North Vietnam defeated a South Vietnam that had the American military removed from it along with any foreign aid to help South Vietnam able to pay for its army... and a North Vietnam reinforced by Russian equipment and foreign aid.
It took North Vietnamese tanks and massive infantry formations to conquer Saigon.... it wasn't just a "popular uprising" of the South Vietnamese people like is sometimes portrayed.
Had the U.S. Congress really wanted to win in Vietnam, they could have appropriated the money, sent the necessary soldiers, and given a blank check to the U.S. President at the time (Richard Nixon... somebody Congress really wanted to get rid of at the time) with a formal declaration of war. That never happened, thus your logic really fails here.
America abandoned South Vietnam and let that country go away in defeat, but America was not really "defeated" in Vietnam. It was just another front in the Cold War from an American perspective.
The quote is "never get involved with a land war in Asia". Wise advise and something that has continually caused problems for America who seems to think they are the exception to the rule.
The problem right now is that America still is bogged down with a land war in Asia... and no reason to start another one.
Using that logic, there were several other nations that had nuclear weapons in their countries, including all of the NATO countries at the time. Still, as you mention, all of the weapons were under direct control of one of the major nuclear powers, so they really couldn't be used except to further the foreign policy goals of the major powers.
Indeed that is largely the only reason why the UK and France still have nuclear weapons at all, as they want to retain local control over their nukes rather than needing to be reliant upon America to provide "protection" against a nuclear attack. Argentina largely dodged a bullet in the Falkland Island War as the UK really didn't care to deploy nukes against that country (not to mention it would have escalated the whole conflict far more than it needed to go). Still, it isn't wise to screw around with a nuclear power even if it is over territory out in the middle of nowhere that most people would be hard pressed to acknowledge even exists.
South Korea got foreign aid (both food and money) from Ethiopia during the Korean War. That should say a great deal about how they fit into the global pecking order at the time. They've certainly improved themselves considerably over the past fifty years.... and North Korea largely hasn't.
The largest difference here is that many people in North Korea still are family members who were divided by the war. Of the older Koreans, it includes full siblings and even a few parent-child relationships, but it is mostly cousins at this point in time. Still, they want to maintain those relationships and there still is a common language and culture to draw upon that would more than simply treat the people of North Korea as mere destitute refugees. It would be harder for North Korea to move into the 21st Century than it was for East Germany to modernize and for the two Germanies to reunite, but it could be done if the opportunity presented itself.
Just as Poland is the natural invasion route between Russia and Germany, as is Belgium between France and Germany (and I might add between Germany and England), Korea is right in the middle of a natural invasion route between China and Japan. That Siberia isn't too far away as well and Korea makes a nice route between Russia and Japan (for at least some ways to attack Japan including how America planned on attacking Japan in World War II had the nukes not worked), you get Korea stuck in the middle of a whole bunch of major global powers.
This isn't really something engineered but simply something that developed due to physical geography. Compared to all of these huge countries, they are a people that have been ravaged over the centuries with constant attacks and regularly changing allegiances depending on who had the upper hand at the time. World War II went through Korea both from Japan trying to get to China as well as Russia trying to get to Japan. That is where you ended up with the current situation.
Korea is a fairly big country, but China, Russia, and Japan are far larger and have many more people. Due to circumstances of geography, they are kind of stuck between all of these huge countries that frankly don't mind letting a much smaller nation stand in the middle acting as a buffer to each other's empires. That America ended up with Japan as a more or less friendly ally in a "cold war" against China and Russia sort of make Korea an inevitable flashpoint as well.
What soldiers in the US are being laid off? Yes, I know that there are some cut-backs (bonuses are no longer being paid to recruits and soldiers are not being allowed to reenlist), but it isn't a "massive influx". The U.S. military right now is at a decade long low point even as it is, and in proportion to the overall American economy those who are serving in the military is laughably small.
By far a much larger influence on the American economy has been the termination of a great many service contracts that used to be performed by civilian employees who worked on military bases or did things for companies with military contracts that no longer exist. Most of those are usually highly skilled workers that can find employment elsewhere doing largely the same thing (including making weapons that are simply being sold to another customer like South Korea or Japan).
As for military personnel themselves that are being discharged.... you might be surprised how many of them have skills that are highly sought after as well. Very few people in the U.S. Army are merely "riflemen" that has no counterpart in civilian life. Even fewer in the Marine Corps (where Marines even receive law enforcement training that can translate into civilian equivalence as a police officer). Nearly every military specialization in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy has a civilian equivalent that represents at least a 2-year college equivalent or better education with significant work experience that is also sought by civilian employers... and that is just the enlisted personnel.
The only real concern about cutting back the military is that the freeze on hiring makes it harder for some teenagers and recent high school graduates to find employment. That isn't exactly anything new for a civilian economy to cope with either. I seriously doubt you know much about how the U.S. military works if you really think this is even remotely a concern for politicians in America.
I can't count the number of times I heard people say "You don't change leaders in the middle of a war." as a reason to vote Bush in for a second term.
You really believe that was the reason Bush was re-elected for his 2nd term? There might have been some old farts and a few fringe people saying stuff like that, but it wasn't even a major campaign discussion point.... other than simply showing "his record" in how he was "acting presidential" during his first term.
