That's the heart of the problem. Currently we are still waiting the 1 km-higth tower, the spain-morocco bridge, there are still people starving on earth, there is still no settlement on the moon nearly 40 years after a man landed first landed on it. All of those points are also only a matter of dedication and resources.
We are not in a StarTrek-like society working for glory. So, yes when there is a 1 mile bridge made of nanotubes, we could start thinking that maybe there is hope for the space elevator.
Was it only in Stark Trek where they built the Mackinac Bridge, the Hoover Dam, and the U.S. road system? Or how about the Apollo missions themselves?
I agree that determination is an issue, but it's hardly sci-fi to think that we could have it.
BTW, the reason we don't have a moon base is because it turns out to be a very difficult problem, much more so than simply touching down on the surface. Even more so without easy access to space.
Then compare that to our current lift technologies. I did this 6 months ago, and seem to remember us needing something on the order of 1000 launches of our biggest rockets to get the elevator up into the sky.
Or like one well-researched proposal I've seen, where you initially launch a very small cable, and then use the elevator itself to lift more cables that you weave into the existing one. The number of launches then becomes 1, but it adds the fun problem of designing a climber that can both climb the cable and weave new cable into the existing one at a reasonable rate for completing the elevator, which turns out to be something like a few hundred miles per hour.
5 cm^2 is pretty huge, you know. A meter wide and paper-thin sound more reasonable.
I know LEO is much less expensive.) that is still ignoring our need for a massive counterweight, which far exceeds the mass of the climber and cargo.
From the same proposal as before: Extend the cable out past GSO, so you don't need a tremendously huge counterweight (only one equal to the weight you want to lift, the cable itself is balanced around GSO), and you can use the climbers that splice new cable into the existing one as the weight when they reach the end.
The proposals I've seen using nanotubes have had a tapered cable or ribbon. I certainly couldn't disprove it, but I'd be surprised to find that steel would actually work.
The hard part of the problem is the materials science.
Nor is it the sort of discoveries we've seen in the materials side of the equation; fibers measured in millimeters. That's not a prototype, it's just basic research. Interesting basic research, worthy basic research, and good basic research to be sure, but it's not a demonstration of practicality by any stretch of the imagination.
When someone builds a small footbridge out of these things, I'll be interested. When you can scale that to a mile-long suspension bridge that supports two lanes of traffic in each direction, I'll be optimistic.
Can't say I agree. The hard part of the problem is the materials science... and here we have in labs macroscopic fibers of a suitable material. Is it long enough? No. Is it strong enough? No. But neither were the first cables of drawn steel strong enough to do what we use them for today in applications you would consider uterly common. Like suspension briges.
The material science, the hard part of the problem as you say, is progressing fantastically. Not "operational space elevator in twenty years" fantastically, but we've made orders of magnitude improvements in strength/weight that were unfathomable twenty years before. I'd say there's every reason in the world to be optimistic, until further research shows that we are in fact heading down an impossible path.
At the point at which we've built a suspension bridge out of carbon nano-fibres, you're way past the point where anyone with any sense would be optimistic. Assuming we've solved the other problems that now seem inconsequential, like climbing robots, then building the elevator would simply be a matter of dedication of resources. Much like building the first steel suspension bridge after the development of sufficiently good steel wire.
Interesting. The last time I recall the issue coming up was when Nike was claiming in their advertisements that they had improved conditions for the sweatshop workers and that they were not sweatshops anymore. I remember this because they were sued for false advertising, but the court ruled that while Nike's claims were in fact false, their lie was protected by the 1st Ammendment.
This was from an article linked by/. a couple years ago, so anything resembling detail is gone. Except the "it's okay for them to lie about sweatshops because of the 1st Ammendment" thing, since the insanity that causes the word "person" in the 14th Ammendment to apply to corporations but not homosexuals (at least until very recently) is a major pet peeve of mine.
I once thought just like the OP. It was in Atari's hey day, before the 5200 had succeeded in failing. I distinctly remember discussing with my friend the future of game consoles, and I was convinced that Atari would never be dethroned. My friend was skeptical. A few years later and it was obvious I was wrong. My excuse is that I was ten years old, but so was my friend, heh. Anyway the next time a situation like that came up with Nintendo I wasn't surprised to see them drop the ball. I surely am not surprised to see Sony too trying to ride on nothing but their good name, and they will be as shocked as ten-year-old me to discover that this just gets their good name run through the mud.
