It's not only latin neuter plurals that end in -a. In all indo-european languages, the neuter nominative, vocative and accusative plurals end in -a. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, German, Polish, Russian etc. It's one of those odd signs that show how closely related these seemingly disparate languages (and many of the people who speak them) really are.
(Of course many Indo-European languages lost the neuter gender anyway -- eg English, French, Persian -- so it doesn't apply to those)
Actually, most of thoose weapons were french, not American. Beyond that, they were given to him because Iran was threatining to use them.
The plain fact is that the US did supply Saddam with both chemical and biolgical weapons. And the US made clear to Saddam that it had no objections to him using them in the 1980s -- neither against the Iranians, nor against the Kurds. And the reason was not because the Iranians were going to use them. It was much simpler than that. The Iranians were going to win, and the US was happy for Saddam to do anything he could to stop that. (It's also interesting that after Saddam invaded Iran -- at US instigation -- the US condemned Iran for its aggression. Goebbels would have been proud.)
After all, trade liberalization did nothing for Europe right? I mean it's not like all of the governments of Europe pre-WWI and WWII were brutal monarchies and dictatorships. It's not like Japan benefited at all from reform of their society post WWII correct?
Where did you get the notion that democracy only arrived in Europe after WWII? There were more brutal dictatorships in Europe after WWII than before it. (Remember Poland? Hungary? Czechoslovakia? All democracies in the 1930s. All abandoned to Stalin in the 1940s.) Quite apart from the fact that democracy only truly arrived in the US following the civil right movement in the 1960s. A black kid in Alabama in the 1950s might as well as been living in a "brutal dictatorship" for all the protection he was given under the law.
On the free trade point, Germany and Japan were rebuilt through long-term commitment to creating a functioning civil society, not by forcing them to open up their markets to international competition. I don't recall that the Marshall Plan came attached with conditions requiring free movement of capital or removal of trade barriers. Those ideas came after monetarism killed off Keynesian economics in the 1980s.
Free trade keeps America rich, but free trade never made America rich. America became rich by carefully protecting its fledgling industries in the 19th century, then unleashing them on the world once they'd reached maturity. Today's developing countries should be allowed to do likewise.
No money ever moved from the CIA to the Islamic group that Bin Ladin was in. Certainly no money after Al qaeda was created. Please do yourself a favor and go read a decent book on Al Qaeda or the Taliban. I suggest "Taliban" or "Jihad.
Maybe you should read Unholy Wars by ABC journalist John Cooper: "Delighted by his impeccable Saudi credentials, the CIA gave Osama free rein in Afghanistan." You might also like to read what US Congressman John Paul (R, Texas - hardly a liberal) has to say on his house.gov website: "Bin Laden himself received training and weapons from the CIA, and that agency's military and financial assistance helped the Afghan rebels build a set of encampments around the city of Khost. Tragically, those same camps became terrorist training facilities for Bin Laden, who uses some of the same soldiers our military once trained as lieutenants in his sickening terrorist network. Our heroic pilots are now busy bombing the same camps we paid to build, all the while threatened by the same Stinger missiles originally supplied by our CIA."
Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from wealthy families.
Terrorism did not begin and end with 9/11. Were the USS Cole bombers rich? The Bali bombers? The attempted shoe bomber? The Morrocco bombers? The Saudi bombers? A few wealthy terrorists does nothing to undermine the basic point, that terrorism flourishes where freedom and basic rights are denied. And it is the widespread support for terrorists in the oppressed regions of the world that allows the few wealthy fanatics, such as Bin Laden, to have such influence.
When I last checked the Saudi ruling family was involved in funding the 9/11 hikackers
Aside from the fact that that is largely unproved, the last I checked the US was the strongest supporter of one of the most repressive regimes in the world. In Saudi Arabia women cannot drive, work or attend university. Morals are enforced by a religious police. Punishments such as whipping, stoning and beheading are common. This is not the Taleban, this is a regime that has been supported to the hilt by the US for decades.
The Ayatollahs are just as bad or worse than the former Shah of Iran. If you ask the common person on Iranian steets, they would probably prefer the US backed Shah to the Ayatollahs.
Oh master of facts, when did you last speak to a common person on the Iranian streets? As a part-Iranian, whose family lost everything in the revolution, let me take issue with you. The Shah was reviled, hated by almost every element of Iranian society. He was nothing more than a US puppet, installed and maintained by the CIA. You do know that in the 1950s Iran was a democratic state, don't you? And that when the democratically elected prime minister, Mossadeq, made good on his democratic promise to nationalise Iran's oil, the CIA overthrew the government and made the Shah into an absolute ruler? (No, that's not propaganda, it's well known.) Tell me, oh lover of freedom, would you rather be a citizen of a country that controls its own affairs (however badly) or of a client state wholly subjugated to the needs of its master?
Afghanistan -- US support of the Mujahadeen led to the Aghani victory and expulsion of Soviet troops from that country.
And following the expulsion of soviet troops, what happened? The country descended into a bunch of warring fiefdoms controlled by local warlords, who brought so much chaos that the Afghans welcomed the Taleban at first! (These are the same warlords that are once again back in control.) If you'd left the Soviets alone, they'd have withdrwan by themselves after 1989 and by now Afghanistan would have probably been a stable and peaceful (if still dirt poor) state.
Lebanon -- a country which is currently occupied by foreign Hezbollah terrorists. If the US staued, that country would not be the hell hole of terrorism that it s now.
Thank you, you illustrate my point perfectly. If the US had stayed and committed to restoring order in what was formerly the most pluralistic, pro-Western arab state. Instead the US did it's standard post-Vietnam "get the hell out ASAP" thing.
Your facts are wrong and you are nothing more than an Anti-american j*rk.
I've noticed that people who disagree with my posts are rarely satisfied with arguing the points, they also have to throw in personal slurs as well. It's a depressing indictment of the value afforded free speech in parts of the slashdot community.
Wasn't the last global empire the British one? (India, Pakistan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong...that's pretty global). It collapsed not because of any military deficiency, but because it couldn't afford to run it any more. Empires don't come cheap (look at the US defence budget).