I certainly doubt if you asked many of those who actually cast a vote for Bush on his 2nd term that their response for why they did that was to "keep from changing leaders during a war".
Hell, most Americans hardly even noticed or even still notice that America is even at war with anybody or that its soldiers are in harms way... except for perhaps the few that have close friends serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. Even then it seems very distant and completely unrelated at all to current events or even dealing with ordinary life in America. It sure isn't like the huge domestic sacrifices that were made during World War I and World War II.
America can easily afford to go to war against China.... and certainly could take care of North Korea without a second thought.
You are correct though about how much it would cost to bring North Korea into the 21st Century though.... which might be a good thing for China as well. South Korea would be so self-absorbed by trying to "fix" North Korea that they wouldn't even remotely be concerned about anything else for well over a century and might even be friendlier to China in the long run.
The U.S. Marine Corps could easily perform an amphibious invasion onto China from several existing bases in that region, and with the assistance of several nuclear submarines could even start that action largely undetected with quite a few people already on the ground preparing such an invasion at any time before the Chinese military could react.
Seriously, the notion of a buffer zone is a silly and outdated notion, and North Korea is increasingly slipping into the backwater of insignificance on the global stage. The kind of bluster that they are making right now even shows how insignificant they have become.
Tuvalu and Niue are just as much of a buffer against "American imperial aggression" as North Korea and cost China a whole lot less in terms of foreign aid. Even the North Korean form of Communism is laughable in China. About the only thing that keeps China from completely pulling the plug is that North Korea represents a way to continue to tweak the nose of America from time to time for laughs and giggles, thus plays well for domestic (to China) public relations efforts.
South Korea has a pretty respectable military of their own that would put up a pretty decent fight against North Korea. It is largely untested and really isn't the same organization that existed in the 1950's, but they have been spending some serious money of their own on a standing army that is also highly motivated to repel a North Korean advance into literally their own homes and push back against what they see as foreign aggressors. The "Republic of Korea" Army also spent some time fighting in Vietnam in the 1960's and 1970's, so they aren't completely without battle experience either.
Depending on your measure, South Korea may even be technically stronger or at least more capable of withstanding a prolonged war than North Korea for that matter. Yes, South Korea doesn't have as many rockets or small arms as North Korea, but they have the money roughly equivalent to a 1st world country vs. North Korea that is arguably more impoverished than Somalia. The North Korean economy is geared almost exclusively to support their military and nothing else, where their people are literally starving to death.
If China decides to step in to "defend their communist brethren", they will frankly trigger World War III in full. I seriously doubt that China would do something that foolish, unless South Korea + the USA largely capture the whole of North Korea.... and even then China may simply say "good riddance". A unified Korea would still be largely in the economic sphere of China and would even act as a foil against Japan for economic dominance of the western Pacific region of the world. Indeed it may even be in the interest of China right now to simply let South Korea take over North Korea as the American military would have little reason to even be in that part of the world in such a situation... except as a token force and some smallish military bases kind of like what exist in Okinawa.
Japan decided to go to war against its largest trading partner in the 1930's. Germany did the same against it largest trading partner during the same era. Sometimes people deciding to start a war don't really care about trade relationships or economic damage that might come from a full scale war.
Of course this is why institutions like grocery stores and video game parlors are popular with "organized crime" and money laundering ventures. It certainly wouldn't be unusual for a grocery store to make a $100,000 daily deposit of cash in a bank, and some larger ones may even make a routine daily deposit of over a million dollars. Gambling casinos may deposit several million dollars each day as cash deposits.
Yes, those organizations may be able to document thousands of individual transactions that got them to the point where they can show where the money came from, but there are reasons to be moving that kind of money around where it may not necessarily even raise an eyebrow.
There are always ways around these rules for those who want to flaunt these kind of regulations. Sometimes they get caught, often they don't.
The US, other states and large financial companies can destroy BTC any moment at will. Switch as couple of data centers / super computers to bitcoin for a couple of hours to reach 51% of the total hash rate and manipulate the bitcoin chain. Repeating that in random intervalls will quickly destroy any confidence in BTC.
Captcha: investor
I'd like to see them try. Seriously. At best all they would accomplish is to throw all of that processing power at preventing new transactions from taking place temporarily and getting accepted into the block chain at tremendous cost of trying to do something silly like having petaflops of processing power being dumped into a useless task. The 51% attack is far overrated, and assumes that you have massive coordination to accomplish that task with spare computing power available that isn't needed to perform some other task at the time it is being used.
A major bank especially wouldn't be doing something like that unless they are explicitly trying to get into the business of processing bitcoin transactions.... in which case they would be providing processing power to prevent such an attack by any other major institution. Banks are in the business of earning money, not throwing it away on a useless endeavor. Major governments might try to do a brute force attack against Bitcoin in this manner, but it would be unlikely to succeed.
The best kind of attack that a sovereign entity like a government might do is to arrest any Bitcoin developers and to deploy packet sniffers that try to block any transaction packets being used to transmit Bitcoin information. It would be easier for them to simply shut down the internet going into and out of their country... assuming they don't mind that kind of harsh treatment of their citizens and cutting themselves off from global trade of any kind.
