Stated in the article is how the Soviet Union decided that it had enough and wanted to conquer Israel with Syrian & Egyptian assistance. The only thing that stopped Russia? The fact that Nixon put the USAF at DEFCON three and opened up all of the missile silos in North Dakota with the promise they would be used if Soviet forces ever stepped foot into Israel. Soviet paratroopers flew over Syria and nearly made it to Israel before Leonid Brezhnev called them back home.
Somewhat directly as a result of this whole mess, OPEC also started the '73 Arab Oil Embargo that also shifted much of the geopolitics of this part of the world to what we recognize today.
That part of the world is very explosive and I could see this being a triggering event for countries like Iran wanting to get ambitious again.
So somebody wants the U.S. Army moving into Egypt now that America has finally been able to start walking away from Iraq?
Yeah, that sounds like a plan for me!
I have a better plan: Let's put together a multi-national force from Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia move into Egypt. That will do wonders for world peace, especially when those countries start to move into Gaza as well.
If the internet had been gradually degraded over time by a lack of investment in infrastructure and monopolizing the service providers as a government monopoly, the network connections could have been cut on a more gradual process that could have been effectively done the same thing but not even noticed by either the citizens or the international community at large. Unfortunately the Egyptian government didn't have the "foresight" to go that route.
The next shoe to drop is cutting off international telecommunications of all kinds. I wonder how long it will be before Egypt drops off the phone exchanges or even out of the international postal union. That is when you know it will be real bad.
While related, apparently one of the largest problems facing Egypt is that unfortunately for the Egyptian people much of the food is imported.... and purchased with dollar-denominated funds when purchased on the international markets.
The U.S. Federal Reserve, due to loose spending of the U.S. Dollar and essentially "running the printing presses" (mainly sending credits to various banks in America buying up "toxic assets" to be owned directly by The Fed) has been devaluing the dollar sending the price of this food up so wheat in particular is about double the price as it was about a year ago or more.
To really make things ugly here, American farmers have been switching from wheat to other crops, most especially corn which is increasingly being used to make ethanol and other synthetic materials including plastic substitutes that used to be made with petroleum. Since corn isn't even being used for food in these situations, that in turn drives up the price of other grains like wheat when it still is grown by those few remaining farmers who still plant that grain. Thanks to U.S. federal ethanol subsidies, poor people in Egypt have to pay even more for a loaf of bread (made from wheat usually) and are in effect taking the brunt end of the problems caused by the housing collapse in America.
Wheat farmers in other countries are also seeing the dollar lose value in relation to their own currency, yet they are struggling with things like higher petroleum prices that are wiping out any profits they may have experienced from higher wheat prices.
In other words, this is a perfect storm of converging events that essentially is making it impossible for ordinary people in Egypt to be able to eat food anymore. It is also a dangerous feed-back loop given their location next to many major oil reserves in the world, especially sitting on a major international trade route that is going to make this a vicious feedback cycle to drive up food prices even more that will in turn stop international trade in food. When you can't eat, you get desperate and usually don't give a damn about who is in charge.... you'll eat their hide and certainly would be willing to go to desperate ends to simply live until tomorrow or not care if you don't.
The situation is really bad, and unfortunately American policies over the years including domestic America policies are really screwing with the Egyptian people right now... much of it as unintended consequences originally intended to help.
Even somebody like Chavez isn't going to help much in this situation, and Mubarak seems to be making some particularly stupid moves in this explosive situation. I don't think Obama is necessarily doing anything worthwhile either, and IMHO should be doing something like shipping millions of tons of wheat to Egypt at least to calm the situation down a bit. Bread and circuses can make a difference, but right now Egypt has neither and the people are really pissed as a result. Cutting off the internet gets rid of the circus, so they are making their own with the protests. Way to go there.
Really? How did a Roman-style Senate prevent corruption and nepotism? Sincerely curious.
I'm trying to see how any incarnation of a Senate is anything but the very definition of corruption and nepotism. Yeah, I'd be curious as well.
It is important to note that Rome was a Republic, not a democracy. The Senate was essentially a lifetime appointment originally and turned into an inherited office over time. Arguably the U.S. Senate is heading that way too.
If you are worried about getting a regular supply of bread for yourself, get a bread maker and put solar panels on your roof. A bucket of wheat can be purchased for comparatively little money (especially compared to the equivalent in loaves of bread) and becoming self-sufficient is perhaps a good thing too. If your neighbors are starving, giving them a couple loaves of bread would go a long way to keeping them out of your stuff too.
There are "food storage" cooperatives and groups who plan for potential disruptions, including in larger cities that have stockpiled food for personal use. It certainly makes sense to have about a two week to a two months food supply in your house "just in case" even if mundane natural disasters strikes, much less extreme civil violence and war. I've used my own food storage for doing things like really stretching my money when I've become unemployed or had an unexpected "emergency" that required spending money elsewhere. I have about a six month supply in a pinch and usually about a month's supply of food where my kids wouldn't even notice the difference if we quit going to the grocery store for that long (with perhaps that the milk would be made from powdered milk).
