No it's not; this isn't tritium (T2O) being discussed, but normal water contaminated with Sr90. ALPS is supposed to separate the Sr. The remaining water has a modestly low level of tritium. Releasing tritium is no big deal; it may slightly harm seafood or maybe even kill it, but it will dilute quickly and is of no harm to humans who eat seafood. Sr90 on the other hand is a metal and while it's easily broken up into dust and carried around by currents it's heavier than water so collects in hot spots on the sea floor.
Simply improving a processor isn't going to change the fact that what people want are low cost processors without vendor lock in.
This is what they say. Then they put Apple on desks and in bags, and buy iPhones, not because it's lower cost but because it's viewed like a perk (like free lunches, snacks, or an on-site gym, etc) - and it's relatively cheap compared to payroll costs in general. What they say is largely irrelevant because they don't know what they want, and in the absence of wanting something else a purchaser will say they need lower cost. When a purchaser says they're cost sensitive it really says they don't know what they need and aren't in the business of brainstorming. This doesn't mean there's no opportunity for innovation outside of cost-performance. Sun benefited from its stackable pizza boxes; people greatly preferred having a stack of those in a corner to the other common alternatives at the time, even though they cost more. They also ran SunOS. Sun wasn't popular with purchasing departments either, but they had no choice because if they bought Pentium PCs or IBM AIX based machines their technical staff would go work someplace else. Sparc was only briefly, if every, best bang for buck in terms of performance. The problem with Sun was their product innovation completely stopped and all they did was tweak the underlying technology. Oracle is just as bad if not worse. This means they have their market locked in, but it's an ever shrinking market that can't be grown.
Imagine instead that you have a rack where you can add and remove boards as you see fit. Need 4 more CPUs each with 16-64 execution units, insert a board. Need another 64GB memory? Insert a board. Need a pile of ethernet ports perhaps with a builtin soft configurable switch, add a board. Or FC-AL, or anything else. And, more interestingly, want to remove a board? Push the stop button on it and the kernel begins releasing all resources on it used - unconfigure interfaces, power down CPUs, or deallocate (possibly page out) memory. When it's safe to remove a light comes on and you pull it out. A power supply might take up four slots; need redundancy? Put in 2 and set the mode to active slave. Or stick in a video board and run it like a big fat desktop. Such a system might cost more than the equivalent x86 servers, perform less, give less bang for buck, but it would have reasonable incremental expansion costs and flexibility. It would find an immediate customer base in academia and technical markets - the pizza box of the 2010s.
In the case of the Sparc T5 they're once again just going after cost. Nothing wrong with that, but more telling is there's no product innovation going on.
Twitter would have made no difference. I was opposed to the Iraq war exactly because waving dossiers without sharing any useful fact or showing hard proof sounded like total BS. Yet in the anti-war demonstrations and anti-war rhetoric it was all about "no war for oil". The reason the war happened was because it was unopposed, which was because the retard knee-jerk left had hijacked the opposition. The Saddam Hussein regime sold us all the oil we wanted, especially if we were to lift the sanctions, so the whole leftist narrative was as much BS as Powell's dossier. I couldn't even tell if these people even cared if there was a misguided war or not, or if anyone died, as long as they could win a few political points. That's why the war happened - because of the left's intellectual inbreeding and inability to make a coherent argument against it. Twitter wouldn't have helped with that, because they'd still be tweeting about war-for-oil narratives which most people would just roll their eyes and facepalm at.
Supporting the Shah has nothing to do with it. Tyrants always play up past grievances to epic proportions. If we hadn't supported the Shah they'd simple use something else. Or make something up; it doesn't terribly matter how factual it is, since once they start talking war over it and build an army to overrun their neighbors it starts being taken seriously. And if it's something they invented they can steer public opinion. What's exceptional in the Iraq war is that a dictator got a taste of their own medicine for a change, and instead of trying counter fiction and warmongering with a rational response we replaced their fictitious narrative with our own.