I should point out that the point of the Shuttle-Mir spaceflights prior to the construction of the ISS was a part of this technology transfer I was talking about. I suppose that was a fantasy too that never took place, just like the Apollo flights were just a hoax perpetrated in some Burbank studio?
My point was that the ISS was not really constructed to be primarily a research laboratory, which was ultimately a sort of afterthought. Ditto for much of the manned spaceflight program as a whole I might add, as much of it had to do with national pride and engineering rather than scientific research. Much of the early literature during the Clinton Administration about why the ISS was being built was seen as a subsidy of the Russian space program. So much so that members of congress in congressional testimony in the 1990's were complaining about more or less footing the entire bill for building the ISS in the first place. In those very same hearings there was some very deep concern about what would happen if the ISS program wasn't going on with Russian engineers, and more than a few members of congress and people testifying in committee suggested that they would indeed be building missiles for North Korea, Iran, and/or "terrorist organizations".
I know it isn't worth your time to go back into the congressional record of that time period, which is too bad as you might learn a thing or two about how reality works. It isn't really a conspiracy either, as it was done out in the open and was a part of the actual purpose and mission of the ISS. The scientific research lab aspect of the ISS was something for it to be doing once it was built and to give it a purpose instead of splashing the station shortly after it was built.
I should note that since completion of the ISS that there have been several very serious proposals to have the ISS decommissioned precisely because its original goals and purpose has been met. Arguably much of the research that is being done on the ISS could be done in other ways at a much cheaper cost. If it was so valuable as a research platform, why would decommissioning even be seriously considered?
Since you seem to have a strong command of what went into the building of the International Space Station and its history, perhaps you could come up with something that is a proper rebuttal rather than a bald personal attack?
I suppose it was just a fantasy that there ever was a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America? Something made up out of whole cloth and the work of conspiracy theory nuts?
That is a fair question, and it should be pointed out that the cost to travel to the ISS has been steadily going up faster than inflation (at least faster than the CPI). I'd say that those space tourists are more than paying for their share of the costs for getting into space.
Keep in mind that the point of these flights is to swap "emergency escape" vehicles in the form of Soyuz capsules. These are the lifeboats of the ISS where the people on the ISS can escape and return to the Earth if something really bad happens.... like a core module getting hit by a meteor. The Soyuz spacecraft have a limited amount of time they can be used in space, and to be safe they are replaced at regular intervals.
Since only two cosmonauts are needed to fly this spacecraft, there is really an "extra" seat in all of these flights.... hence the reason why Russia was willing to sell the flight opportunities to a company like Space Adventures. Previously (in the Soviet Union era) this "extra seat" was often used as a public relations tool where "guest cosmonauts" were offered a ride from mainly countries with good relations with the Soviet Union. In other words, these "tourists" have been going up for several decades now. People flying on the Soyuz are still expected to know how to operate the spacecraft, which is why even the "tourists" still have to spend six months or longer in a training program at Star City before they are allowed to fly.
This is no Disneyland vacation. Spacecraft capable of flying genuine passengers has yet to be built. Well, the Space Shuttle could have done that, but it was so expensive to operate that mere passengers weren't a viable option on that spacecraft either. Perhaps once the SpaceX Dragon is fully crew certified you might see some real tourists with much more limited training in spaceflight operations that are more completely "paying their own freight" to go into space. How many people do you know that in order to fly to Europe on a 747 need to be certified on that airframe as a commercial pilot (with multi-engine and instrument landing endorsements) before making the trip?
Some of the modules on the Russian side of the ISS were even intended to be either placed on Mir or on a scheduled "Mir II" spacecraft that was going to be built before the idea of the ISS was put forward in a serious proposal. Indeed Russia is still thinking of taking their modules away from the ISS and using them as the core of a new space station.... especially if the U.S. government wants to splash the American modules.
Essentially, the ISS really is just an upscaled Mir, which is in turn based on technology developed under the Almaz program that the Soviet Union ran. It does include some knowledge gained from Skylab as well, but the Soviet Union had many iterations of space stations while America had just the Skylab (and possibly the Spacelab modules on the SpaceShuttle) previously.
In spite of links like the one above that seems to treat the International Space Station as a research platform, its real purpose was hardly to conduct research in weightlessness.
Keep in mind that the actual purpose of the structure is to perform two important tasks:
1) To keep rocket engineers gainfully employed on a major engineering project.... especially engineers from the former Soviet Union so they don't sell their services to countries like North Korea and Iran.
2) To act as a "vehicle" to transfer knowledge gained by Russia over the past several decades of doing elaborate construction projects in space (especially from Mir) and thus have American astronauts understand the difficulties and problems with large scale construction projects in space.
As to if that was worth the $100 billion spent on the International Space Station, that could certainly be debated. Note that has nothing at all to do with actual scientific research.
If anything, some really odd modules were cut from the design of the ISS that could have made it a viable research platform, but haven't flown (including a couple that were built and then mothballed because it couldn't be put on the manifest of the Space Shuttle). Since it is in orbit, I think it is a crying shame to let it go to waste and especially to threaten that it be dismantled and splashed into the Pacific Ocean.
