They're not called Chipzilla for nothing. I can't remember the last time Intel had poor yields ( or were admitting to it) but this has been an issue for pretty much everyone else for years, particularly AMD.
Oh, they've had poor yields at times. But they can often make up for it -- a big part of being 'zilla -- with their sheer manufacturing capacity. Low yields just means their costs are higher, not that they can't supply customers. It has happened though that they had to "paper launch" products in the past. Though saying they've had poor yields should not be taken to imply that their fab tech isn't absolutely top notch -- low yields happens to everyone.;) But it's that fab tech times their fab size that makes them chipzilla.
There is no other fauna shown on his desert homeworld that is "about two meters" Everything was much larger or much smaller, even in the remastered edition.
Look, Luke's not used to the metric system because Tatooine uses Imperial units (groan). Second, he sucks at estimating sizes, okay? Without the Force he never would have had a chance of hitting that exhaust port.
- it's not "you died, and are dead" it's "you never existed because activation destroyed the universe". As in: nobody ever activated it, so universes where activation is possible do not exist. No one exists to comment on their survival "so-far", the universe is all-encompassing.
I thought the many-worlds interpretation of QM that this bullshit is based on was one where each quantum event results in the universe splitting into different universes for each possible outcome. Not that there is another universe exactly like this one where every quantum event up to now happened exactly the same, only now some quantum event happens differently and the two diverge. Because that still wouldn't explain quantum collapse in our universe. As in, an infinitely-branching tree, not an infinite number of non-branching lines (where some lines can't exist). That wouldn't help explain collapse at all.
In an infinity of universes, there are universes where X is physically impossible, and there are universes where X never happens despite being possible.
So now you're positing that each of these universes has different laws of physics? And for some reason, in one of these universes the universe allows for but self destructs in the event of a paradox?
As of today, every known paradox is either impossible (FTL time travel) or not actually a paradox (twins paradox). Going back to the previous statement, there is zero evidence for "you never existed because activation destroyed the universe" being a possible outcome of anything. Positing universes where universe-destroying paradoxes are possible sounds like a fun premise for science fiction, but that's about it.
Yes, I do believe that physical impossibility is much more likely and so we are probably in a universe which is simply impossible to destroy
Oh and speaking of science fiction, given as many things that have to be assumed and outright made up to support this theory, why are we making the particular assumption that a paradox destroys the universe? It seems an odd choice when a universe retro-actively destroying itself is itself a paradox. In Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, paradoxes are just part of being part of the Time Corps and something that is the agent's problem to deal with, not the universe's.
I did not mention the Higgs boson, so detection of it is unrelated.
No, that only means you didn't mention the most important aspect of this. Without the Higgs Boson and whatever hypothetical paradox its detection is hypothetically supposed to create, there is no reason whatsoever to posit that only universes with no working LHC can exist. At that point you'd basically be arguing that the Anthropic Principle means that Granny McGee of Arlington Virgina had to lose at Bingo last Tuesday.
- If activation of the LHC destroys the universe and its past, we must exist in a universe in which the universe which does not activate the LHC. The same can be said of Britney Spears releasing another hit, and I think it's no less valid.
Yeah, exactly, it's just as valid a form of circular logic. "Britney hasn't released another hit, ergo it's impossible and universe-destroying, ergo Britney can't release another hit, ergo explaining why she hasn't." I could make a "no less valid" argument that the reason I can't get my code working is because there cannot be a universe in which I have. I'll see if my boss buys that.
All because the LHC had one significant but mundane failure, and something that could have hypothetically resulted in an LHC shutdown but didn't. You mention that unlikely events would have to happen, but so far this isn't unlikely at all. The only reason this is even remotely newsworthy is because in the internet era the LHC has so many eyes on it.
this theory has actually been proposed: That activating the LHC would actually destroy the universe, that is, the whole universe, even reaching back into the past. That would mean that the only possible universes are ones in which the LHC is never activated, which means that if we keep trying, implausible events will continue to occur, preventing the LHC from activating- after all, we're here now, right. That's _proof_ that the LHC will never be activated!
