not freezing to death in the winter.
Social programs are really a matter of liberty. They only work if those with means are compelled by force to provide for those without means. Any use of compulsion should be kept in check - this is why the draft is a bad idea (if a war is worth fighting, then folks will volunteer). This is why the Berlin wall was a bad idea - sure, keeping in prosperous people was better for the communist dream and all that, but it was a horrible affront to personal liberty. In general we need to be careful in our power to tax - it shouldn't be used for social engineering.
Then again, I suppose my desire to have freedom to spend the money I earn in the manner in which I choose is also just an "opinion"... Guess what - all ideas start as opinions...
Well, unexploded cluster bombs really aren't any different than any other kind of unexploded bomb. A certain percentage of all bombs are duds, and can be very dangerous. The only difference is that there tend to be a lot more cluster bombs lying around after an attack just because so many submunitions are deployed.
The only solution to unexploded ordinance is to not drop ordinance at all. I'm sure this is going to be accepted by any nation without an air force, and just about nobody else. For that matter, count out artillery shells as well - I'm sure some percentage of those don't detonate.
Unfortunately, people get killed in war. The solution is to avoid war whenever possible, but sometimes there is no avoiding it, simply because there are lots of idiots out there. If you pacify some dictator it just means that his demands get twice as bad the next time around, and two more spring up to join him. The solution is to carry a big stick, try not to use it much, and when you do use it make sure you cut off the head of the snake and stick it on a pike. In the end this is the most humane solution and tends to get the fewest number of civilians killed. Unfortunately, this hasn't been the policy practiced by the US of late. After 9/11 the Taliban had to be made an example of, but there really wasn't any need to go beyond that. After Kuwait Sadaam should have probably been removed from leadership then and there - you can't punish somebody by merely returning things back to the status quo - failing that he should have probably been left alone the second time around until he tried something stupid again. Dictators that mistreat their citizens need to be reigned in as well - maybe not via invasion, but the UN need to stand up to dictators more. One fundamental right that the UN should stand up for is the right of citizens to leave their nation freely - this is probably the single most definitive measure of whether a government is oppressive - whether it allows its citizens to leave freely.
Ok, I'm starting to ramble here. In any case, the problem isn't really cluster bombs or land mines. Those issues will take care of themselves once the big problems get resolved...
The last time the U.S. used antipersonnel mines was in the Gulf War in 1991 and according to a study recently released by the General Accounting Office, the Bush Administration is reported to be reviewing war plans that include plans for the use of mines. The Pentagon has said it "retains the right to use landmines."
Keep in mind that the US military has a plan for EVERYTHING. I'm sure that if martians showed up and started melting people in Chicago, the US military would have a full set of plans ready to go. They would probably have plans for using or not using nuclear bombs, biological weapons. nerve gas, and landmines. They would probably also have plans for using or not using tinfoil-wrapped umbrellas as an area defense measure against alien microwave guns, and probably a stockpile of said umbrellas and foil. It is just in the nature of the US military to plan for everything - that doesn't mean the US actually expects to use said plans.
So, when you hear that the US is updating plans for the use of nuclear bunker-busting bombs in Iran, it doesn't mean that anybody expects to use them at all. It just means that if some Iranian does something really stupid that nobody is expecting them to do, that we'll be prepared to neutralize them on a moment's notice. Ditto for plans to invade North Korea, or China. Nobody expects a dictator who is secure to launch an offensive that will only serve to get himself killed - but they might just do it anyway, and it only pays to be prepared.
The fact is that landmines are an extremely effective method for denying an area to an enemy without having to post thousands of soldiers on the ground where they end up getting shot or IED'd. They have HUGE downsides as well, and the US army should think twice before using them. However, if it is a questino of 5 civilians 10 years from now, or 500 soldiers next week, most likely the soldiers will win out. And I'm sure the US would have every intention of clearing out the mines when it is done with them - probably very thoroughly, but I'm sure not with 100% success. Still, the fact is that landmines are a pretty trivial problem when smoking is still widespread, and cars are still piloted manually. Even if the US doesn't deploy mines, it is certain that the enemy will, and the US will still end up cleaning up after them...
Once again you make outrageous statements based on some sort of religious conviction.
Uh, what would be my prior statement? This is my first comment in this thread.
What do you mean doesn't work? If the majority of recepients didn't like it they would not fight so hard for it and they would fight to change it. Maybe in your world recepients of social security don't interact with society and are not happy with SS but in my world that's just not true.
Oh, they're happy alright. They just shouldn't be. In my opinion the purpose of socialism is to act as a safety net for those who are either unlucky for a time, or are disabled in some fashion. Therefore, the ultimate goal of any socialist program should be to try to get people off the program entirely. The best way to do that is to integrate recipients into society with payers - thus allowing them to network for jobs, develop skills, and hopefully appreciate the fact that there is a better way.
Everybody I know who is on social security feels like they deserve every bit of what they got because they paid into it while they were young. They supported their elders and now it's your turn to support them.