With some gardening, I can even grow fresh vegetables. Some fairly substantial food can be grown in a plot of land only 4 m^2 or even a little less in a pinch. Most people in even apartments usually have something that size available to them even if it is on a balcony or a flower box outside of a window. It isn't perfect, but every little bit helps.
Food cooperatives also set up some more direct consumer to farm connections where not only can you purchase food directly from farmers at a substantial discount over grocery stores, but in the event of a major crises you have that direct connection to somebody who has food and resources that can keep your family alive.
The biggest impediment to using the Internet over ham radio is the prohibition on encrypted content. So sending a PGP-encrypted message or viewing a website over HTTPS would be against the rules.
Then again, if you are going to ham radio as a means to continue network communications because government control has clamped down on other means for network connectivity, I don't think worrying about encrypted communications is necessarily going to be the most pressing issue on your mind. Commercial activity is going to matter even less.
By way of Wikipedia, this article on Astronomy.com seems to point out that indeed the connection to SG-1 is there in terms of how this asteroid was named.
It is sort of ironic too as there was an episode of SG-1 that dealt with an asteroid that was purposely deflected to hit the Earth by that Goa'uld system lord of the same name. That the mythology of the Egyptian god fits so well and the name up to that point had not been previously used on an asteroid only made it a perfect fit. It certainly isn't a name that would upset the IAU as much as 2309 Mr. Spock did at the time it was named. BTW, that particular asteroid was named after a pet cat and not the Star Trek character.
It is a little better than a wild ass guess. This particular asteroid happens to pass fairly close to the Earth from time to time and is also studied a bit more carefully due to its predicted potential to strike the Earth.
Yes, there is a chance it could be wrong, but there have been other asteroids which have been studied much more carefully and have even had physical probes go near or even land upon them for various kinds of scientific studies. Based upon those studies as well as meteor samples it seems like a pretty good assumption.
The orbital trajectory is known to a high degree, and it certainly will be passing near the Earth... at least pass closer to the Earth than the Moon is from us. A manned expedition to this asteroid is even possible under those circumstances, and certainly a sample/return mission could be possible not to mention having dozens of amateur and professional telescopes get a real close look at this object when it passes under the orbits of a whole bunch of satellites.
What is especially useful here is due to this sort of close observation, it can help to refine and confirm or deny theories used to identify the composition of more distant asteroids. More likely it will help to refine them and perhaps even set up additional and finer classification guidelines.
I think the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is mentioned is mainly due the fact that it is the only real "opposition party" that has any resemblance of an organization which can be traced to before this whole protest was started in the first place.
I'd put odds-on favorite that it will be a completely different group which emerges in control once all of the dust settles and the real power brokering happens. That the Muslim Brotherhood may be sitting in a position of some political authority is more than likely going to be true, but I don't see them as necessarily the only possible outcome here either.
My own hope is that some other intelligent group of people will emerge that tries to strike some sort of compromise among many of those involved, and can at least work to respond to the needs of the ordinary Egyptian people. There are some very real problems that are happening here, and the Mubarak government isn't dealing with those issues either. Some of them such as the food prices getting out of hand are intractable and won't be resolved regardless of who gets into power after all is said and done.
About 150 people have been killed so far in the violence over this past week, spread out across Egypt. As far as how many of these were due to the government killing protesters is perhaps in dispute, but there certainly is bloodshed happening now. That the violence has been kept this low is to me a tribute that all involved, including the Mubarak government, don't want this to blow up into thousands of martyrs that could really push this on to the next level.
Often the IRA received direct funding from people in and around Boston and New York, where strongly Irish ex-pat communities were only supporting "Irish independence" and "freedom fighters" in their homeland. That the U.S. government turned a blind eye to these fundraising efforts and may have even channeled a bit of funding through these efforts may be true, but I'd also have to say that deliberate funding of the pIRA was generally not overt.
Even today the stereotype of somebody of Irish descent being a New York City police officer is not too far off, as Irish families have provided a great many officers and "Danny Boy" is certainly sung at many funerals of officers from both Boston and New York. After 9/11 it was very common to be heard in several contexts.
It doesn't help that America has an incompetent President who prior to 2009 only had experience as an executive running the staff of his Senate office.... and even that was a huge jump over the half dozen TAs and student assistants he had as an economics professor. Half of the time I don't think the President knows where the money is even going or who is even being supported or not.
U.S. foreign policy is hypocritical in part because it is rarely even being run by the same person or for that matter even the same political philosophies. Most often it is run by bureaucratic hacks that are more often bought off by political lobbyists that promote some sort of commercial objective. In some cases, I'd dare say that Coca-Cola and McDonald's has a stronger influence on foreign policy than even the President.
FidoNet to TCP/IP gateways have existed in the past, and I've used them too. E-mail in particular was something I've used in the past rather extensively and works better than you'd think including some interesting routing of direct messages.
FidoNet works particularly well when network communication is spotty and intermittent.... such as using dial-up links and perhaps Sneaker nets.
Sneaker nets in particular seem like an ideal solution to what is happening in Egypt.
