"Let's make a simple bet -- I say CEV will launch before Klipper."
Hell yea I'll take that bet as long as its a MANNED launch to LEO, safe up and back. I'm willing to accept the big handicap that NASA has way more money to throw at it. Even if I lose I wont have to apologize until 2015 at the earliest. I'm sure they will throw some tin cans in to LEO before then but they have to be MANNED in to orbit and thats gonna take NASA forever after they get done pushing paper and wringing their hands. I really hope the Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, Indians throw money behind Kliper. I bet they will, some ESA people are already talking like it, because I think they all know NASA is a joke at this point, and nobody wants to partner with Bush's arrogant America on anything at this point(excepting the UK).
"a leftover, unlaunched Mir part, is the "core" of the ISS."
Not even gonna start this stupid arguement again, Zarya and Zveda are the core of the station, everyone knows it except you. I think you know it too but refuse to admit it to yourself. It was manned as soon as they were operational. Only major module the U.S. has there at the moment is Destiny a lab module, it isn't the core.
Stop dissing Mir. While the U.S. spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars on artist conceptions of a space station, none of which flew, the Russians had a permenent manned presence in space for a tiny fraction of the cost. If the Russian hadn't built the core for the ISS I wager it would still be sitting on an arists table. NASA saves face acting like it was charity bringing in the Russians. In fact they had NO knowledge about building a long duration space station. Skylab was cool but it was brief, LONG ago, and done by Apollo veterans most of whom have retired or died.
"Your critique of their design is simply monday morning quarterbacking and ignorance of the constraints they had to work within."
Their "design" failed in every respect. Granted a political quagmire between Presidents, Congress, NASA and the DOD helped it fail but they still failed and that is all that matters in the end. They failed to succeed. It was supposed to be cheap, it was the antithesis of cheap. It was supposed to have a high launch rate, it instead has been unlaunchable for years, and the launch rate goes down every year (and by the way the Russians had to step up and keep the ISS going for the last 2 1/2 years, and put NASA astronauts and supplies though NASA hasn't paid them a cent due to an embargo over Iran). It was supposed to do evertyhing in space. After Challenger it was largely abandoned and relegated to doing incredibly expensive physiology experiments. After Columbia its now good for nothing other than faking an expensive expendable launch vehicle to finish a $100 billion dollar hole in space.
Sorry man the Shuttle was a failure no matter how you slice it. Its sad, I wish it wasn't but it is. People need to come to grips with two failures in a row(Shuttle and ISS) and do whatever it take to stop failing.
There are some great technical achievements in the Shuttle but that doesn't change the fact that as a launch vehicle it was a failure.
"How would you suggest returning from the moon?"
Huh? Think you need to get there first and I don't think NASA has any chance to get there before 2020 if ever.
"So what was your point?"... that if you read the accident reports on Challenger and Columbia there is a recurring theme that NASA failed to recogize danger and to deal with fatal flaws, because their team communication was terrible, and it was especially bad between the launch team at Kennedy and all the teams at Johnson. You can scatter your team all over the U.S. its just going to cost a fortune and you are dramaticly increasing the chance for mistakes, and in this case those mistakes cost billions and kill people.
"Moreover, the designs aren't exclusively done at JSC anyway -- they are done in California, Texas, Kansas, etc."
They exist, they fail miserably optimizing most C and C++ code or at least they aren't good enough at it to make up for Itanic's handicapped clock speed.
You just need to read the other posts here about how hard it is to develop compilers that can find 4 way parallel instructions to cram in to the VLIW at compile time. You find a lot more opportunities at runtime using dynamic scheduling at the price of complexity in the CPU.
Maybe someday the compilers will be really good and Pentirum/AMD CPU clocks will hit the wall and Itanic will reign supreme. Intel is one of the few companies with pockets deep enough to keep it alive and keep pouring the billions in to both the CPU and the compiler, until it starts outshining x86_64 on anything other than vectorizable Fortran. Wouldn't necessarily count on that confluence of events happening in time to save it. I'd really like to see how much Intel has sunk in to Itanic versus the ROI. It must be appalling. Only a company with a near monopoly elsewhere could survive it.
Me I'll take an AMD 3400+. My whole computer cost $800 versus $2000 for just an Itanic CPU, it has 2 GB/sec memory bandwidth, runs IA32 apps really fast, is running Gentoo Linux so everything is taking advantage of all the new registers and instructions set improvements, and I have 64 bit addressing. Its sweet and sensible.
I'm not argueing that Itanic wont hold its niche in supercomputing. Aren't many people who are going to put one on a desktop or in a server.
You left out the crucial element of the story. Intel signed a technology agreement with DEC, under the pretense that they would license the Alpha architecture. DEC gave them ALL the Alpha design docs. Intel read them all, and probably xeroxed them all, then said they weren't interested and sent them back.
They then proceeded to incorporate most of what they learned from the Alpha design in to Pentium Pro, Pentium II, without paying DEC anything, and they quickly erased the performance gap between IA32 and RISC, and then with their vast resource left most of them in the dust. DEC won a court decision years later over it and got some chump change for it but DEC is dead and Intel owns the lion's share of the CPU market.
Yet another example of how NOT having core values in your company is more likely to make you successful than having them. Successful business is brutual, ugly and largely devoid of ethics or values other than "Greed is King".
But seriously, it gets no respect because its a complete dog on anything other than vectorizable Fortran codes. Its inherent in the design.
The compiler has to do a LOT of work to pack instructions in to the VLIW(Very long instruction word). To get max performance I think you need to schedule 4? instructions in each word. You can do that with carefully written vectorizable Fortran with the help of a talented supercomputing class code tuner.
When you get to C and C++ it is nearly impossible. Pointers and pointer aliasing completely frustrate the compiler, and in general most C and C++ code don't have the vectorized nature of the class vectorized Fortran codes.
The IA32 emulation is inherently much slower than a Pentium or Athlon at the same clock and they have much higher clocks than the Itanic. So any application you carry a binary over from an IA32 box is a real dog. It takes advantage of none of the chips strengths and hits all its weaknesses.
IA64 has a place on some supercomputing applications that exloit its strenghts. On others I wager x386_64 is both cheaper(higher sales volume and easier to manufacture), faster and easier to develop code for. On any C or C++ code IA32 and x86_64 will win hands down.
With Itanium Intel was betting bumping up the clock on chips would run out of gas sooner than it did. They thought you would have to go to VLIW to keep increasing performance. Unfortunately clocks kept going up enough that the high end AMD and Penitum left it in the dust. AMD also developed x86_64 which gave people 64 bit address space which is needed for some apps, but PC prices and high clocks.
IA64 is doomed in any place other than niche supercomputing apps and its struggling there against Power, x86_64 etc.
Carmack was filthy rich after Doom 2. You really have to love your work to knock yourself out doing it if you don't need the money anymore, or alternately be really greedy so there is never enough. Most tycoons dabble at their work, and point and make other people grind code, they don't do it themselves.
Carmack has been spending to much time playing with fast cars, rockets, etc. which is what rich people do when they have a lot of money to burn and are desperate to keep themselves amused.
I also imaging after spending years grinding out the earlier versions it gets hard to gen up the enthusiasm for the third one.
He also likes to play with graphics tricks and Doom 3 he just took his fascination to an extreme level, with no regard for game play or that it wouldn't run well or at all on the hardware most people have.
So if Carmack was mostly a write off for Doom 3 you would need some talented and hungrier programmers to fill his shoes and maybe they didn't have that, especially in the area of compelling game play.
"You know that someone has either done too much cociane, is stupid, or has read too much Rand"
Nice slam dude. Hate to point this out to you but the rest of your post is rambling and barely coherent.
"I can generally tell that people are clueless about spaceflight, and real world events in general, when they complain about the locations of the space centers."