Still think that's retarded. First, yes we're here now, but why must that be so? Why can't we all vanish in a puff of logic when the LHC comes on, if that's the fate of any universe in which it happens? Don't give me the quantum suicide nonsense -- yes if you're here to comment on your survival of the suicide experiment, you're in one of the lucky universes. But in many other universes, you died and are dead. Why can't this universe be one of them?
Second, when the theoretical potential for paradoxes appears, the universe doesn't prevent them through a series of implausible events that have absolutely nothing to do with the paradox in question. It prevents them via them being physically impossible. E.g. faster than light travel allows backwards time travel and thus time paradoxes. But faster than light travel is (as far as we can tell) impossible. You can't make an FTL drive that then mysteriously fails every time you try to turn it on -- you just can't build an FTL drive in the first place! If the LHC detecting a Higgs Boson results in a universe-ending paradox, then the most logic outcome is that the LHC simply won't be able to detect them.
Third, I'm not seeing what the difference between direct and indirect detection is here. Right now, the Higgs is just theory, but if it does exist, then they're everywhere and we're indirectly observing its existence every time we interact with a particle that has mass. Why is saying "Oh hey, our detectors found one!" materially different? Why does "the universe" care that we can validate our theory?
Which leads right into the Fourth, which is I'm still not seeing the theoretical basis for a Higgs-based parodox. It seems more like reverse engineering -- the LHC is busted, ergo the Higgs might cause paradoxes (which means birds drop baguettes into machinery?)
Same thing: barn swallow and red-rumped swallow nest in Europe the summer and winter in southern Africa. So it's not what the bird was but when it was that determines whether it is European or African.
No, it's the names used to describe different species that make it European and African, not its location (names don't have to make sense, and the same bird often has multiple common names). Those are two separate species of swallow.
The European Swallow aka European Barn Swallow is migratory. The African Swallow aka South African Swallow is not. So when it's summer in the southern hemisphere, you could visit South Africa and see European Swallows and African Swallows at the same time.
Whoa. That's... that's amazing. Someone actually thought they had magic powers to the point that they wanted to apply for the Randi challenge, then, going against everything I know about people claiming to be magic, rigorously tested themselves just to be sure, and came to the conclusion that oops, no they don't.
That's... wow.
I mean, maybe a lot of people do that and you never hear about it because they never publicize their non-power, but that's still just an amazing breath of fresh air.
As the price of fossil fuels rise the market will fund alternative energy sources. [Moving to non-fossil energy sources] will happen in spite of what anyone does.
Of course they will, but the question is will this funding be soon enough and large enough to sufficiently replace fossil fuels at a pace that matches the rise in oil prices?
Our entire economy is dependent on fossil fuels. If the price goes up, and there isn't enough alternative sources available so that we need to continue paying this increasing cost, it will put a severe drag on our economy. If the price of oil rises to quickly, and the alternative energy sources are not ready, it could drive us into a depression far worse than the mere recession we're still struggling with now. Where, then, will the money come from to continue developing alternative energy? And what good will it do when it takes years and years to build up?
We are facing a severe problem with fossil fuels if we don't do something about it well in advance. If "the market" is going to wait until the price of oil is prohibitively expensive, then it's going to be too late.
Funding alternative energy means getting the free market to do something it normally doesn't very well, which is respond to obvious problems before they materially hurt the market's bottom line.
Personally I think we can fund NASA too, but that's me.
Actually the surge was probably the most promising piece of strategy in the war, because there actually *were* a lot of things we wanted to be able to do in the breathing space that gave us.
One thing that doesn't get talked about much, and which I didn't know at the time when I was pessimistic about "The Surge", is that the troop buildup only represents about half of the strategy. The other half, which was brilliant and something we should have done long ago, was to engage (read: buy out) all the Sunni leaders. It's basically the same tack we took with the tribal warlords in Afghanistan where it also worked. In one fell swoop we not only denied al Qaeda in Iraq their major source of local support, we actually got their former allies to fight them for us. It also helped reduce the sectarian violence. Best use of money in Iraq in a long time as far as I'm concerned.
We should have done that a long time ago, the problem was that Rummy was incapable of seeing beyond Sunni == Bathist == Enemy.