I used Emusic back when it was unlimited downloads, and it was quite simply music heaven. I wasn't one of those guys who downloaded 20G of music that I could never listen to. Instead I would download a dozen albums from bands I'd never heard of, burn a CD to listen to at work, and decide what I liked over the course of a couple weeks, then download more of the bands I liked for several more weeks of new music enjoyment.
It was this ability to experiment and try out new bands that made it great. I hadn't heard of most of the bands they had, so even more than at a typical music store the ability to sample as much as I wanted was liberating. Once they switched (back, they charged per song when they first opened) to a limited model, the feeling of freedom was gone. Now I had to pick and choose what was worth . I cancelled my subscription.
The ideal sharing application would be bittorrent. Single-source peer-to-peer file sharing programs are too slow compared to a high-speed dedicated server, whereas bittorrent can be faster than a single beefy server.
Anyway, this is a fantastic idea. If they switched back to an all-you-can-eat model I'd re-up my subscription in a heartbeat.
Basically, Sony is making many of the exact same mistakes Sega made with the Saturn. Given that Sony was Sega's "$299" antagonist at the time, you'd think they'd know better.
Yeah, you'd think that being famous for "winning" E3 merely by uttering a price that undercut the competition by $100 would make them realize that price does matter.
If you don't want the blu-ray player, don't buy it.
Oh, don't worry, that's what many people have already decided.
As a Blu-Ray player, it's a good deal.
As a game console, it isn't a good deal.
So the question is: How many people care about Blu Ray vs care about having a game console? And if you care about Blu Ray right now and are thus an early adopter with spare cash to blow on something that could go the way of laserdisc, are you going to buy a "good deal" Blu Ray player or a "high end" Blu Ray player? You've already spent several grand on your TV; is it worth it to buy a top-end player to hook up to it, or do you need to make your game console pull double-duty?
The rest of us who don't have an HD TV couldn't care less about Blu Ray. Assuming I ever do care about HD video formats it's going to be after the format war shakes out, whether that means one format wins and the other dies, or multi-format players become ubiquitous (like with DVD writers).
Sony is trying to use the PS3 to win the format war so that people will care about Blu Ray. In the meantime, the only thing positive you can say about the PS3 price is "it's good for a Blu Ray player".
The problem with this is: Sony is trying to create demand for a new format with a product whose price can only be justified if you already have demand for that format.
I can't say I really liked seeing all the product placement... Yet at the same time, it wasn't really in-game advertising, as there were no explicit logos or trademarked names on anything -- merely recognizable shapes/designs/colors. The idea was to play on existing familiarities, not reinforce product branding.
This was present in Pikmin 1 also, but at an even more subtle level. You never really collected the various products, they'd just be sitting in the scenes, covered in moss or otherwise representing the fact that this alien world was actually a post-humans earth inundated with the trash we leave behind everywhere we go.
Now... I'm actually a big Nintendo fan. A HUGE one. I even liked Pokémon to an extent (Pokémon Stadium 2 has great party games). But I have to call out someone on their BS, even if it's a Nintendo exec.
Right. This is the difference between being a fan and a fanboy.
I don't follow. In order to show that someone is making things up, you have to make things up yourself? That doesn't make sense. I see no reason why you couldn't do a line-by-line debunking that is rigorous, backed by facts where necessary, or at least points out "this is unreferenced", "this is taken out of context", "There is an implied conclusion here", or "the evidence doesn't support this conclusion".
Yes, sorry, I didn't make that clear. The reason that doing a complete 100% line-by-line debunking nearly always resorts to using the same erroneous techniques as the thing being debunked is that it it is extremely rare that the original material is 100% false. A truly rigorous and unbiased debunking would allow for this and admit where it was unable to fault a claim (with rigor). Which should hopefully illuminate my previous post's point: These line-by-line debunkings have as their goal the refutation of everything the original source said, and thus sacrifices rigor in order to be able to say something bad about everything in the source.
What was Bush doing reading? Perhaps he was scheduled to read to a group of elementary students for weeks or months in advance. Perhaps the terrorists weren't considerate enough to inform Mr. Bush of the impending attack on the World Trade Center. According to reports, when the first sketchy information about a plane hitting the World Trade Center came in, Bush's first reaction was, "That's one lousy pilot." Which, I have to admit was my first reaction upon hearing the news on my clock radio that morning. In fact, I spent twenty minutes getting up and ready before I switched to headline news to see "if they might show the moron". By that time, the second plane had already hit. According to the Conspiracy Theorists out there, I must have been part of the conspiracy because I was brushing my teeth while the planes hit the buildings. It's just as valid as your statement about Bush.