I'm quite certain that the ISPs, even if it isn't because of government meddling, are melting down due to a breakdown of government services (connections are being broken from the riots/vandalism) and because people are crushing the connections with usage alone. If you are in Egypt, you need to know what is going on and are seeking out others even if you have a network connection.
A similar kind of impact happened in America following 9/11/2001 where many ISPs felt a crush of usage. Even Slashdot couldn't keep up at one point with that crush. I see what is happening in Egypt to be no different and the need for staying connected is even more important if you live in Egypt.
Trying to run wires or even set up an antenna for a mesh network is still going to be a task risking life and property if it is done, if for no other reason than pot shots from demonstrators and looters is going to get in the way at the moment, much less from government officials and soldiers. Egypt would not be a good place to start an ISP at the moment.
I am appalled and perhaps even a touch angry with some of the political pundits in America, particularly those who made commentary on the Sunday talk show circuit over this weekend. Those commentators seem to be completely out of touch with what is going on, yet their "spin" on things is what the American people are getting fed in terms of what is happening in Egypt.
Sometimes Slashdot is ahead of the curve on geek news compared to the mainstream outlets, but I've never seen a political event where what I've been reading on this site is so far ahead of these mainstream reporters that it seems like two completely different events have been going on.
I understand that the U.S. government is in a tricky situation where support for the existing government seems to be the implied course of action. One of the things that is of particular note is that the U.S. government is directly financing and supporting the Mubarak government, including the direct training and equipping of the Egyptian Army. It is for that reason especially that the opinion of the U.S. government matters, where switching support to another faction in the Egyptian society can have a huge impact even if the Mubarak government refuses to go away. Some of the direct cash payments come from the Camp David Peace Accords where both Israel and Egypt were given direct cash payments to essentially "pay off" both countries if they agreed to a peace treaty. It was a good deal for America too as it prevented World War III from starting in that part of the world (a long, long story there).
The problem with the Mubarak government is that they have no mechanism for people dissatisfied with the government to be able to express themselves, or to establish a political faction contrary to the prevailing ones. Essentially the only option available to change the government is violent overthrow of that government. The protesters know that their voice can only be heard in the fashion they are protesting right now, and the "changes" in the government doesn't resolve their grievances.
While not a perfect analogy, the Tea Party protests in America represented a similar dissatisfaction with the way things were being run, but the net result of those protests is that many of the "leaders" of that movement now sit in positions of real political power and are proposing legislation and making a real difference. That is the benefit of at least some sort of democratic method for change to exist, particularly in an era of modern communications to tie together different isolated groups into something much larger. I'm not saying that Egypt needs to use an identical process, but they need to come up with something, perhaps uniquely Egyptian, for their problems.
"It can never happen here" are some of the most dangerous words ever spoken, no?
It isn't like the U.S. government has never been guilty of mass arrests for arbitrary reasons unrelated to criminal acts or even flat out genocide of undesirable groups in its past under the current constitutional government. That last incident is particularly interesting as the commanding officer in that incident was promoted by the U.S. President at the time (Abraham Lincoln) as gratitude for the fact that his men had raped women and killed hundreds of children. It wasn't even covered up but instead widely reported and even praised when it happened.
Yeah, the U.S. government can always be trusted to do the right thing all of the time.
The tapping of ISPs and other communications infrastructure goes back much more than just nine years. That has been happening almost continuously since the "emergency powers" under the Roosevelt Administration thought it necessary to censor civilian communications during World War II. That was continued during the "cold war" on an extensive basis and the post-9/11/2001 laws were pretty much a renewal of the earlier efforts that told those government agents involved to keep doing what they had been doing earlier.
Emergency authority, once granted, is rarely rescinded. Even if "authority" to act didn't exist under one particular piece of legislation like the "Patriot Act", there are literally hundreds of other laws, executive orders, and FCC regulations that apply as well to do most of the same thing if some federal agent wanted to act. At least it usually wasn't as brazen as it was under the Roosevelt administration when civilian postal communications (letters) were literally blacked out with felt markers redacting parts of the communication... if the letter was even permitted to be sent in the first place. I'm talking civilians sending letters to other civilians from ordinary towns and not even involving military personnel.
Even the process of setting up "monitoring equipment" can have a substantial impact upon the communications process and certainly acts as a communications delay in a number of cases where the data has to flow through an additional node as all of the data is sorted for "suspicious behavior". That seems to be what the current U.S. federal government approach seems to be, even if the actual shutting down of the communications isn't happening except on an "inadvertent" basis. Some of the major traffic choke points are where this monitoring is taking place, such as in data centers connected to undersea fiber links to other continents. The infrastructure costs to lay another cable down are such that you can't do something of that nature in a clandestine fashion without the federal government knowing about it... even if you tried and even made the connection in some other country like Mexico or Costa Rica first.
While the language of the legislation doesn't explicitly call for shutting down communications, it has that effect as the capability of using "emergency powers" to shut down the communications infrastructure certainly is possible with this system by simply shutting down these choke points that are already under government control.