I do agree with you though that for all of the money even to maintain the ISS there should be not just a bunch of peer reviewed papers, but a regular quality journal that would be eagerly reviewed from all of the research that is happening there. Definitely there should be roughly monthly papers based on some of the research that is happening there. Then again, there should also be more people up there doing research rather than the current skeleton crew that barely keeps up with the maintenance of the ISS (getting back to some of the modules that were cut that would have housed those researchers).
It doesn't help that America lacks a vehicle to even get to the ISS, with the possible exception of the Dragon capsule by SpaceX. Even that could only be used in a real emergency at the moment.
That may be one solution. That is assuming that the users are making "short transmissions", as there will be a demand for bandwidth as well as just frequencies.
The question being raised about this frequency usage is not for space to space communication, but for space to ground communication. In other words, it is dealing with stuff that is happening here on the Earth and in the jurisdiction of some government.
To use your example, if Richard Branson is flying his Spaceship Two over New Mexico and asking for clearance to land, he needs to get permission from the FCC to even use the radio to communicate with the personnel at Spaceport America. If he was doing this in another country like Australia or (much more likely) Scotland, he would need to get permission of those respective governments to do the same thing.
This has absolutely nothing to do with nationalism or America asserting itself into regulating people who aren't even in America. There are groups like the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) that deals with these kind of issues on an international level, and there are already treaties in place for dealing with this very kind of thing. Not all countries agree on the same issues, but those who have advanced telecommunications infrastructures generally do cooperate. Smaller countries like Niue or Tuvalu tend to not care so much about frequency usage, but then again it usually isn't a problem (or rather full of all kinds of problems precisely because there isn't any strong regulating agency over frequency usage). BTW, the ITU is linked to the United Nations... if you weren't aware of them previously. You don't need to propose a thing because it already is international custom and law.
In other words, this is all about the 96% of the people in the civilized world who actually give a damn about this stuff, and that other 8% you are bitching about are living in places like Ethiopia and Somalia where concerns about commercial spaceflight isn't going to be a concern for another century or more, if it ever happens.
My experience is that commercial radio engineers tend to know more about their spectrum usage and how it interacts with other frequencies much better than most amateurs.... even experienced "Ham" radio operators. This isn't to say that somebody training under an amateur radio license is completely clueless, and I'll admit that one of the major reasons for encouraging amateur radio operators by the FCC and other licensing bodies was to help train a group of people who could theoretically be employed in an emergency for military and/or government service. Many amateur radio organizations usually do community service with emergency communications systems... to cite an example of this kind of partnership.
That said, commercial radio is difficult in part because commercial operators are granted the ability to use higher amounts of power, occupy prime frequency bands, and need to "play nice" with other radio users (even if they sometimes are jerks about playing nice). That is sort of the point of the whole licensing process that radio broadcasters and even commercial radio users like cell phone tower operators work under. The whole licensing regime is also the allocation of scarce resources (bandwidth is at a premium at many frequencies) and not everybody can be accommodated to use whatever they want to use whenever they want to use it.
Most commercial radio engineers have amateur licenses as well, at least so far as it gives them additional ways for them to practice their skills and already have the knowledge to pass most amateur licensing exams. The opposite isn't as true.
I would generally agree with your assessment, other than the fact that there are many commercial operators planning on getting into the game real soon with much more frequent flights than has been the case in the past. By far and away most of those flights are going to be sub-orbital (typically only going to 100 km in altitude) and the bulk of these flights will even be working with air traffic in some fashion or another.
Orbital spacecraft are going to be a much tougher problem, particularly for things like nanosatellites. They will be using that spectrum for prolonged periods of time (years at a time or longer), and if there are crews in spacecraft like a Bigelow module or some other "orbital hotel", they may even need a global "clear channel" of some sort.
Allowing everybody to have the luxury of a global clear channel communications link like the Apollo astronauts enjoyed in the 1960's isn't going to be possible if large numbers of people start using space and seek their own "private communications channel". It will be interesting to see how this will all work out, and I don't think there is a single realistic solution to this mess but rather a whole bunch of compromises and even rethinking how communications between ground stations and spacecraft will take place in the coming decades.
There is a bug report that was filed that attempted to address this very issue. Sadly, it isn't even remotely something that Mojang seems interested in doing... at least so far as something that mod developers could actively participate in using:
I would love to see Mojang offering a direct plug-in service for mod developers that could even include a payment stream like the Apple app store. I wouldn't personally mind Mojang getting a cut of anything I wrote if they offered this service, and "free" plug-ins could still be offered through a service like this.
That seems to be the reason for Ad Fly links as well, since most developers wouldn't mind some pizza money (they rarely make much more than that, if anything at all) for their efforts.
Yes, you can just pickup redstone and use it for ordinary things like turning on power for a rail or ringing a doorbell. Where it gets complicated is trying to figure out digital logic based off of nor circuits.
That silly chart is really just how to make "compact" circuits based off of that same logic. This latest update adds an additional layer of complexity as now you can send "numeric" values through redstone circuits and not just ones and zeros. The old circuits still work pretty much as they used to though.