And after seeing that a second plane had hit the second tower and that America was clearly being attacked by unknown forces, did you then return to your morning routine as if nothing had happened?
You are giving Bush way too much credit and not recalling what really happened. When his aide whispered in his ear that a second plane had struck and that "America is under attack", he continued to sit in his seat and read My Pet Goat for another seven minutes. Now if you're anything like me, you don't fancy yourself much of a prime candidate for the job of President. Yet do you not agree that you, I, or just about anyone on hearing the news that the nation you lead is being attacked, would have excused oneself from the publicity stunt and then demanded to hear anything and everything known about these attacks?
Now this doesn't prove anything vis a vis Bush and 9/11 conspiracy. Instead, it proves something much more mundane, and something much more obvious five years later: Bush is a terrible leader. He is a horrible Commander in Chief, he is a horrible leader in times of true urgency. He can't think on his feet at all -- if it isn't handed to him by his handlers and speech writers, then he botches it or as in the case of My Pet Goat completely seizes up, unable to act.
That's the problem with 'line-by-line' debunkings. In order to prove the thesis that the entire Loose Change video is 100% nonsense without any glimmer of truth at all, the author of the debunking needs to refute each and every single little comment made in the entire thing. This innevitably involves the same leaps of logic, unreferenced sources, and implication through sarcasm/incredulity that you can legitimately fault the original source for.
The problem is adherence to that original thesis, which is an expression of the intention to crush the conspiracy theorists, rather than to examine the truth -- adherence to an agenda at the expense of rigorous truth being what the debunker is accusing the conspiracy theorist of! There was the same problem with debunkings of Farenheit 9/11 -- in order to prove that nothing Michael Moore said was true, the debunkers had to go out on limbs at least as far as Moore himself did.
Fortunately I don't feel a need to accept or reject anything 100%, and I can read both the original theory and the debunkings with a grain of salt and say "that sounds like BS, that makes me wonder, this is speculation, this has some sources I should check into"... an so forth.
I think you should view the debunking of Loose Change in the same way. Don't necessarily take it seriously, but do look at where it seems to be making valid points.
Neither of the things I meantioned were hypothetical in the least. Are you talking about the Contra's selling drugs in the U.S.? That happened. The archive has documents showing that the government was aware of Contra-run planes flying into the country -- California specifically -- loaded with drugs, and leaving full of weapons they purchased with the proceeds from the drugs. The government knew and approved, it being a perfect way to get around the fact that directly funding the Contras was at that point illegal.
As far as secrecy, I'm not sure what that has to do with things being hypothetical vs. real. It is true that there was a news report that made the same allegations that are now known to be true, but it wasn't until many years later that an FOIA request gave us the documents in the archive and proved that they were in fact true. Yet there are still people who don't believe it happened. So not that bad a job of keeping it secret, if you ask me.
Except FEMA claims that it was primarily fire damage that caused the collapse. Which makes sense, as for the building to fall straight down as it did the core of the building would have had to have been damaged, while if the damage to the south side was critical to the collapse either that side would have fallen while the rest remained upright or it would have fallen over rather than implode.
I'm not claiming to have all the facts, and I can admit that because unlike that other douchebag, the facts are all I care about. None of us have all the facts. Yet the facts as they have been presented in the official story are suspicious to me, thus my questions. Thanks for the interview links, they were informative.
Quote: "In a stunning and belated development concerning the attacks of 9/11 Larry Silverstein, the controller of the destroyed WTC complex, stated plainly in a PBS documentary that he and the FDNY decided jointly to demolish the Solomon Bros. building, or WTC 7, late in the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001."
Wow, thanks. That's fascinating, in that it directly contradicts the official story -- has it been adopted into the official story?
Back to the engines. Airplane engines are relatively fragile pieces of equipment and are full of fuel. Also, given that they are close to the body on a 757 Picture Here The hole made in the pentagon was bigger than the fuselage by a large amount. There was one hole and it makes sense that there was one hole. When objects crash into a building or wall, they do not leave nice clean carboard cutouts like in cartoons, they leave big gaping holes.
They are not relatively fragile compared to the rest of the plane. Look at any other crash -- the engines are usually one of the most recognizable pieces remaining. Now I can't see any reference to the size of the impact hole, but my recollection is that it wasn't much larger than the main fuselage, and while "close" the engines are distanced from the main body by more than half the width of said body. Of course a plane won't make nice clean cardboard cutouts; this is exactly why it looks odd.