Now, this is by far the worst possible use for social security - as a retirement plan. If you want to save up for retirement, just do it - you'll save far more privately than with social security. Also - current recipients did NOT support their elders to the degree that they want to be supported - just look at a chart of life expectancies vs time - their elders died much younger than they will. The first generation of recipients didn't support anybody - the last generation of payers won't get supported at all. Yup, it is grossly unfair - but reality nonetheless - all we're doing right now is debating whether the last generation of recipients has already passed, is about to pass, or will pass 10-20 years from now before the system collapses.
The problem with anything is abuse.
Agreed - and social programs that have no plan on getting people off of them are inherently abused. Again, I didn't call for a ban on social programs, just a reworking. Social programs should always seek to help enable their recipients to become independant, to whatever degree that this is possible. For some this may never happen, but integration with society should still be pursued. Nobody will resent somebody who is severely mentally handicapped for not paying in more than they take out. Those who are able-bodied/minded, on the other hand, should be encouraged to work.
Why did the great depression occur if private enterprise was so great? Maybe the great depression occured BECAUSE there was a weak govt and private enterpise ruled the day. Every think of that?
Well, the problem wasn't so much that private enterprise ruled the day, per se. The problem was that information on the stock market was largely restricted to insiders. Today private enterprise still rules the day, but the SEC is far more powerful (did the SEC even exist in the 20's?).
The problem is one of extremes. In the early 1900's companies didn't follow standardized accounting practices, and the market was highly manipulated. Today market information is fairly well regulated. As a libertarian I'd say that this is a good thing - laws to prevent fraud are perfectly valid. There might be cases where they can be simplified, but the free market only works right if everybody has the same access to information - otherwise you have big investors robbing corporations to line their own pockets, at the expense of smaller investors.
There are many cases where government regulation is important, but not to the extreme we have today. On the one hand we don't want the lack of quality that used to be widespread in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals back at the start of the 20th century. On the other hand, today people don't even have the right to purchase drugs without the permission of a doctor - even if the drugs are well made and well-labeled with regard to effects. Likewise, the drug development process is so expensive due to testing requirements that the market is limited to a handful of companies, and they have found that the market is such that investment in marketing is more profitable than investment in R&D (due to the huge cost - a dollar in R&D doesn't get you much more product, but a dollar in market share does get you more market share). If the testing requirements were relaxed while the quality requirements were maintained, the result would be a more open market for new drugs, and vastly diminished costs. On the other hand, far less testing would be done, and doctors would not have as much information regarding the effectiveness of various drug products. However, this might be a good place for the NIH to step in and do comparative studies - the cost will still be high, but one study might be able to cover more drugs and would likely to be more impartial and test for answers to questions that pharma manufacturers might not want to ask.
Society is capable of functioning with far fewer regs than it has today - and while this might restructure the costs of running society overall it probably will still lower them. Speaking to social security - back before the depression people didn't retire at all unless they were rich - they worked until they died or were disabled. The disabled were relatively few in number, and if they couldn't find a job they were often cared for by churches and neighbors (back then people actually talked to their neighbors - but then again there was no cheap long-distance travel, so who else would you talk to?). Back then the poor were definitely poorer, but there were probably fewer of them. Working poor were a bigger issue - this was back before unions put an end to horrible work conditions. This is one issue I do have with libertarianism - in theory it is nice to think that people should be free to enter into any contract that they wish, but then that would include even slavery or indentured servitude. These systems have always been a major source of abuse.
The problem with social nets of any kind is abuse - they reward those who do not work. That might include those who are just down on their luck. However, it also includes many who could work, but don't. And the cost to society is huge. On the other hand, such system do tend to make society more "fair" - defined as a more similar level of wealth across society - at the cost of a smaller total wealth for everyone. As long as humans are selfish the poor will be neglected more than the
Nobody is indespensable - unless they're litterally solid gold. If you are coming up with ideas that are making the company REALLY BIG money they might tolerate some childish attitude. However, if you're just the boss that screams at everybody, eventually your boss will get tired of your high turnover rates and the fact that you're driving up wages (to promote retention).
Well, picture this scenario - there are 50 items that I want 1 of on ebay. I'm willing to pay up to $50 for 1 of these items. The various auctions end at intervals, but mostly at inconvenient hours or such that I'd rather not sit in front of the PC watching them.
I could bid my true value on 1 of those items. It looks like I have the winning bid on that item when I go to bed. When I wake up, somebody has outbid me with $60 and I didn't get it. I also note that 1 of the other identical items sold for $30 - I would have gotten that one for less than my max bid.
With sniping I just tell my software what my max bid is, and it bids the first item up to 50 and stops, and then bids the second item up to 50 and stops, and so on - until I get an item for 50 or less.
I would never bid on an item with the only goal of getting it for any price - that's just silly unless it is some kind of collectible with sentimental value.
I think the biggest utility of sniping is when you want 1 of some item, and there are 300 listed on ebay. You determine what price you're willing to pay, and sniping ensures that you only end up with 1 item. If you just put your maximum bid in for all 300 you might end up with 50 of them. However, if you put your max bid on only 1 item then you might be outbid on that one item, when a another iteration might sell for less due to an inefficient market.
Again, reconcile your market analysis with traffic in a Best Buy. Middle class people - even lower middle class people - with jobs and the will can afford a 40" TV. Even if big screen is only available to half the population, that's a lot of people, and enough to cause an increase in programming.