If you read the accident reports on Challenger and Columbia you find they are chocked full of examples of bad communications going on between teams split between Johnson and Kennedy and that bad communication directly contributed to them making bad decisions, or failing to make good ones. I'm willing to bet if they had all been in the same room some of them wouldn't have happened.
Having worked on teams that are geographicly distributed and spanning time zones, I KNOW how bad communication can be, and worse when you have groups split up like that they tend to grow apart and start fighting with each other. Its an invitation to turf wars as each center fights for power and money, and it ends up in massive duplications, accounting, facilities, security, cafeterias, etc. Not a problem if you have lots of money to waste, stupid if you want to spend money on building spacecraft. You can do distributed developement for some things especially if EVERYONE is in a different place because you are less likely to get cliques and turf wars. You can do software with a distributed model because the product can travel through wires. You can do distributed development if people are working on things that are logically very compartmentalized. Kennedy and Johnson are massively intertwined with each other and its really stupid to not have them in the same place.
If you are building complex machinery you will be way ahead of the game if everyone is in one place. Your efficiency will be better, you will be less likely to make mistakes or have a miscommunication that results in a fatal error.
Not sure I'm really argueing that everyone should end up at Kennedy. All I'm argueing for is that the team be as small as possible, per Kelly's Rule #3 and that it all be in one place most of the time. From experience, increasing the size of teams makes them more inefficient, makes the schedule worse not better, and obviously makes the project vastly more expensive.
The bottomline best part about consolidation is it would totally disrupt and break up a largely disfunctional organization and hopefully break it out of a rut that is leading it to failure time after time.
At this point I give up even trying to rebutt your post. You ramble so much its hard to spot a coherent point to argue with.
"Trust me, anyone that thinks Kliper is real is fundamentaly clueless."
Like CEV is real, its an RFP from NASA that was a gigantic exercise in bureaucracy and killing trees to which Boeing and Lockheed responded with half baked artists conceptions, and Lockheed wants to build a mini-me shuttle. Why bother with a competition when you know in advance Boeing and Lockheed would be the two competitors, coin toss over which one wins at which point they partner to insure any pretense of competition disappears. All the people working on Shuttle transfer to CEV and the astronomical launch costs stay exactly the same if not more. Only thing going in NASA's favor is Griffin is way better than O'Keefe, maybe he will turn it around but I wager the politburo there will suck the life out of him.
As I recall in our last thread on the Russian Space agency you made this some fine statement about it being funded by Russian prostitutes, in one sentance you managed sexist, racist, petty and immature. You seem to have some bias against the Russians therefor deserve to be ignored on the subject. Most objective observers would realize they DO have a lot of talent there, they just don't have NASA's budget unfortunately. As you recall they built the core of the ISS because they had more than a decade experience of operating a continuosly manned space station on a budget far smaller than ISS. That leads to my point about doing more with less (Rutan and the RSA) versus doing less with more(NASA).
"starting over would be a horrendous mistake."
For you maybe because I'm guessing you are one of the beneficiaries of the jobs program and you would be out on your ass and homeless without out it. I'm guessing you work there and from your past posts the space program would be better off without you. Score one for my plan because it would ax you:)
"All of our space flight knowledge would be lost."
It wouldn't be lost, you would immediately hire back all the people that had a clue. The goal is to get rid of all the paper pushing bureaucrats and deadbeats that have NO useful knowledge. You would be replacing a soviet ministry and a bureaucracy with a meritocracy. If you have the experience, the knowledge and more importantly the right attitude and the enthusiasm you would get hired and get a fresh start in an organization that wouldn't slowly suck the life out of you.
There is some useful knowledge left at NASA in specific disciplines but most of the Apollo expertise is long gone and the expertise in the shuttle and ISS is expertise in failure. Unless they learned well from their massive mistakes they aren't necessarily useful. They've also turned in to teams that fail more than they succeed. You would need to break their losing streak to salvage them.
"they haven't even left LEO"
Neither has anyone at NASA. At this point all the people that knew how to leave LEO have retired or died, Von Braun principle among them, he died in 1977. Probably best he did't live to see what happened to his dream after he died, it would have killed him.
"And why in the world does proximity to the launch site make a hill of beans difference to the design effort?"
Because eventually you are going to launch the thing and you want all the people that designed and built it there to make sure it doesn't BLOW UP, dumbass. Its total insanity to have mission control and launch 1000 miles apart, and having teams discussing complex engineering issues handicapped by telecons, videocons, or 1000 mile trips to get together and figure out whats important and whats not, what is going to blow up the vehicle and what don't matter and should be ignored so it doesn't kill the launch schedule for no reason.
"None of the companies you mention or allude to could really care less about the tiny amount of contract dollars they get from NASA"
Bullshit. NASA contracts are billions of dollars to Lockheed and Boeing, plus there is massive dual use application with all the
Well in a lot of ways NASA's manned space program is a jobs program and without it there might a lot of homeless aerospace engineers(all the ones not willing to get a top secret clearance and work for the DOD on antimissile defense). The only problem with it as a jobs program for the potentially homeless is the efficiency of the charity is horrendous.
You know its a jobs program because in a recent article on the new adminstrator and his attempts to get NASA redirected towards something that isn't a dead end like the Shuttle and the ISS, there were several blurbs about how Congressman wouldn't stand for any budget cutting during the transition to CEV that meant lost jobs in any of their states/districts. The implication being NASA has to keep both its civil servant and Boeing/Lockheed contractor army at the same levels from now to eternity. That means NASA will continue to pour billions of dollars a year in to supporting this jobs program, whether there is real work or not, and it will drain funding away from actually building new launch vehicles. Also if you keep the staffing levels the same as now when CEV starts launching the launch costs are going to astronomical too.
Unfortunately since the beginning, NASA and its contractor horde were spread across the nation so congressman would give them money and political support because it resulted in jobs in their states and districts. It was OK during the Apollo era because funding was vast and they had a purpose. Over the years the funding dwindled, and the sense of purpose disappeared. It became a jobs program instead of an organization pushing back frontiers. It resulted in the ISS in particular, a 100 billion dollar hole in space which has no useful purpose other than it created high tech jobs, kept aerospace engineers in the U.S and Russia employed, and made Boeing, Lockheed etc. a lot of money for very little.
You want to fix NASA's manned space program can everyon civil servant and contractor and start over and implement Kelly Johnson's 14 rules(he built the SR-71 and U2 and the Skunkworks) in particular:
Rule No. 3 The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10 percent to 25 percent compared to the so-called normal systems).
Basicly fire all the civil servants and all the contractors and start over. Put everyone in one place, and put someone in charge that can do more with less instead of less with more. Burt Rutan would be a great counterpart for Kelly Johnson though he would have to be completely freed of all the politics and bureaucracy that is strangling NASA. There are lots of people in the Russian Space Agency who would also be great for the nucleus of an all new manned space program. Of course they are already doing Kliper and it sounds like there is a chance Europe will team with them on it and kiss NASA off. The RSA is already building mockups of Kliper, while NASA is just pushing piles of paper from point A to point B on CEV.
You know the manned space program is fixed when Johnson is closed. It was insane to put a 1000 miles between the launch site and mission control just because LBJ wanted to give his home state jobs, see, a jobs program again. The bad communication between Johnson and Kennedy was a leading contributor to both shuttle disasters.
Sorry man but you for what ever reason have no understanding of the situtation in Iraq or the situation the Army and Marines are in.
The Army and the Marines simply don't have the troops to maintain the relatively small force in Iraq. They might have a enough if they stopped rotating forces out after a year or if they abandoned places like Korea. The Army and Marines have been dramaticly downsized in favor of high tech weapons, the air force and the Navy. The U.S. military is no longer designed for extended occupation duty.