Slashdot Mirror
North Vietnam defeated a South Vietnam that had the American military removed from it along with any foreign aid to help South Vietnam able to pay for its army... and a North Vietnam reinforced by Russian equipment and foreign aid.
It took North Vietnamese tanks and massive infantry formations to conquer Saigon.... it wasn't just a "popular uprising" of the South Vietnamese people like is sometimes portrayed.
Had the U.S. Congress really wanted to win in Vietnam, they could have appropriated the money, sent the necessary soldiers, and given a blank check to the U.S. President at the time (Richard Nixon... somebody Congress really wanted to get rid of at the time) with a formal declaration of war. That never happened, thus your logic really fails here.
America abandoned South Vietnam and let that country go away in defeat, but America was not really "defeated" in Vietnam. It was just another front in the Cold War from an American perspective.
I'm sure most columnists would be happy with Obama attacking South Korea. It would give them something to write about!
The quote is "never get involved with a land war in Asia". Wise advise and something that has continually caused problems for America who seems to think they are the exception to the rule.
The problem right now is that America still is bogged down with a land war in Asia... and no reason to start another one.
Using that logic, there were several other nations that had nuclear weapons in their countries, including all of the NATO countries at the time. Still, as you mention, all of the weapons were under direct control of one of the major nuclear powers, so they really couldn't be used except to further the foreign policy goals of the major powers.
Indeed that is largely the only reason why the UK and France still have nuclear weapons at all, as they want to retain local control over their nukes rather than needing to be reliant upon America to provide "protection" against a nuclear attack. Argentina largely dodged a bullet in the Falkland Island War as the UK really didn't care to deploy nukes against that country (not to mention it would have escalated the whole conflict far more than it needed to go). Still, it isn't wise to screw around with a nuclear power even if it is over territory out in the middle of nowhere that most people would be hard pressed to acknowledge even exists.
South Korea got foreign aid (both food and money) from Ethiopia during the Korean War. That should say a great deal about how they fit into the global pecking order at the time. They've certainly improved themselves considerably over the past fifty years.... and North Korea largely hasn't.
The largest difference here is that many people in North Korea still are family members who were divided by the war. Of the older Koreans, it includes full siblings and even a few parent-child relationships, but it is mostly cousins at this point in time. Still, they want to maintain those relationships and there still is a common language and culture to draw upon that would more than simply treat the people of North Korea as mere destitute refugees. It would be harder for North Korea to move into the 21st Century than it was for East Germany to modernize and for the two Germanies to reunite, but it could be done if the opportunity presented itself.
Just as Poland is the natural invasion route between Russia and Germany, as is Belgium between France and Germany (and I might add between Germany and England), Korea is right in the middle of a natural invasion route between China and Japan. That Siberia isn't too far away as well and Korea makes a nice route between Russia and Japan (for at least some ways to attack Japan including how America planned on attacking Japan in World War II had the nukes not worked), you get Korea stuck in the middle of a whole bunch of major global powers.
This isn't really something engineered but simply something that developed due to physical geography. Compared to all of these huge countries, they are a people that have been ravaged over the centuries with constant attacks and regularly changing allegiances depending on who had the upper hand at the time. World War II went through Korea both from Japan trying to get to China as well as Russia trying to get to Japan. That is where you ended up with the current situation.
Korea is a fairly big country, but China, Russia, and Japan are far larger and have many more people. Due to circumstances of geography, they are kind of stuck between all of these huge countries that frankly don't mind letting a much smaller nation stand in the middle acting as a buffer to each other's empires. That America ended up with Japan as a more or less friendly ally in a "cold war" against China and Russia sort of make Korea an inevitable flashpoint as well.
What soldiers in the US are being laid off? Yes, I know that there are some cut-backs (bonuses are no longer being paid to recruits and soldiers are not being allowed to reenlist), but it isn't a "massive influx". The U.S. military right now is at a decade long low point even as it is, and in proportion to the overall American economy those who are serving in the military is laughably small.
By far a much larger influence on the American economy has been the termination of a great many service contracts that used to be performed by civilian employees who worked on military bases or did things for companies with military contracts that no longer exist. Most of those are usually highly skilled workers that can find employment elsewhere doing largely the same thing (including making weapons that are simply being sold to another customer like South Korea or Japan).
As for military personnel themselves that are being discharged.... you might be surprised how many of them have skills that are highly sought after as well. Very few people in the U.S. Army are merely "riflemen" that has no counterpart in civilian life. Even fewer in the Marine Corps (where Marines even receive law enforcement training that can translate into civilian equivalence as a police officer). Nearly every military specialization in the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy has a civilian equivalent that represents at least a 2-year college equivalent or better education with significant work experience that is also sought by civilian employers... and that is just the enlisted personnel.
The only real concern about cutting back the military is that the freeze on hiring makes it harder for some teenagers and recent high school graduates to find employment. That isn't exactly anything new for a civilian economy to cope with either. I seriously doubt you know much about how the U.S. military works if you really think this is even remotely a concern for politicians in America.
