I think my original point still stands, because Kennedy had a vision of humanity bettering itself through the application of technology that would have had knock-on effects after he left office. Not one President since then has actually _inspired_ that kind of project and has instead been quite happy to bomb middle-eastern countries and wonder why the sons and daughters hate America so much.
Short term thinking is the key. Whereas three centuries ago people tended to think in terms of anything up to forty years to finish any large project, these days government gets really antsy about anything that takes longer than four years.
"Underneath the outer atmosphere is liquid metallic hydrogen. What does that mean?"
You're putting forward theory as fact and missing a several thousand kilometre thick wodge of increasingly dense gas that can stay partially stable for months or centuries in the case of the Great Red Spot.
The major point appears to be the bottom line. So far the American government has started to _demand_ that pure research carry solid results in a typically short-sighted fashion, meaning that anything undertaken has to show a valid political gain within the four/eight year term of any given president.
Kennedy pretty much stated that they'd go to the moon, _knowing_ that he wouldn't be president by the time they got there, and although various political commentators might point out the propaganda issues involved, I personally think that the result is what counted there.
"Drones are now armed, and dangerous, and some Yemenis terrorists learned this the hard way (meaning they were blown to smithereens by a Predator-launched missile."
I'm still not convinced that a Predator can carry and launch a terminal guidance missile and I regard this as disinformation of a type that is happening more and more often.
I could believe that the Predator painted the target for a laser guided weapon along the lines of a GBU-15, but I don't believe for one instant that they were confident enough of remote piloting a light aircraft that could reliably identify a ground target.
It smells like bigging up the capabilities of an RPV until Boeing get the fighters on the blend.
"But in most cases it's safer than conventional weapons: disabling electronics in a hospital, on an intersection or at a chemical plant is better than just pelt those targets with bombs."
Pelting Hospitals with bombs is generally not a good idea anyway, because the UN gets all uppity and starts waving around the Geneva Convention and mentioning 'civilians'.
I suspect that anyone suggesting using HPM weaponry in Iraq is looking more at the 'testbed' nature of the war rather than their effectiveness, given that the state of arms/armament in that region is limited to mostly surplus Russian/American hardware.
The only conceivable reason for deployment would be to attack hardened targets and communications, but you can bet that those things would be protected against induced currents (DefStan mentions three inline arrestors for antenna for protection from nuclear EMP), however, the civilians aren't.
So, instead of simply looking at the lovely byline provided by the warporn reports, it might be interesting to look at the effect of EMP as a whole in terms of the effects it produces. I believe someone mentioned 'pacemakers exploding'.
OD
PS The US has been pumping money into 'non-lethal' weaponry for years, mainly as a means of stressing supply lines rather than working on the conventional method of 'killing lots of troops'. The collatoral/infrastructure damage from indiscriminate use of HPM is going to be more, not less, than conventional arms. The main problem the US (and other developed nations) have is avoiding troop casualties.
"Well, with all of this new revelation that the universe is made up of 95% of "dark matter","
I.e. 'cold' matter that you can't pick up easy by looking for it.
"do we really know that dark matter didn't create the hydrogen atoms?"
It did. It's protons, neutrons, electrons, WIMPs, MACHOs and other exotica that it's really hard to construct in a lab less than several light years in size with easy access to a stable fusion furnace and near zero-g with ample parking. One of the newer ideas is strange matter, lumps of superdense collections of strange quarks.
The 'big bang' is simply a method of delineating the 'before' and 'after' of a single event...before...nobody knows...after, there's a fairly tight sequence of events that hang together quite well given the constants that can be tested on earth and our basic assumptions about the universe. That's not to say it's correct, but it's probably darned close.
"The international and unregulated nature of the internet has, up until now, enabled communication that was completely untappable. This should do more for solving that problem, at least for law enforcement authorities (no hackers tracking my traffic please;) ), giving criminals and terrorists alike nowhere to hide. I for one welcome these measures, as I don't wish to see another 9/11, and presumably neither do the rest of you."
You have to be trolling. Oh well, in answer to that...
1) Centralised data means a single point of attack.
2) Trust your government, do you? Even after Iran Contra?
3) I don't notice anyone saying that they've gotten any useful intelligence from emails _before_ a crime has been committed.
It's the same in the UK. The civil service seem very eager for there to be a national identity card, and keep proposing it as a solution for a variety of different problems.
One year it can be used to combat terrorism, the next it can be used to crack down on asylum seekers. ooh how about we use to prevent identity fraud ? Every time the public refuses to accept this government monitoring of them, but still the civil servants keep suggesting the same plan over and over.
I must admit that I haven't fathomed out why the identity card is going to be better (New! Improved!!) than our existing passports and/or national insurance numbers. Either those mechanisms of identity verification are so flawed as to be laughable (chilling in the case of passports) or there is another agenda than merely verifying someone's identity.
I note that most places are refusing passports as a method of identification these days.
I'm strenuously opposing the idea they have of supplying 'smart cards' containing personal information. Kinda the reason we started using serverside sessions rather than cookies all those years back.
I think one thing that annoys me more than anything else is that government looks at the technology that Geeks have put through the mincer and rejected and think, 'hey, that's neat'. I've seen what passes for IT in government and the NHS and it frightens me, seriously.
Oddly Draconis. If you have to ask, you wouldn't understand.
One of the slightly odder claims is that this was worth $90 million anually.
That's over three times the annual piracy rate in Taiwan. source: http://www.ifpi.org/site-content/press/20021017.ht ml
Something smells and for once it's not my T-shirt.