You can split hairs whether its liberation or occupation. I bet you from an Iraqi perspective which is all that counts, if you are Shia or Kurd they are liberators, if you are Sunni they are occupiers. The fact is the U.S. and British military are the only thing keeping the current government in power, and they aren't leaving anytime soon. It is a subject of some serious debate if the U.S. will ever leave in total. Most educated guesses are some of those bases are permenent and will replace bases in Saudi Arabia which are being abandoned because Saudi Arabia puts to many constraints on them. Iraq is also better for projecting power at, threatening, and potentially invading Iran and Syria.
If they stop rotating forces they would quickly end up with a force more broken than it already is and they wouldn't be able to retain the people they have. Most people don't want to be away from their families for years at a time or stuck in a hell hole like Iraq for any length of time.
They aren't overutilizing the Gaurd and Reserves out of choice. They have to. The Army and Marines don't have the numbers or skill sets for occupation duty. In particular many of the military police units essential for occupation duty were intentionally moved in to the gaurd and reserve because they didn't think they were needed in any numbers until Iraq turned in to a quagmire.
And of course the Army and Marines are now consistently missing their recruiting goals. A volunteer army works up until you get entangled in an ugly guerilla war, where soldiers can't see the enemy and have to patrol streets under constant risk of IED's, car bombs and snipers. Most people are smart enough to not volunteer for that kind of duty.
They are using Bradley's less because they weren't designed to be constantly driven, especially for long distances escorting convoys. The tracks in particular were wearing out at a massive and expensive rate. The Army is trying to switch over to Strykers because they are cheaper to operate and their wheels are better suited to extended driving and occupation duty. But they are more vulnerable to IED's. Bradley's and M1 tanks would be a plus due to the heavy armor but their weaponary is totally inappropriate for occupation duty in cities where there are seldom any visible targets. Again they are to expensive to operate and they would quickly be worn out using them for patrol and convoy duty, not to mention they are to slow for convoy duty.
Forgot to add, do a Google search on TPAJAX, the CIA operation that overthrew the government of Iran and restored the Shah to his throne in 1953 and which also gave U.S. oil companies extensive access to Iranian oil at the expense of the British and the Iranian people.
Then do a seatch on SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. They were one of the most feared and despised in the 20th century which is quite an achievement. The Shah was never very popular with the people of Iran. He crowned himself king of kings in 1967, and become increasingly erratic and repressive. He held power through the '70's largely thanks to fear of SAVAK. In a lot of ways he resembled Saddam though most of his American backers will never admit it.
As a matter of fact, in Iran, yes it is. The Shah held and gained power almost entirely thanks to the U.S. backing him. He was a corrupt despot, who brutalized his people. They stormed the U.S. Embassy to exact revenge for America's destructive role in their country. Only hope you have for finding many friends for the U.S. in Iran are among the young who don't remember the Shah.
"If you believe the US can't afford "hundreds of billions of dollars" you haven't looked at how much we blow on pizza."
I think you should probably focus your attention on the U.S. current account deficit, instead of pizza. Its running around 6.4% of GDP and will easily hit a new high over $800 billion this year. The U.S. is a nation living lavishly on borrowed money and borrowed time. The U.S. wont be able to afford anything if foreign banks and investors decide to stop propping up its trade and budget deficits.
"Precision munitions provide great leverage."
Only if you can find targets.
I'm sure the U.S. could sieze Tehran, I just doubt the U.S. could control the place. Once it turns in to an insurgency as it has in Iraq all of America's shiny weapons are nearly useless. You need grunts to patrol streets and to be fed in to the meat grinder. Chances are you will need draftee's since most young Americans are realizing its no fun patrolling streets in the Middle East where people want to kill you.
Dude, you are too funny. I'm sure they were in place until it turned out the Iraqi's didn't greet the U.S. with roses, and the U.S. military got itself tied completely up in Iraq. The U.S. military is stretched so thin it can't do ANYTHING else without a draft. If the U.S. can't occupy a little mostly flat place like Iraq they have no chance controlling Iran.
There is zero chance the Bush administration could sell another war to the American people unless they fabricate one whopping lie of a case for it. Not sure anyone would believe it the second time around now that everyone realizes they are liars and they got a couple thousand Americans killed based on those lies, and are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars we dont have.
"hostage-taking terrorist"
In case you haven't heard your President is a hostage taking terrorist too:) If you haven't heard of Rendition its a program where the U.S. has been snatching people around the globe, and throwing them in a jet to be tortured in various dicatorships around the world. Hostage taking terrorist indeed.
I think its still every much open to debate if Iran's new president had much to do with the embassy. The current government of Iran is bad but so was the Shah, the ruthless dictator the U.S. installed and propped up before 1979 and so maddened the Iranian people that they were pushed in to the arms of the Islamic Revolution, and in to thinking the Ayatollahs were an improvement over the Shah. Bottomline is if you don't like the Iranian government, you can mostly blame the U.S. because its misguided policies laid the foundation for it.
"We stand for freedom; they stand for expanding their own power"
Probably should ask before I start this rant, who exactly is "We" and "They". Those are kind of vague terms.
Oh well, I cant wait to start the rant, I'm assuming "We" is the blessed United States of America and the "They" is all the devil's spawn who oppose her.
First, Dude, you need to stop kidding yourself.
OK here is the first hint, just a little clue, what nation refers to itself as the worlds sole remaining superPOWER. You see superPOWER means they have a whole lot of POWER. If the U.S. isn't seeking to expand its POWER the only explanation is because it already has all the POWER so its no longer possible to expand the POWER any further.
Maybe you could have sold the "we stand for freedom" part if you'd stopped there. But I assure you if there is one entity completely devoted to expanding its power in the world its the United States.
You don't spend $500 billion a year on weapons, wars and intelligence unless you are planning on using it to expand your power. You dont put troops in like 120 countries unless you are intent on expanding your power. You don't have a dozen aircraft carriers and thousands of nukes unless you are bent on expanding your power.
You don't invade a country every 5 years or so and change their government unless you want power, well maybe if you installed freedom you would have a case but we have installed more dictatorships than democracies over the last 100 years. You don't stage coups every few years, topple sovereign governments, and install puppets, often ruthless and despotic dictators as puppets if you "stand for freedom" and are disinterested in power. I assure you the list of countries where the U.S has installed or kept in power ruthless dictators is long and well documented. The mess that is Iran today is entirely due to the United States installing and keeping in power the Shah of Iran, a ruthless dictator who was the antithesis of freedom. Marcos in the Phillipines, Diem in Vietnam, Pinochet in Chile, Samosa in Nicaragua, Guatamala, El Salvador, Argentina, this list goes on for a while, all places where the U.S. sold freedom down the river, and peoples in to slavery, in the pursuit of wealth and POWER.
So Saddam, was paying PLO terrorists, lets spend $500 billion dollars, kill a couple thousand American soldiers, and piss off the entire world doing Israel's dirty work for them. Hate to break it to you the Saudi's pay PLO terrorists too, why aren't we taking them down too. All the Arab states support the Palastinians. The Palastinians were thrown out of their homes, off their land and out of their homeland, and have been sitting in squalid refugee camps for most of the last 50 years, homeless and stateless. They need some help.
"Add to that his threats and weapons programs"
Dude, you seem to be stuck in 2001. Everyone, including the Bush administration has admited there were no weapons programs worth anything any time recently. Saddam's aids maybe told them there were some, and Chalibi set up a scam in which people like CurveBall lied and told the Bush administration there were weapons programs, and the Bushists were all to willing to believe the lies. If Saddam, had any weapons "programs" they must have been bad ones because they didn't keep him in power.
"War crimes?!? Please...you are so out of the mainstream. Bush's policies are key to eliminating the slime on this planet."
Well it aint working because your apparently still here;)
Out of the mainstream huh, well if you've read the Downing Street Memo, Blair's inner circle openly discussed the risk that they would be open to war crimes charges if they invaded Iraq based on fabrication, which is exactly what happened.