Well, let's keep in mind that the purpose of the ICC is to prosecute war criminals in states that won't prosecute themselves. The same legislative body that passes the Service Members Protection Act also has laws in place for the prosecution of U.S. war criminals. And it oversees the military judicial system, which prosecutes the same. If you hand evidence to a military prosecutor that some general ordered the genocide of a village, or instituted a policy of persecution, or otherwise ordered crimes to be committed - they WILL be investigated, and if there is a case there WILL be prosecution. In fact if there's any organization on this planet that's anal about obeying rules it's the U.S. federal government. NO part of the federal government tolerates criminal activity. There's just no debate; you'd be handed off to the FBI immediately. The same applies to the U.S. armed forces, there's just no tolerance for attacking or abusing civilians. There's no culture of doing that. It's not an organization built for that purpose, to set that into system, organized to that end. It decides exactly what it can do, then sticks to it. An officer would have an extremely hard time getting away with any crap, so when it happens it tends to be individuals or small units that lose it. Which do get prosecuted, making an obvious example to anyone else who ever considered the same, and their superiors get investigated to make sure they weren't involved in it. Their email, text messages, random witnesses who might have overheard orders or discussions, etc - it all gets collected. As a result, it's not possible to claim no as of yet uncovered systematic war crimes never happened in some conspiracy at some point, but it's really very remote. A state and a military ruled by law doesn't need the ICC. The only people who would be indicted would be by political finger pointing ("oh yeah, Obama himself must been involved!!! Amerikkka baaahd!!!").
Note the "citation needed" in that Wikipedia quote. NATO's position was that if adopted it becomes law, and first use would become an criminal act. But the USSR was never hampered by this since it wasn't ruled by law, and could just change its mind and strike first. Hence, the agreement would in practice have different implications for the two parties. NFU is irrelevant today and never amounted to more than a propaganda play.
and a lot of fairly intelligent people also think it's valid.
The issue that brought it to light was 'is the acquiring of WMDs a cause for preemptive war? It's largely agreed that there can be circumstances where a preemptive war is justified.
Yes, it's justified where the owner of the weapons publicly threatens or promises to use them against me. Not pre-emptively because I've never made a comparable threat, but regardless of what I say and do, because their stated goal is to kill me.
Just for a moment imagine that China and and North Korea got together and did some military exercises simulating the invasion of the US off of the California coast.
We would find it natural if they got together and simulated a defense against an attack by the U.S. or anyone else for that matter. Just like we get together with South Korea to simulate a defense against an attack by the north.
It's important to understand that the DPRK is not like any other country. Any other country would agree to peace, demobilization, and getting back to business. But the DPRK is organized solely for the purpose of winning a war against the south. It doesn't want peace. It wants to find an angle where its chances of winning are reasonably good - at which point it seize the opportunity before it's lost. The DPRK promotes people who win wars, who don't stop to think or worry about casualties. Children are indoctrinated into a war mentality starting in kindergarten. This isn't "western propaganda" or some sort of slander - it's how the country is organized in every respect.
Doesn't the US use the strike first excuse to continually start wars with smaller countries by claiming WMD's, terrorists etc
Debatable if we ever did. Maybe Cuba, but Cuba had a policy of being the spearhead of a Soviet attack on the U.S., so was genuinely hostile. It wasn't until after the blockade and standoff that the Cubans (on the insistence of the Russians) changed their policy and agreed to coexist, while the U.S. more or less implicitly agreed not to try to restore the Batista regime.
We're currently at war though, with Al-Qaeda and their allies. They attacked us by bombing NYC, which we considered an act of war even if it's not by a state. That's just a technicality however, like any other sovereign state we will defend ourselves. We bombed Al-Qaeda bases and camps in Afghanistan in return for their bombing our embassy in Nairobi; we didn't consider the embassy bombing an act of war. If the Afghans considered the retaliation an act of war they didn't say so. Either way, it's not unusual for parties to claim a war started at different points; the fact is we're at war with AQ, their allies, and the states that aid them. This means captured enemies may be held as POWs until the war is over (indefinitely if so needed) - and POWs don't have the rights of criminals. They live under a military regime and discipline, are expected to provide their name and rank (if not they may be considered clandestines in which case we'll hand them to our clandestines to obtain information), have no visitation rights, no right to attorney (they don't need any unless they're also accused of crimes - which we will try them for once the war is over), no private space, no right to mail unless we agree to it, etc. We can hold them until the war is over - indefinitely if required. If as a state you aid or shelter our enemy you become our enemy. (Pakistan? Hello? You listening? Pay attention! This part is important to you.)
Iraq was our enemy because Saddam Hussein said it was. It's that simple. If you open your mouth and say you have WMDs and you will be giving them to our enemy it doesn't matter if you actually have them or not, plan to give them away or not, or if you're just high on hashish. You made yourself our enemy, and we'll squish you. If you don't want this to happen it's as easy as keeping your mouth shut and not spread rumors about fictitious weapons programs.
when they want to steal someone elses resources.
The U.S. has never stolen resources from anyone. We may have bought at the time cheap resources which then turned out to be extremely valuable, at which point the seller wants it back. Or they want to cancel the deal for some other reason.