Anyway, you're right that the problem was that the only purpose of The Surge was to create a window of opportunity for other things to happen, which didn't. Though most of those things were political, as in they needed the Iraqi government to take the lead, and well they just couldn't get them done. Go figure, the Iraqi government is as full of corruption and people interested only in themselves and their power at the expense of the country as ours (if not more so).:P
In other words, the bipartisan effort in the Obama administration/current Senate goes something like this: Hey, why don't you just agree with us and be bipartisan?.
I think that distinction deserves more than just a slash. Obama has made a significant effort to reach out to Republicans and incorporate their ideas. It's the Democrats in both houses of Congress that don't want to play along. They're the ones that are riding high on their majorities and same-party president (apparently just having a majority wasn't enough to accomplish anything) and giving the Republicans a taste of their own medicine... Which is totally what the country needs right now. *sigh*
The whole argument that we have to stay to clean up the mess only stands because everyone refuses to mention the fact that the Iraq democratically elected government have legally and publically asked us to get the hell out of their country repeatedly.
Publicly they may have been asking us to leave, but privately and legally they asked us to stay for a while. The reason? Because when that government was first formed, it literally had zero power anywhere our marines were not present to enforce it. The people in power knew that their power entirely hinged upon our presence, and would evaporate like so much acetone the second we left. It was years before more than a handful (all Kurdish) of Iraqi Army forces would even show up when needed. The police were nothing more than targets for bombers. Now they've eventually become less of a joke, but can still only deal with people like al Sadr by negotiating cease fires. They can't actually fight him (and got their asses handed to them when they tried).
Still more time passed, and in late 2008 the Iraqi government was hoping that by the middle of 2009 they would not need U.S. combat forces in the cities, and by the end of 2011 they would not need us at all, and that is the basis for the current withdrawal agreement.
There are more actors in play here than the Iraqi government and the U.S. occupation forces. Neither of those was responsible for the bombings of two weeks ago. Invading was stupid, but leaving immediately after the first elections would have been stupid too. Our stupidity in invading resulted in chaos in the aftermath of the fall of the government. The stupidity of leaving would have resulted in the fall of the government, and more chaos.
I hate it too, but there's a reality here that involves more players than just the newly formed Iraqi government and U.S. occupation forces.
Note that the Iraq war has *not* made oil cheaper: in fact it has got five times more expensive. The Iraq war has not improved the lifestyle for those of us in the belligerent countries.
Unless you're an executive for an oil company. Or a defense contractor. Or a general contractor who does both. For them the Iraq War was a smashing success.
Actually I think the burden falls on someone to come up with a reason why we should have a schedule instead of full immediate withdrawl.
Seeing as they democratically elected a government and one of the first acts passed by their government was a demand that the US withdraw its invading force from their territory.
The reason we have a schedule instead of immediate withdrawal is because the agreement with the Iraqi government includes a schedule, not a demand for immediate withdrawal.
Seriously, the Iraqi government was and still is weak. It required the presence of U.S. forces to insist upon that government's validity, otherwise that act and every other act this nascent government passed would have been worth less than the paper it was written on. The Iraqi government knows this, so don't use them as a justification for immediate withdrawal, because they don't agree with you. We aren't refusing to leave, we're staying for exactly as long as we were asked!
Invading Iraq was retarded, and the retardation that went into that decision was extended to the planning and thus the result was a disaster. The Iraqis didn't ask for 'liberation' of any kind, and they certainly didn't ask for the kind they got. But once that happened anyway, the situation became a lot more complicated than an analogy to broken windows can contain.
Thank God we're getting out, anyway. Hopefully by then the Iraqi government is strong enough to sustain itself without us. Though that's more likely than the Iraqi government not being a corrupt extension of the religious militia that makes up most of its military and government. Not that there's anything we can do about that at this point!
The Pentagon and intel agencies actually spent millions on "psychic warfare" projects at one point;
Personally I think the Pentagon's deeply credulous and well funded search for psychics to be better proof of their non-existence than the unclaimed Randi Foundation prize. You can claim Randi is biased against the existence of psychics (and of course this makes their powers not work). But these guys really, really wanted to find actual, no bullshit, no cold-reading, honest-to-God psychics. And they didn't.