And recconile your market analysis with traffic in a K-mart. Most people don't show at Best Buy. Sure, most of my coworkers probably do (I don't only because they sell a lot of overpriced junk, although I might consider them for an HDTV). However, most people living in my area don't even have college degrees - let alone jobs that pay more than $15/hr.
Look at an income distribution chart sometime. You'd be amazed at how many people make less than $30K. At that wage just paying the rent is a hardship. Even at my income I'm not exactly dying to make the high-def plunge, and if I did it would be more for the AC3 audio than the 1040p video. I'd be just as likely to interface it with my standard def TV until a high def set can be obtained for maybe a few hundred (all it takes is a $100 tuner card for my mythtv backend).
I don't even understand why SDTVs are still sold. Prices won't come down until conventional televisions are off the market. Then when no one will buy a tv, they must lower the prices.
It is this thing in the US called a free market. Even if Sony/Hitachi/etc decided to stop making SDTVs in the hope of selling more HDTVs they would just lose market share to some Korean or Chinese outfit which sells Walmart the TVs that people want to buy. Then the big companies would go out of business since they can't afford to only sell $2000 TV sets to a few thousand people a year.
The only way to get rid of SDTV entirely would be via government regulation, and if congress issues a decree that nobody who isn't willing to pay $500 for a TV ought to be able to watch TV, they're going to have a mess. TV is the whole reason that people aren't rioting in the streets - bread and circuses - no congressman is going to close down the circus...
Ok, for those who didn't see the relevance - in this case you have engineers saying don't launch, and managers saying launch. It is in the interests of the engineers to never certify a launch - that way they can say "I told you so" if it blows up - as one of the parent posts pointed out.
The point is that if somebody is only going to get beat up if the launch fails, and there is no penalty for unnecessarily cancelling a launch, then you're going to get nothing but no-go decisions. These engineers are working in government posts - the only way they lose their job is if they mess up. A mess up is defined as an exploding space shuttle. A deorbiting ISS is also a mess up, but in a different department. Therefore the shuttle support engineers are best off just leaving the thing on the pad while they tinker with designs until retirement.
I'm sure many or most of the engineers dont' have this attitude outright - but the incentives are probably aligned this way - so deadlock is going to be the way things go until the shuttle is retired...
Any project is a compromise between quality, cost, and timeline. The goal is to balance these goals appropriately. I've seen many a bureaucracy where you have a QA group who has to sign off on all code, but they only get rewarded on the basis of how few issues come back to haunt them and not on how many projects get done. Therefore, their goal is to avoid signing anything at all - they would get the best bonsues if no code were released at all - since then nothing would fail. On the other hand you get a project leader whose only goal is to get the code out the door so that he can get a promotion before the complaints start rolling in.
Why companies can't just give people incentives to relase code when it is ready and not before or after I can't understand...
Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to destroy a planet? You could probably put a couple of miles of crater in the crust, but mass of dirt displaced goes up with the cube of size. If you blasted the living daylights out of North America the only affect on the other side of the planet would be blocked sunlight due to particles in the air.
To completely destroy the earth you essentially have to get its entire mass moving at escape velocity in all directions. That is a lot of energy - probably on the order of the output of the entire sun for a measurable amount of time. It would be an engineering project on the scale of a Dyson sphere. Sure, the antimatter involved might fit in a very large building, but every joule of energy contained within had to be generated using conventional means.
Hmm - I've updated my kernel numerous times in the last year, but I wasn't aware of any actual security bulletins. I do subscribe to my distro security lists and update religiously when packages I'm using have security issues. I tend to update my kernel to stay current with the distro, but I didn't notice actual security alerts...
Whether the license allows free distribution is under debate.
It would appear to prohibit distribution along with the GNU java classes, for example.
It also seems to require indemnification from 3rd-party lawsuits - which is a potentially expensive license term (ie MS downloads java from debian, finds a legal issue, sues Sun, sun asks Debian to take care of the suit for them).
Uh, I can't remember the last time I had to patch my linux kernel due to a security issue. Maybe there was an occasion in the last year, but that is unlikely. That is the only thing in linux that requires a reboot.
As far as the other stuff you mention goes - none of that requires substantial downtime. Sure, if you're making an application change you might need to work out what dependencies need to be updated, but it isn't like you're going to do that while production is down.
If you're running a server that you care enough about to bother reading uptime surveys, then you're not going to make any changes to it until you've performed the change in an identical test environment following a documented procedure, and have tested the change to ensure the system works. Then you just follow the same procedure again in production and it will work there as well. And running a different OS isn't going to make a difference in your application update plans, except possibly for stuff like package-manager utilities or other tools to manage your apps. On linux you'd actually have more support for this stuff - if you need to have good control over your production server with some app not supported by the OS vendor then you're better off making your own RPM for it.
If you generally upgrade applications by fiddling with the production server until it works, then you're really not the target audience for server uptime reports. That kind of stuff will kill uptime on any server.
When they mapped the human Genome, it took 7 years to map only 5%, but then as technology improved in DNA mapping and processing they mapped the rest in another 7 or so years...