We have a problem in this world if a country like the U.S. can fabricate a case for war against any country they choose, take the country down on the whim of a cracked, power mad, President and Vice President, and never have to answer for it. Whose next, Syria or Iran?
"I don't know where you live, but I guarantee in the long run it will be a better place because of these policies."
Well you just proved you have no clue what you are talking about and how stuck you are on yourself, because I guarantee you, that you, me nor anyone else, has a clue where these policies are going to take us in the long run.
Well to be honest I think a "pop quiz" is a perfectly correct thing to do in an interview, I don't care who the interviewee is. I think Microsoft is kind of lucky the guy walked because he apparently has a prima donna attitude that he is way to "good" to be subjected to a basic test to see if he knows his stuff. He would probably be way to "good" to work in a team where people aren't worshipping his PhD'ness.
I've met more than few PhD's over the years who are so disconnected from reality, due in part to spending most of their adult life in a university, that they need to stay in an ivory tower because they will be useless to you if you are trying to develop and ship a product in the dirty, ugly, nasty, imperfect real world. They apparently nailed the process of getting grades and doing dissertations but some of them start coasting once they have the PhD, and just think "big thoughts". From them on they settle in to the concept they just have to say, look I have a PhD, so I don't really need to do anything to earn the paycheck.
Its a lot easier than you think for people to do a snow job to get through college, and then on references, resumes and interviews so you think they will perform for you and then once you hire them it turns out they don't. If you actually challenge their knowledge though, with something they can't snow you on, that is a good interviewer.
Part of the point of the pop quiz isn't necessarily if they even know the answer. its how they handle the pressure, and if they don't know the answer if they can convince you that they know how to find the answer. This guy handled it by showing he was to f**kin good to even be quizzed. Thank you, don't want you buddy, will call if we need an egotistical opera singer.
When I interview I give pop quizes but they are usally open book or open computer rather. I want to see that the person can find the answer, without having to crutch off the people around them.
If its for a programming job I routinely ask them to find a bug or bugs in a simple program. If you cant do that then you are more con artist than programmer.
"My only beef with the Afghanistan situation is that we're dropping the ball now."
Hate to break it to you but the problem started when the U.S. installed Karzai as a puppet to run the country for the U.S. He is an ex Conoco employee, which was a big plus to the oil men in the White House when they picked him. He is a total kiss up to the Bush administration. The U.S. spent liberally flying around the country in a helicopter, handing out money to tribal leaders to make sure he got elected. You can't really expect a puppet like Karzai to get tough and demand the U.S. fulfill its aid promises, or for example threaten to kick the U.S. out of Bagram for instance. If he got to tough with the U.S. they would see that he was replaced with a more compliant puppet. You see Afghanistan is EXACTLY like every puppet regime the U.S. has abused over the last century.
I think you would have to go further and say the U.S. completely botched the whole Afghan war, not juse the aftermath.
Instead of going in to Afghanistan fast and hard and smacking down the Taliban and Al Qaeda they sent in a few special forces and fought pretty much the entire ground war using unreliable proxy armies, mostly from warlords with decidely mixed, agendas and they mostly let the Taliban and Al Qaeda scatter. The warlords were both easily bribed and more converned about maintaining their private armies and growing the profits from their opium farms.
Instead of fighting an enemy that was somewhat centralized in Afghanistan they are now well scattered around the world, and many have returned to the tribal areas in Pakistan where they have as much of a haven as they did under the Taliban, since Pakistan wont let anyone near them there.
Why was Afghanistan botched so badly, because George had a fixation on Saddam and Iraq, and had issues with his daddy's unfinished business. So he redirected most of the forces he should have used to ruthless liquidate Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, into Iraq. As a result Al Qaeda is alive, well and going strong, and Iraq is a bloody mess, and a recruiting poster for Islamic revolution. It sends a really bad message when you are attacked as badly as the U.S. was on 9/11 and you let the people responsible get away and go hammer some guy that had nothing to do with it.
I know George is supposed to be a "war" president and he used to score his highest marks in the polls for fighting the war on "Terrorism", and thats how he got reelected, but if you really look at his record he completely botched both Afghanistan and Iraq, and Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are as strong as every, so I really don't know what is is he's done to deserve street cred for being tough on terrorism, other than maybe robbing people of their civil liberties, for example snatching people around the world and spiriting them off to be tortured, or locking American citizens up indefinitely with no due process.
Another interesting tidbit I saw this week, Uzbekistan and Kyrgistan I think, backed by Russia and China are telling the U.S. to get the hell out of the bases they loaned to the U.S. to invade Afghanistan. It turns out the U.S. has been using the bases to incite the overthrow of the respective governments, Uzbekistan in particular, which has had some violent internal strife recently. They are oppresive dictatorships to be sure, but its kind of a case study in how to piss off people, or maybe piss on people, when a country helps you out with a military base to avenge 9/11, you let Bin Laden get away and then you focus your energy on trying and overthrow the government that loaned the base to you instead of on Al Qaeda.
Damn. You tell me the U.S. and Britain don't intentionally kill civilians. I point out they have, numerous times, throughout the last century. Then you say well in the "majority" of instances their actions were noble, especially lately. You conceed the U.S. and Britain have intentionally killed civilians, but somehow in your morale caluclus those killings were "justified", but you've unilaterally decided Palastinain suicide bombers, teens growin up in squalid refugee camps fenced in by Isreal so they are more like ghettos, with nothing to live for can never be "justified" when they do what they do.
I'm sorry you just lost the arguement. Fact is "terrorists" intentionally kill civilians to "terrorize" them. America and Britain have intentionally killed civilians to "terrorize" them. Simple fact, they are in the long historical view no better or any different from today's suicide bombers.
You can try to rationalize Hiroshima and Nagasaki in some sick calculus that by intentionally killing hundreds of thousands of civilians we saved so many lives. Well:
A. You could have accomplised that with one bomb, the second was gratuitous killing and terrorism. There is a new book out on Oppenheimer by one of his kids and it says just that. Most of the scientists could have lived with Hiroshima but they were appalled when the second one was dropped so quickly after the first. It accelerated their opposition to nuclear proliferation.
B. They could have dropped them on remote military bases, killed mostly soliders and Japan still would have capitulated. They dropped them on cities to maximize the terror and to insure quick and unconditional surrender, to send a message to the Russians, and no doubt to exact revenge for Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
" I believe that in the majority of these instances, and on the whole, the general goal is an overall reduction in loss of life;"
In World War II the general goal of bombing cities was NEVER an overall reduction in a loss of life. It was a war where the gloves were off, Germany bombed London and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, so The U.S. and Britain were of the opinion their enemies got what they deserved. For Britain, once they decided daylight bombing was to dangerous, they had no option left but to carpet bomb and fire bomb cities because they couldn't find specific targets at night. They intentionally opted to kill and terrorize civilians to "minimize" the risk to their flyers. There is no such excuse in Japan. The U.S. was proficient at precision daylight bombing. They opted for carpet bombing cities with incendiaries to maximize civilian casualties and to terrorize the population.
Again I'm not saying suicide bombers are "right" I'm just sick of countries like America and the U.K. acting like they are pure as driven snow and would never do such thing. Well they have, and a lot worse. In my book people who kill for religion, wealth, politics and power are all equally contemtible. I have no use for the people who rationalize when they do it its cool, but anyone else does it they are no better than animals. Hate to break it to you but you are all animals.
I think you missed some of the subtelty in my post, I didn't say he WAS an anarchist. I just, correctly, said he was widely refered to as an anarchist. Like I said, in the early 20th century everyone opposed to "the powers that be" was called an "anarchist" just like today they are called "terrorists". The power that be defined anyone who was opposed to their grip on power as an "anarchist" so they made it look sound they were the preservers of "order" and anyone who opposed them was advocating chaos (a.k.a. anarchy). Most people don't like the sound of anarchy which is why it was an effective term to use in propaganda.