Maybe you're thinking of the silliness of war for oil? We don't go to war over oil. Whoever is in power, whether tyrant or humane democrat or anything inbetween, will sell us all the oil we need at market price. From an oil perspective it makes absolutely no difference. If they don't sell it to us someone else will. In fact, we even use oil embargos as a sanction: if you don't clean up your act we won't buy oil from you, and everyone else will have to choose between doing business with you or us. Guess who will be standing with billions of unsold barrels of oil and no liquidity to Xboxes and Mercks for the elite? Iran is finding out. Others can find out too. Wars for oil? What a stupid idea by people who can't think straight.
Or have a dictator pupet they want to place in power.
This pretty much ended with the USSR. We no longer need them. Our natural allies are other democracies; while there may be squabbles and hostilities, we're family and have an inherent bond and stick up for each other. (I'd be inclined to make an exception for Pakistan though.) However, we still do business and can have friendly relations with strategically important dictatorships, especially when it comes to balancing threats against other democr
Similar, but different for important reasons. A cease fire is a temporary stop for a specified period of time.
There can be a lot of reason for that, but peace discussion usually isn't one of them
The reason there's no peace treaty is that N.K. has never wanted to discuss it. They accept nothing other than unification in a communist state, and the only peaceful way that can happen is if the south surrenders. It's not merely a policy - the entire N.K. state is built to support the war effort. When it thinks it has a good chance of winning it will attack. It's not going to hesitate, and in fact regards failure capitalize on advantage as a character failure and incompetence.
Yeah, they might have to attach it to a seventy year old propeller powered aircraft.
Delivery is EASY. Especially if you only have one. The first one is the easiest to deliver.
It's not that easy. Any N.K. aircraft would be watched the entire way across the pacific and intercepted when it got close enough to the west coast. Even if it claims to be full of defectors it would be assumed to be hostile and directed to a remote airfield, without getting near anything urban. It would be directed to enter the airspace at a safe course; failure to comply would inevitably end up with it shot down well off the coast. It would be landed, those on board detained, and the aircraft searched. The damage they could do by setting off a fission device at any time would be very limited.
The alternative is to smuggle it to Canada (not easy) or Mexico (perhaps easier) and fly it in from there. Still the chance of just flying in over the restricted airspace of a major city with the kind of aircraft needed to carry a primitive fission device is minuscule. It's not something you put in the back of a Cessna 172... Primitive nuclear weapons are huge, radioactive, and draw tons of attention.
A more important reason is tactical: the civilians aren't attacking, and shelling them isn't going to help win the war against those who are actively trying to kill you. Talk is cheap, but in war any sane commander will target the latter. Of course there are many examples of insane commanders, and it's not entirely impossible N.K. would fall into that category. But it's a whole lot more likely they're only actively nurturing an image of crazy, and will act rationally should the war resume.
Also, the Chinese PLA 'volunteer units' wouldn't be equipped by China, unlike in the 1950s. Then they claimed the equipment belonged to the people and the PLA units, and the government couldn't prevent the units from taking it with them. That just would never fly today; even the most ardent communist dinosaur would find it laughably transparent. (In the 50s though communists found it perfectly reasonable.)
I don't think that's quite what I suggested in my post; no question that North Korea's army is no joke, but I do think that South Korea with the US backing them would be able to take North Korea, if China decides to sit out hostilities.
The U.S. could defeat North Korea today without much trouble. That would hurt South Korea, but strictly speaking it wouldn't hurt the U.S. so if N.K. were actually a threat to the U.S. we could say screw the south, we're taking them down. The reason we don't is that they're not a threat to us; they're a threat to our allies and we defend our allies from a belligerent neighbor, not the other way around. There's no point resuming war with N.K. until they attack. There's nothing to gain, just a bunch of dead people on both sides. But let's be clear about it: if those dead people potentially involved a U.S. city or the west coast, the equation would change - and not in the favor of Koreans on either side of the border. This is why their current threats are dangerous.
In terms of military, N.K. is no more sophisticated than Iraq, Iran, Serbia, Libya, Syria, China, etc. They just have a bigger arsenal than some. They will still have nothing to put up and will only take a little longer to grind down. It would still be a complete massacre, and since we can hand off any rebuilding to the south - which is the real cost - it would mostly just the cost of a few thousand troops and a few billions in spent munitions and fuel. A air war would destroy their air defenses and air fields, then ports and ships, then bases, artillery, and armor. Then the USMC would overrun the territory; Iraq took three weeks from border to border, so maybe a week or two for N.K. once they roll. Basically, we can take down N.K. at any time. And China wouldn't do squat because they'd just be massacred the same, although they might send 'volunteers' like last, but nothing they'd get too involved about. This is not the 1950s or 1970s anymore... their air defense would never even see it coming, after which they quickly no longer have any. Of course, this would be pointless until they become a direct threat to the U.S.