I can't count the number of times I heard people say "You don't change leaders in the middle of a war." as a reason to vote Bush in for a second term.
You really believe that was the reason Bush was re-elected for his 2nd term? There might have been some old farts and a few fringe people saying stuff like that, but it wasn't even a major campaign discussion point.... other than simply showing "his record" in how he was "acting presidential" during his first term.
I certainly doubt if you asked many of those who actually cast a vote for Bush on his 2nd term that their response for why they did that was to "keep from changing leaders during a war".
Hell, most Americans hardly even noticed or even still notice that America is even at war with anybody or that its soldiers are in harms way... except for perhaps the few that have close friends serving in Afghanistan or Iraq. Even then it seems very distant and completely unrelated at all to current events or even dealing with ordinary life in America. It sure isn't like the huge domestic sacrifices that were made during World War I and World War II.
America can easily afford to go to war against China.... and certainly could take care of North Korea without a second thought.
You are correct though about how much it would cost to bring North Korea into the 21st Century though.... which might be a good thing for China as well. South Korea would be so self-absorbed by trying to "fix" North Korea that they wouldn't even remotely be concerned about anything else for well over a century and might even be friendlier to China in the long run.
The U.S. Marine Corps could easily perform an amphibious invasion onto China from several existing bases in that region, and with the assistance of several nuclear submarines could even start that action largely undetected with quite a few people already on the ground preparing such an invasion at any time before the Chinese military could react.
Seriously, the notion of a buffer zone is a silly and outdated notion, and North Korea is increasingly slipping into the backwater of insignificance on the global stage. The kind of bluster that they are making right now even shows how insignificant they have become.
Tuvalu and Niue are just as much of a buffer against "American imperial aggression" as North Korea and cost China a whole lot less in terms of foreign aid. Even the North Korean form of Communism is laughable in China. About the only thing that keeps China from completely pulling the plug is that North Korea represents a way to continue to tweak the nose of America from time to time for laughs and giggles, thus plays well for domestic (to China) public relations efforts.
South Korea has a pretty respectable military of their own that would put up a pretty decent fight against North Korea. It is largely untested and really isn't the same organization that existed in the 1950's, but they have been spending some serious money of their own on a standing army that is also highly motivated to repel a North Korean advance into literally their own homes and push back against what they see as foreign aggressors. The "Republic of Korea" Army also spent some time fighting in Vietnam in the 1960's and 1970's, so they aren't completely without battle experience either.
Depending on your measure, South Korea may even be technically stronger or at least more capable of withstanding a prolonged war than North Korea for that matter. Yes, South Korea doesn't have as many rockets or small arms as North Korea, but they have the money roughly equivalent to a 1st world country vs. North Korea that is arguably more impoverished than Somalia. The North Korean economy is geared almost exclusively to support their military and nothing else, where their people are literally starving to death.
If China decides to step in to "defend their communist brethren", they will frankly trigger World War III in full. I seriously doubt that China would do something that foolish, unless South Korea + the USA largely capture the whole of North Korea.... and even then China may simply say "good riddance". A unified Korea would still be largely in the economic sphere of China and would even act as a foil against Japan for economic dominance of the western Pacific region of the world. Indeed it may even be in the interest of China right now to simply let South Korea take over North Korea as the American military would have little reason to even be in that part of the world in such a situation... except as a token force and some smallish military bases kind of like what exist in Okinawa.
Japan decided to go to war against its largest trading partner in the 1930's. Germany did the same against it largest trading partner during the same era. Sometimes people deciding to start a war don't really care about trade relationships or economic damage that might come from a full scale war.
Of course this is why institutions like grocery stores and video game parlors are popular with "organized crime" and money laundering ventures. It certainly wouldn't be unusual for a grocery store to make a $100,000 daily deposit of cash in a bank, and some larger ones may even make a routine daily deposit of over a million dollars. Gambling casinos may deposit several million dollars each day as cash deposits.
Yes, those organizations may be able to document thousands of individual transactions that got them to the point where they can show where the money came from, but there are reasons to be moving that kind of money around where it may not necessarily even raise an eyebrow.
There are always ways around these rules for those who want to flaunt these kind of regulations. Sometimes they get caught, often they don't.
The US, other states and large financial companies can destroy BTC any moment at will. Switch as couple of data centers / super computers to bitcoin for a couple of hours to reach 51% of the total hash rate and manipulate the bitcoin chain. Repeating that in random intervalls will quickly destroy any confidence in BTC.
Captcha: investor
I'd like to see them try. Seriously. At best all they would accomplish is to throw all of that processing power at preventing new transactions from taking place temporarily and getting accepted into the block chain at tremendous cost of trying to do something silly like having petaflops of processing power being dumped into a useless task. The 51% attack is far overrated, and assumes that you have massive coordination to accomplish that task with spare computing power available that isn't needed to perform some other task at the time it is being used.
A major bank especially wouldn't be doing something like that unless they are explicitly trying to get into the business of processing bitcoin transactions.... in which case they would be providing processing power to prevent such an attack by any other major institution. Banks are in the business of earning money, not throwing it away on a useless endeavor. Major governments might try to do a brute force attack against Bitcoin in this manner, but it would be unlikely to succeed.