As for the Roman empire, its military loss was also the result of political and economic turmoil. It certainly had nothing to do with military technology -- the "barbarians" who overran the empire had not advanced technologically for centuries. The late Roman armies spent most of their time fighting each other in endless civil wars, leaving the frontiers severely undermanned. The Romans were well aware of their military weakness (they were reduced to fielding armies composed mostly of "barbarian" tribes, still under their tribal commanders), but lacked the political and economic will to resolve the problem. The Eastern Roman Empire (later the Byzantine Empire) did overcome these problems, and survived for another 1000 years.
Indeed, nothing stops such countries from being as prosperous and free as the US.
Nothing except the dumping of subsidised Western food on their markets, that drives local farmers out of business. And the pressure to use GM crops whose terms of use prevent farmers from saving seed and replanting it next year.
Nothing except AIDs rates affecting in some cases up to half the population, made far worse by short-sighted US policies that won't give money to any aid organisation that promotes birth control (so no condoms) and by grasping pharma companies that won't let them have cheap drugs.
Nothing except Western governments that are happy to decry the use of repressive measures while selling those same repressive governments the tools of repression. (Saddam's chemical weapons were aquired with the help of the US government, after all. What did they think he'd do with them? Go fishing?)
Nothing except IMF- and World Bank-imposed policies that force governments to sign up to neo-liberal "austerity" packages that destroy their industries and leave them open to corporate takeovers by the West. (Take a look at economic history. You'll see that free-market countries like the US and Britain got rich through fiercely protective and anti-competitive policies. Only once they were economically dominant did they embrace free markets.)
Oh, and of course, there's one other thing stopping dozens of countries (from Columbia to Saudi Arabia to Khazakhstan) from becoming "civilised". US government support for governments and organisations that "commit murder against their own people and terrorism against others". (Let's not forget who funded and trained Osama and his friends in the first place...America.)
And please, don't patronise the intelligence of the world by insisting that the US went to war to liberate Iraq from a tyrannical regime and that those who resisted did so for financial gain. The war was never sold as a humanitarian war -- it was sold on the basis of WMD and terrorism. We've found no evidence of either. And those who claim it was about liberating the Iraqi people had better explain why the Iraqis needed liberating so much more than the Cubans, the Zimbabweans, the North Koreans etc.
and how will all that new hardware prevent terrorist attacks? souped-up soldiers on every internal flight? x-ray goggles to determine the contents of every passing truck?
the US is easily capable of defeating any army in the field. unless military intelligence is expecting alien invaders to land in the near future, this hardware will in no practical way affect US military superiority. Dictators won't suddenly think, shit, now the US can defeat me in 24 hours instead of a 48, so I'd better fall into line. It's hard to see why any of this stuff is necessary for anything except justifying ever-increasing military spending.
If the US govt put a fraction of the money and effort it expends on the military into addressing the grievances of dispossessed people around the world, it wouldn't have a problem with terrorism. Most current anti-American terrorist activities is focussed in countries where either the US maintains an unpopular and repressive regime (eg Saudi Arabia, and to some extent Israel - if you're a Palestinian), countries where the US formerly maintained an unpopular and repressive regime (Iran), or countries where the US made explicit or covert military interventions which did nothing to help its people (Lebanon, Afghanistan in the 1980s)
Unless the US govt changes its m.o. since the end of the Marshall Plan and returns to a long-term commitment to building sustainable states -- based on the needs of their people, not US corporations -- in countries that it has helped to devastate, we can expect Iraq and Afghanistan to become major sources of terrorists in the next few years.
Having lived for several years in Boston before returning to the UK, it might also be because Bostonians tend to drive like homicidal maniacs. (I wonder what proportion of US road deaths happen in New England). In one year of living in an apartment near a (not so busy, light-controlled) intersection, I saw two cars drive straight into buildings on the corner. one was quite impressive actually since the car had to dodge seveal concrete columns before ending up through a plate-glass windows scarcely wider than the car itself...
well actually they don't need to do it. There are stories of cheats finding a car the same make and colour as their own, then making a stick-on copy of the numberplate. That way when the owner complains he wasn't in the area at the time of the speeding/running a light/whatever, the police send him a photo of what looks exactly like his car with his number. Without a good alibi, you'll have a tough time defending that in court.
But I still stick by my point that some criminals will outwit the system. We just have to choose the dividing line that makes it difficult enough for that to happen to reduce crime effectively, but doesn't impinge on civil liberties too far.
If somebody steals your car, and you report it stolen quickly, then with cameras there's a much better chance of finding it before the number plates are switched (if your average 2-bit car thief bothers). If your numberplate is stolen, then report it stolen and the police will quickly be able to find the thief.
There are good arguments against using cameras to track cars, but the fact that criminals can get around them isn't one. There are hundreds of thousands of law-breakers out there who have managed to outwit the police. You can't use that as an argument against having police.
As long as the thing wasnt being used as an auto traffic cop for running through red lights and such, since we know from some experience here in the U.S. that that can cause some seriuos issues via mis-identifying breaking the law, and turning right at a red.
actually, Britain has hundreds of cameras used to catch motorists who speed or run red lights. Of course in the UK you're not allowed to turn at a red light anyway, but there are still misidentification problems -- mostly when people sell on their cars and the new owner doesn't register the purchase.
Interestingly in the UK there's almost no concern about the cameras imposing on civil liberties (or making mistakes). On the other hand, there was a massive backlash from motorists who regarded it as unfair that they should be penalised for speeding or running the lights...I can't say they have my sympathy. More people are killed in road accidents than any other non-disease cause of death.
Actually, food is basically government controlled in all industrialised countries. There's no "free market" for food because the US, EU, Japan etc all massively subsidize their farmers, as well as tightly regulating how food can be produced and restricting imports.
By setting subsidies, and the rules to qualify for them, governments basically control how much of each type of food is controlled. You want to produce more bread and less beans? Increase subsidies for wheat farmers, reduce them for bean farmers.