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I think my original point still stands, because Kennedy had a vision of humanity bettering itself through the application of technology that would have had knock-on effects after he left office. Not one President since then has actually _inspired_ that kind of project and has instead been quite happy to bomb middle-eastern countries and wonder why the sons and daughters hate America so much.
Short term thinking is the key. Whereas three centuries ago people tended to think in terms of anything up to forty years to finish any large project, these days government gets really antsy about anything that takes longer than four years.
OD
"Learn some basic astronomy."
You mean planetography.
"Underneath the outer atmosphere is liquid metallic hydrogen. What does that mean?"
You're putting forward theory as fact and missing a several thousand kilometre thick wodge of increasingly dense gas that can stay partially stable for months or centuries in the case of the Great Red Spot.
OD
The major point appears to be the bottom line. So far the American government has started to _demand_ that pure research carry solid results in a typically short-sighted fashion, meaning that anything undertaken has to show a valid political gain within the four/eight year term of any given president.
Kennedy pretty much stated that they'd go to the moon, _knowing_ that he wouldn't be president by the time they got there, and although various political commentators might point out the propaganda issues involved, I personally think that the result is what counted there.
OD
"Drones are now armed, and dangerous, and some Yemenis terrorists learned this the hard way (meaning they were blown to smithereens by a Predator-launched missile."
I'm still not convinced that a Predator can carry and launch a terminal guidance missile and I regard this as disinformation of a type that is happening more and more often.
I could believe that the Predator painted the target for a laser guided weapon along the lines of a GBU-15, but I don't believe for one instant that they were confident enough of remote piloting a light aircraft that could reliably identify a ground target.
It smells like bigging up the capabilities of an RPV until Boeing get the fighters on the blend.
OD
"But in most cases it's safer than conventional weapons: disabling electronics in a hospital, on an intersection or at a chemical plant is better than just pelt those targets with bombs."
Pelting Hospitals with bombs is generally not a good idea anyway, because the UN gets all uppity and starts waving around the Geneva Convention and mentioning 'civilians'.
I suspect that anyone suggesting using HPM weaponry in Iraq is looking more at the 'testbed' nature of the war rather than their effectiveness, given that the state of arms/armament in that region is limited to mostly surplus Russian/American hardware.
The only conceivable reason for deployment would be to attack hardened targets and communications, but you can bet that those things would be protected against induced currents (DefStan mentions three inline arrestors for antenna for protection from nuclear EMP), however, the civilians aren't.
So, instead of simply looking at the lovely byline provided by the warporn reports, it might be interesting to look at the effect of EMP as a whole in terms of the effects it produces. I believe someone mentioned 'pacemakers exploding'.
OD
PS The US has been pumping money into 'non-lethal' weaponry for years, mainly as a means of stressing supply lines rather than working on the conventional method of 'killing lots of troops'. The collatoral/infrastructure damage from indiscriminate use of HPM is going to be more, not less, than conventional arms. The main problem the US (and other developed nations) have is avoiding troop casualties.
"Well, with all of this new revelation that the universe is made up of 95% of "dark matter","
I.e. 'cold' matter that you can't pick up easy by looking for it.
"do we really know that dark matter didn't create the hydrogen atoms?"
It did. It's protons, neutrons, electrons, WIMPs, MACHOs and other exotica that it's really hard to construct in a lab less than several light years in size with easy access to a stable fusion furnace and near zero-g with ample parking. One of the newer ideas is strange matter, lumps of superdense collections of strange quarks.
The 'big bang' is simply a method of delineating the 'before' and 'after' of a single event...before...nobody knows...after, there's a fairly tight sequence of events that hang together quite well given the constants that can be tested on earth and our basic assumptions about the universe. That's not to say it's correct, but it's probably darned close.
"The international and unregulated nature of the internet has, up until now, enabled communication that was completely untappable. This should do more for solving that problem, at least for law enforcement authorities (no hackers tracking my traffic please ;) ), giving criminals and terrorists alike nowhere to hide. I for one welcome these measures, as I don't wish to see another 9/11, and presumably neither do the rest of you."
You have to be trolling. Oh well, in answer to that...
1) Centralised data means a single point of attack.
2) Trust your government, do you? Even after Iran Contra?
3) I don't notice anyone saying that they've gotten any useful intelligence from emails _before_ a crime has been committed.
OD
It's the same in the UK. The civil service seem very eager for there to be a national identity card, and keep proposing it as a solution for a variety of different problems. One year it can be used to combat terrorism, the next it can be used to crack down on asylum seekers. ooh how about we use to prevent identity fraud ? Every time the public refuses to accept this government monitoring of them, but still the civil servants keep suggesting the same plan over and over. I must admit that I haven't fathomed out why the identity card is going to be better (New! Improved!!) than our existing passports and/or national insurance numbers. Either those mechanisms of identity verification are so flawed as to be laughable (chilling in the case of passports) or there is another agenda than merely verifying someone's identity. I note that most places are refusing passports as a method of identification these days. I'm strenuously opposing the idea they have of supplying 'smart cards' containing personal information. Kinda the reason we started using serverside sessions rather than cookies all those years back. I think one thing that annoys me more than anything else is that government looks at the technology that Geeks have put through the mincer and rejected and think, 'hey, that's neat'. I've seen what passes for IT in government and the NHS and it frightens me, seriously. Oddly Draconis. If you have to ask, you wouldn't understand.
One of the slightly odder claims is that this was worth $90 million anually. That's over three times the annual piracy rate in Taiwan. source: http://www.ifpi.org/site-content/press/20021017.ht ml
Something smells and for once it's not my T-shirt.