The definition of an anarchist they were using, was someone who was trying to overthrow the established powers. "The Black Hand" were revolutionaries and nationalists trying to drive the Habsburgs out of the Balkans. To the Habsburgs, their allies and royal kin throughout Europe that meant they were "anarchists" because they were trying to topple the Habsburgs.
Most muslim groups we brand as "terrorists" today are really nationalists, with a heavy religion angle, trying to topple governments they dont like. Al Qaeda was born out of the effort to throw the Russian infidel invaders out of a Muslim state, Afghanistan. Many of their members are dedicated to toppling the governments of Saudi Arabi and Egypt, using terminology of the early 20th century they would be called "anarchists", versus the terminology of the early 21st century where they are called "terrorists", same, same. Most of the middle east groups we brand as "terrorist" like Hamas are nationalists trying to drive Israel out of Palestine to regain control of the homeland they were driven out of in stages after World War II.
Uh, dude the intent is the same. Its to win a political and military victory and break the will of a civilian population, by killing and terrorizing civilians.
If a strategic bombing campaign is targeting factories, military bases, and industrial capacity then you are correct, there is a difference in intent. When you are fire bombing or nuking cities with the express intent of killing and terrorizing a civilian population the intent is exactly the same as a "terrorist" and again the U.S. and Britain have killed millions more people by intentionally bombing civilians, than Muslim "terrorists" every will.
You are just doing what people always do, practicing selective memory and only remembering the parts of war you like, and can rationalize, and blocking out all the times America and Britain have indiscriminately and intentionally killed civilians. You say our reasons for doing something atrocious are always justified, you guys on the other side will never be justified if you do exactly the same thing.
Free fire zone in Vietnam were another great example. Civilians in them weren't killed by accident. The military's express goal was to indiscriminately terrorize and kill civilians in areas of Vietnam the military decided were sympathetic to the Viet Cong.
" US soldier following all procedures accidentally killing civilians with an errant round"
Nice bending of what I said. I wasn't talking about an "accident" and an "errant round". I'm talking about dropping bombs in civilian areas where the military KNOWS they can't differentiate between civilians and insurgents. Flattening Fallujah was a prefect example. A lot of civilians left before it started but many didn't and when they didn't it was open season on them.
Note that when the U.S. produces an insurgent "body count" out of Iraq which they dont do often but they do still do, all thed dead are counted as insurgents, and the never counted as civilians, though a high percentage are certain to be innocent civilians.
Its a fact of life in war, you are going to kill people I'm just saying I don't think you can get all holier than thou when people use the only means at their disposal to return the favor. Its the price of overwhelming military superiority, only stupid people would try to stand toe to toe with the U.S. and Britain by standing out in a field. They would be incinerated and it would be an act of futility. Only thing they would get out of it is some sympathy. Therefore its inevitable they retaliate with the only means that will work, IED's and suicide bombers.
I'm not saying they are right, some of them are totally whacked in the head thanks to years of religious indoctrination, but thats true of all religious fanatics not just Muslim ones. Jews and Christian can be just as bad. But you should appreciate that why the do what they do is totally understandable. It is the only way to fight a war against a country that spends $500 billion a year on wearpons and wars.
"Except for the minor detail that the terrorists are doing everything they can to inflict maximum civilian casualities"
Bzzzzzzzt. Wrong. Try again. The U.S and Britain were doing everything they could to maximize civilian casualties during World War II. How else can you explain the fire bombing of cities like Dresden and pretty much every city in Japan. Japanese cities were all built from wood so mass incendiary bombing created some wonderous fire storms that killed almost nothing but civilians which is mostly what you find in most citites.
Or lets take Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the U.S. had been trying to minimize civilian casualties they would have dropped them on military targets that weren't in the middle of large cities. They also probably could have dropped one not two. The Nagasaki bomb was gratuitous killing of civilians designed to "terrorize" Japan in to unconditional surrender. It was precisely "terrorism" American's cherish their double standards though, like most people, though more so.
Militaries will SAY they are trying to minimize casualties, and they probably do try more now than they used to, partially because the global press scrutiny is harsher than it once was. Still the U.S. routinely kills people from high altitude and long distance with no real knowledge of weather the target is full of civlians or insurgents. There are only two options, in a guerilla war:
- Dont kill insurgents so you don't kill civilians - Kill insurgents and you are going to civilians
There isn't a third option.
Another example, its well documented that the U.S. declared regions of Vietnam as free fire zones, which meant the U.S. military was licensed to kill everyone in those zones, full well knowing many if not most were innocent civilians.
Uh, I don't know, maybe because Iraq and Saddam HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11.
I guess maybe your right, the Iraq war couldn't have been an overreaction to 9/11 since its wasn't a reaction to it at all since there was no connection between the two outside of the fabrications of the Bush administration.
But on the other hand as recently as Bush's prime time speech a week ago he was STILL trying to tie Iraq to 9/11 and using 9/11 to justify a largely unprovoked invasion. I could have seen taking down Saddam back in the early 90's when he invaded Kuwait, but to wait more than a decade and then do it with no real justification put the U.S. and Britain dangerously close to war crimes charges because thats what people who launch unprovoked aggressive wars are branded as these days, Saddam was one when he invaded Kuqait, Hitler was one, now the U.S. and Britain are in the same league. How sad:)
"A terrorist attack is a deliberate decision on the part of another human to kill as many people, usually innocent, in the target site as is practical or possible."
So is pressing the bomb release in a bomber, especially when you are bombing cities you know are full of civilians, or firing a howitzer on a city, or the guns on a tank, its just cleaner than being a suicide bomber and you can keep doing it day after day. Suicide bombers are self punishing and one shot deals.
Militaries and terrorists are more similar than they are different, the only real differentiators are one is state sponsored, one is better equipped and one claims an aura of legitimacy, that isn't really there, just because it is run by a nation state. At the end of the day they both knowingly kill innocent civilians. Strategic bombing in World War II and Vietnam killed millions of civilians... intentionally. As did nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bombing Hiroshima might have been justified and ended further blooshed but Nagasaki was gratuitous and intentional killing of civilians to stoke "terror" in the minds of the Japanese. If that wasn't terrorism I don't know what is.
Western militaries will claim these days that they do everything in their power to avoid civilian casualties and sometimes they do, but in a war where the other side doesn't wear pretty uniforms and the war is happening in cities full of civilians, the fact is militaries do kil civilians, they know it, all they can say is oops, sorry, didn't mean to, here is a $100 for the death of your relative.
In a well reported incident in Israel they dropped a bomb from an F-16 in the middle of an apartment complex full of women and children in order to assassinate an adversary. They knew they were going to kill civilians, they did it anwyay intentionally. Does that make them terrorists? By your definition it does.
As soon as nation states start strategic bombing campaigns there isn't even a pretense that killing civilians is unintentional, it is usually the object, they are trying to break an adversaries will through terrorizing the civilian population. The key differenence between terrorist and armies is armies can kill vastly larger numbers of people than rag tag terrorists ever will.
"Anarchist groups haven't been involved in terrorism since the nineteenth Century and it's hard to believe they'd suddenly start now."
I'm pretty sure Anarchists were still quite active in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century "anarchist" was the blanket condemnation applied to enemies of the state as was "communist" in the 50's and "terrorist" is today. There is something about political propaganda that mandates there be some in vogue term ending in "ist" which politicians can use to brand and denigrate all their enemies without having to think to much.
Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by someone usually refered to as an "anarchist", and in an important lesson we should learn from today, the overreaction by nation states to that act of terrorism did vastly more damage to those nation states than the act of terrorism itself. It triggered World War I, millions of casualties, the Russian Revolution, and the end of the Habsberg empire of which Ferdinand was an heir.