The best kind of attack that a sovereign entity like a government might do is to arrest any Bitcoin developers and to deploy packet sniffers that try to block any transaction packets being used to transmit Bitcoin information. It would be easier for them to simply shut down the internet going into and out of their country... assuming they don't mind that kind of harsh treatment of their citizens and cutting themselves off from global trade of any kind.
I should point out that the point of the Shuttle-Mir spaceflights prior to the construction of the ISS was a part of this technology transfer I was talking about. I suppose that was a fantasy too that never took place, just like the Apollo flights were just a hoax perpetrated in some Burbank studio?
My point was that the ISS was not really constructed to be primarily a research laboratory, which was ultimately a sort of afterthought. Ditto for much of the manned spaceflight program as a whole I might add, as much of it had to do with national pride and engineering rather than scientific research. Much of the early literature during the Clinton Administration about why the ISS was being built was seen as a subsidy of the Russian space program. So much so that members of congress in congressional testimony in the 1990's were complaining about more or less footing the entire bill for building the ISS in the first place. In those very same hearings there was some very deep concern about what would happen if the ISS program wasn't going on with Russian engineers, and more than a few members of congress and people testifying in committee suggested that they would indeed be building missiles for North Korea, Iran, and/or "terrorist organizations".
I know it isn't worth your time to go back into the congressional record of that time period, which is too bad as you might learn a thing or two about how reality works. It isn't really a conspiracy either, as it was done out in the open and was a part of the actual purpose and mission of the ISS. The scientific research lab aspect of the ISS was something for it to be doing once it was built and to give it a purpose instead of splashing the station shortly after it was built.
I should note that since completion of the ISS that there have been several very serious proposals to have the ISS decommissioned precisely because its original goals and purpose has been met. Arguably much of the research that is being done on the ISS could be done in other ways at a much cheaper cost. If it was so valuable as a research platform, why would decommissioning even be seriously considered?
Since you seem to have a strong command of what went into the building of the International Space Station and its history, perhaps you could come up with something that is a proper rebuttal rather than a bald personal attack?
I suppose it was just a fantasy that there ever was a Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States of America? Something made up out of whole cloth and the work of conspiracy theory nuts?
That is a fair question, and it should be pointed out that the cost to travel to the ISS has been steadily going up faster than inflation (at least faster than the CPI). I'd say that those space tourists are more than paying for their share of the costs for getting into space.
Keep in mind that the point of these flights is to swap "emergency escape" vehicles in the form of Soyuz capsules. These are the lifeboats of the ISS where the people on the ISS can escape and return to the Earth if something really bad happens.... like a core module getting hit by a meteor. The Soyuz spacecraft have a limited amount of time they can be used in space, and to be safe they are replaced at regular intervals.
Since only two cosmonauts are needed to fly this spacecraft, there is really an "extra" seat in all of these flights.... hence the reason why Russia was willing to sell the flight opportunities to a company like Space Adventures. Previously (in the Soviet Union era) this "extra seat" was often used as a public relations tool where "guest cosmonauts" were offered a ride from mainly countries with good relations with the Soviet Union. In other words, these "tourists" have been going up for several decades now. People flying on the Soyuz are still expected to know how to operate the spacecraft, which is why even the "tourists" still have to spend six months or longer in a training program at Star City before they are allowed to fly.
This is no Disneyland vacation. Spacecraft capable of flying genuine passengers has yet to be built. Well, the Space Shuttle could have done that, but it was so expensive to operate that mere passengers weren't a viable option on that spacecraft either. Perhaps once the SpaceX Dragon is fully crew certified you might see some real tourists with much more limited training in spaceflight operations that are more completely "paying their own freight" to go into space. How many people do you know that in order to fly to Europe on a 747 need to be certified on that airframe as a commercial pilot (with multi-engine and instrument landing endorsements) before making the trip?
Some of the modules on the Russian side of the ISS were even intended to be either placed on Mir or on a scheduled "Mir II" spacecraft that was going to be built before the idea of the ISS was put forward in a serious proposal. Indeed Russia is still thinking of taking their modules away from the ISS and using them as the core of a new space station.... especially if the U.S. government wants to splash the American modules.
Essentially, the ISS really is just an upscaled Mir, which is in turn based on technology developed under the Almaz program that the Soviet Union ran. It does include some knowledge gained from Skylab as well, but the Soviet Union had many iterations of space stations while America had just the Skylab (and possibly the Spacelab modules on the SpaceShuttle) previously.
In spite of links like the one above that seems to treat the International Space Station as a research platform, its real purpose was hardly to conduct research in weightlessness.
Keep in mind that the actual purpose of the structure is to perform two important tasks:
As to if that was worth the $100 billion spent on the International Space Station, that could certainly be debated. Note that has nothing at all to do with actual scientific research.
If anything, some really odd modules were cut from the design of the ISS that could have made it a viable research platform, but haven't flown (including a couple that were built and then mothballed because it couldn't be put on the manifest of the Space Shuttle). Since it is in orbit, I think it is a crying shame to let it go to waste and especially to threaten that it be dismantled and splashed into the Pacific Ocean.