The key word that's part of ICBM is "ballistic", from the Greek ballein, I throw. It's travelling through extremely thin gas, and its trajectory is therefore practically simple Newtonian dynamics. Its position from moment to moment should be extremely predictable.
In theory, yes. In practice, it's going to depend on how accurately you can measure its position and velocity at any given moment. The missile is moving very rapidly relative to the target size it presents, so small errors in measuring its position will result in larger errors in the extrapolated arc and could easily result in a miss. Also, since Star Wars none of the anti-ICBM techniques have focused on the peak of its trajectory where it is a purely Newtonian ballistic projectile. They either target the lift phase where it is most decidedly not ballistic, or the descent phase where air resistance cannot be ignored. The ones who designed and programmed the missile can't predict its trajectory to within one missile-width, so why assume it's easy for the defender to figure this out? It's not an easy problem at all, which is why the Missile Defense Shield has met with only limited (read: assisted) success.
Even worse would be to assume that technology is limited by the Latin roots of words used to describe it. "Ballistic" already applies to only a portion of the flight, and as Russia was quite keen to point out during the height of the MDS push their missiles have descent phase countermeasures like, um, dodging.
So think of it more like hitting an unconscious fly that is traveling as fast as a fastball, could at any moment wake up and start flapping, and you aren't trying to catch it in a glove, you're trying to spear it with a toothpick before it gets too close.
Solvable? Oh sure probably for any given iteration of the enemy's missile. Obviously easier than hitting a relatively slow-moving target that wants to be hit and thus can be broadcasting its position (like the test missiles did in the descent-phase anti-missile tests)? Yeah I'm not so sure about that.
The problem is, I'm sure, soluble, but the technical difficulty should not be underestimated.
No, its certainly not an easy task. I just think hitting a missile that doesn't want to be hit is comparable if not harder to achieve (because while the missile will be modified to make it harder to hit, the elevator will be modified to make it easier).
Yeah, despite all that, let's make a big deal about what the people in Iraq are doing. After all, they are primitive foreigners. There's no way good, right-thinking Americans would act that way.
Oh hey look, it's a Slashdot article making fun of lie detectors! Without mentioning the silly beliefs of Iraqis or anyone else! Thus clearly demonstrating the pro-Iraqi, anti-American biases of Slashdot.
Waitaminute... contradiction... Must... Invoke... Selective... Reasoning... No it's not working!
Okay, I guess instead I'll just have to say that we make fun of polygraphs, dousing rods, and other such things in articles about those things, and we make fun of Magic Bomb Detectors in articles about those. Now doesn't that just make a ton more sense?
It's culturally acceptable to have cats roaming the vicinity of its home, just as it's culturally acceptable to have dogs shitting everywhere, even if most of the shit is scraped up.
Have you seen all the posts in this very thread of people saying they'll shoot (at best) your cat if they find it in their yard?
Some people don't give a shit about your notion of socially acceptable, and they don't care about your cat either.
If everyone had the mentality of 'pets must never, ever, ever inconvenience me in any way what-so-ever' your dogs would have to be walked in your own garden, never to leave your property, as even the most well-looked-after dogs cause inconvenience for others.
No, they would have to be walked on a leash, not allowed to enter other peoples' property freely.
But luckily most people are sane, and so aren't that ridiculous.
Yeah, most people just ask that you keep your dog on a leash, and your cat inside or otherwise out of their yard. And for the safety of your animal, you should comply.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not called Chipzilla for nothing. I can't remember the last time Intel had poor yields ( or were admitting to it)
but this has been an issue for pretty much everyone else for years, particularly AMD.
Oh, they've had poor yields at times. But they can often make up for it -- a big part of being 'zilla -- with their sheer manufacturing capacity. Low yields just means their costs are higher, not that they can't supply customers. It has happened though that they had to "paper launch" products in the past. Though saying they've had poor yields should not be taken to imply that their fab tech isn't absolutely top notch -- low yields happens to everyone. ;) But it's that fab tech times their fab size that makes them chipzilla.
There is no other fauna shown on his desert homeworld that is "about two meters" Everything was much larger or much smaller, even in the remastered edition.