Lack of evidence is not the problem - the problem is that the IAEA is blocked from inspecting facilities part of Iran's nuclear program. There are only two plausible reasons for this: either you have a nuclear weapons program, or you want the world to think you have one. It makes no difference which is the case.
That's why you should use a utility like teracopy to do the copy. I use it to verify that the files have been copied and then immediately delete the files on the card. That way, I know that they made it to the disk.
I'd recommend leaving them on the card until you've backed up the disk so you have two copies at all times. When out traveling I import everything new on a card to Lightroom on my laptop, but leave it on the card. When the card is close to full I move on to the next. When I get home and have safely copied everything from my laptop to my main NAS I reformat the cards. I also leave the images on the laptop; when the 480GB SSD on it fills up I delete old images. The NAS gets backed up to disks that are stored off-site, but I'm in no rush to delete anything off the laptop until I need space. It's actually nice to always have my latest work on hand on the laptop as well.
Definitely not a top-of-the-line camera, but still fairly decent - Canon EOS 7D. With the latest firmware, mine claims to have a 22 shot buffer in RAW, 80 shot buffer in large JPEG. 8fps. Plus it'll potentially shoot for even longer depending on how fast the memory card is - but it does take CompactFlash rather than SD.
22 shots is merely the size of the buffer though. If you shoot 4 fps continuous and it takes 1 second to flush each raw image, then it will take 5 seconds for you to get to shot #22. In those 5 seconds the camera will have flushed the first 5 shots though and you have only 17 in the buffer. So you can shoot 5 more. Now at shot #27 the camera with have flushed one more and you can squeeze in shot #28 before it slows down to match the flush rate. The # of shots you get before it slows down is reciprocal of the buffer fill rate (in - out). When out >= in, it's 1/0, or infinite, which in practice means the buffer never fills and you can shoot until the card fills up. This also tells us that as out rate approaches in rate there is a disproportionately rapid gain in # of continuous shots until slowdown. Of course, out rate is capped by the card controller speed in the camera, so at some point a faster card doesn't help, but it depends on the camera. The current gen Nikons (at least D800 and D4) seem to make good use of whatever card speed you wish to splurge on.
It's also worth noting that a faster cards will give a few more shots before the buffer fills, simply because fill_rate = in_rate - out_rate. If in_rate is camera specific dependent on settings and continuous shooting speed, then increasing out_rate reduces fill_rate, making the buffer last longer.
To rip in real time, you'd need at least 7 MB/s of write throughput, or something faster than a class 6.
7MB/s is pretty slow by today's standards though. Most of my CF cards for my pair of D800E's are 30, 45, 90MB/s write. Faster cards provide for generally more responsive interface speeds for review, delete, reformat, focus checking, etc. Less time spent writing saves battery since the time between sleep modes is reduced. I rarely fill the buffer though, even on a camera not made for continuous action shooting. However, when the buffer does fill card speed is very noticeable. To a photographer nothing is worse and more distracting than a camera that doesn't go click when you push the shutter release!
whenever I see discussions on slashdot this does not really seem to be an issue to US citizens at all. Why is this the case? Are these problems properly addressed in school and media?
The mess at Hanford is the result of experimentation in all kinds of processing, reactor construction, and handling. It's the byproduct of learning how to do this safely and what works and what doesn't. When the worst waste was produced mainly in the 40s and 50s, there was no practical knowledge or experience with any of this. As usual, we bore the brunt of the cost and effort of figuring all the basics out, while everybody else shows up after the heavy lifting is done.
Yeah, go for three. One for the usual email etc, one for editing and debugging, and one for the application you're working on. Nothing is as inconvenient as having an event driven GUI app and debugger on the same screen. If you bring the debugger to the front you can't see what's being rendered. If you bring the application to the front you obscure the debugger, and if the app is stopped on a breakpoint it won't service the event loop. You can share the two on a larger display without overlap, but these days you need to be able to debug an app in full screen mode. The third display is for email, skype/IM, looking up documentation etc without interrupting your work in progress.
Slashdot Mirror
The water itself is radioactive.