Without subsidies, food production would be far more efficient. On the other hand, precisely because everyone needs food, using subsidies to reduce the purchase price and clawing back the difference in tax is an effective way of transferring the cost of eating from the poor to the rich. Cheap food for the poor has been good policy since the Roman Empire -- keep the masses well fed, and they're less likely to revolt. There's a pretty good correlation throughout European history between the price of bread and popular revolutions.
However today the argument for subsidizing food in the West is pretty weak. Hunger is no longer a problem for even the poorest people in society (obesity is greatest among the poor). A hundred years ago most people spent something like 50% of their income on food. Today the average person spends only a fraction of that (I'm counting the cost of ingredients, not have a restaurant cook them for you). On the other hand, food subsidies in the West are one of the main barriers keeping the third world reliant on aid. Because subsidised food for the west undercuts local producers, local farmers go out of business (even though local food is almost always far cheaper to produce & distribute).
Anyone who's looking for a thought provoking new science book might want to check out the shortlist for the Aventis Prize.
Here's the lowdown:
Small World, by Mark Buchanan
In brief: Starting with the philosopher Karl Popper and finishing on Malaysian fireflies, this book covers research often neglected by popular science publications, such as computer networks and cellular biochemistry. Buchanan reveals how networks have been uncovered in all areas of life. With extraordinary examples covering everything from the KGB to the spread of syphilis, he outlines how discoveries in complexity science could lead to a new kind of physics.
Reckoning With Risk: Learning to live with uncertainty, by Gerd Gigerenzer
In brief: Everyone should read this book. Not a catchy headline, but it's surprisingly compulsive, untangling concepts such as frequency and probability, using real examples from DNA fingerprinting to HIV testing and mammograms.
The Extravagant Universe: Exploding stars, dark energy and the accelerating cosmos, by Robert P Kirshner
In brief: A supernova expert describes how an American team provided new insights into the expansion of the Universe and the mysterious dark energy that pervades the cosmos. It provides lots of colour from the frontline of astronomy. It's a good read and a clear guide to some of the key debates in cosmology over the last century.
Right Hand, Left Hand: The origins of asymmetry in brains, bodies, atoms and cultures, by Chris McManus
In brief: A fabulous read for any left-handers and - come to think of it - for all right-handers, too. It poses questions most of us never even think of, such as "Why are most people right-handed?" and "Why is the heart on the left-hand side of the body?" It draws on art, philosophy, medicine and physics to provide illuminating answers.
The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature, by Steven Pinker
In brief: Explains why many intellectuals today deny the existence of human nature and argue instead that each of us is a tabula rasa on which the environment writes. With his trademark stylish writing, wit and flair, Pinker is a top-notch guide to the latest thinking on that age-old debate over nature versus nurture. It is hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking.
Where Is Everybody? Fifty solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life, by Stephen Webb
In brief: Webb writes with verve and humour about the possible answers to the question once posed by the brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi: "If alien life exists, where IS everybody?" It's a down-to-earth guide to some of the latest thinking on staples of science fiction such as extraterrestrial life and interstellar travel.
The groundwater way is not just efficient, you can use it to do work. In fact you don't even need to pump the water to achieve cooling. Just stick one end of a thermocouple in your house and the other end in the ground. Hey presto, you're generating electricity while cooling the house. (not much, but it's still pretty neat)
Your maths is right, but your example is misleading. Moving heat from a hot room into cool ground water takes no energy input at all -- that's just the regular flow of heat (what's hot gets colder, what's cold gets hotter). What air conditioners do is move heat from a cold room into hot outside air, i.e. the cold gets colder and the hot gets hotter.
If you're looking for environmentally friendly ways to keep cool, don't get an air conditioner. Those beasts are incredibly inefficient. According to basic thermodynamics, the _maximum_ efficiency possible from a heat engine (one that either uses heat to do work, or expends work to move heat) is given by (T_h-T_l)/T_h, where T_h is the temperature (in Kelvin) of your hot reservoir, and T_l the temperature of your cold reservoir.
Now in the context of air conditioning, the "hot" reservoir is the air outside, which is at say 305K (32 C), and the "cold" reservoir the air inside, at say 293K (20C). That gives an efficiency of 4%. So for every 100 watt of electricity you'r paying for, only 4 watts actually go towards cooling your house. The other 96 watts are expended in heating up the outside air..
So what's a green alternative? Well in the middle east they came up with a pretty good solution a couple of millenia back. They're called wind towers -- basically like very tall, wide chimneys only with no fireplace underneath. As the wind passes over the chimney (and there's almost always some wind), it draws the air up and creates a cooling breeze throughout the house. Other aids are thick solid walls and stone floors -- these cool overnight and take a long time to heat up in the day.
Poland was invaded on *both* sides in 1939, not 1945.
read the post, I said Poland was invaded in 1939 not 1945. I'm half Polish, my wife is Polish, I speak fluent Polish, I've seen the bullet holes in the post office in Gdansk from the first shots fired in WW2. The US (and Britain) shamelessly abandoned Poland to Stalin. Maybe in 1945 the US only had 3 atomic bombs, but the USSR didn't get even one until 1949. The US could have had dozens by then (probably did). Many people (including Bertrand Russell, if you've heard of him) in the 1950s wondered why the US didn't use such a golden opportunity to defeat Stalin. (And as for having 3 bombs and wasting 2 of them on a country that was already clearly close to defeat...what does that tell you about long-term strategic planning?)
The U.S. was committed to defending democracy and freedom because it paid up, showed up, and turned the tide, unlike the French, who just gave up in a few weeks.
The French didn't just give up. They lost. So did the British. The British also had troops in France, and they were beaten back just as quickly (Dunkirk). The plain fact is that the German army was by far the best in the world at the time. The reason that the US and UK weren't defeated by Germany at the start of the war is simple. Neither of them have a land border with Germany.
What you think of as the holocaust didn't start until months after the Wannasee conferance, which was in 1942.