As soon as you make the declaration that "high value infrastructure" has that "high value", it becomes a political game to get your particular facility excluded or included in that definition for various reasons, including pragmatic if there is a high speed link that is subsidized or has some features which from a pure business standpoint seems to be useful. It is also a slippery slope to define anything as "high value" as that can run amok when a bureaucracy tries to expand its scope of authority once established. That is the natural tendency of any human organization to grow or die, even if that growth is harmful to society as a whole.
This reminds me of some of the early attempts at television... also of equally lousy resolution due to bandwidth issues.
As mentioned in the article, true "holographic" representation of an environment would take an insane amount of processing and bandwidth. There are some "tricks" that can sort of simplify this issue after a fashion and still not require stereoscopic glasses or anything fancy on the part of the viewer, but even those have their limitations.
Making a credible Volumetric display is the real trick... something several people have worked on to some degree or another. I can only hope that eventually something will actually happen with the technology but in the meantime it is still and experimental toy and not something for serious work... yet.
This attempt here is nothing more than the equivalent of Felix the Cat as used by Philo Farnsworth on some of the early broadcast television tests.
The problem with theoretical physics is that unfortunately they often end up predicting physical reality to a high degree. Breakthroughs such as Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have often put the theoreticians substantially ahead of the experimenters to the point that sometimes the theoreticians end up getting a swelled head in the process and think they are invincible.
Other scientific disciplines have had some people try to pull off the same stunt, usually to disastrous ends.
In theory practice and theory ought to be the same. In practice, they usually aren't.
Out of curiosity.... what would the falsifiable result be for this particular study? "Proving" that there is no common gene between religiously oriented people and a similar absence of that gene in non-religious people?
Even that potential is a load of garbage. Pseudo genetics has been around for centuries trying to figure out how people work, but unfortunately with the discovery of DNA those who try to make up potential genetic traits are going to find they will have a harder and harder time proving their theories without identifying specific genes that are associated with this "trait". For scam artists that are spinning wheels of academia in the quest to "publish or perish", they will find their theories increasingly marginalized as "hard science" starts to take over from the pseudo science of earlier decades and centuries in genetic research.
Genetic research is now more akin to debugging and reverse-engineering software than it is to the social sciences of yesterday, and "researchers" who can't engage in a thoughtful discussion to identify specific genes by name or number to compare between specific people are not really doing any realistic genetic research at all. If some group like this wants to make a conjecture and suggest there might exist a gene that does something of this nature, that is one thing to consider. Genes that influence alcoholism have been identified, for example. This said, these guys aren't even making this a conjecture. At best, it is a strong wish and hoping the idea could be a conjecture.
In this age where the entire human genome has been effectively mapped and various genes in the genome with variants are being named and studied in detail, I'd have to agree that making a broad study that doesn't identify a specific gene to support this theory is mostly pure bullshit.
If they are going to be making such broad claims, at least try to find some sort of common gene that can be found with Muslims, Amish, Mormons, Catholics, and other religious communities that seem to have a large number of children. If the authors are too lazy to perform some gene sequencing to document or even suggest what "gene" might be responsible for this behavior, at best this is pure conjecture and not really worth commenting upon or for that matter even worth doing a follow up study. There certainly is no "scientific" basis for their theory unless they are subscribing to Lamarckian inheritance philosophies or something else that is just as much of a crackpot idea.
There could be such a gene, but I could make any other sort of conjecture that would be similarly unprovable. The study itself is unfalsifiable, and therefore not scientific as it doesn't follow the scientific method.
While religious motivations have been used as an excuse to start wars, I'd like to see any "proof" that the religion itself has been the root cause of the war and not some megalomaniac who got into a position to convince his co-believers into action.
Wars are started by people, often for a political motive. The medieval crusades that you are implying here were all started mainly for political reasons (gaining access to trade routes, finding things for 3rd & 4th sons of nobility to do besides assassinating their older brothers, "expanding realms", and other factors) and the religious component was mostly a minor issue. The sacking of Constantinople, the capital of a "Christian nation", was one of the major accomplishments of the ancient crusades too.
Besides, when was the last "legitimate" crusade? Arguably the "reconquista" of the Iberian peninsula in the late 15th Century was one of the last of them, and even that was not really a "proper" crusade other than it did pit the "Christian" Spanish king against the "Muslim" Moors. So you are complaining about something which ended over 500 years ago as a general tendency of Christianity?
I'd even say that the current "war on terror" is mostly a bunch of idiots who are trying to use the trappings of religion for political purposes, and it isn't the religion itself that is the motivating factor. If anything, religious tendencies might arguably be a tempering force and usually it is religious leaders who are crying for peace and patience. Yes, exceptions can be found, but for every "religious nut" trying to stir up a hornet's nest of problems to start a war I'm sure I can find a dozen or more others with strong religious tendencies to be actively involved with trying to stop war from happening and even going so far as taking punches or risking their own lives in an attempt to stop the war from happening.
Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, both professed atheists, can account for far more death, misery, wars, and famine than almost all religious leaders or even religiously inclined political leaders in the entire history of humanity combined.
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Even more sad is that the last time America tried to get involved more directly with Egypt, it very nearly resulted in World War III starting.