Love that place, and love the Freedom of Information Act that allows it to exist -- one of the true strengths of our Democracy.
If you haven't read it, and if you are at all prone to dismissing "conspiracy theories" on the basis that our government wouldn't do that kind of thing, you have to read it. If you've ever wondered: Did the CIA really know and approve of the Contras funding their war by selling drugs in the States? Did the U.S. really know that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand and providing cover stories for him? Read it.
Nothing that I know of that is relevent to the current situation, but it is still a fantastic archive and a great resource for putting to pasture any remaining naivete you may have about the nature of governments.
If anything's wrong, it's the towers falling so quickly like they did.
And the third building (WTC 7, wasn't it?) falling at all. Apparently it was struck by falling debri... which caused it to collapse on itself just like the skyscrapers next to it? This has never made sense to me.
Neither has the apparent lack of damage from the engines of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Those engines contained more concentrated mass than the main fuselage of the plain; should there not be three holes in the wall?
Personally, $600 for a console is an outlandish sum in my household, and if my boy asked for one, I'd tell him he's nuts and he'd better get a job (thankfully he's only 2).
Yeah, if he was older it'd be much worse. I hear the labor market is really suffering now for the five to nine year old demographic. As it is he shouldn't have much trouble landing a job.
I posted this yesterday, but anyway I though of something when they were taking about how cheap the PS3 was since Bluray was implemented, and it's doesn't look good for Bluray. Basically, the PS3 is going to kill off Bluray, and I'll tell you why.
Then there's the fact that most gamers interested in the PS3 don't care about Blu Ray. Since Blu Ray is both the reason that the PS3 is so expensive and the killer feature that is supposed to make you want it despite the high price, I think it's also fair to say that Blu Ray may kill off the PS3.
The PS3 is far from the most expensive console in history (that would be the Neo Geo, at almost $1000 adjusted price) but that hasn't stopped analysts, publishers, developers, and gamers from grumbling about it the week after E3.
Well, when you put it like that... I guess I won't be buying a NeoGeo either!
Of course that comparison hasn't stopped people from complaining. Nobody cares about a favorable comparison against a ridiculously overpriced console that never saw any mainstream (i.e. not arcade) success. What we care about is comparisons against the relevent competition, or comparisons against what we can afford.
It's like debunking the rise of authoritarianism in America by saying China is worse. "Better than China" isn't something I want to be bragging about. Or Bill Clinton improving the education system in Arkansas from 50th to 49th. Um, good job?
I think it's interesting that Sony is pushing their console into a price realm that hasn't been breached by a commercially successfull console since before the PC revolution.
Square, on the other hand, royally screwed Nintendo, and people seem to forget that Nintendo actually played the 'mature' role by not publicly bad-mouthing Square. Then, somehow, people like the grandparent poster to this day believe that Nintendo did something to alienate Square other than not provide enough storage space for their games.
The space issue is clearly the most important thing, the reason there was no FF for the N64. Yet after FFVII was released for the PS1, a Nintendo rep (president? U.S. President? I don't remember) did in fact publicly bad-mouth Square and specifically FFVII. He said he was actually glad that N64 owners couldn't play FFVII, said they were being saved from having to play the movie-posing-as-game.
I hate load times as much as the next guy, and love Nintendo more than the next guy, but honestly saying FFVII was a bad game and that Nintendo gamers were better off without it was just stupid. As was using cartriges when contemporary games were clearly demanding more, load times be damned. It may be the latter that kept Square off the N64, but the former sure pissed off a lot of Nintendo fans and couldn't have made Square happy either.
Wealth only came into it because 1) this guy was wealthy, as he would have to be to buy the tag to shoot the bear and 2) only wealthy people have the time to waste to travel to far away locations just to shoot things to bring back as souvenirs.
You apparently didn't "hear" the real distinction, which was people who shoot things to make dinner versus people who shoot things to make decorations for their den.
I have family who hunts for sport -- as in they don't need to hunt in order to eat -- and likes a good trophy, but they also get a year's supply of venison out of the deal. That, to me, makes all the difference between connecting with our hunter past and killing things to feel like a big shot.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the heart of the problem. Currently we are still waiting the 1 km-higth tower, the spain-morocco bridge, there are still people starving on earth, there is still no settlement on the moon nearly 40 years after a man landed first landed on it. All of those points are also only a matter of dedication and resources.