I do agree with you though that for all of the money even to maintain the ISS there should be not just a bunch of peer reviewed papers, but a regular quality journal that would be eagerly reviewed from all of the research that is happening there. Definitely there should be roughly monthly papers based on some of the research that is happening there. Then again, there should also be more people up there doing research rather than the current skeleton crew that barely keeps up with the maintenance of the ISS (getting back to some of the modules that were cut that would have housed those researchers).
It doesn't help that America lacks a vehicle to even get to the ISS, with the possible exception of the Dragon capsule by SpaceX. Even that could only be used in a real emergency at the moment.
That may be one solution. That is assuming that the users are making "short transmissions", as there will be a demand for bandwidth as well as just frequencies.
The question being raised about this frequency usage is not for space to space communication, but for space to ground communication. In other words, it is dealing with stuff that is happening here on the Earth and in the jurisdiction of some government.
To use your example, if Richard Branson is flying his Spaceship Two over New Mexico and asking for clearance to land, he needs to get permission from the FCC to even use the radio to communicate with the personnel at Spaceport America. If he was doing this in another country like Australia or (much more likely) Scotland, he would need to get permission of those respective governments to do the same thing.
This has absolutely nothing to do with nationalism or America asserting itself into regulating people who aren't even in America. There are groups like the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) that deals with these kind of issues on an international level, and there are already treaties in place for dealing with this very kind of thing. Not all countries agree on the same issues, but those who have advanced telecommunications infrastructures generally do cooperate. Smaller countries like Niue or Tuvalu tend to not care so much about frequency usage, but then again it usually isn't a problem (or rather full of all kinds of problems precisely because there isn't any strong regulating agency over frequency usage). BTW, the ITU is linked to the United Nations... if you weren't aware of them previously. You don't need to propose a thing because it already is international custom and law.
In other words, this is all about the 96% of the people in the civilized world who actually give a damn about this stuff, and that other 8% you are bitching about are living in places like Ethiopia and Somalia where concerns about commercial spaceflight isn't going to be a concern for another century or more, if it ever happens.
My experience is that commercial radio engineers tend to know more about their spectrum usage and how it interacts with other frequencies much better than most amateurs.... even experienced "Ham" radio operators. This isn't to say that somebody training under an amateur radio license is completely clueless, and I'll admit that one of the major reasons for encouraging amateur radio operators by the FCC and other licensing bodies was to help train a group of people who could theoretically be employed in an emergency for military and/or government service. Many amateur radio organizations usually do community service with emergency communications systems... to cite an example of this kind of partnership.
That said, commercial radio is difficult in part because commercial operators are granted the ability to use higher amounts of power, occupy prime frequency bands, and need to "play nice" with other radio users (even if they sometimes are jerks about playing nice). That is sort of the point of the whole licensing process that radio broadcasters and even commercial radio users like cell phone tower operators work under. The whole licensing regime is also the allocation of scarce resources (bandwidth is at a premium at many frequencies) and not everybody can be accommodated to use whatever they want to use whenever they want to use it.
Most commercial radio engineers have amateur licenses as well, at least so far as it gives them additional ways for them to practice their skills and already have the knowledge to pass most amateur licensing exams. The opposite isn't as true.
I would generally agree with your assessment, other than the fact that there are many commercial operators planning on getting into the game real soon with much more frequent flights than has been the case in the past. By far and away most of those flights are going to be sub-orbital (typically only going to 100 km in altitude) and the bulk of these flights will even be working with air traffic in some fashion or another.
Orbital spacecraft are going to be a much tougher problem, particularly for things like nanosatellites. They will be using that spectrum for prolonged periods of time (years at a time or longer), and if there are crews in spacecraft like a Bigelow module or some other "orbital hotel", they may even need a global "clear channel" of some sort.
Allowing everybody to have the luxury of a global clear channel communications link like the Apollo astronauts enjoyed in the 1960's isn't going to be possible if large numbers of people start using space and seek their own "private communications channel". It will be interesting to see how this will all work out, and I don't think there is a single realistic solution to this mess but rather a whole bunch of compromises and even rethinking how communications between ground stations and spacecraft will take place in the coming decades.
There is a bug report that was filed that attempted to address this very issue. Sadly, it isn't even remotely something that Mojang seems interested in doing... at least so far as something that mod developers could actively participate in using:
https://mojang.atlassian.net/browse/MCAPI-102
I would love to see Mojang offering a direct plug-in service for mod developers that could even include a payment stream like the Apple app store. I wouldn't personally mind Mojang getting a cut of anything I wrote if they offered this service, and "free" plug-ins could still be offered through a service like this.
That seems to be the reason for Ad Fly links as well, since most developers wouldn't mind some pizza money (they rarely make much more than that, if anything at all) for their efforts.
Yes, you can just pickup redstone and use it for ordinary things like turning on power for a rail or ringing a doorbell. Where it gets complicated is trying to figure out digital logic based off of nor circuits.
That silly chart is really just how to make "compact" circuits based off of that same logic. This latest update adds an additional layer of complexity as now you can send "numeric" values through redstone circuits and not just ones and zeros. The old circuits still work pretty much as they used to though.