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yom_Kippur_War
Stated in the article is how the Soviet Union decided that it had enough and wanted to conquer Israel with Syrian & Egyptian assistance. The only thing that stopped Russia? The fact that Nixon put the USAF at DEFCON three and opened up all of the missile silos in North Dakota with the promise they would be used if Soviet forces ever stepped foot into Israel. Soviet paratroopers flew over Syria and nearly made it to Israel before Leonid Brezhnev called them back home.
Somewhat directly as a result of this whole mess, OPEC also started the '73 Arab Oil Embargo that also shifted much of the geopolitics of this part of the world to what we recognize today.
That part of the world is very explosive and I could see this being a triggering event for countries like Iran wanting to get ambitious again.
So somebody wants the U.S. Army moving into Egypt now that America has finally been able to start walking away from Iraq?
Yeah, that sounds like a plan for me!
I have a better plan: Let's put together a multi-national force from Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia move into Egypt. That will do wonders for world peace, especially when those countries start to move into Gaza as well.
If the internet had been gradually degraded over time by a lack of investment in infrastructure and monopolizing the service providers as a government monopoly, the network connections could have been cut on a more gradual process that could have been effectively done the same thing but not even noticed by either the citizens or the international community at large. Unfortunately the Egyptian government didn't have the "foresight" to go that route.
The next shoe to drop is cutting off international telecommunications of all kinds. I wonder how long it will be before Egypt drops off the phone exchanges or even out of the international postal union. That is when you know it will be real bad.
While related, apparently one of the largest problems facing Egypt is that unfortunately for the Egyptian people much of the food is imported.... and purchased with dollar-denominated funds when purchased on the international markets.
The U.S. Federal Reserve, due to loose spending of the U.S. Dollar and essentially "running the printing presses" (mainly sending credits to various banks in America buying up "toxic assets" to be owned directly by The Fed) has been devaluing the dollar sending the price of this food up so wheat in particular is about double the price as it was about a year ago or more.
To really make things ugly here, American farmers have been switching from wheat to other crops, most especially corn which is increasingly being used to make ethanol and other synthetic materials including plastic substitutes that used to be made with petroleum. Since corn isn't even being used for food in these situations, that in turn drives up the price of other grains like wheat when it still is grown by those few remaining farmers who still plant that grain. Thanks to U.S. federal ethanol subsidies, poor people in Egypt have to pay even more for a loaf of bread (made from wheat usually) and are in effect taking the brunt end of the problems caused by the housing collapse in America.
Wheat farmers in other countries are also seeing the dollar lose value in relation to their own currency, yet they are struggling with things like higher petroleum prices that are wiping out any profits they may have experienced from higher wheat prices.
In other words, this is a perfect storm of converging events that essentially is making it impossible for ordinary people in Egypt to be able to eat food anymore. It is also a dangerous feed-back loop given their location next to many major oil reserves in the world, especially sitting on a major international trade route that is going to make this a vicious feedback cycle to drive up food prices even more that will in turn stop international trade in food. When you can't eat, you get desperate and usually don't give a damn about who is in charge.... you'll eat their hide and certainly would be willing to go to desperate ends to simply live until tomorrow or not care if you don't.
The situation is really bad, and unfortunately American policies over the years including domestic America policies are really screwing with the Egyptian people right now... much of it as unintended consequences originally intended to help.
Even somebody like Chavez isn't going to help much in this situation, and Mubarak seems to be making some particularly stupid moves in this explosive situation. I don't think Obama is necessarily doing anything worthwhile either, and IMHO should be doing something like shipping millions of tons of wheat to Egypt at least to calm the situation down a bit. Bread and circuses can make a difference, but right now Egypt has neither and the people are really pissed as a result. Cutting off the internet gets rid of the circus, so they are making their own with the protests. Way to go there.
Really? How did a Roman-style Senate prevent corruption and nepotism? Sincerely curious.
I'm trying to see how any incarnation of a Senate is anything but the very definition of corruption and nepotism. Yeah, I'd be curious as well.
It is important to note that Rome was a Republic, not a democracy. The Senate was essentially a lifetime appointment originally and turned into an inherited office over time. Arguably the U.S. Senate is heading that way too.
If you are worried about getting a regular supply of bread for yourself, get a bread maker and put solar panels on your roof. A bucket of wheat can be purchased for comparatively little money (especially compared to the equivalent in loaves of bread) and becoming self-sufficient is perhaps a good thing too. If your neighbors are starving, giving them a couple loaves of bread would go a long way to keeping them out of your stuff too.
There are "food storage" cooperatives and groups who plan for potential disruptions, including in larger cities that have stockpiled food for personal use. It certainly makes sense to have about a two week to a two months food supply in your house "just in case" even if mundane natural disasters strikes, much less extreme civil violence and war. I've used my own food storage for doing things like really stretching my money when I've become unemployed or had an unexpected "emergency" that required spending money elsewhere. I have about a six month supply in a pinch and usually about a month's supply of food where my kids wouldn't even notice the difference if we quit going to the grocery store for that long (with perhaps that the milk would be made from powdered milk).