What do you mean by "what I think of as the holocaust". Ask my grandfather what he thought. He was the only survivor in his family. Ask my aunt, who worked to help reconstruct postwar Germany . The fact that industrial-scale murder didn't start until a couple of years after the Jews were herded into ghettos and forced to work as slaves with practically no food is hardly to the Nazi's favour. Moreover the allies knew what was going on, and they knew which train tracks led to the concentration camps. They could have dramatically slowed down the holocaust by bombing them. They did NOTHING to stop the holocaust during the war. That's shameful.
It certainly could NOT have done anything more than bluffed the Soviets who already occupied 3/4's of Western Europe and enjoyed a massive superiority both in armor and men
The USSR did not occupy any of western Europe with the exception of Germany as far west as Berling (and Berlin is in eastern Germany). And the reason that Eastern Europe became communist was because Roosevelt, against Churchill's advice, trusted Stalin when he promised to allow the countries "liberated" by the soviets to have free elections. It was a question of willpower as much as musclepower.
Oh, and by the way, the Russians were also fighting the Japanese (indeed technically they're still at war over some disputed islands.) Not to mention the Chinese, they had a part to play in the victory too.
Didn't see too much help rolling them up either, although we were grateful for the help.
I'll tell my uncle who spent 4 years in a Japanese PoW camp to thank you for your kind sentiments. I'm sure that the British scientists who helped develop the bomb will likewise be grateful.
Is this the crap they teach you in public schools nowadays? Your ignorance of history is as shocking as your assumption that you are a master of it.
I don't normally bring this up, but seeing as how you choose to insult my intelligence and my schooling, you're right, I did go to public school (that's the British term for prep schools). Then I went to Cambridge, where I graduated second in my year, then I won a fellowship to do my masters in Harvard, and now I'm in law school. (and yes, I did work in the real world in between.) So I think my education and intelligence stack up pretty well against most people. But even if I am an idiot, calling me names isn't the way to win the argument.
What the French, and the rest of Europe, learned from WWII is that you can't depend on the Americans to defend anyone's democracy but their own. WWII started when France and Britain declared war on Germany (in 1939) in response to Germany's invasion of Poland.
The US didn't join until 1942, after Pearl Harbour and after the Germans had declared war on the US. By this time the Axis powers had occupied practically all of continental Europe (and most of Asia) and the holocaust was well under way.
If the US had been committed to defending democracy and freedom, it would have joined France and Britain in 1939. Instead it was happy to sit on the sidelines and make money from both sides until it was itself attacked in 1942. And at the end of the war, it was happy to let Stalin take over Eastern Europe -- including Poland, for whose freedom the entire war had started. As the world's only nuclear power at the time, there's no question that the US could have forced the USSR to allow free elections in Eastern Europe. Instead, the US let its constant focus on its own short-term interest lead it into the cold war.
The lesson that Europe learned from the US in WWII was not that America will fight to protect democracy and freedom. It's that America will only fight when it believes that it's in its own narrow self-interest to do so.
No, the first thing Napoleon did was to defeat those countries that had already declared war on France. Austria, Prussia and Russia didn't much like the idea of a regicidal republic on their borders and were trying to restore the French monarchy.
Of course once Napoleon discovered how easy it was to beat everyone else, it sort of went to his head. But to start with it was pure survival.
There's no radiation pressure inside the black hole, because all the radiation comes from _outside_ the event horizon (as it must do, since nothing can escape the horizon).
Basically Hawking radiation is a consequence of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum plus an event horizon. In a vacuum, "virtual" particle-antiparticle pairs (including photons, which are their own antiparticles) are forever being spontaneously created and then annihilated. Hawking radiation happens when one half of that pair is swallowed up by a black hole. It can no longer reach the other half, so they can't annihilate each other. Instead the other particle escapes -- and that's Hawking radiation.
Essentially the black hole is "stealing" energy from the vacuum. Of course the universe has to balance the books and ultimately it works out that black hole has lost the amount of energy emitted by the escaping particle.
No. In SI units, c is not measured but defined. Physically, c is just a man-made constant of proportionality deriving from the fact that, for historical reasons, we measure time differently from space. In reality, both time and space are physical dimensions and so it makes perfect sense to express both in terms of the same units, be they seconds or metres.
That's why most theoretical physicists like to do their calculations in "natural units" -- i.e. you set c=1 and h/2pi=1 -- since in reality the values of the fundamental constants are artefacts of your measurement system. Scientifically speaking, it makes sense to set all independent constants to 1 since it brings out the fact that the "equivalence" of eg mass and energy, or distance and time, is really an identicality.
but surely the point is not how much infrastructure, but how much infrastructure per head of population (or, if you're worried about the cost, infrastructure divided by GDP).
And really, what's the cost? Going metric is not a question of replacing pint containers with half-litre ones, but of labelling the containers in metric. Thus in the UK, we "officially" use metric for most things. But most things are still the same size.
Of course in the long term it doesn't mean much to go metric unless you change the sizes of things to take advantage of the easier calculations. But that can be a much more gradual process.
Given that we know mass and energy are equivalent, why not define the kilogram in terms of its equivalent energy? i.e. 1kg = E_kg/(c^2). The energy could then be translated into the frequency of a photon having that energy using the relation E=h*v (that's v as in "nu"). So 1kg = h_kg*v/(c^2)
That reduces defining the kilogram to a question of defining the second. And the second is defined as 9192631770 oscillations of between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of Caesium 133.
In fact, because of the accuracy with which we can measure time, the second has become the defacto fundamental quantity. For example, the metre is defined in terms of the distance covered by light in 1/299 792 458 s. (such a pity they didn't just go for 1/300000000...this could have been done by keeping the metre the same but defining the second slightly differently, which hardly anyone would have noticed)
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It's not only latin neuter plurals that end in -a.
In all indo-european languages, the neuter nominative, vocative and accusative plurals end in -a. Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, German, Polish, Russian etc. It's one of those odd signs that show how closely related these seemingly disparate languages (and many of the people who speak them) really are.