You prove his point. When was DNA sequencing discovered? When was the significance DNA discovered? That all dates back to the 50s-60s. It took about 40 years to develop that until it was economically feasible to sequence entire genomes. The first bacteria wasn't even sequenced until the mid-90s I believe.
All research groups constantly update their facilities. Some technologies become marketable quickly, but even the aforementioned DNA genome sequencing capabilities really aren't being mass-marketed yet (sure, you can buy a copy of the human genome in general, or spend $30 to sequence a few hundred base pairs, but you can't buy a copy of your own genome for any price on the general market). We're getting close, but many technologies (if not most) take decades from concept to market. I'm talking original concept - not from the time that somebody makes a pitch to a venture capitalist until the patenting of "one-click" shopping. Instead, think time from first hyperlinked computer application until the time hyperlinks are used to buy things routinely.
There is probably a way to do this is secure even when the stego algorithm is known. I'd go and hunt through the literature.
Hmm - not sure about that.
If somebody knows the algo, couldn't they just re-stego the code with a different key? Now instead of all the ternary operators spelling MICROSOFT it would spell BORLAND. Or, if you know the algo you could read the current watermark, and then mangle the code until it is no longer readable.
All they really need to do is just run the code though a polymorphic virus engine or something along those lines. It would be obvious that they mangled up the code, but you'd never be able to tell what it used to say...
All they need to do is GPL all the code they hold the rights for - and indicate which code that is. Sure, it won't be 100% open-source, but then rather than writing the whole thing from scratch now the community just needs to write 5-10% of it from scratch.
A simple statement of intent with some concrete action would mobilize legions of open-source zealots. Right now those legions are mobilized to try to contain the spread of java.
Try running freenet on it. You'll be lucky if it even fully loads without a segfault (something that shouldn't be possible with Java). Then again, haven't tried it recently so there is an outside chance it will work.
Sun's 64-bit JVM is adequate for helloworld.class, and for some moderately-complex stuff, but give it something massive and it tends to crash. If it were open-source it might be more likely to get some fixes.
Uh, that would be the propaganda designed to distract everybody from the fact that they are living in a dictatorship, perhaps?
If the US annexed Saudi Arabia about the only big changes would be the emancipation of women and the end to stoning of blasphemers. Oh, and the fact that people would suddenly have this strange thing called elections.
Sure, it isn't the US's place to go around arbitrarily setting up democracies. However, that doesn't mean that these places are paradises of human rights...
Re:It's no wonder people buy into Intellegent Desi
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One Big Bang, Or Many?
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Well, clearly this isn't true for everybody - there are people who understand evolution fairly well and yet don't accept that we're here because of it.
Of course, in the case of the unwashed masses, most either believe or disbelieve evolution not because they do or don't understand it, but rather because of the influence of somebody else or a willingness to just accept something based on presentation. That goes for most people who do believe in evolution - in the big scheme of things relatively few people actually understand it one way or another.
The only people who would use a backpack bomb in a first-nuclear-strike attack would be terrorists without state affiliation. No state would attempt this. At best they would disrupt the US and kill a few thousand people - even with a nuke in manhatten. A single man-portable bomb just doesn't do that much damage at low altitude.
On the other hand, a nuke on wall street is going to result in the nation that delivered it being turned into a hunk of glass.
The backpack nuke is better held as a deterrent - to prevent the US from launching a nuclear strike. Once you employ nukes your enemy has nothing to lose by using theirs - and their best strategy is to use as many as they can as quickly as they can. The only nation that can stand up to the US in a nuclear war is the former soviet states. But, they know better. So do most nations with nuclear arsenals.
Now, if the US does something stupid like nuking China, then all bets are off. The US would still come out ahead in an exchange - the Chinese don't have that many ICBMs - they'd blast most major bases and cities, but the US would depopulate most of the country - urban and rural. However, the US is best off sticking to conventional warfare against nuclear states.
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Except Hurricanes?
I'm sure the military bases in Mississippi and Louisiana were properly secured and evacuated, and after the storm they were quickly cleaned up and back in an operational state. Part of that planning probably included not putting any bases below sea level.
Cleaning up the rest of the world after storms isn't really in their mandate. I'm sure the military was also involved in all the testing that showed that the city would be turned into a toilet bowl after a major hurricane - Congress just decided not to fund any solutions to the problem.
And the military could have helped out quite a bit more if they were permitted to treat the war-zone that followed just like any other war zone - with looters shot by snipers on sight. Ditto for those who fail to disperse on command when rescue personnel are being harassed. This is the stuff that the military is actually good at. It just doesn't fit in with the modern litigous society.
The solution to hurricanes is to not provide government funds of any kind for the rebuilding of costal or below-sea-level housing. The only relief that should be provided is the purchase of property for the conversion into parks, and the granting of relocation funding. Ditto for homes destroyed in recurring floods of any kind. If the rich want to build mansions on the shoreline, that is fine, but they shouldn't go looking for handouts when a storm comes along. The poor don't belong there at all - those who are already there should be allowed to stay, but when their homes are knocked down they should be granted relief funds to move out.
Personally, I think the answer is to form a league of democracies that meet strict standards of human rights and political freedom. Set the standards high and stick to them. It might be that Israel for instance wouldn't be able to join.