We are not in a StarTrek-like society working for glory. So, yes when there is a 1 mile bridge made of nanotubes, we could start thinking that maybe there is hope for the space elevator.
Was it only in Stark Trek where they built the Mackinac Bridge, the Hoover Dam, and the U.S. road system? Or how about the Apollo missions themselves?
I agree that determination is an issue, but it's hardly sci-fi to think that we could have it.
BTW, the reason we don't have a moon base is because it turns out to be a very difficult problem, much more so than simply touching down on the surface. Even more so without easy access to space.
Then compare that to our current lift technologies. I did this 6 months ago, and seem to remember us needing something on the order of 1000 launches of our biggest rockets to get the elevator up into the sky.
Or like one well-researched proposal I've seen, where you initially launch a very small cable, and then use the elevator itself to lift more cables that you weave into the existing one. The number of launches then becomes 1, but it adds the fun problem of designing a climber that can both climb the cable and weave new cable into the existing one at a reasonable rate for completing the elevator, which turns out to be something like a few hundred miles per hour.
5 cm^2 is pretty huge, you know. A meter wide and paper-thin sound more reasonable.
I know LEO is much less expensive.) that is still ignoring our need for a massive counterweight, which far exceeds the mass of the climber and cargo.
From the same proposal as before: Extend the cable out past GSO, so you don't need a tremendously huge counterweight (only one equal to the weight you want to lift, the cable itself is balanced around GSO), and you can use the climbers that splice new cable into the existing one as the weight when they reach the end.
The proposals I've seen using nanotubes have had a tapered cable or ribbon. I certainly couldn't disprove it, but I'd be surprised to find that steel would actually work.
The hard part of the problem is the materials science.
Nor is it the sort of discoveries we've seen in the materials side of the equation; fibers measured in millimeters. That's not a prototype, it's just basic research. Interesting basic research, worthy basic research, and good basic research to be sure, but it's not a demonstration of practicality by any stretch of the imagination.
When someone builds a small footbridge out of these things, I'll be interested. When you can scale that to a mile-long suspension bridge that supports two lanes of traffic in each direction, I'll be optimistic.
Can't say I agree. The hard part of the problem is the materials science... and here we have in labs macroscopic fibers of a suitable material. Is it long enough? No. Is it strong enough? No. But neither were the first cables of drawn steel strong enough to do what we use them for today in applications you would consider uterly common. Like suspension briges.
The material science, the hard part of the problem as you say, is progressing fantastically. Not "operational space elevator in twenty years" fantastically, but we've made orders of magnitude improvements in strength/weight that were unfathomable twenty years before. I'd say there's every reason in the world to be optimistic, until further research shows that we are in fact heading down an impossible path.
At the point at which we've built a suspension bridge out of carbon nano-fibres, you're way past the point where anyone with any sense would be optimistic. Assuming we've solved the other problems that now seem inconsequential, like climbing robots, then building the elevator would simply be a matter of dedication of resources. Much like building the first steel suspension bridge after the development of sufficiently good steel wire.
Interesting. The last time I recall the issue coming up was when Nike was claiming in their advertisements that they had improved conditions for the sweatshop workers and that they were not sweatshops anymore. I remember this because they were sued for false advertising, but the court ruled that while Nike's claims were in fact false, their lie was protected by the 1st Ammendment.
/. a couple years ago, so anything resembling detail is gone. Except the "it's okay for them to lie about sweatshops because of the 1st Ammendment" thing, since the insanity that causes the word "person" in the 14th Ammendment to apply to corporations but not homosexuals (at least until very recently) is a major pet peeve of mine.
This was from an article linked by
I once thought just like the OP. It was in Atari's hey day, before the 5200 had succeeded in failing. I distinctly remember discussing with my friend the future of game consoles, and I was convinced that Atari would never be dethroned. My friend was skeptical. A few years later and it was obvious I was wrong. My excuse is that I was ten years old, but so was my friend, heh. Anyway the next time a situation like that came up with Nintendo I wasn't surprised to see them drop the ball. I surely am not surprised to see Sony too trying to ride on nothing but their good name, and they will be as shocked as ten-year-old me to discover that this just gets their good name run through the mud.
That's a fantastic idea.