Look, Luke's not used to the metric system because Tatooine uses Imperial units (groan). Second, he sucks at estimating sizes, okay? Without the Force he never would have had a chance of hitting that exhaust port.
- it's not "you died, and are dead" it's "you never existed because activation destroyed the universe". As in: nobody ever activated it, so universes where activation is possible do not exist. No one exists to comment on their survival "so-far", the universe is all-encompassing.
I thought the many-worlds interpretation of QM that this bullshit is based on was one where each quantum event results in the universe splitting into different universes for each possible outcome. Not that there is another universe exactly like this one where every quantum event up to now happened exactly the same, only now some quantum event happens differently and the two diverge. Because that still wouldn't explain quantum collapse in our universe. As in, an infinitely-branching tree, not an infinite number of non-branching lines (where some lines can't exist). That wouldn't help explain collapse at all.
In an infinity of universes, there are universes where X is physically impossible, and there are universes where X never happens despite being possible.
So now you're positing that each of these universes has different laws of physics? And for some reason, in one of these universes the universe allows for but self destructs in the event of a paradox?
As of today, every known paradox is either impossible (FTL time travel) or not actually a paradox (twins paradox). Going back to the previous statement, there is zero evidence for "you never existed because activation destroyed the universe" being a possible outcome of anything. Positing universes where universe-destroying paradoxes are possible sounds like a fun premise for science fiction, but that's about it.
Yes, I do believe that physical impossibility is much more likely and so we are probably in a universe which is simply impossible to destroy
Oh and speaking of science fiction, given as many things that have to be assumed and outright made up to support this theory, why are we making the particular assumption that a paradox destroys the universe? It seems an odd choice when a universe retro-actively destroying itself is itself a paradox. In Heinlein's The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, paradoxes are just part of being part of the Time Corps and something that is the agent's problem to deal with, not the universe's.
I did not mention the Higgs boson, so detection of it is unrelated.
No, that only means you didn't mention the most important aspect of this. Without the Higgs Boson and whatever hypothetical paradox its detection is hypothetically supposed to create, there is no reason whatsoever to posit that only universes with no working LHC can exist. At that point you'd basically be arguing that the Anthropic Principle means that Granny McGee of Arlington Virgina had to lose at Bingo last Tuesday.
- If activation of the LHC destroys the universe and its past, we must exist in a universe in which the universe which does not activate the LHC. The same can be said of Britney Spears releasing another hit, and I think it's no less valid.
Yeah, exactly, it's just as valid a form of circular logic. "Britney hasn't released another hit, ergo it's impossible and universe-destroying, ergo Britney can't release another hit, ergo explaining why she hasn't." I could make a "no less valid" argument that the reason I can't get my code working is because there cannot be a universe in which I have. I'll see if my boss buys that.
All because the LHC had one significant but mundane failure, and something that could have hypothetically resulted in an LHC shutdown but didn't. You mention that unlikely events would have to happen, but so far this isn't unlikely at all. The only reason this is even remotely newsworthy is because in the internet era the LHC has so many eyes on it.
that wasn't my title, actually its been completely rewritten by K Dawson, editors do a lot more than people think on here.
They do more to achieve less.
It must be their motto. :)
Posting things like this on the front page makes /. look very childish.
OH NOES! How will we EVER recover Slashdot's good name?!
Timothy, you should know better.
You MUST be... very fun at parties. :P
It's a rare trip to Home Depot or Lowes where I don't see sparrows perched on the rafters.
this theory has actually been proposed: That activating the LHC would actually destroy the universe, that is, the whole universe, even reaching back into the past. That would mean that the only possible universes are ones in which the LHC is never activated, which means that if we keep trying, implausible events will continue to occur, preventing the LHC from activating- after all, we're here now, right. That's _proof_ that the LHC will never be activated!
Still think that's retarded. First, yes we're here now, but why must that be so? Why can't we all vanish in a puff of logic when the LHC comes on, if that's the fate of any universe in which it happens? Don't give me the quantum suicide nonsense -- yes if you're here to comment on your survival of the suicide experiment, you're in one of the lucky universes. But in many other universes, you died and are dead. Why can't this universe be one of them?