(Of course many Indo-European languages lost the neuter gender anyway -- eg English, French, Persian -- so it doesn't apply to those)
Actually, most of thoose weapons were french, not American. Beyond that, they were given to him because Iran was threatining to use them.
The plain fact is that the US did supply Saddam with both chemical and biolgical weapons. And the US made clear to Saddam that it had no objections to him using them in the 1980s -- neither against the Iranians, nor against the Kurds. And the reason was not because the Iranians were going to use them. It was much simpler than that. The Iranians were going to win, and the US was happy for Saddam to do anything he could to stop that. (It's also interesting that after Saddam invaded Iran -- at US instigation -- the US condemned Iran for its aggression. Goebbels would have been proud.)
After all, trade liberalization did nothing for Europe right? I mean it's not like all of the governments of Europe pre-WWI and WWII were brutal monarchies and dictatorships. It's not like Japan benefited at all from reform of their society post WWII correct?
Where did you get the notion that democracy only arrived in Europe after WWII? There were more brutal dictatorships in Europe after WWII than before it. (Remember Poland? Hungary? Czechoslovakia? All democracies in the 1930s. All abandoned to Stalin in the 1940s.) Quite apart from the fact that democracy only truly arrived in the US following the civil right movement in the 1960s. A black kid in Alabama in the 1950s might as well as been living in a "brutal dictatorship" for all the protection he was given under the law.
On the free trade point, Germany and Japan were rebuilt through long-term commitment to creating a functioning civil society, not by forcing them to open up their markets to international competition. I don't recall that the Marshall Plan came attached with conditions requiring free movement of capital or removal of trade barriers. Those ideas came after monetarism killed off Keynesian economics in the 1980s.
Free trade keeps America rich, but free trade never made America rich. America became rich by carefully protecting its fledgling industries in the 19th century, then unleashing them on the world once they'd reached maturity. Today's developing countries should be allowed to do likewise.
No money ever moved from the CIA to the Islamic group that Bin Ladin was in. Certainly no money after Al qaeda was created. Please do yourself a favor and go read a decent book on Al Qaeda or the Taliban. I suggest "Taliban" or "Jihad.
Maybe you should read Unholy Wars by ABC journalist John Cooper: "Delighted by his impeccable Saudi credentials, the CIA gave Osama free rein in Afghanistan." You might also like to read what US Congressman John Paul (R, Texas - hardly a liberal) has to say on his house.gov website: "Bin Laden himself received training and weapons from the CIA, and that agency's military and financial assistance helped the Afghan rebels build a set of encampments around the city of Khost. Tragically, those same camps became terrorist training facilities for Bin Laden, who uses some of the same soldiers our military once trained as lieutenants in his sickening terrorist network. Our heroic pilots are now busy bombing the same camps we paid to build, all the while threatened by the same Stinger missiles originally supplied by our CIA."
Most of the 9/11 hijackers came from wealthy families.
Terrorism did not begin and end with 9/11. Were the USS Cole bombers rich? The Bali bombers? The attempted shoe bomber? The Morrocco bombers? The Saudi bombers? A few wealthy terrorists does nothing to undermine the basic point, that terrorism flourishes where freedom and basic rights are denied. And it is the widespread support for terrorists in the oppressed regions of the world that allows the few wealthy fanatics, such as Bin Laden, to have such influence.
When I last checked the Saudi ruling family was involved in funding the 9/11 hikackers
Aside from the fact that that is largely unproved, the last I checked the US was the strongest supporter of one of the most repressive regimes in the world. In Saudi Arabia women cannot drive, work or attend university. Morals are enforced by a religious police. Punishments such as whipping, stoning and beheading are common. This is not the Taleban, this is a regime that has been supported to the hilt by the US for decades.
The Ayatollahs are just as bad or worse than the former Shah of Iran. If you ask the common person on Iranian steets, they would probably prefer the US backed Shah to the Ayatollahs.
Oh master of facts, when did you last speak to a common person on the Iranian streets? As a part-Iranian, whose family lost everything in the revolution, let me take issue with you. The Shah was reviled, hated by almost every element of Iranian society. He was nothing more than a US puppet, installed and maintained by the CIA. You do know that in the 1950s Iran was a democratic state, don't you? And that when the democratically elected prime minister, Mossadeq, made good on his democratic promise to nationalise Iran's oil, the CIA overthrew the government and made the Shah into an absolute ruler? (No, that's not propaganda, it's well known.) Tell me, oh lover of freedom, would you rather be a citizen of a country that controls its own affairs (however badly) or of a client state wholly subjugated to the needs of its master?
Afghanistan -- US support of the Mujahadeen led to the Aghani victory and expulsion of Soviet troops from that country.
And following the expulsion of soviet troops, what happened? The country descended into a bunch of warring fiefdoms controlled by local warlords, who brought so much chaos that the Afghans welcomed the Taleban at first! (These are the same warlords that are once again back in control.) If you'd left the Soviets alone, they'd have withdrwan by themselves after 1989 and by now Afghanistan would have probably been a stable and peaceful (if still dirt poor) state.Lebanon -- a country which is currently occupied by foreign Hezbollah terrorists. If the US staued, that country would not be the hell hole of terrorism that it s now.
Thank you, you illustrate my point perfectly. If the US had stayed and committed to restoring order in what was formerly the most pluralistic, pro-Western arab state. Instead the US did it's standard post-Vietnam "get the hell out ASAP" thing.
Your facts are wrong and you are nothing more than an Anti-american j*rk.
I've noticed that people who disagree with my posts are rarely satisfied with arguing the points, they also have to throw in personal slurs as well. It's a depressing indictment of the value afforded free speech in parts of the slashdot community.
Wasn't the last global empire the British one? (India, Pakistan, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Malaysia, Burma, Singapore, Hong Kong...that's pretty global). It collapsed not because of any military deficiency, but because it couldn't afford to run it any more. Empires don't come cheap (look at the US defence budget).