I used Emusic back when it was unlimited downloads, and it was quite simply music heaven. I wasn't one of those guys who downloaded 20G of music that I could never listen to. Instead I would download a dozen albums from bands I'd never heard of, burn a CD to listen to at work, and decide what I liked over the course of a couple weeks, then download more of the bands I liked for several more weeks of new music enjoyment.
It was this ability to experiment and try out new bands that made it great. I hadn't heard of most of the bands they had, so even more than at a typical music store the ability to sample as much as I wanted was liberating. Once they switched (back, they charged per song when they first opened) to a limited model, the feeling of freedom was gone. Now I had to pick and choose what was worth . I cancelled my subscription.
The ideal sharing application would be bittorrent. Single-source peer-to-peer file sharing programs are too slow compared to a high-speed dedicated server, whereas bittorrent can be faster than a single beefy server.
Anyway, this is a fantastic idea. If they switched back to an all-you-can-eat model I'd re-up my subscription in a heartbeat.
Basically, Sony is making many of the exact same mistakes Sega made with the Saturn. Given that Sony was Sega's "$299" antagonist at the time, you'd think they'd know better.
Yeah, you'd think that being famous for "winning" E3 merely by uttering a price that undercut the competition by $100 would make them realize that price does matter.
If you don't want the blu-ray player, don't buy it.
Oh, don't worry, that's what many people have already decided.
As a Blu-Ray player, it's a good deal.
As a game console, it isn't a good deal.
So the question is: How many people care about Blu Ray vs care about having a game console? And if you care about Blu Ray right now and are thus an early adopter with spare cash to blow on something that could go the way of laserdisc, are you going to buy a "good deal" Blu Ray player or a "high end" Blu Ray player? You've already spent several grand on your TV; is it worth it to buy a top-end player to hook up to it, or do you need to make your game console pull double-duty?
The rest of us who don't have an HD TV couldn't care less about Blu Ray. Assuming I ever do care about HD video formats it's going to be after the format war shakes out, whether that means one format wins and the other dies, or multi-format players become ubiquitous (like with DVD writers).
Sony is trying to use the PS3 to win the format war so that people will care about Blu Ray. In the meantime, the only thing positive you can say about the PS3 price is "it's good for a Blu Ray player".
The problem with this is: Sony is trying to create demand for a new format with a product whose price can only be justified if you already have demand for that format.
I can't say I really liked seeing all the product placement... Yet at the same time, it wasn't really in-game advertising, as there were no explicit logos or trademarked names on anything -- merely recognizable shapes/designs/colors. The idea was to play on existing familiarities, not reinforce product branding.
This was present in Pikmin 1 also, but at an even more subtle level. You never really collected the various products, they'd just be sitting in the scenes, covered in moss or otherwise representing the fact that this alien world was actually a post-humans earth inundated with the trash we leave behind everywhere we go.
Now... I'm actually a big Nintendo fan. A HUGE one. I even liked Pokémon to an extent (Pokémon Stadium 2 has great party games). But I have to call out someone on their BS, even if it's a Nintendo exec.
Right. This is the difference between being a fan and a fanboy.
I don't follow. In order to show that someone is making things up, you have to make things up yourself? That doesn't make sense. I see no reason why you couldn't do a line-by-line debunking that is rigorous, backed by facts where necessary, or at least points out "this is unreferenced", "this is taken out of context", "There is an implied conclusion here", or "the evidence doesn't support this conclusion".
Yes, sorry, I didn't make that clear. The reason that doing a complete 100% line-by-line debunking nearly always resorts to using the same erroneous techniques as the thing being debunked is that it it is extremely rare that the original material is 100% false. A truly rigorous and unbiased debunking would allow for this and admit where it was unable to fault a claim (with rigor). Which should hopefully illuminate my previous post's point: These line-by-line debunkings have as their goal the refutation of everything the original source said, and thus sacrifices rigor in order to be able to say something bad about everything in the source.
What was Bush doing reading? Perhaps he was scheduled to read to a group of elementary students for weeks or months in advance. Perhaps the terrorists weren't considerate enough to inform Mr. Bush of the impending attack on the World Trade Center. According to reports, when the first sketchy information about a plane hitting the World Trade Center came in, Bush's first reaction was, "That's one lousy pilot." Which, I have to admit was my first reaction upon hearing the news on my clock radio that morning. In fact, I spent twenty minutes getting up and ready before I switched to headline news to see "if they might show the moron". By that time, the second plane had already hit. According to the Conspiracy Theorists out there, I must have been part of the conspiracy because I was brushing my teeth while the planes hit the buildings. It's just as valid as your statement about Bush.