Second, when the theoretical potential for paradoxes appears, the universe doesn't prevent them through a series of implausible events that have absolutely nothing to do with the paradox in question. It prevents them via them being physically impossible. E.g. faster than light travel allows backwards time travel and thus time paradoxes. But faster than light travel is (as far as we can tell) impossible. You can't make an FTL drive that then mysteriously fails every time you try to turn it on -- you just can't build an FTL drive in the first place! If the LHC detecting a Higgs Boson results in a universe-ending paradox, then the most logic outcome is that the LHC simply won't be able to detect them.
Third, I'm not seeing what the difference between direct and indirect detection is here. Right now, the Higgs is just theory, but if it does exist, then they're everywhere and we're indirectly observing its existence every time we interact with a particle that has mass. Why is saying "Oh hey, our detectors found one!" materially different? Why does "the universe" care that we can validate our theory?
Which leads right into the Fourth, which is I'm still not seeing the theoretical basis for a Higgs-based parodox. It seems more like reverse engineering -- the LHC is busted, ergo the Higgs might cause paradoxes (which means birds drop baguettes into machinery?)
It's that long loaf of bread that people on TV are always carrying in their grocery bags when something interesting happens to them.
Wait, I thought that was celery?
Same thing: barn swallow and red-rumped swallow nest in Europe the summer and winter in southern Africa. So it's not what the bird was but when it was that determines whether it is European or African.
No, it's the names used to describe different species that make it European and African, not its location (names don't have to make sense, and the same bird often has multiple common names). Those are two separate species of swallow.
The European Swallow aka European Barn Swallow is migratory. The African Swallow aka South African Swallow is not. So when it's summer in the southern hemisphere, you could visit South Africa and see European Swallows and African Swallows at the same time.
Or did the bird drop a decorative architectural ornament (not to be confused with a breadstick) down the hole?
You laugh, but it was that very thing that spelled doom for my short-lived career in construction contracting.
There should be a hanging sign in the Oval Office with flipping numbers that says "We have gone [63] years without a nuclear holocaust! Good Job!"
http://forums.randi.org/showthread.php?t=29682
-> performed his own double-blind tests only to discover that he had deluded himself
Whoa. That's... that's amazing. Someone actually thought they had magic powers to the point that they wanted to apply for the Randi challenge, then, going against everything I know about people claiming to be magic, rigorously tested themselves just to be sure, and came to the conclusion that oops, no they don't.
That's... wow.
I mean, maybe a lot of people do that and you never hear about it because they never publicize their non-power, but that's still just an amazing breath of fresh air.
As the price of fossil fuels rise the market will fund alternative energy sources. [Moving to non-fossil energy sources] will happen in spite of what anyone does.
Of course they will, but the question is will this funding be soon enough and large enough to sufficiently replace fossil fuels at a pace that matches the rise in oil prices?
Our entire economy is dependent on fossil fuels. If the price goes up, and there isn't enough alternative sources available so that we need to continue paying this increasing cost, it will put a severe drag on our economy. If the price of oil rises to quickly, and the alternative energy sources are not ready, it could drive us into a depression far worse than the mere recession we're still struggling with now. Where, then, will the money come from to continue developing alternative energy? And what good will it do when it takes years and years to build up?
We are facing a severe problem with fossil fuels if we don't do something about it well in advance. If "the market" is going to wait until the price of oil is prohibitively expensive, then it's going to be too late.
Funding alternative energy means getting the free market to do something it normally doesn't very well, which is respond to obvious problems before they materially hurt the market's bottom line.
Personally I think we can fund NASA too, but that's me.
Actually the surge was probably the most promising piece of strategy in the war, because there actually *were* a lot of things we wanted to be able to do in the breathing space that gave us.
One thing that doesn't get talked about much, and which I didn't know at the time when I was pessimistic about "The Surge", is that the troop buildup only represents about half of the strategy. The other half, which was brilliant and something we should have done long ago, was to engage (read: buy out) all the Sunni leaders. It's basically the same tack we took with the tribal warlords in Afghanistan where it also worked. In one fell swoop we not only denied al Qaeda in Iraq their major source of local support, we actually got their former allies to fight them for us. It also helped reduce the sectarian violence. Best use of money in Iraq in a long time as far as I'm concerned.