What about China? They're going to be mighty ticked at being excluded, and if they are included there goes your pristine genetleman's club. They're not as bad as Iraq was under Sadaam, but they're definitely up there with the secret police keeping people under their thumbs. Then again, maybe democracies of the world shouldn't worry as much about ticking off China and they should learn not to depend on dictatorships for all their raw labor.
Ditto with Israel - the US is going to be ticked if they're left out (maybe).
I agree it is a good idea in theory - probably the closest existing organization to this is NATO. In practice, however, I can see this being quite messy...
In other words why don't you present some evidence that lack of social services leads to a more prosperous evidence.
I'm not arguing that a lack of ANY social services leads to a more prosperous society. Even if this were so, there are no nations to look at out there which have first-world economies that lack social services. Perhaps a good contrast would be the US/Europe - where social services exist to varying degrees. Overall, the US is clearly more prosperous despite spending 1000 times as much on its military.
Comparing the modern US to that of the early 1900s is not possible - besides the creation of social security we've also had tremendous reforms of employment law, securities law, and the general advancement of education, technology, and medicine.
Yes, that's a nice opinion. Congratulations on having such a nice opinion. Really, I admire your opinion.
However, it is an opinion that has the potential to create better lives for everybody - including those who are down and out. The opinion that homeless folks are better off with jobs than living on the street might be resented by some homeless people, but it doesn't change the fact that they would be much more comfortable not freezing to death in the winter.
Social programs are really a matter of liberty. They only work if those with means are compelled by force to provide for those without means. Any use of compulsion should be kept in check - this is why the draft is a bad idea (if a war is worth fighting, then folks will volunteer). This is why the Berlin wall was a bad idea - sure, keeping in prosperous people was better for the communist dream and all that, but it was a horrible affront to personal liberty. In general we need to be careful in our power to tax - it shouldn't be used for social engineering.
Then again, I suppose my desire to have freedom to spend the money I earn in the manner in which I choose is also just an "opinion"... Guess what - all ideas start as opinions...
Well, unexploded cluster bombs really aren't any different than any other kind of unexploded bomb. A certain percentage of all bombs are duds, and can be very dangerous. The only difference is that there tend to be a lot more cluster bombs lying around after an attack just because so many submunitions are deployed.
The only solution to unexploded ordinance is to not drop ordinance at all. I'm sure this is going to be accepted by any nation without an air force, and just about nobody else. For that matter, count out artillery shells as well - I'm sure some percentage of those don't detonate.
Unfortunately, people get killed in war. The solution is to avoid war whenever possible, but sometimes there is no avoiding it, simply because there are lots of idiots out there. If you pacify some dictator it just means that his demands get twice as bad the next time around, and two more spring up to join him. The solution is to carry a big stick, try not to use it much, and when you do use it make sure you cut off the head of the snake and stick it on a pike. In the end this is the most humane solution and tends to get the fewest number of civilians killed. Unfortunately, this hasn't been the policy practiced by the US of late. After 9/11 the Taliban had to be made an example of, but there really wasn't any need to go beyond that. After Kuwait Sadaam should have probably been removed from leadership then and there - you can't punish somebody by merely returning things back to the status quo - failing that he should have probably been left alone the second time around until he tried something stupid again. Dictators that mistreat their citizens need to be reigned in as well - maybe not via invasion, but the UN need to stand up to dictators more. One fundamental right that the UN should stand up for is the right of citizens to leave their nation freely - this is probably the single most definitive measure of whether a government is oppressive - whether it allows its citizens to leave freely.
Ok, I'm starting to ramble here. In any case, the problem isn't really cluster bombs or land mines. Those issues will take care of themselves once the big problems get resolved...
The last time the U.S. used antipersonnel mines was in the Gulf War in 1991 and according to a study recently released by the General Accounting Office, the Bush Administration is reported to be reviewing war plans that include plans for the use of mines. The Pentagon has said it "retains the right to use landmines."
Keep in mind that the US military has a plan for EVERYTHING. I'm sure that if martians showed up and started melting people in Chicago, the US military would have a full set of plans ready to go. They would probably have plans for using or not using nuclear bombs, biological weapons. nerve gas, and landmines. They would probably also have plans for using or not using tinfoil-wrapped umbrellas as an area defense measure against alien microwave guns, and probably a stockpile of said umbrellas and foil. It is just in the nature of the US military to plan for everything - that doesn't mean the US actually expects to use said plans.
So, when you hear that the US is updating plans for the use of nuclear bunker-busting bombs in Iran, it doesn't mean that anybody expects to use them at all. It just means that if some Iranian does something really stupid that nobody is expecting them to do, that we'll be prepared to neutralize them on a moment's notice. Ditto for plans to invade North Korea, or China. Nobody expects a dictator who is secure to launch an offensive that will only serve to get himself killed - but they might just do it anyway, and it only pays to be prepared.
The fact is that landmines are an extremely effective method for denying an area to an enemy without having to post thousands of soldiers on the ground where they end up getting shot or IED'd. They have HUGE downsides as well, and the US army should think twice before using them. However, if it is a questino of 5 civilians 10 years from now, or 500 soldiers next week, most likely the soldiers will win out. And I'm sure the US would have every intention of clearing out the mines when it is done with them - probably very thoroughly, but I'm sure not with 100% success. Still, the fact is that landmines are a pretty trivial problem when smoking is still widespread, and cars are still piloted manually. Even if the US doesn't deploy mines, it is certain that the enemy will, and the US will still end up cleaning up after them...