Kind of shows how one relatively easy to execute act can lead to widespread devestation when politicians go nuts in response.
9/11 as tragic as it was, lead to an overreaction by the U.S. that resulted in the Iraq war which has killed far more people than 9/11 did and will cost the U.S. far more than 9/11 did before its done.
The use of bombs against civilians as happened in Madrid and London is tragic. But, I'm afraid you really can't to holier than though about it when you drop bombs on civilians as the U.S., Britain and Israel have done as a matter of routine over the years. There isn't really any difference between the two acts other than the attempt by the U.S, Britain and Israel to rationalize it, the fact is the civilians are just as dead and maimed whether you use a suicide bomber or an F-16 to deliver the payload.
- IBM wants a patent regime in the EU - EU wants high paying tech jobs in the EU - IBM has lots of high paying tech jobs they can locate pretty much where they want - IBM tries to blackmail the EU in to passing a patent regime otherwise they move jobs out of the EU
Didn't necessarily say it made sense, it was just a way for software companies to try to pressure the EU in to doing what they want. It apparently didn't work. There is a blurb on the GNU web site indicating an IBM lobbiest did in fact try it.
Of course, I don't imagine IBM wants to leave any software deve jobs in the EU anyway so maybe it was an idle threat since all the jobs are toast anyway. Maybe the EU didn't fall for the threat because they know IBM is moving the jobs to India and China whatever.
An software deve office in the EU is expensive and European workers aren't exactly the hardest working on the planet. Its no accident France has a 10% unemployment rate in the newly globalized world.
And as the fruits of your victory, IBM, Microsoft and other big software companies will continue to, or will accelerate closing down their software development divisions in the EU and continue migrating all those high tech jobs to India and China. IBM announced layoffs for 10K+ recently mostly in the EU and just happened to announce they were hiring about the same number in India.
An IBM lobbyist, used this as an explicit threat against the EU to try to coerce them in to passing software patents, either give us software patents or we continue to shutdown operations and drain high tech jobs out of the EU. Of course the paradox is China respects IP rights even less than the EU does, but hey they work cheap.
Chances are most of the software companies have will drained all the software jobs out of the EU anyway, wages in Europe and the U.S are to high, benefits to good, work weeks to short, cost of living to high, workers spoiled, and labor is organized, compared to India and China.
The only hope is that workers in China and India are now being corrupted by their new affluence and will soon be whiling away their time surfing the net, playing video games, driving around in cars, and watching TV so maybe in another 20-30 years they will be as messed up as U.S. and European workers are.
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"Let's make a simple bet -- I say CEV will launch before Klipper."
... that if you read the accident reports on Challenger and Columbia there is a recurring theme that NASA failed to recogize danger and to deal with fatal flaws, because their team communication was terrible, and it was especially bad between the launch team at Kennedy and all the teams at Johnson. You can scatter your team all over the U.S. its just going to cost a fortune and you are dramaticly increasing the chance for mistakes, and in this case those mistakes cost billions and kill people.
Hell yea I'll take that bet as long as its a MANNED launch to LEO, safe up and back. I'm willing to accept the big handicap that NASA has way more money to throw at it. Even if I lose I wont have to apologize until 2015 at the earliest. I'm sure they will throw some tin cans in to LEO before then but they have to be MANNED in to orbit and thats gonna take NASA forever after they get done pushing paper and wringing their hands. I really hope the Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, Indians throw money behind Kliper. I bet they will, some ESA people are already talking like it, because I think they all know NASA is a joke at this point, and nobody wants to partner with Bush's arrogant America on anything at this point(excepting the UK).
"a leftover, unlaunched Mir part, is the "core" of the ISS."
Not even gonna start this stupid arguement again, Zarya and Zveda are the core of the station, everyone knows it except you. I think you know it too but refuse to admit it to yourself. It was manned as soon as they were operational. Only major module the U.S. has there at the moment is Destiny a lab module, it isn't the core.
Stop dissing Mir. While the U.S. spent 20 years and tens of billions of dollars on artist conceptions of a space station, none of which flew, the Russians had a permenent manned presence in space for a tiny fraction of the cost. If the Russian hadn't built the core for the ISS I wager it would still be sitting on an arists table. NASA saves face acting like it was charity bringing in the Russians. In fact they had NO knowledge about building a long duration space station. Skylab was cool but it was brief, LONG ago, and done by Apollo veterans most of whom have retired or died.
"Your critique of their design is simply monday morning quarterbacking and ignorance of the constraints they had to work within."
Their "design" failed in every respect. Granted a political quagmire between Presidents, Congress, NASA and the DOD helped it fail but they still failed and that is all that matters in the end. They failed to succeed. It was supposed to be cheap, it was the antithesis of cheap. It was supposed to have a high launch rate, it instead has been unlaunchable for years, and the launch rate goes down every year (and by the way the Russians had to step up and keep the ISS going for the last 2 1/2 years, and put NASA astronauts and supplies though NASA hasn't paid them a cent due to an embargo over Iran). It was supposed to do evertyhing in space. After Challenger it was largely abandoned and relegated to doing incredibly expensive physiology experiments. After Columbia its now good for nothing other than faking an expensive expendable launch vehicle to finish a $100 billion dollar hole in space.
Sorry man the Shuttle was a failure no matter how you slice it. Its sad, I wish it wasn't but it is. People need to come to grips with two failures in a row(Shuttle and ISS) and do whatever it take to stop failing.
There are some great technical achievements in the Shuttle but that doesn't change the fact that as a launch vehicle it was a failure.
"How would you suggest returning from the moon?"
Huh? Think you need to get there first and I don't think NASA has any chance to get there before 2020 if ever.
"So what was your point?"
"Moreover, the designs aren't exclusively done at JSC anyway -- they are done in California, Texas, Kansas, etc."
They exist, they fail miserably optimizing most C and C++ code or at least they aren't good enough at it to make up for Itanic's handicapped clock speed.
You just need to read the other posts here about how hard it is to develop compilers that can find 4 way parallel instructions to cram in to the VLIW at compile time. You find a lot more opportunities at runtime using dynamic scheduling at the price of complexity in the CPU.
Maybe someday the compilers will be really good and Pentirum/AMD CPU clocks will hit the wall and Itanic will reign supreme. Intel is one of the few companies with pockets deep enough to keep it alive and keep pouring the billions in to both the CPU and the compiler, until it starts outshining x86_64 on anything other than vectorizable Fortran. Wouldn't necessarily count on that confluence of events happening in time to save it. I'd really like to see how much Intel has sunk in to Itanic versus the ROI. It must be appalling. Only a company with a near monopoly elsewhere could survive it.
Me I'll take an AMD 3400+. My whole computer cost $800 versus $2000 for just an Itanic CPU, it has 2 GB/sec memory bandwidth, runs IA32 apps really fast, is running Gentoo Linux so everything is taking advantage of all the new registers and instructions set improvements, and I have 64 bit addressing. Its sweet and sensible.
I'm not argueing that Itanic wont hold its niche in supercomputing. Aren't many people who are going to put one on a desktop or in a server.
You left out the crucial element of the story. Intel signed a technology agreement with DEC, under the pretense that they would license the Alpha architecture. DEC gave them ALL the Alpha design docs. Intel read them all, and probably xeroxed them all, then said they weren't interested and sent them back.
They then proceeded to incorporate most of what they learned from the Alpha design in to Pentium Pro, Pentium II, without paying DEC anything, and they quickly erased the performance gap between IA32 and RISC, and then with their vast resource left most of them in the dust. DEC won a court decision years later over it and got some chump change for it but DEC is dead and Intel owns the lion's share of the CPU market.