No it's not; this isn't tritium (T2O) being discussed, but normal water contaminated with Sr90. ALPS is supposed to separate the Sr. The remaining water has a modestly low level of tritium. Releasing tritium is no big deal; it may slightly harm seafood or maybe even kill it, but it will dilute quickly and is of no harm to humans who eat seafood. Sr90 on the other hand is a metal and while it's easily broken up into dust and carried around by currents it's heavier than water so collects in hot spots on the sea floor.
Simply improving a processor isn't going to change the fact that what people want are low cost processors without vendor lock in.
This is what they say. Then they put Apple on desks and in bags, and buy iPhones, not because it's lower cost but because it's viewed like a perk (like free lunches, snacks, or an on-site gym, etc) - and it's relatively cheap compared to payroll costs in general. What they say is largely irrelevant because they don't know what they want, and in the absence of wanting something else a purchaser will say they need lower cost. When a purchaser says they're cost sensitive it really says they don't know what they need and aren't in the business of brainstorming. This doesn't mean there's no opportunity for innovation outside of cost-performance. Sun benefited from its stackable pizza boxes; people greatly preferred having a stack of those in a corner to the other common alternatives at the time, even though they cost more. They also ran SunOS. Sun wasn't popular with purchasing departments either, but they had no choice because if they bought Pentium PCs or IBM AIX based machines their technical staff would go work someplace else. Sparc was only briefly, if every, best bang for buck in terms of performance. The problem with Sun was their product innovation completely stopped and all they did was tweak the underlying technology. Oracle is just as bad if not worse. This means they have their market locked in, but it's an ever shrinking market that can't be grown.
Imagine instead that you have a rack where you can add and remove boards as you see fit. Need 4 more CPUs each with 16-64 execution units, insert a board. Need another 64GB memory? Insert a board. Need a pile of ethernet ports perhaps with a builtin soft configurable switch, add a board. Or FC-AL, or anything else. And, more interestingly, want to remove a board? Push the stop button on it and the kernel begins releasing all resources on it used - unconfigure interfaces, power down CPUs, or deallocate (possibly page out) memory. When it's safe to remove a light comes on and you pull it out. A power supply might take up four slots; need redundancy? Put in 2 and set the mode to active slave. Or stick in a video board and run it like a big fat desktop. Such a system might cost more than the equivalent x86 servers, perform less, give less bang for buck, but it would have reasonable incremental expansion costs and flexibility. It would find an immediate customer base in academia and technical markets - the pizza box of the 2010s.
In the case of the Sparc T5 they're once again just going after cost. Nothing wrong with that, but more telling is there's no product innovation going on.
...and there was no one else left to lift a finger.
Twitter would have made no difference. I was opposed to the Iraq war exactly because waving dossiers without sharing any useful fact or showing hard proof sounded like total BS. Yet in the anti-war demonstrations and anti-war rhetoric it was all about "no war for oil". The reason the war happened was because it was unopposed, which was because the retard knee-jerk left had hijacked the opposition. The Saddam Hussein regime sold us all the oil we wanted, especially if we were to lift the sanctions, so the whole leftist narrative was as much BS as Powell's dossier. I couldn't even tell if these people even cared if there was a misguided war or not, or if anyone died, as long as they could win a few political points. That's why the war happened - because of the left's intellectual inbreeding and inability to make a coherent argument against it. Twitter wouldn't have helped with that, because they'd still be tweeting about war-for-oil narratives which most people would just roll their eyes and facepalm at.
Supporting the Shah has nothing to do with it. Tyrants always play up past grievances to epic proportions. If we hadn't supported the Shah they'd simple use something else. Or make something up; it doesn't terribly matter how factual it is, since once they start talking war over it and build an army to overrun their neighbors it starts being taken seriously. And if it's something they invented they can steer public opinion. What's exceptional in the Iraq war is that a dictator got a taste of their own medicine for a change, and instead of trying counter fiction and warmongering with a rational response we replaced their fictitious narrative with our own.
Well, let's keep in mind that the purpose of the ICC is to prosecute war criminals in states that won't prosecute themselves. The same legislative body that passes the Service Members Protection Act also has laws in place for the prosecution of U.S. war criminals. And it oversees the military judicial system, which prosecutes the same. If you hand evidence to a military prosecutor that some general ordered the genocide of a village, or instituted a policy of persecution, or otherwise ordered crimes to be committed - they WILL be investigated, and if there is a case there WILL be prosecution. In fact if there's any organization on this planet that's anal about obeying rules it's the U.S. federal government. NO part of the federal government tolerates criminal activity. There's just no debate; you'd be handed off to the FBI immediately. The same applies to the U.S. armed forces, there's just no tolerance for attacking or abusing civilians. There's no culture of doing that. It's not an organization built for that purpose, to set that into system, organized to that end. It decides exactly what it can do, then sticks to it. An officer would have an extremely hard time getting away with any crap, so when it happens it tends to be individuals or small units that lose it. Which do get prosecuted, making an obvious example to anyone else who ever considered the same, and their superiors get investigated to make sure they weren't involved in it. Their email, text messages, random witnesses who might have overheard orders or discussions, etc - it all gets collected. As a result, it's not possible to claim no as of yet uncovered systematic war crimes never happened in some conspiracy at some point, but it's really very remote. A state and a military ruled by law doesn't need the ICC. The only people who would be indicted would be by political finger pointing ("oh yeah, Obama himself must been involved!!! Amerikkka baaahd!!!").