With some gardening, I can even grow fresh vegetables. Some fairly substantial food can be grown in a plot of land only 4 m^2 or even a little less in a pinch. Most people in even apartments usually have something that size available to them even if it is on a balcony or a flower box outside of a window. It isn't perfect, but every little bit helps.
Food cooperatives also set up some more direct consumer to farm connections where not only can you purchase food directly from farmers at a substantial discount over grocery stores, but in the event of a major crises you have that direct connection to somebody who has food and resources that can keep your family alive.
The biggest impediment to using the Internet over ham radio is the prohibition on encrypted content. So sending a PGP-encrypted message or viewing a website over HTTPS would be against the rules.
Then again, if you are going to ham radio as a means to continue network communications because government control has clamped down on other means for network connectivity, I don't think worrying about encrypted communications is necessarily going to be the most pressing issue on your mind. Commercial activity is going to matter even less.
By way of Wikipedia, this article on Astronomy.com seems to point out that indeed the connection to SG-1 is there in terms of how this asteroid was named.
It is sort of ironic too as there was an episode of SG-1 that dealt with an asteroid that was purposely deflected to hit the Earth by that Goa'uld system lord of the same name. That the mythology of the Egyptian god fits so well and the name up to that point had not been previously used on an asteroid only made it a perfect fit. It certainly isn't a name that would upset the IAU as much as 2309 Mr. Spock did at the time it was named. BTW, that particular asteroid was named after a pet cat and not the Star Trek character.
It is a little better than a wild ass guess. This particular asteroid happens to pass fairly close to the Earth from time to time and is also studied a bit more carefully due to its predicted potential to strike the Earth.
Yes, there is a chance it could be wrong, but there have been other asteroids which have been studied much more carefully and have even had physical probes go near or even land upon them for various kinds of scientific studies. Based upon those studies as well as meteor samples it seems like a pretty good assumption.
The orbital trajectory is known to a high degree, and it certainly will be passing near the Earth... at least pass closer to the Earth than the Moon is from us. A manned expedition to this asteroid is even possible under those circumstances, and certainly a sample/return mission could be possible not to mention having dozens of amateur and professional telescopes get a real close look at this object when it passes under the orbits of a whole bunch of satellites.
What is especially useful here is due to this sort of close observation, it can help to refine and confirm or deny theories used to identify the composition of more distant asteroids. More likely it will help to refine them and perhaps even set up additional and finer classification guidelines.
I think the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is mentioned is mainly due the fact that it is the only real "opposition party" that has any resemblance of an organization which can be traced to before this whole protest was started in the first place.
I'd put odds-on favorite that it will be a completely different group which emerges in control once all of the dust settles and the real power brokering happens. That the Muslim Brotherhood may be sitting in a position of some political authority is more than likely going to be true, but I don't see them as necessarily the only possible outcome here either.
My own hope is that some other intelligent group of people will emerge that tries to strike some sort of compromise among many of those involved, and can at least work to respond to the needs of the ordinary Egyptian people. There are some very real problems that are happening here, and the Mubarak government isn't dealing with those issues either. Some of them such as the food prices getting out of hand are intractable and won't be resolved regardless of who gets into power after all is said and done.
About 150 people have been killed so far in the violence over this past week, spread out across Egypt. As far as how many of these were due to the government killing protesters is perhaps in dispute, but there certainly is bloodshed happening now. That the violence has been kept this low is to me a tribute that all involved, including the Mubarak government, don't want this to blow up into thousands of martyrs that could really push this on to the next level.
Often the IRA received direct funding from people in and around Boston and New York, where strongly Irish ex-pat communities were only supporting "Irish independence" and "freedom fighters" in their homeland. That the U.S. government turned a blind eye to these fundraising efforts and may have even channeled a bit of funding through these efforts may be true, but I'd also have to say that deliberate funding of the pIRA was generally not overt.
Even today the stereotype of somebody of Irish descent being a New York City police officer is not too far off, as Irish families have provided a great many officers and "Danny Boy" is certainly sung at many funerals of officers from both Boston and New York. After 9/11 it was very common to be heard in several contexts.
It doesn't help that America has an incompetent President who prior to 2009 only had experience as an executive running the staff of his Senate office.... and even that was a huge jump over the half dozen TAs and student assistants he had as an economics professor. Half of the time I don't think the President knows where the money is even going or who is even being supported or not.
U.S. foreign policy is hypocritical in part because it is rarely even being run by the same person or for that matter even the same political philosophies. Most often it is run by bureaucratic hacks that are more often bought off by political lobbyists that promote some sort of commercial objective. In some cases, I'd dare say that Coca-Cola and McDonald's has a stronger influence on foreign policy than even the President.
FidoNet to TCP/IP gateways have existed in the past, and I've used them too. E-mail in particular was something I've used in the past rather extensively and works better than you'd think including some interesting routing of direct messages.
FidoNet works particularly well when network communication is spotty and intermittent.... such as using dial-up links and perhaps Sneaker nets.
Sneaker nets in particular seem like an ideal solution to what is happening in Egypt.