Once again you make outrageous statements based on some sort of religious conviction.
Uh, what would be my prior statement? This is my first comment in this thread.
What do you mean doesn't work? If the majority of recepients didn't like it they would not fight so hard for it and they would fight to change it. Maybe in your world recepients of social security don't interact with society and are not happy with SS but in my world that's just not true.
Oh, they're happy alright. They just shouldn't be. In my opinion the purpose of socialism is to act as a safety net for those who are either unlucky for a time, or are disabled in some fashion. Therefore, the ultimate goal of any socialist program should be to try to get people off the program entirely. The best way to do that is to integrate recipients into society with payers - thus allowing them to network for jobs, develop skills, and hopefully appreciate the fact that there is a better way.
Everybody I know who is on social security feels like they deserve every bit of what they got because they paid into it while they were young. They supported their elders and now it's your turn to support them.
Now, this is by far the worst possible use for social security - as a retirement plan. If you want to save up for retirement, just do it - you'll save far more privately than with social security. Also - current recipients did NOT support their elders to the degree that they want to be supported - just look at a chart of life expectancies vs time - their elders died much younger than they will. The first generation of recipients didn't support anybody - the last generation of payers won't get supported at all. Yup, it is grossly unfair - but reality nonetheless - all we're doing right now is debating whether the last generation of recipients has already passed, is about to pass, or will pass 10-20 years from now before the system collapses.
The problem with anything is abuse.
Agreed - and social programs that have no plan on getting people off of them are inherently abused. Again, I didn't call for a ban on social programs, just a reworking. Social programs should always seek to help enable their recipients to become independant, to whatever degree that this is possible. For some this may never happen, but integration with society should still be pursued. Nobody will resent somebody who is severely mentally handicapped for not paying in more than they take out. Those who are able-bodied/minded, on the other hand, should be encouraged to work.
Why did the great depression occur if private enterprise was so great? Maybe the great depression occured BECAUSE there was a weak govt and private enterpise ruled the day. Every think of that?
Well, the problem wasn't so much that private enterprise ruled the day, per se. The problem was that information on the stock market was largely restricted to insiders. Today private enterprise still rules the day, but the SEC is far more powerful (did the SEC even exist in the 20's?).
The problem is one of extremes. In the early 1900's companies didn't follow standardized accounting practices, and the market was highly manipulated. Today market information is fairly well regulated. As a libertarian I'd say that this is a good thing - laws to prevent fraud are perfectly valid. There might be cases where they can be simplified, but the free market only works right if everybody has the same access to information - otherwise you have big investors robbing corporations to line their own pockets, at the expense of smaller investors.
There are many cases where government regulation is important, but not to the extreme we have today. On the one hand we don't want the lack of quality that used to be widespread in the manufacture of pharmaceuticals back at the start of the 20th century. On the other hand, today people don't even have the right to purchase drugs without the permission of a doctor - even if the drugs are well made and well-labeled with regard to effects. Likewise, the drug development process is so expensive due to testing requirements that the market is limited to a handful of companies, and they have found that the market is such that investment in marketing is more profitable than investment in R&D (due to the huge cost - a dollar in R&D doesn't get you much more product, but a dollar in market share does get you more market share). If the testing requirements were relaxed while the quality requirements were maintained, the result would be a more open market for new drugs, and vastly diminished costs. On the other hand, far less testing would be done, and doctors would not have as much information regarding the effectiveness of various drug products. However, this might be a good place for the NIH to step in and do comparative studies - the cost will still be high, but one study might be able to cover more drugs and would likely to be more impartial and test for answers to questions that pharma manufacturers might not want to ask.
Society is capable of functioning with far fewer regs than it has today - and while this might restructure the costs of running society overall it probably will still lower them. Speaking to social security - back before the depression people didn't retire at all unless they were rich - they worked until they died or were disabled. The disabled were relatively few in number, and if they couldn't find a job they were often cared for by churches and neighbors (back then people actually talked to their neighbors - but then again there was no cheap long-distance travel, so who else would you talk to?). Back then the poor were definitely poorer, but there were probably fewer of them. Working poor were a bigger issue - this was back before unions put an end to horrible work conditions. This is one issue I do have with libertarianism - in theory it is nice to think that people should be free to enter into any contract that they wish, but then that would include even slavery or indentured servitude. These systems have always been a major source of abuse.
The problem with social nets of any kind is abuse - they reward those who do not work. That might include those who are just down on their luck. However, it also includes many who could work, but don't. And the cost to society is huge. On the other hand, such system do tend to make society more "fair" - defined as a more similar level of wealth across society - at the cost of a smaller total wealth for everyone. As long as humans are selfish the poor will be neglected more than the
Nobody is indespensable - unless they're litterally solid gold. If you are coming up with ideas that are making the company REALLY BIG money they might tolerate some childish attitude. However, if you're just the boss that screams at everybody, eventually your boss will get tired of your high turnover rates and the fact that you're driving up wages (to promote retention).