Note the "citation needed" in that Wikipedia quote. NATO's position was that if adopted it becomes law, and first use would become an criminal act. But the USSR was never hampered by this since it wasn't ruled by law, and could just change its mind and strike first. Hence, the agreement would in practice have different implications for the two parties. NFU is irrelevant today and never amounted to more than a propaganda play.
and a lot of fairly intelligent people also think it's valid.
The issue that brought it to light was 'is the acquiring of WMDs a cause for preemptive war? It's largely agreed that there can be circumstances where a preemptive war is justified.
Yes, it's justified where the owner of the weapons publicly threatens or promises to use them against me. Not pre-emptively because I've never made a comparable threat, but regardless of what I say and do, because their stated goal is to kill me.
Just for a moment imagine that China and and North Korea got together and did some military exercises simulating the invasion of the US off of the California coast.
We would find it natural if they got together and simulated a defense against an attack by the U.S. or anyone else for that matter. Just like we get together with South Korea to simulate a defense against an attack by the north.
It's important to understand that the DPRK is not like any other country. Any other country would agree to peace, demobilization, and getting back to business. But the DPRK is organized solely for the purpose of winning a war against the south. It doesn't want peace. It wants to find an angle where its chances of winning are reasonably good - at which point it seize the opportunity before it's lost. The DPRK promotes people who win wars, who don't stop to think or worry about casualties. Children are indoctrinated into a war mentality starting in kindergarten. This isn't "western propaganda" or some sort of slander - it's how the country is organized in every respect.
Doesn't the US use the strike first excuse to continually start wars with smaller countries by claiming WMD's, terrorists etc
Debatable if we ever did. Maybe Cuba, but Cuba had a policy of being the spearhead of a Soviet attack on the U.S., so was genuinely hostile. It wasn't until after the blockade and standoff that the Cubans (on the insistence of the Russians) changed their policy and agreed to coexist, while the U.S. more or less implicitly agreed not to try to restore the Batista regime.
We're currently at war though, with Al-Qaeda and their allies. They attacked us by bombing NYC, which we considered an act of war even if it's not by a state. That's just a technicality however, like any other sovereign state we will defend ourselves. We bombed Al-Qaeda bases and camps in Afghanistan in return for their bombing our embassy in Nairobi; we didn't consider the embassy bombing an act of war. If the Afghans considered the retaliation an act of war they didn't say so. Either way, it's not unusual for parties to claim a war started at different points; the fact is we're at war with AQ, their allies, and the states that aid them. This means captured enemies may be held as POWs until the war is over (indefinitely if so needed) - and POWs don't have the rights of criminals. They live under a military regime and discipline, are expected to provide their name and rank (if not they may be considered clandestines in which case we'll hand them to our clandestines to obtain information), have no visitation rights, no right to attorney (they don't need any unless they're also accused of crimes - which we will try them for once the war is over), no private space, no right to mail unless we agree to it, etc. We can hold them until the war is over - indefinitely if required. If as a state you aid or shelter our enemy you become our enemy. (Pakistan? Hello? You listening? Pay attention! This part is important to you.)
Iraq was our enemy because Saddam Hussein said it was. It's that simple. If you open your mouth and say you have WMDs and you will be giving them to our enemy it doesn't matter if you actually have them or not, plan to give them away or not, or if you're just high on hashish. You made yourself our enemy, and we'll squish you. If you don't want this to happen it's as easy as keeping your mouth shut and not spread rumors about fictitious weapons programs.
when they want to steal someone elses resources.
The U.S. has never stolen resources from anyone. We may have bought at the time cheap resources which then turned out to be extremely valuable, at which point the seller wants it back. Or they want to cancel the deal for some other reason.