And after seeing that a second plane had hit the second tower and that America was clearly being attacked by unknown forces, did you then return to your morning routine as if nothing had happened?
You are giving Bush way too much credit and not recalling what really happened. When his aide whispered in his ear that a second plane had struck and that "America is under attack", he continued to sit in his seat and read My Pet Goat for another seven minutes. Now if you're anything like me, you don't fancy yourself much of a prime candidate for the job of President. Yet do you not agree that you, I, or just about anyone on hearing the news that the nation you lead is being attacked, would have excused oneself from the publicity stunt and then demanded to hear anything and everything known about these attacks?
Now this doesn't prove anything vis a vis Bush and 9/11 conspiracy. Instead, it proves something much more mundane, and something much more obvious five years later: Bush is a terrible leader. He is a horrible Commander in Chief, he is a horrible leader in times of true urgency. He can't think on his feet at all -- if it isn't handed to him by his handlers and speech writers, then he botches it or as in the case of My Pet Goat completely seizes up, unable to act.
That's the problem with 'line-by-line' debunkings. In order to prove the thesis that the entire Loose Change video is 100% nonsense without any glimmer of truth at all, the author of the debunking needs to refute each and every single little comment made in the entire thing. This innevitably involves the same leaps of logic, unreferenced sources, and implication through sarcasm/incredulity that you can legitimately fault the original source for.
The problem is adherence to that original thesis, which is an expression of the intention to crush the conspiracy theorists, rather than to examine the truth -- adherence to an agenda at the expense of rigorous truth being what the debunker is accusing the conspiracy theorist of! There was the same problem with debunkings of Farenheit 9/11 -- in order to prove that nothing Michael Moore said was true, the debunkers had to go out on limbs at least as far as Moore himself did.
Fortunately I don't feel a need to accept or reject anything 100%, and I can read both the original theory and the debunkings with a grain of salt and say "that sounds like BS, that makes me wonder, this is speculation, this has some sources I should check into"... an so forth.
I think you should view the debunking of Loose Change in the same way. Don't necessarily take it seriously, but do look at where it seems to be making valid points.
Neither of the things I meantioned were hypothetical in the least. Are you talking about the Contra's selling drugs in the U.S.? That happened. The archive has documents showing that the government was aware of Contra-run planes flying into the country -- California specifically -- loaded with drugs, and leaving full of weapons they purchased with the proceeds from the drugs. The government knew and approved, it being a perfect way to get around the fact that directly funding the Contras was at that point illegal.
As far as secrecy, I'm not sure what that has to do with things being hypothetical vs. real. It is true that there was a news report that made the same allegations that are now known to be true, but it wasn't until many years later that an FOIA request gave us the documents in the archive and proved that they were in fact true. Yet there are still people who don't believe it happened. So not that bad a job of keeping it secret, if you ask me.
And severe structural damage.
Except FEMA claims that it was primarily fire damage that caused the collapse. Which makes sense, as for the building to fall straight down as it did the core of the building would have had to have been damaged, while if the damage to the south side was critical to the collapse either that side would have fallen while the rest remained upright or it would have fallen over rather than implode.
I'm not claiming to have all the facts, and I can admit that because unlike that other douchebag, the facts are all I care about. None of us have all the facts. Yet the facts as they have been presented in the official story are suspicious to me, thus my questions. Thanks for the interview links, they were informative.
That's too bad, because that would have made sense. Instead we have the Warren Commision-esque "magic fire".
Quote: "In a stunning and belated development concerning the attacks of 9/11 Larry Silverstein, the controller of the destroyed WTC complex, stated plainly in a PBS documentary that he and the FDNY decided jointly to demolish the Solomon Bros. building, or WTC 7, late in the afternoon of Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2001."
Wow, thanks. That's fascinating, in that it directly contradicts the official story -- has it been adopted into the official story?
Back to the engines. Airplane engines are relatively fragile pieces of equipment and are full of fuel. Also, given that they are close to the body on a 757 Picture Here The hole made in the pentagon was bigger than the fuselage by a large amount. There was one hole and it makes sense that there was one hole. When objects crash into a building or wall, they do not leave nice clean carboard cutouts like in cartoons, they leave big gaping holes.
They are not relatively fragile compared to the rest of the plane. Look at any other crash -- the engines are usually one of the most recognizable pieces remaining. Now I can't see any reference to the size of the impact hole, but my recollection is that it wasn't much larger than the main fuselage, and while "close" the engines are distanced from the main body by more than half the width of said body. Of course a plane won't make nice clean cardboard cutouts; this is exactly why it looks odd.