Well, picture this scenario - there are 50 items that I want 1 of on ebay. I'm willing to pay up to $50 for 1 of these items. The various auctions end at intervals, but mostly at inconvenient hours or such that I'd rather not sit in front of the PC watching them.
I could bid my true value on 1 of those items. It looks like I have the winning bid on that item when I go to bed. When I wake up, somebody has outbid me with $60 and I didn't get it. I also note that 1 of the other identical items sold for $30 - I would have gotten that one for less than my max bid.
With sniping I just tell my software what my max bid is, and it bids the first item up to 50 and stops, and then bids the second item up to 50 and stops, and so on - until I get an item for 50 or less.
I would never bid on an item with the only goal of getting it for any price - that's just silly unless it is some kind of collectible with sentimental value.
I think the biggest utility of sniping is when you want 1 of some item, and there are 300 listed on ebay. You determine what price you're willing to pay, and sniping ensures that you only end up with 1 item. If you just put your maximum bid in for all 300 you might end up with 50 of them. However, if you put your max bid on only 1 item then you might be outbid on that one item, when a another iteration might sell for less due to an inefficient market.
This is really the only point in sniping.
Again, reconcile your market analysis with traffic in a Best Buy. Middle class people - even lower middle class people - with jobs and the will can afford a 40" TV. Even if big screen is only available to half the population, that's a lot of people, and enough to cause an increase in programming.
And recconile your market analysis with traffic in a K-mart. Most people don't show at Best Buy. Sure, most of my coworkers probably do (I don't only because they sell a lot of overpriced junk, although I might consider them for an HDTV). However, most people living in my area don't even have college degrees - let alone jobs that pay more than $15/hr.
Look at an income distribution chart sometime. You'd be amazed at how many people make less than $30K. At that wage just paying the rent is a hardship. Even at my income I'm not exactly dying to make the high-def plunge, and if I did it would be more for the AC3 audio than the 1040p video. I'd be just as likely to interface it with my standard def TV until a high def set can be obtained for maybe a few hundred (all it takes is a $100 tuner card for my mythtv backend).
I don't even understand why SDTVs are still sold. Prices won't come down until conventional televisions are off the market. Then when no one will buy a tv, they must lower the prices.
It is this thing in the US called a free market. Even if Sony/Hitachi/etc decided to stop making SDTVs in the hope of selling more HDTVs they would just lose market share to some Korean or Chinese outfit which sells Walmart the TVs that people want to buy. Then the big companies would go out of business since they can't afford to only sell $2000 TV sets to a few thousand people a year.
The only way to get rid of SDTV entirely would be via government regulation, and if congress issues a decree that nobody who isn't willing to pay $500 for a TV ought to be able to watch TV, they're going to have a mess. TV is the whole reason that people aren't rioting in the streets - bread and circuses - no congressman is going to close down the circus...
Ok, for those who didn't see the relevance - in this case you have engineers saying don't launch, and managers saying launch. It is in the interests of the engineers to never certify a launch - that way they can say "I told you so" if it blows up - as one of the parent posts pointed out.
The point is that if somebody is only going to get beat up if the launch fails, and there is no penalty for unnecessarily cancelling a launch, then you're going to get nothing but no-go decisions. These engineers are working in government posts - the only way they lose their job is if they mess up. A mess up is defined as an exploding space shuttle. A deorbiting ISS is also a mess up, but in a different department. Therefore the shuttle support engineers are best off just leaving the thing on the pad while they tinker with designs until retirement.
I'm sure many or most of the engineers dont' have this attitude outright - but the incentives are probably aligned this way - so deadlock is going to be the way things go until the shuttle is retired...
Any project is a compromise between quality, cost, and timeline. The goal is to balance these goals appropriately. I've seen many a bureaucracy where you have a QA group who has to sign off on all code, but they only get rewarded on the basis of how few issues come back to haunt them and not on how many projects get done. Therefore, their goal is to avoid signing anything at all - they would get the best bonsues if no code were released at all - since then nothing would fail. On the other hand you get a project leader whose only goal is to get the code out the door so that he can get a promotion before the complaints start rolling in.
Why companies can't just give people incentives to relase code when it is ready and not before or after I can't understand...
Do you have any idea how much energy it takes to destroy a planet? You could probably put a couple of miles of crater in the crust, but mass of dirt displaced goes up with the cube of size. If you blasted the living daylights out of North America the only affect on the other side of the planet would be blocked sunlight due to particles in the air.
To completely destroy the earth you essentially have to get its entire mass moving at escape velocity in all directions. That is a lot of energy - probably on the order of the output of the entire sun for a measurable amount of time. It would be an engineering project on the scale of a Dyson sphere. Sure, the antimatter involved might fit in a very large building, but every joule of energy contained within had to be generated using conventional means.
Hmm - I've updated my kernel numerous times in the last year, but I wasn't aware of any actual security bulletins. I do subscribe to my distro security lists and update religiously when packages I'm using have security issues. I tend to update my kernel to stay current with the distro, but I didn't notice actual security alerts...
Whether the license allows free distribution is under debate.