Maybe you're thinking of the silliness of war for oil? We don't go to war over oil. Whoever is in power, whether tyrant or humane democrat or anything inbetween, will sell us all the oil we need at market price. From an oil perspective it makes absolutely no difference. If they don't sell it to us someone else will. In fact, we even use oil embargos as a sanction: if you don't clean up your act we won't buy oil from you, and everyone else will have to choose between doing business with you or us. Guess who will be standing with billions of unsold barrels of oil and no liquidity to Xboxes and Mercks for the elite? Iran is finding out. Others can find out too. Wars for oil? What a stupid idea by people who can't think straight.
Or have a dictator pupet they want to place in power.
This pretty much ended with the USSR. We no longer need them. Our natural allies are other democracies; while there may be squabbles and hostilities, we're family and have an inherent bond and stick up for each other. (I'd be inclined to make an exception for Pakistan though.) However, we still do business and can have friendly relations with strategically important dictatorships, especially when it comes to balancing threats against other democr
Similar, but different for important reasons. A cease fire is a temporary stop for a specified period of time. There can be a lot of reason for that, but peace discussion usually isn't one of them
The reason there's no peace treaty is that N.K. has never wanted to discuss it. They accept nothing other than unification in a communist state, and the only peaceful way that can happen is if the south surrenders. It's not merely a policy - the entire N.K. state is built to support the war effort. When it thinks it has a good chance of winning it will attack. It's not going to hesitate, and in fact regards failure capitalize on advantage as a character failure and incompetence.
Yeah, they might have to attach it to a seventy year old propeller powered aircraft.
Delivery is EASY. Especially if you only have one. The first one is the easiest to deliver.
It's not that easy. Any N.K. aircraft would be watched the entire way across the pacific and intercepted when it got close enough to the west coast. Even if it claims to be full of defectors it would be assumed to be hostile and directed to a remote airfield, without getting near anything urban. It would be directed to enter the airspace at a safe course; failure to comply would inevitably end up with it shot down well off the coast. It would be landed, those on board detained, and the aircraft searched. The damage they could do by setting off a fission device at any time would be very limited.
The alternative is to smuggle it to Canada (not easy) or Mexico (perhaps easier) and fly it in from there. Still the chance of just flying in over the restricted airspace of a major city with the kind of aircraft needed to carry a primitive fission device is minuscule. It's not something you put in the back of a Cessna 172... Primitive nuclear weapons are huge, radioactive, and draw tons of attention.
A more important reason is tactical: the civilians aren't attacking, and shelling them isn't going to help win the war against those who are actively trying to kill you. Talk is cheap, but in war any sane commander will target the latter. Of course there are many examples of insane commanders, and it's not entirely impossible N.K. would fall into that category. But it's a whole lot more likely they're only actively nurturing an image of crazy, and will act rationally should the war resume.
Also, the Chinese PLA 'volunteer units' wouldn't be equipped by China, unlike in the 1950s. Then they claimed the equipment belonged to the people and the PLA units, and the government couldn't prevent the units from taking it with them. That just would never fly today; even the most ardent communist dinosaur would find it laughably transparent. (In the 50s though communists found it perfectly reasonable.)
I don't think that's quite what I suggested in my post; no question that North Korea's army is no joke, but I do think that South Korea with the US backing them would be able to take North Korea, if China decides to sit out hostilities.
The U.S. could defeat North Korea today without much trouble. That would hurt South Korea, but strictly speaking it wouldn't hurt the U.S. so if N.K. were actually a threat to the U.S. we could say screw the south, we're taking them down. The reason we don't is that they're not a threat to us; they're a threat to our allies and we defend our allies from a belligerent neighbor, not the other way around. There's no point resuming war with N.K. until they attack. There's nothing to gain, just a bunch of dead people on both sides. But let's be clear about it: if those dead people potentially involved a U.S. city or the west coast, the equation would change - and not in the favor of Koreans on either side of the border. This is why their current threats are dangerous.
In terms of military, N.K. is no more sophisticated than Iraq, Iran, Serbia, Libya, Syria, China, etc. They just have a bigger arsenal than some. They will still have nothing to put up and will only take a little longer to grind down. It would still be a complete massacre, and since we can hand off any rebuilding to the south - which is the real cost - it would mostly just the cost of a few thousand troops and a few billions in spent munitions and fuel. A air war would destroy their air defenses and air fields, then ports and ships, then bases, artillery, and armor. Then the USMC would overrun the territory; Iraq took three weeks from border to border, so maybe a week or two for N.K. once they roll. Basically, we can take down N.K. at any time. And China wouldn't do squat because they'd just be massacred the same, although they might send 'volunteers' like last, but nothing they'd get too involved about. This is not the 1950s or 1970s anymore... their air defense would never even see it coming, after which they quickly no longer have any. Of course, this would be pointless until they become a direct threat to the U.S.