As for the Roman empire, its military loss was also the result of political and economic turmoil. It certainly had nothing to do with military technology -- the "barbarians" who overran the empire had not advanced technologically for centuries. The late Roman armies spent most of their time fighting each other in endless civil wars, leaving the frontiers severely undermanned. The Romans were well aware of their military weakness (they were reduced to fielding armies composed mostly of "barbarian" tribes, still under their tribal commanders), but lacked the political and economic will to resolve the problem. The Eastern Roman Empire (later the Byzantine Empire) did overcome these problems, and survived for another 1000 years.
Indeed, nothing stops such countries from being as prosperous and free as the US.
Nothing except the dumping of subsidised Western food on their markets, that drives local farmers out of business. And the pressure to use GM crops whose terms of use prevent farmers from saving seed and replanting it next year.
Nothing except AIDs rates affecting in some cases up to half the population, made far worse by short-sighted US policies that won't give money to any aid organisation that promotes birth control (so no condoms) and by grasping pharma companies that won't let them have cheap drugs.
Nothing except Western governments that are happy to decry the use of repressive measures while selling those same repressive governments the tools of repression. (Saddam's chemical weapons were aquired with the help of the US government, after all. What did they think he'd do with them? Go fishing?)
Nothing except IMF- and World Bank-imposed policies that force governments to sign up to neo-liberal "austerity" packages that destroy their industries and leave them open to corporate takeovers by the West. (Take a look at economic history. You'll see that free-market countries like the US and Britain got rich through fiercely protective and anti-competitive policies. Only once they were economically dominant did they embrace free markets.)
Oh, and of course, there's one other thing stopping dozens of countries (from Columbia to Saudi Arabia to Khazakhstan) from becoming "civilised". US government support for governments and organisations that "commit murder against their own people and terrorism against others". (Let's not forget who funded and trained Osama and his friends in the first place...America.)
And please, don't patronise the intelligence of the world by insisting that the US went to war to liberate Iraq from a tyrannical regime and that those who resisted did so for financial gain. The war was never sold as a humanitarian war -- it was sold on the basis of WMD and terrorism. We've found no evidence of either. And those who claim it was about liberating the Iraqi people had better explain why the Iraqis needed liberating so much more than the Cubans, the Zimbabweans, the North Koreans etc.
and you'd better think about the Chinese air force. Without proper air cover, any large ground force becomes a sitting duck
and how will all that new hardware prevent terrorist attacks? souped-up soldiers on every internal flight? x-ray goggles to determine the contents of every passing truck?
the US is easily capable of defeating any army in the field. unless military intelligence is expecting alien invaders to land in the near future, this hardware will in no practical way affect US military superiority. Dictators won't suddenly think, shit, now the US can defeat me in 24 hours instead of a 48, so I'd better fall into line. It's hard to see why any of this stuff is necessary for anything except justifying ever-increasing military spending.
If the US govt put a fraction of the money and effort it expends on the military into addressing the grievances of dispossessed people around the world, it wouldn't have a problem with terrorism. Most current anti-American terrorist activities is focussed in countries where either the US maintains an unpopular and repressive regime (eg Saudi Arabia, and to some extent Israel - if you're a Palestinian), countries where the US formerly maintained an unpopular and repressive regime (Iran), or countries where the US made explicit or covert military interventions which did nothing to help its people (Lebanon, Afghanistan in the 1980s)
Unless the US govt changes its m.o. since the end of the Marshall Plan and returns to a long-term commitment to building sustainable states -- based on the needs of their people, not US corporations -- in countries that it has helped to devastate, we can expect Iraq and Afghanistan to become major sources of terrorists in the next few years.
Having lived for several years in Boston before returning to the UK, it might also be because Bostonians tend to drive like homicidal maniacs. (I wonder what proportion of US road deaths happen in New England). In one year of living in an apartment near a (not so busy, light-controlled) intersection, I saw two cars drive straight into buildings on the corner. one was quite impressive actually since the car had to dodge seveal concrete columns before ending up through a plate-glass windows scarcely wider than the car itself...
you'll find plenty of lights in the towns.
well actually they don't need to do it. There are stories of cheats finding a car the same make and colour as their own, then making a stick-on copy of the numberplate. That way when the owner complains he wasn't in the area at the time of the speeding/running a light/whatever, the police send him a photo of what looks exactly like his car with his number. Without a good alibi, you'll have a tough time defending that in court.
But I still stick by my point that some criminals will outwit the system. We just have to choose the dividing line that makes it difficult enough for that to happen to reduce crime effectively, but doesn't impinge on civil liberties too far.
the owner is sent pictures in the post of wha
If somebody steals your car, and you report it stolen quickly, then with cameras there's a much better chance of finding it before the number plates are switched (if your average 2-bit car thief bothers). If your numberplate is stolen, then report it stolen and the police will quickly be able to find the thief.
There are good arguments against using cameras to track cars, but the fact that criminals can get around them isn't one. There are hundreds of thousands of law-breakers out there who have managed to outwit the police. You can't use that as an argument against having police.
As long as the thing wasnt being used as an auto traffic cop for running through red lights and such, since we know from some experience here in the U.S. that that can cause some seriuos issues via mis-identifying breaking the law, and turning right at a red.
actually, Britain has hundreds of cameras used to catch motorists who speed or run red lights. Of course in the UK you're not allowed to turn at a red light anyway, but there are still misidentification problems -- mostly when people sell on their cars and the new owner doesn't register the purchase.
Interestingly in the UK there's almost no concern about the cameras imposing on civil liberties (or making mistakes). On the other hand, there was a massive backlash from motorists who regarded it as unfair that they should be penalised for speeding or running the lights...I can't say they have my sympathy. More people are killed in road accidents than any other non-disease cause of death.
Actually, food is basically government controlled in all industrialised countries. There's no "free market" for food because the US, EU, Japan etc all massively subsidize their farmers, as well as tightly regulating how food can be produced and restricting imports.
By setting subsidies, and the rules to qualify for them, governments basically control how much of each type of food is controlled. You want to produce more bread and less beans? Increase subsidies for wheat farmers, reduce them for bean farmers.