Yet another example of how NOT having core values in your company is more likely to make you successful than having them. Successful business is brutual, ugly and largely devoid of ethics or values other than "Greed is King".
But seriously, it gets no respect because its a complete dog on anything other than vectorizable Fortran codes. Its inherent in the design.
The compiler has to do a LOT of work to pack instructions in to the VLIW(Very long instruction word). To get max performance I think you need to schedule 4? instructions in each word. You can do that with carefully written vectorizable Fortran with the help of a talented supercomputing class code tuner.
When you get to C and C++ it is nearly impossible. Pointers and pointer aliasing completely frustrate the compiler, and in general most C and C++ code don't have the vectorized nature of the class vectorized Fortran codes.
The IA32 emulation is inherently much slower than a Pentium or Athlon at the same clock and they have much higher clocks than the Itanic. So any application you carry a binary over from an IA32 box is a real dog. It takes advantage of none of the chips strengths and hits all its weaknesses.
IA64 has a place on some supercomputing applications that exloit its strenghts. On others I wager x386_64 is both cheaper(higher sales volume and easier to manufacture), faster and easier to develop code for. On any C or C++ code IA32 and x86_64 will win hands down.
With Itanium Intel was betting bumping up the clock on chips would run out of gas sooner than it did. They thought you would have to go to VLIW to keep increasing performance. Unfortunately clocks kept going up enough that the high end AMD and Penitum left it in the dust. AMD also developed x86_64 which gave people 64 bit address space which is needed for some apps, but PC prices and high clocks.
IA64 is doomed in any place other than niche supercomputing apps and its struggling there against Power, x86_64 etc.
Carmack was filthy rich after Doom 2. You really have to love your work to knock yourself out doing it if you don't need the money anymore, or alternately be really greedy so there is never enough. Most tycoons dabble at their work, and point and make other people grind code, they don't do it themselves.
Carmack has been spending to much time playing with fast cars, rockets, etc. which is what rich people do when they have a lot of money to burn and are desperate to keep themselves amused.
I also imaging after spending years grinding out the earlier versions it gets hard to gen up the enthusiasm for the third one.
He also likes to play with graphics tricks and Doom 3 he just took his fascination to an extreme level, with no regard for game play or that it wouldn't run well or at all on the hardware most people have.
So if Carmack was mostly a write off for Doom 3 you would need some talented and hungrier programmers to fill his shoes and maybe they didn't have that, especially in the area of compelling game play.
"You know that someone has either done too much cociane, is stupid, or has read too much Rand"
Nice slam dude. Hate to point this out to you but the rest of your post is rambling and barely coherent.
"I can generally tell that people are clueless about spaceflight, and real world events in general, when they complain about the locations of the space centers."
If you read the accident reports on Challenger and Columbia you find they are chocked full of examples of bad communications going on between teams split between Johnson and Kennedy and that bad communication directly contributed to them making bad decisions, or failing to make good ones. I'm willing to bet if they had all been in the same room some of them wouldn't have happened.
Having worked on teams that are geographicly distributed and spanning time zones, I KNOW how bad communication can be, and worse when you have groups split up like that they tend to grow apart and start fighting with each other. Its an invitation to turf wars as each center fights for power and money, and it ends up in massive duplications, accounting, facilities, security, cafeterias, etc. Not a problem if you have lots of money to waste, stupid if you want to spend money on building spacecraft. You can do distributed developement for some things especially if EVERYONE is in a different place because you are less likely to get cliques and turf wars. You can do software with a distributed model because the product can travel through wires. You can do distributed development if people are working on things that are logically very compartmentalized. Kennedy and Johnson are massively intertwined with each other and its really stupid to not have them in the same place.
If you are building complex machinery you will be way ahead of the game if everyone is in one place. Your efficiency will be better, you will be less likely to make mistakes or have a miscommunication that results in a fatal error.
Not sure I'm really argueing that everyone should end up at Kennedy. All I'm argueing for is that the team be as small as possible, per Kelly's Rule #3 and that it all be in one place most of the time. From experience, increasing the size of teams makes them more inefficient, makes the schedule worse not better, and obviously makes the project vastly more expensive.
The bottomline best part about consolidation is it would totally disrupt and break up a largely disfunctional organization and hopefully break it out of a rut that is leading it to failure time after time.
At this point I give up even trying to rebutt your post. You ramble so much its hard to spot a coherent point to argue with.
"Trust me, anyone that thinks Kliper is real is fundamentaly clueless."
:)
Like CEV is real, its an RFP from NASA that was a gigantic exercise in bureaucracy and killing trees to which Boeing and Lockheed responded with half baked artists conceptions, and Lockheed wants to build a mini-me shuttle. Why bother with a competition when you know in advance Boeing and Lockheed would be the two competitors, coin toss over which one wins at which point they partner to insure any pretense of competition disappears. All the people working on Shuttle transfer to CEV and the astronomical launch costs stay exactly the same if not more. Only thing going in NASA's favor is Griffin is way better than O'Keefe, maybe he will turn it around but I wager the politburo there will suck the life out of him.
As I recall in our last thread on the Russian Space agency you made this some fine statement about it being funded by Russian prostitutes, in one sentance you managed sexist, racist, petty and immature. You seem to have some bias against the Russians therefor deserve to be ignored on the subject. Most objective observers would realize they DO have a lot of talent there, they just don't have NASA's budget unfortunately. As you recall they built the core of the ISS because they had more than a decade experience of operating a continuosly manned space station on a budget far smaller than ISS. That leads to my point about doing more with less (Rutan and the RSA) versus doing less with more(NASA).
"starting over would be a horrendous mistake."
For you maybe because I'm guessing you are one of the beneficiaries of the jobs program and you would be out on your ass and homeless without out it. I'm guessing you work there and from your past posts the space program would be better off without you. Score one for my plan because it would ax you
"All of our space flight knowledge would be lost."
It wouldn't be lost, you would immediately hire back all the people that had a clue. The goal is to get rid of all the paper pushing bureaucrats and deadbeats that have NO useful knowledge. You would be replacing a soviet ministry and a bureaucracy with a meritocracy. If you have the experience, the knowledge and more importantly the right attitude and the enthusiasm you would get hired and get a fresh start in an organization that wouldn't slowly suck the life out of you.
There is some useful knowledge left at NASA in specific disciplines but most of the Apollo expertise is long gone and the expertise in the shuttle and ISS is expertise in failure. Unless they learned well from their massive mistakes they aren't necessarily useful. They've also turned in to teams that fail more than they succeed. You would need to break their losing streak to salvage them.
"they haven't even left LEO"
Neither has anyone at NASA. At this point all the people that knew how to leave LEO have retired or died, Von Braun principle among them, he died in 1977. Probably best he did't live to see what happened to his dream after he died, it would have killed him.
"And why in the world does proximity to the launch site make a hill of beans difference to the design effort?"
Because eventually you are going to launch the thing and you want all the people that designed and built it there to make sure it doesn't BLOW UP, dumbass. Its total insanity to have mission control and launch 1000 miles apart, and having teams discussing complex engineering issues handicapped by telecons, videocons, or 1000 mile trips to get together and figure out whats important and whats not, what is going to blow up the vehicle and what don't matter and should be ignored so it doesn't kill the launch schedule for no reason.
"None of the companies you mention or allude to could really care less about the tiny amount of contract dollars they get from NASA"
Bullshit. NASA contracts are billions of dollars to Lockheed and Boeing, plus there is massive dual use application with all the
Well in a lot of ways NASA's manned space program is a jobs program and without it there might a lot of homeless aerospace engineers(all the ones not willing to get a top secret clearance and work for the DOD on antimissile defense). The only problem with it as a jobs program for the potentially homeless is the efficiency of the charity is horrendous.