We should have done that a long time ago, the problem was that Rummy was incapable of seeing beyond Sunni == Bathist == Enemy.
Anyway, you're right that the problem was that the only purpose of The Surge was to create a window of opportunity for other things to happen, which didn't. Though most of those things were political, as in they needed the Iraqi government to take the lead, and well they just couldn't get them done. Go figure, the Iraqi government is as full of corruption and people interested only in themselves and their power at the expense of the country as ours (if not more so). :P
In other words, the bipartisan effort in the Obama administration/current Senate goes something like this: Hey, why don't you just agree with us and be bipartisan?.
I think that distinction deserves more than just a slash. Obama has made a significant effort to reach out to Republicans and incorporate their ideas. It's the Democrats in both houses of Congress that don't want to play along. They're the ones that are riding high on their majorities and same-party president (apparently just having a majority wasn't enough to accomplish anything) and giving the Republicans a taste of their own medicine... Which is totally what the country needs right now. *sigh*
I wonder what the false positive rate is. ;)
It's equal to the ratio of Ford Pintos that go through Iraqi checkpoints. :)
The whole argument that we have to stay to clean up the mess only stands because everyone refuses to mention the fact that the Iraq democratically elected government have legally and publically asked us to get the hell out of their country repeatedly.
Publicly they may have been asking us to leave, but privately and legally they asked us to stay for a while. The reason? Because when that government was first formed, it literally had zero power anywhere our marines were not present to enforce it. The people in power knew that their power entirely hinged upon our presence, and would evaporate like so much acetone the second we left. It was years before more than a handful (all Kurdish) of Iraqi Army forces would even show up when needed. The police were nothing more than targets for bombers. Now they've eventually become less of a joke, but can still only deal with people like al Sadr by negotiating cease fires. They can't actually fight him (and got their asses handed to them when they tried).
Still more time passed, and in late 2008 the Iraqi government was hoping that by the middle of 2009 they would not need U.S. combat forces in the cities, and by the end of 2011 they would not need us at all, and that is the basis for the current withdrawal agreement.
There are more actors in play here than the Iraqi government and the U.S. occupation forces. Neither of those was responsible for the bombings of two weeks ago. Invading was stupid, but leaving immediately after the first elections would have been stupid too. Our stupidity in invading resulted in chaos in the aftermath of the fall of the government. The stupidity of leaving would have resulted in the fall of the government, and more chaos.
I hate it too, but there's a reality here that involves more players than just the newly formed Iraqi government and U.S. occupation forces.
Note that the Iraq war has *not* made oil cheaper: in fact it has got five times more expensive. The Iraq war has not improved the lifestyle for those of us in the belligerent countries.
Unless you're an executive for an oil company. Or a defense contractor. Or a general contractor who does both. For them the Iraq War was a smashing success.
Actually I think the burden falls on someone to come up with a reason why we should have a schedule instead of full immediate withdrawl.
Seeing as they democratically elected a government and one of the first acts passed by their government was a demand that the US withdraw its invading force from their territory.
The reason we have a schedule instead of immediate withdrawal is because the agreement with the Iraqi government includes a schedule, not a demand for immediate withdrawal.
Seriously, the Iraqi government was and still is weak. It required the presence of U.S. forces to insist upon that government's validity, otherwise that act and every other act this nascent government passed would have been worth less than the paper it was written on. The Iraqi government knows this, so don't use them as a justification for immediate withdrawal, because they don't agree with you. We aren't refusing to leave, we're staying for exactly as long as we were asked!
Invading Iraq was retarded, and the retardation that went into that decision was extended to the planning and thus the result was a disaster. The Iraqis didn't ask for 'liberation' of any kind, and they certainly didn't ask for the kind they got. But once that happened anyway, the situation became a lot more complicated than an analogy to broken windows can contain.
Thank God we're getting out, anyway. Hopefully by then the Iraqi government is strong enough to sustain itself without us. Though that's more likely than the Iraqi government not being a corrupt extension of the religious militia that makes up most of its military and government. Not that there's anything we can do about that at this point!