Lack of evidence is not the problem - the problem is that the IAEA is blocked from inspecting facilities part of Iran's nuclear program. There are only two plausible reasons for this: either you have a nuclear weapons program, or you want the world to think you have one. It makes no difference which is the case.
It's very odd to me that they seem to have left out Lexar completely from this little test.
The Lexar 1000X CF cards are still the gold standard for photography.
Back when it was still updated, Rob Galbraith's card performance database was the place to look.
That's why you should use a utility like teracopy to do the copy. I use it to verify that the files have been copied and then immediately delete the files on the card. That way, I know that they made it to the disk.
I'd recommend leaving them on the card until you've backed up the disk so you have two copies at all times. When out traveling I import everything new on a card to Lightroom on my laptop, but leave it on the card. When the card is close to full I move on to the next. When I get home and have safely copied everything from my laptop to my main NAS I reformat the cards. I also leave the images on the laptop; when the 480GB SSD on it fills up I delete old images. The NAS gets backed up to disks that are stored off-site, but I'm in no rush to delete anything off the laptop until I need space. It's actually nice to always have my latest work on hand on the laptop as well.
But, basically, my rule is two or more copies.
Definitely not a top-of-the-line camera, but still fairly decent - Canon EOS 7D. With the latest firmware, mine claims to have a 22 shot buffer in RAW, 80 shot buffer in large JPEG. 8fps. Plus it'll potentially shoot for even longer depending on how fast the memory card is - but it does take CompactFlash rather than SD.
22 shots is merely the size of the buffer though. If you shoot 4 fps continuous and it takes 1 second to flush each raw image, then it will take 5 seconds for you to get to shot #22. In those 5 seconds the camera will have flushed the first 5 shots though and you have only 17 in the buffer. So you can shoot 5 more. Now at shot #27 the camera with have flushed one more and you can squeeze in shot #28 before it slows down to match the flush rate. The # of shots you get before it slows down is reciprocal of the buffer fill rate (in - out). When out >= in, it's 1/0, or infinite, which in practice means the buffer never fills and you can shoot until the card fills up. This also tells us that as out rate approaches in rate there is a disproportionately rapid gain in # of continuous shots until slowdown. Of course, out rate is capped by the card controller speed in the camera, so at some point a faster card doesn't help, but it depends on the camera. The current gen Nikons (at least D800 and D4) seem to make good use of whatever card speed you wish to splurge on.
It's also worth noting that a faster cards will give a few more shots before the buffer fills, simply because fill_rate = in_rate - out_rate. If in_rate is camera specific dependent on settings and continuous shooting speed, then increasing out_rate reduces fill_rate, making the buffer last longer.
To rip in real time, you'd need at least 7 MB/s of write throughput, or something faster than a class 6.
7MB/s is pretty slow by today's standards though. Most of my CF cards for my pair of D800E's are 30, 45, 90MB/s write. Faster cards provide for generally more responsive interface speeds for review, delete, reformat, focus checking, etc. Less time spent writing saves battery since the time between sleep modes is reduced. I rarely fill the buffer though, even on a camera not made for continuous action shooting. However, when the buffer does fill card speed is very noticeable. To a photographer nothing is worse and more distracting than a camera that doesn't go click when you push the shutter release!
whenever I see discussions on slashdot this does not really seem to be an issue to US citizens at all. Why is this the case? Are these problems properly addressed in school and media?
The mess at Hanford is the result of experimentation in all kinds of processing, reactor construction, and handling. It's the byproduct of learning how to do this safely and what works and what doesn't. When the worst waste was produced mainly in the 40s and 50s, there was no practical knowledge or experience with any of this. As usual, we bore the brunt of the cost and effort of figuring all the basics out, while everybody else shows up after the heavy lifting is done.
Yeah, go for three. One for the usual email etc, one for editing and debugging, and one for the application you're working on. Nothing is as inconvenient as having an event driven GUI app and debugger on the same screen. If you bring the debugger to the front you can't see what's being rendered. If you bring the application to the front you obscure the debugger, and if the app is stopped on a breakpoint it won't service the event loop. You can share the two on a larger display without overlap, but these days you need to be able to debug an app in full screen mode. The third display is for email, skype/IM, looking up documentation etc without interrupting your work in progress.
It's easy to override for those who need it. A competent IT department will do so remotely.
See also: http://phys.org/news/2013-01-false-beliefs-persist-instant-online.html