Without subsidies, food production would be far more efficient. On the other hand, precisely because everyone needs food, using subsidies to reduce the purchase price and clawing back the difference in tax is an effective way of transferring the cost of eating from the poor to the rich. Cheap food for the poor has been good policy since the Roman Empire -- keep the masses well fed, and they're less likely to revolt. There's a pretty good correlation throughout European history between the price of bread and popular revolutions.
However today the argument for subsidizing food in the West is pretty weak. Hunger is no longer a problem for even the poorest people in society (obesity is greatest among the poor). A hundred years ago most people spent something like 50% of their income on food. Today the average person spends only a fraction of that (I'm counting the cost of ingredients, not have a restaurant cook them for you). On the other hand, food subsidies in the West are one of the main barriers keeping the third world reliant on aid. Because subsidised food for the west undercuts local producers, local farmers go out of business (even though local food is almost always far cheaper to produce & distribute).
Anyone who's looking for a thought provoking new science book might want to check out the shortlist for the Aventis Prize.
Here's the lowdown:
Small World, by Mark Buchanan
In brief: Starting with the philosopher Karl Popper and finishing on Malaysian fireflies, this book covers research often neglected by popular science publications, such as computer networks and cellular biochemistry. Buchanan reveals how networks have been uncovered in all areas of life. With extraordinary examples covering everything from the KGB to the spread of syphilis, he outlines how discoveries in complexity science could lead to a new kind of physics.
Reckoning With Risk: Learning to live with uncertainty, by Gerd Gigerenzer
In brief: Everyone should read this book. Not a catchy headline, but it's surprisingly compulsive, untangling concepts such as frequency and probability, using real examples from DNA fingerprinting to HIV testing and mammograms.
The Extravagant Universe: Exploding stars, dark energy and the accelerating cosmos, by Robert P Kirshner
In brief: A supernova expert describes how an American team provided new insights into the expansion of the Universe and the mysterious dark energy that pervades the cosmos. It provides lots of colour from the frontline of astronomy. It's a good read and a clear guide to some of the key debates in cosmology over the last century.
Right Hand, Left Hand: The origins of asymmetry in brains, bodies, atoms and cultures, by Chris McManus
In brief: A fabulous read for any left-handers and - come to think of it - for all right-handers, too. It poses questions most of us never even think of, such as "Why are most people right-handed?" and "Why is the heart on the left-hand side of the body?" It draws on art, philosophy, medicine and physics to provide illuminating answers.
The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature, by Steven Pinker
In brief: Explains why many intellectuals today deny the existence of human nature and argue instead that each of us is a tabula rasa on which the environment writes. With his trademark stylish writing, wit and flair, Pinker is a top-notch guide to the latest thinking on that age-old debate over nature versus nurture. It is hugely enjoyable and thought-provoking.
Where Is Everybody? Fifty solutions to the Fermi Paradox and the problem of extraterrestrial life, by Stephen Webb
In brief: Webb writes with verve and humour about the possible answers to the question once posed by the brilliant physicist Enrico Fermi: "If alien life exists, where IS everybody?" It's a down-to-earth guide to some of the latest thinking on staples of science fiction such as extraterrestrial life and interstellar travel.
Just a thought, seeing as the article is about modular nuclear power. Quite a clever play on words if that's what it is.
Coming next: Jewlery, certified kosher earings.
The groundwater way is not just efficient, you can use it to do work. In fact you don't even need to pump the water to achieve cooling. Just stick one end of a thermocouple in your house and the other end in the ground. Hey presto, you're generating electricity while cooling the house. (not much, but it's still pretty neat)
Your maths is right, but your example is misleading. Moving heat from a hot room into cool ground water takes no energy input at all -- that's just the regular flow of heat (what's hot gets colder, what's cold gets hotter). What air conditioners do is move heat from a cold room into hot outside air, i.e. the cold gets colder and the hot gets hotter.
anyone have any creative, green ideas
If you're looking for environmentally friendly ways to keep cool, don't get an air conditioner. Those beasts are incredibly inefficient. According to basic thermodynamics, the _maximum_ efficiency possible from a heat engine (one that either uses heat to do work, or expends work to move heat) is given by (T_h-T_l)/T_h, where T_h is the temperature (in Kelvin) of your hot reservoir, and T_l the temperature of your cold reservoir.
Now in the context of air conditioning, the "hot" reservoir is the air outside, which is at say 305K (32 C), and the "cold" reservoir the air inside, at say 293K (20C). That gives an efficiency of 4%. So for every 100 watt of electricity you'r paying for, only 4 watts actually go towards cooling your house. The other 96 watts are expended in heating up the outside air..
So what's a green alternative? Well in the middle east they came up with a pretty good solution a couple of millenia back. They're called wind towers -- basically like very tall, wide chimneys only with no fireplace underneath. As the wind passes over the chimney (and there's almost always some wind), it draws the air up and creates a cooling breeze throughout the house. Other aids are thick solid walls and stone floors -- these cool overnight and take a long time to heat up in the day.
Poland was invaded on *both* sides in 1939, not 1945.
read the post, I said Poland was invaded in 1939 not 1945. I'm half Polish, my wife is Polish, I speak fluent Polish, I've seen the bullet holes in the post office in Gdansk from the first shots fired in WW2. The US (and Britain) shamelessly abandoned Poland to Stalin. Maybe in 1945 the US only had 3 atomic bombs, but the USSR didn't get even one until 1949. The US could have had dozens by then (probably did). Many people (including Bertrand Russell, if you've heard of him) in the 1950s wondered why the US didn't use such a golden opportunity to defeat Stalin. (And as for having 3 bombs and wasting 2 of them on a country that was already clearly close to defeat...what does that tell you about long-term strategic planning?)
The U.S. was committed to defending democracy and freedom because it paid up, showed up, and turned the tide, unlike the French, who just gave up in a few weeks.