Love that place, and love the Freedom of Information Act that allows it to exist -- one of the true strengths of our Democracy.
If you haven't read it, and if you are at all prone to dismissing "conspiracy theories" on the basis that our government wouldn't do that kind of thing, you have to read it. If you've ever wondered: Did the CIA really know and approve of the Contras funding their war by selling drugs in the States? Did the U.S. really know that Iraq was using chemical weapons against Iran and the Kurds at the same time Donald Rumsfeld was shaking Saddam's hand and providing cover stories for him? Read it.
Nothing that I know of that is relevent to the current situation, but it is still a fantastic archive and a great resource for putting to pasture any remaining naivete you may have about the nature of governments.
If anything's wrong, it's the towers falling so quickly like they did.
And the third building (WTC 7, wasn't it?) falling at all. Apparently it was struck by falling debri... which caused it to collapse on itself just like the skyscrapers next to it? This has never made sense to me.
Neither has the apparent lack of damage from the engines of the plane that hit the Pentagon. Those engines contained more concentrated mass than the main fuselage of the plain; should there not be three holes in the wall?
Personally, $600 for a console is an outlandish sum in my household, and if my boy asked for one, I'd tell him he's nuts and he'd better get a job (thankfully he's only 2).
Yeah, if he was older it'd be much worse. I hear the labor market is really suffering now for the five to nine year old demographic. As it is he shouldn't have much trouble landing a job.
I posted this yesterday, but anyway I though of something when they were taking about how cheap the PS3 was since Bluray was implemented, and it's doesn't look good for Bluray. Basically, the PS3 is going to kill off Bluray, and I'll tell you why.
Then there's the fact that most gamers interested in the PS3 don't care about Blu Ray. Since Blu Ray is both the reason that the PS3 is so expensive and the killer feature that is supposed to make you want it despite the high price, I think it's also fair to say that Blu Ray may kill off the PS3.
The PS3 is far from the most expensive console in history (that would be the Neo Geo, at almost $1000 adjusted price) but that hasn't stopped analysts, publishers, developers, and gamers from grumbling about it the week after E3.
Well, when you put it like that... I guess I won't be buying a NeoGeo either!
Of course that comparison hasn't stopped people from complaining. Nobody cares about a favorable comparison against a ridiculously overpriced console that never saw any mainstream (i.e. not arcade) success. What we care about is comparisons against the relevent competition, or comparisons against what we can afford.
It's like debunking the rise of authoritarianism in America by saying China is worse. "Better than China" isn't something I want to be bragging about. Or Bill Clinton improving the education system in Arkansas from 50th to 49th. Um, good job?
I think it's interesting that Sony is pushing their console into a price realm that hasn't been breached by a commercially successfull console since before the PC revolution.
Square, on the other hand, royally screwed Nintendo, and people seem to forget that Nintendo actually played the 'mature' role by not publicly bad-mouthing Square. Then, somehow, people like the grandparent poster to this day believe that Nintendo did something to alienate Square other than not provide enough storage space for their games.
The space issue is clearly the most important thing, the reason there was no FF for the N64. Yet after FFVII was released for the PS1, a Nintendo rep (president? U.S. President? I don't remember) did in fact publicly bad-mouth Square and specifically FFVII. He said he was actually glad that N64 owners couldn't play FFVII, said they were being saved from having to play the movie-posing-as-game.
I hate load times as much as the next guy, and love Nintendo more than the next guy, but honestly saying FFVII was a bad game and that Nintendo gamers were better off without it was just stupid. As was using cartriges when contemporary games were clearly demanding more, load times be damned. It may be the latter that kept Square off the N64, but the former sure pissed off a lot of Nintendo fans and couldn't have made Square happy either.
Wealth only came into it because 1) this guy was wealthy, as he would have to be to buy the tag to shoot the bear and 2) only wealthy people have the time to waste to travel to far away locations just to shoot things to bring back as souvenirs.
You apparently didn't "hear" the real distinction, which was people who shoot things to make dinner versus people who shoot things to make decorations for their den.
I have family who hunts for sport -- as in they don't need to hunt in order to eat -- and likes a good trophy, but they also get a year's supply of venison out of the deal. That, to me, makes all the difference between connecting with our hunter past and killing things to feel like a big shot.