I'm quite certain that the ISPs, even if it isn't because of government meddling, are melting down due to a breakdown of government services (connections are being broken from the riots/vandalism) and because people are crushing the connections with usage alone. If you are in Egypt, you need to know what is going on and are seeking out others even if you have a network connection.
A similar kind of impact happened in America following 9/11/2001 where many ISPs felt a crush of usage. Even Slashdot couldn't keep up at one point with that crush. I see what is happening in Egypt to be no different and the need for staying connected is even more important if you live in Egypt.
Trying to run wires or even set up an antenna for a mesh network is still going to be a task risking life and property if it is done, if for no other reason than pot shots from demonstrators and looters is going to get in the way at the moment, much less from government officials and soldiers. Egypt would not be a good place to start an ISP at the moment.
I am appalled and perhaps even a touch angry with some of the political pundits in America, particularly those who made commentary on the Sunday talk show circuit over this weekend. Those commentators seem to be completely out of touch with what is going on, yet their "spin" on things is what the American people are getting fed in terms of what is happening in Egypt.
Sometimes Slashdot is ahead of the curve on geek news compared to the mainstream outlets, but I've never seen a political event where what I've been reading on this site is so far ahead of these mainstream reporters that it seems like two completely different events have been going on.
I understand that the U.S. government is in a tricky situation where support for the existing government seems to be the implied course of action. One of the things that is of particular note is that the U.S. government is directly financing and supporting the Mubarak government, including the direct training and equipping of the Egyptian Army. It is for that reason especially that the opinion of the U.S. government matters, where switching support to another faction in the Egyptian society can have a huge impact even if the Mubarak government refuses to go away. Some of the direct cash payments come from the Camp David Peace Accords where both Israel and Egypt were given direct cash payments to essentially "pay off" both countries if they agreed to a peace treaty. It was a good deal for America too as it prevented World War III from starting in that part of the world (a long, long story there).
The problem with the Mubarak government is that they have no mechanism for people dissatisfied with the government to be able to express themselves, or to establish a political faction contrary to the prevailing ones. Essentially the only option available to change the government is violent overthrow of that government. The protesters know that their voice can only be heard in the fashion they are protesting right now, and the "changes" in the government doesn't resolve their grievances.
While not a perfect analogy, the Tea Party protests in America represented a similar dissatisfaction with the way things were being run, but the net result of those protests is that many of the "leaders" of that movement now sit in positions of real political power and are proposing legislation and making a real difference. That is the benefit of at least some sort of democratic method for change to exist, particularly in an era of modern communications to tie together different isolated groups into something much larger. I'm not saying that Egypt needs to use an identical process, but they need to come up with something, perhaps uniquely Egyptian, for their problems.
"It can never happen here" are some of the most dangerous words ever spoken, no?
It isn't like the U.S. government has never been guilty of mass arrests for arbitrary reasons unrelated to criminal acts or even flat out genocide of undesirable groups in its past under the current constitutional government. That last incident is particularly interesting as the commanding officer in that incident was promoted by the U.S. President at the time (Abraham Lincoln) as gratitude for the fact that his men had raped women and killed hundreds of children. It wasn't even covered up but instead widely reported and even praised when it happened.
Yeah, the U.S. government can always be trusted to do the right thing all of the time.
The tapping of ISPs and other communications infrastructure goes back much more than just nine years. That has been happening almost continuously since the "emergency powers" under the Roosevelt Administration thought it necessary to censor civilian communications during World War II. That was continued during the "cold war" on an extensive basis and the post-9/11/2001 laws were pretty much a renewal of the earlier efforts that told those government agents involved to keep doing what they had been doing earlier.
Emergency authority, once granted, is rarely rescinded. Even if "authority" to act didn't exist under one particular piece of legislation like the "Patriot Act", there are literally hundreds of other laws, executive orders, and FCC regulations that apply as well to do most of the same thing if some federal agent wanted to act. At least it usually wasn't as brazen as it was under the Roosevelt administration when civilian postal communications (letters) were literally blacked out with felt markers redacting parts of the communication... if the letter was even permitted to be sent in the first place. I'm talking civilians sending letters to other civilians from ordinary towns and not even involving military personnel.
Even the process of setting up "monitoring equipment" can have a substantial impact upon the communications process and certainly acts as a communications delay in a number of cases where the data has to flow through an additional node as all of the data is sorted for "suspicious behavior". That seems to be what the current U.S. federal government approach seems to be, even if the actual shutting down of the communications isn't happening except on an "inadvertent" basis. Some of the major traffic choke points are where this monitoring is taking place, such as in data centers connected to undersea fiber links to other continents. The infrastructure costs to lay another cable down are such that you can't do something of that nature in a clandestine fashion without the federal government knowing about it... even if you tried and even made the connection in some other country like Mexico or Costa Rica first.
While the language of the legislation doesn't explicitly call for shutting down communications, it has that effect as the capability of using "emergency powers" to shut down the communications infrastructure certainly is possible with this system by simply shutting down these choke points that are already under government control.