The French didn't just give up. They lost. So did the British. The British also had troops in France, and they were beaten back just as quickly (Dunkirk). The plain fact is that the German army was by far the best in the world at the time. The reason that the US and UK weren't defeated by Germany at the start of the war is simple. Neither of them have a land border with Germany.
What you think of as the holocaust didn't start until months after the Wannasee conferance, which was in 1942.
What do you mean by "what I think of as the holocaust". Ask my grandfather what he thought. He was the only survivor in his family. Ask my aunt, who worked to help reconstruct postwar Germany . The fact that industrial-scale murder didn't start until a couple of years after the Jews were herded into ghettos and forced to work as slaves with practically no food is hardly to the Nazi's favour. Moreover the allies knew what was going on, and they knew which train tracks led to the concentration camps. They could have dramatically slowed down the holocaust by bombing them. They did NOTHING to stop the holocaust during the war. That's shameful.
It certainly could NOT have done anything more than bluffed the Soviets who already occupied 3/4's of Western Europe and enjoyed a massive superiority both in armor and men
The USSR did not occupy any of western Europe with the exception of Germany as far west as Berling (and Berlin is in eastern Germany). And the reason that Eastern Europe became communist was because Roosevelt, against Churchill's advice, trusted Stalin when he promised to allow the countries "liberated" by the soviets to have free elections. It was a question of willpower as much as musclepower.
Oh, and by the way, the Russians were also fighting the Japanese (indeed technically they're still at war over some disputed islands.) Not to mention the Chinese, they had a part to play in the victory too.
Didn't see too much help rolling them up either, although we were grateful for the help.
I'll tell my uncle who spent 4 years in a Japanese PoW camp to thank you for your kind sentiments. I'm sure that the British scientists who helped develop the bomb will likewise be grateful.
Is this the crap they teach you in public schools nowadays? Your ignorance of history is as shocking as your assumption that you are a master of it.
I don't normally bring this up, but seeing as how you choose to insult my intelligence and my schooling, you're right, I did go to public school (that's the British term for prep schools). Then I went to Cambridge, where I graduated second in my year, then I won a fellowship to do my masters in Harvard, and now I'm in law school. (and yes, I did work in the real world in between.) So I think my education and intelligence stack up pretty well against most people. But even if I am an idiot, calling me names isn't the way to win the argument.
What the French, and the rest of Europe, learned from WWII is that you can't depend on the Americans to defend anyone's democracy but their own. WWII started when France and Britain declared war on Germany (in 1939) in response to Germany's invasion of Poland.
The US didn't join until 1942, after Pearl Harbour and after the Germans had declared war on the US. By this time the Axis powers had occupied practically all of continental Europe (and most of Asia) and the holocaust was well under way.
If the US had been committed to defending democracy and freedom, it would have joined France and Britain in 1939. Instead it was happy to sit on the sidelines and make money from both sides until it was itself attacked in 1942. And at the end of the war, it was happy to let Stalin take over Eastern Europe -- including Poland, for whose freedom the entire war had started. As the world's only nuclear power at the time, there's no question that the US could have forced the USSR to allow free elections in Eastern Europe. Instead, the US let its constant focus on its own short-term interest lead it into the cold war.
The lesson that Europe learned from the US in WWII was not that America will fight to protect democracy and freedom. It's that America will only fight when it believes that it's in its own narrow self-interest to do so.
No, the first thing Napoleon did was to defeat those countries that had already declared war on France. Austria, Prussia and Russia didn't much like the idea of a regicidal republic on their borders and were trying to restore the French monarchy.
Of course once Napoleon discovered how easy it was to beat everyone else, it sort of went to his head. But to start with it was pure survival.
There's no radiation pressure inside the black hole, because all the radiation comes from _outside_ the event horizon (as it must do, since nothing can escape the horizon).
Basically Hawking radiation is a consequence of quantum fluctuations in the vacuum plus an event horizon. In a vacuum, "virtual" particle-antiparticle pairs (including photons, which are their own antiparticles) are forever being spontaneously created and then annihilated. Hawking radiation happens when one half of that pair is swallowed up by a black hole. It can no longer reach the other half, so they can't annihilate each other. Instead the other particle escapes -- and that's Hawking radiation.
Essentially the black hole is "stealing" energy from the vacuum. Of course the universe has to balance the books and ultimately it works out that black hole has lost the amount of energy emitted by the escaping particle.
No. In SI units, c is not measured but defined. Physically, c is just a man-made constant of proportionality deriving from the fact that, for historical reasons, we measure time differently from space. In reality, both time and space are physical dimensions and so it makes perfect sense to express both in terms of the same units, be they seconds or metres.
That's why most theoretical physicists like to do their calculations in "natural units" -- i.e. you set c=1 and h/2pi=1 -- since in reality the values of the fundamental constants are artefacts of your measurement system. Scientifically speaking, it makes sense to set all independent constants to 1 since it brings out the fact that the "equivalence" of eg mass and energy, or distance and time, is really an identicality.
but surely the point is not how much infrastructure, but how much infrastructure per head of population (or, if you're worried about the cost, infrastructure divided by GDP).
And really, what's the cost? Going metric is not a question of replacing pint containers with half-litre ones, but of labelling the containers in metric. Thus in the UK, we "officially" use metric for most things. But most things are still the same size.
Of course in the long term it doesn't mean much to go metric unless you change the sizes of things to take advantage of the easier calculations. But that can be a much more gradual process.
Given that we know mass and energy are equivalent, why not define the kilogram in terms of its equivalent energy? i.e. 1kg = E_kg/(c^2).
The energy could then be translated into the frequency of a photon having that energy using the relation E=h*v (that's v as in "nu"). So 1kg = h_kg*v/(c^2)
That reduces defining the kilogram to a question of defining the second. And the second is defined as 9192631770 oscillations of between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of Caesium 133.
In fact, because of the accuracy with which we can measure time, the second has become the defacto fundamental quantity. For example, the metre is defined in terms of the distance covered by light in 1/299 792 458 s. (such a pity they didn't just go for 1/300000000...this could have been done by keeping the metre the same but defining the second slightly differently, which hardly anyone would have noticed)