The Pentagon and intel agencies actually spent millions on "psychic warfare" projects at one point;
Personally I think the Pentagon's deeply credulous and well funded search for psychics to be better proof of their non-existence than the unclaimed Randi Foundation prize. You can claim Randi is biased against the existence of psychics (and of course this makes their powers not work). But these guys really, really wanted to find actual, no bullshit, no cold-reading, honest-to-God psychics. And they didn't.
The key word that's part of ICBM is "ballistic", from the Greek ballein, I throw. It's travelling through extremely thin gas, and its trajectory is therefore practically simple Newtonian dynamics. Its position from moment to moment should be extremely predictable.
In theory, yes. In practice, it's going to depend on how accurately you can measure its position and velocity at any given moment. The missile is moving very rapidly relative to the target size it presents, so small errors in measuring its position will result in larger errors in the extrapolated arc and could easily result in a miss. Also, since Star Wars none of the anti-ICBM techniques have focused on the peak of its trajectory where it is a purely Newtonian ballistic projectile. They either target the lift phase where it is most decidedly not ballistic, or the descent phase where air resistance cannot be ignored. The ones who designed and programmed the missile can't predict its trajectory to within one missile-width, so why assume it's easy for the defender to figure this out? It's not an easy problem at all, which is why the Missile Defense Shield has met with only limited (read: assisted) success.
Even worse would be to assume that technology is limited by the Latin roots of words used to describe it. "Ballistic" already applies to only a portion of the flight, and as Russia was quite keen to point out during the height of the MDS push their missiles have descent phase countermeasures like, um, dodging.
So think of it more like hitting an unconscious fly that is traveling as fast as a fastball, could at any moment wake up and start flapping, and you aren't trying to catch it in a glove, you're trying to spear it with a toothpick before it gets too close.
Solvable? Oh sure probably for any given iteration of the enemy's missile. Obviously easier than hitting a relatively slow-moving target that wants to be hit and thus can be broadcasting its position (like the test missiles did in the descent-phase anti-missile tests)? Yeah I'm not so sure about that.
The problem is, I'm sure, soluble, but the technical difficulty should not be underestimated.
No, its certainly not an easy task. I just think hitting a missile that doesn't want to be hit is comparable if not harder to achieve (because while the missile will be modified to make it harder to hit, the elevator will be modified to make it easier).
What exactly is a cookie molecule ?
It's CO2KI. A carbon atom, two oxygen atoms, one potassium, and iodine. There's an extra 'e' added to its common name in English.
It's funny you should mention that, because around late October 2008 I was desperately moaning "Braaaaaaaains!"
Yeah, despite all that, let's make a big deal about what the people in Iraq are doing. After all, they are primitive foreigners. There's no way good, right-thinking Americans would act that way.
Oh hey look, it's a Slashdot article making fun of lie detectors! Without mentioning the silly beliefs of Iraqis or anyone else! Thus clearly demonstrating the pro-Iraqi, anti-American biases of Slashdot.
Waitaminute... contradiction... Must... Invoke... Selective... Reasoning... No it's not working!
Okay, I guess instead I'll just have to say that we make fun of polygraphs, dousing rods, and other such things in articles about those things, and we make fun of Magic Bomb Detectors in articles about those. Now doesn't that just make a ton more sense?
It's culturally acceptable to have cats roaming the vicinity of its home, just as it's culturally acceptable to have dogs shitting everywhere, even if most of the shit is scraped up.
Have you seen all the posts in this very thread of people saying they'll shoot (at best) your cat if they find it in their yard?
Some people don't give a shit about your notion of socially acceptable, and they don't care about your cat either.
If everyone had the mentality of 'pets must never, ever, ever inconvenience me in any way what-so-ever' your dogs would have to be walked in your own garden, never to leave your property, as even the most well-looked-after dogs cause inconvenience for others.
No, they would have to be walked on a leash, not allowed to enter other peoples' property freely.
But luckily most people are sane, and so aren't that ridiculous.
Yeah, most people just ask that you keep your dog on a leash, and your cat inside or otherwise out of their yard. And for the safety of your animal, you should comply.