As soon as you make the declaration that "high value infrastructure" has that "high value", it becomes a political game to get your particular facility excluded or included in that definition for various reasons, including pragmatic if there is a high speed link that is subsidized or has some features which from a pure business standpoint seems to be useful. It is also a slippery slope to define anything as "high value" as that can run amok when a bureaucracy tries to expand its scope of authority once established. That is the natural tendency of any human organization to grow or die, even if that growth is harmful to society as a whole.
This reminds me of some of the early attempts at television... also of equally lousy resolution due to bandwidth issues.
As mentioned in the article, true "holographic" representation of an environment would take an insane amount of processing and bandwidth. There are some "tricks" that can sort of simplify this issue after a fashion and still not require stereoscopic glasses or anything fancy on the part of the viewer, but even those have their limitations.
Making a credible Volumetric display is the real trick... something several people have worked on to some degree or another. I can only hope that eventually something will actually happen with the technology but in the meantime it is still and experimental toy and not something for serious work... yet.
This attempt here is nothing more than the equivalent of Felix the Cat as used by Philo Farnsworth on some of the early broadcast television tests.
The problem with theoretical physics is that unfortunately they often end up predicting physical reality to a high degree. Breakthroughs such as Relativity and Quantum Mechanics have often put the theoreticians substantially ahead of the experimenters to the point that sometimes the theoreticians end up getting a swelled head in the process and think they are invincible.
Other scientific disciplines have had some people try to pull off the same stunt, usually to disastrous ends.
In theory practice and theory ought to be the same. In practice, they usually aren't.
Out of curiosity.... what would the falsifiable result be for this particular study? "Proving" that there is no common gene between religiously oriented people and a similar absence of that gene in non-religious people?
Even that potential is a load of garbage. Pseudo genetics has been around for centuries trying to figure out how people work, but unfortunately with the discovery of DNA those who try to make up potential genetic traits are going to find they will have a harder and harder time proving their theories without identifying specific genes that are associated with this "trait". For scam artists that are spinning wheels of academia in the quest to "publish or perish", they will find their theories increasingly marginalized as "hard science" starts to take over from the pseudo science of earlier decades and centuries in genetic research.
Genetic research is now more akin to debugging and reverse-engineering software than it is to the social sciences of yesterday, and "researchers" who can't engage in a thoughtful discussion to identify specific genes by name or number to compare between specific people are not really doing any realistic genetic research at all. If some group like this wants to make a conjecture and suggest there might exist a gene that does something of this nature, that is one thing to consider. Genes that influence alcoholism have been identified, for example. This said, these guys aren't even making this a conjecture. At best, it is a strong wish and hoping the idea could be a conjecture.
In this age where the entire human genome has been effectively mapped and various genes in the genome with variants are being named and studied in detail, I'd have to agree that making a broad study that doesn't identify a specific gene to support this theory is mostly pure bullshit.
If they are going to be making such broad claims, at least try to find some sort of common gene that can be found with Muslims, Amish, Mormons, Catholics, and other religious communities that seem to have a large number of children. If the authors are too lazy to perform some gene sequencing to document or even suggest what "gene" might be responsible for this behavior, at best this is pure conjecture and not really worth commenting upon or for that matter even worth doing a follow up study. There certainly is no "scientific" basis for their theory unless they are subscribing to Lamarckian inheritance philosophies or something else that is just as much of a crackpot idea.
There could be such a gene, but I could make any other sort of conjecture that would be similarly unprovable. The study itself is unfalsifiable, and therefore not scientific as it doesn't follow the scientific method.
While religious motivations have been used as an excuse to start wars, I'd like to see any "proof" that the religion itself has been the root cause of the war and not some megalomaniac who got into a position to convince his co-believers into action.
Wars are started by people, often for a political motive. The medieval crusades that you are implying here were all started mainly for political reasons (gaining access to trade routes, finding things for 3rd & 4th sons of nobility to do besides assassinating their older brothers, "expanding realms", and other factors) and the religious component was mostly a minor issue. The sacking of Constantinople, the capital of a "Christian nation", was one of the major accomplishments of the ancient crusades too.
Besides, when was the last "legitimate" crusade? Arguably the "reconquista" of the Iberian peninsula in the late 15th Century was one of the last of them, and even that was not really a "proper" crusade other than it did pit the "Christian" Spanish king against the "Muslim" Moors. So you are complaining about something which ended over 500 years ago as a general tendency of Christianity?
I'd even say that the current "war on terror" is mostly a bunch of idiots who are trying to use the trappings of religion for political purposes, and it isn't the religion itself that is the motivating factor. If anything, religious tendencies might arguably be a tempering force and usually it is religious leaders who are crying for peace and patience. Yes, exceptions can be found, but for every "religious nut" trying to stir up a hornet's nest of problems to start a war I'm sure I can find a dozen or more others with strong religious tendencies to be actively involved with trying to stop war from happening and even going so far as taking punches or risking their own lives in an attempt to stop the war from happening.
Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin, both professed atheists, can account for far more death, misery, wars, and famine than almost all religious leaders or even religiously inclined political leaders in the entire history of humanity combined.
So... how would you detect free will, if it does exist?
The fact that you posted such an absurd statement is to me proof enough that free will exists.
Free will implies the freedom to be a jackass, both when and when it is not convenient.