It would appear to prohibit distribution along with the GNU java classes, for example.
It also seems to require indemnification from 3rd-party lawsuits - which is a potentially expensive license term (ie MS downloads java from debian, finds a legal issue, sues Sun, sun asks Debian to take care of the suit for them).
Uh, I can't remember the last time I had to patch my linux kernel due to a security issue. Maybe there was an occasion in the last year, but that is unlikely. That is the only thing in linux that requires a reboot.
As far as the other stuff you mention goes - none of that requires substantial downtime. Sure, if you're making an application change you might need to work out what dependencies need to be updated, but it isn't like you're going to do that while production is down.
If you're running a server that you care enough about to bother reading uptime surveys, then you're not going to make any changes to it until you've performed the change in an identical test environment following a documented procedure, and have tested the change to ensure the system works. Then you just follow the same procedure again in production and it will work there as well. And running a different OS isn't going to make a difference in your application update plans, except possibly for stuff like package-manager utilities or other tools to manage your apps. On linux you'd actually have more support for this stuff - if you need to have good control over your production server with some app not supported by the OS vendor then you're better off making your own RPM for it.
If you generally upgrade applications by fiddling with the production server until it works, then you're really not the target audience for server uptime reports. That kind of stuff will kill uptime on any server.
When they mapped the human Genome, it took 7 years to map only 5%, but then as technology improved in DNA mapping and processing they mapped the rest in another 7 or so years...
You prove his point. When was DNA sequencing discovered? When was the significance DNA discovered? That all dates back to the 50s-60s. It took about 40 years to develop that until it was economically feasible to sequence entire genomes. The first bacteria wasn't even sequenced until the mid-90s I believe.
All research groups constantly update their facilities. Some technologies become marketable quickly, but even the aforementioned DNA genome sequencing capabilities really aren't being mass-marketed yet (sure, you can buy a copy of the human genome in general, or spend $30 to sequence a few hundred base pairs, but you can't buy a copy of your own genome for any price on the general market). We're getting close, but many technologies (if not most) take decades from concept to market. I'm talking original concept - not from the time that somebody makes a pitch to a venture capitalist until the patenting of "one-click" shopping. Instead, think time from first hyperlinked computer application until the time hyperlinks are used to buy things routinely.
There is probably a way to do this is secure even when the stego algorithm is known. I'd go and hunt through the literature.
Hmm - not sure about that.
If somebody knows the algo, couldn't they just re-stego the code with a different key? Now instead of all the ternary operators spelling MICROSOFT it would spell BORLAND. Or, if you know the algo you could read the current watermark, and then mangle the code until it is no longer readable.
All they really need to do is just run the code though a polymorphic virus engine or something along those lines. It would be obvious that they mangled up the code, but you'd never be able to tell what it used to say...
All they need to do is GPL all the code they hold the rights for - and indicate which code that is. Sure, it won't be 100% open-source, but then rather than writing the whole thing from scratch now the community just needs to write 5-10% of it from scratch.
A simple statement of intent with some concrete action would mobilize legions of open-source zealots. Right now those legions are mobilized to try to contain the spread of java.
Try running freenet on it. You'll be lucky if it even fully loads without a segfault (something that shouldn't be possible with Java). Then again, haven't tried it recently so there is an outside chance it will work.
Sun's 64-bit JVM is adequate for helloworld.class, and for some moderately-complex stuff, but give it something massive and it tends to crash. If it were open-source it might be more likely to get some fixes.
Uh, that would be the propaganda designed to distract everybody from the fact that they are living in a dictatorship, perhaps?
If the US annexed Saudi Arabia about the only big changes would be the emancipation of women and the end to stoning of blasphemers. Oh, and the fact that people would suddenly have this strange thing called elections.
Sure, it isn't the US's place to go around arbitrarily setting up democracies. However, that doesn't mean that these places are paradises of human rights...
Well, clearly this isn't true for everybody - there are people who understand evolution fairly well and yet don't accept that we're here because of it.
Of course, in the case of the unwashed masses, most either believe or disbelieve evolution not because they do or don't understand it, but rather because of the influence of somebody else or a willingness to just accept something based on presentation. That goes for most people who do believe in evolution - in the big scheme of things relatively few people actually understand it one way or another.
The only people who would use a backpack bomb in a first-nuclear-strike attack would be terrorists without state affiliation. No state would attempt this. At best they would disrupt the US and kill a few thousand people - even with a nuke in manhatten. A single man-portable bomb just doesn't do that much damage at low altitude.
On the other hand, a nuke on wall street is going to result in the nation that delivered it being turned into a hunk of glass.
The backpack nuke is better held as a deterrent - to prevent the US from launching a nuclear strike. Once you employ nukes your enemy has nothing to lose by using theirs - and their best strategy is to use as many as they can as quickly as they can. The only nation that can stand up to the US in a nuclear war is the former soviet states. But, they know better. So do most nations with nuclear arsenals.
Now, if the US does something stupid like nuking China, then all bets are off. The US would still come out ahead in an exchange - the Chinese don't have that many ICBMs - they'd blast most major bases and cities, but the US would depopulate most of the country - urban and rural. However, the US is best off sticking to conventional warfare against nuclear states.