You know its a jobs program because in a recent article on the new adminstrator and his attempts to get NASA redirected towards something that isn't a dead end like the Shuttle and the ISS, there were several blurbs about how Congressman wouldn't stand for any budget cutting during the transition to CEV that meant lost jobs in any of their states/districts. The implication being NASA has to keep both its civil servant and Boeing/Lockheed contractor army at the same levels from now to eternity. That means NASA will continue to pour billions of dollars a year in to supporting this jobs program, whether there is real work or not, and it will drain funding away from actually building new launch vehicles. Also if you keep the staffing levels the same as now when CEV starts launching the launch costs are going to astronomical too.
Unfortunately since the beginning, NASA and its contractor horde were spread across the nation so congressman would give them money and political support because it resulted in jobs in their states and districts. It was OK during the Apollo era because funding was vast and they had a purpose. Over the years the funding dwindled, and the sense of purpose disappeared. It became a jobs program instead of an organization pushing back frontiers. It resulted in the ISS in particular, a 100 billion dollar hole in space which has no useful purpose other than it created high tech jobs, kept aerospace engineers in the U.S and Russia employed, and made Boeing, Lockheed etc. a lot of money for very little.
You want to fix NASA's manned space program can everyon civil servant and contractor and start over and implement Kelly Johnson's 14 rules(he built the SR-71 and U2 and the Skunkworks) in particular:
Rule No. 3
The number of people having any connection with the project must be restricted in an almost vicious manner. Use a small number of good people (10 percent to 25 percent compared to the so-called normal systems).
Basicly fire all the civil servants and all the contractors and start over. Put everyone in one place, and put someone in charge that can do more with less instead of less with more. Burt Rutan would be a great counterpart for Kelly Johnson though he would have to be completely freed of all the politics and bureaucracy that is strangling NASA. There are lots of people in the Russian Space Agency who would also be great for the nucleus of an all new manned space program. Of course they are already doing Kliper and it sounds like there is a chance Europe will team with them on it and kiss NASA off. The RSA is already building mockups of Kliper, while NASA is just pushing piles of paper from point A to point B on CEV.
You know the manned space program is fixed when Johnson is closed. It was insane to put a 1000 miles between the launch site and mission control just because LBJ wanted to give his home state jobs, see, a jobs program again. The bad communication between Johnson and Kennedy was a leading contributor to both shuttle disasters.
Sorry man but you for what ever reason have no understanding of the situtation in Iraq or the situation the Army and Marines are in.
The Army and the Marines simply don't have the troops to maintain the relatively small force in Iraq. They might have a enough if they stopped rotating forces out after a year or if they abandoned places like Korea. The Army and Marines have been dramaticly downsized in favor of high tech weapons, the air force and the Navy. The U.S. military is no longer designed for extended occupation duty.
You can split hairs whether its liberation or occupation. I bet you from an Iraqi perspective which is all that counts, if you are Shia or Kurd they are liberators, if you are Sunni they are occupiers. The fact is the U.S. and British military are the only thing keeping the current government in power, and they aren't leaving anytime soon. It is a subject of some serious debate if the U.S. will ever leave in total. Most educated guesses are some of those bases are permenent and will replace bases in Saudi Arabia which are being abandoned because Saudi Arabia puts to many constraints on them. Iraq is also better for projecting power at, threatening, and potentially invading Iran and Syria.
If they stop rotating forces they would quickly end up with a force more broken than it already is and they wouldn't be able to retain the people they have. Most people don't want to be away from their families for years at a time or stuck in a hell hole like Iraq for any length of time.
They aren't overutilizing the Gaurd and Reserves out of choice. They have to. The Army and Marines don't have the numbers or skill sets for occupation duty. In particular many of the military police units essential for occupation duty were intentionally moved in to the gaurd and reserve because they didn't think they were needed in any numbers until Iraq turned in to a quagmire.
And of course the Army and Marines are now consistently missing their recruiting goals. A volunteer army works up until you get entangled in an ugly guerilla war, where soldiers can't see the enemy and have to patrol streets under constant risk of IED's, car bombs and snipers. Most people are smart enough to not volunteer for that kind of duty.
They are using Bradley's less because they weren't designed to be constantly driven, especially for long distances escorting convoys. The tracks in particular were wearing out at a massive and expensive rate. The Army is trying to switch over to Strykers because they are cheaper to operate and their wheels are better suited to extended driving and occupation duty. But they are more vulnerable to IED's. Bradley's and M1 tanks would be a plus due to the heavy armor but their weaponary is totally inappropriate for occupation duty in cities where there are seldom any visible targets. Again they are to expensive to operate and they would quickly be worn out using them for patrol and convoy duty, not to mention they are to slow for convoy duty.
"Yeah, yeah, it's all our fault."
Forgot to add, do a Google search on TPAJAX, the CIA operation that overthrew the government of Iran and restored the Shah to his throne in 1953 and which also gave U.S. oil companies extensive access to Iranian oil at the expense of the British and the Iranian people.
Then do a seatch on SAVAK, the Shah's secret police. They were one of the most feared and despised in the 20th century which is quite an achievement. The Shah was never very popular with the people of Iran. He crowned himself king of kings in 1967, and become increasingly erratic and repressive. He held power through the '70's largely thanks to fear of SAVAK. In a lot of ways he resembled Saddam though most of his American backers will never admit it.
"Yeah, yeah, it's all our fault."
As a matter of fact, in Iran, yes it is. The Shah held and gained power almost entirely thanks to the U.S. backing him. He was a corrupt despot, who brutalized his people. They stormed the U.S. Embassy to exact revenge for America's destructive role in their country. Only hope you have for finding many friends for the U.S. in Iran are among the young who don't remember the Shah.
"If you believe the US can't afford "hundreds of billions of dollars" you haven't looked at how much we blow on pizza."
I think you should probably focus your attention on the U.S. current account deficit, instead of pizza. Its running around 6.4% of GDP and will easily hit a new high over $800 billion this year. The U.S. is a nation living lavishly on borrowed money and borrowed time. The U.S. wont be able to afford anything if foreign banks and investors decide to stop propping up its trade and budget deficits.
"Precision munitions provide great leverage."
Only if you can find targets.
I'm sure the U.S. could sieze Tehran, I just doubt the U.S. could control the place. Once it turns in to an insurgency as it has in Iraq all of America's shiny weapons are nearly useless. You need grunts to patrol streets and to be fed in to the meat grinder. Chances are you will need draftee's since most young Americans are realizing its no fun patrolling streets in the Middle East where people want to kill you.
"and I believe plans are in place"
Dude, you are too funny. I'm sure they were in place until it turned out the Iraqi's didn't greet the U.S. with roses, and the U.S. military got itself tied completely up in Iraq. The U.S. military is stretched so thin it can't do ANYTHING else without a draft. If the U.S. can't occupy a little mostly flat place like Iraq they have no chance controlling Iran.
There is zero chance the Bush administration could sell another war to the American people unless they fabricate one whopping lie of a case for it. Not sure anyone would believe it the second time around now that everyone realizes they are liars and they got a couple thousand Americans killed based on those lies, and are costing us hundreds of billions of dollars we dont have.
"hostage-taking terrorist"
In case you haven't heard your President is a hostage taking terrorist too
I think its still every much open to debate if Iran's new president had much to do with the embassy. The current government of Iran is bad but so was the Shah, the ruthless dictator the U.S. installed and propped up before 1979 and so maddened the Iranian people that they were pushed in to the arms of the Islamic Revolution, and in to thinking the Ayatollahs were an improvement over the Shah. Bottomline is if you don't like the Iranian government, you can mostly blame the U.S. because its misguided policies laid the foundation for it.
"We stand for freedom; they stand for expanding their own power"
Probably should ask before I start this rant, who exactly is "We" and "They". Those are kind of vague terms.
Oh well, I cant wait to start the rant, I'm assuming "We" is the blessed United States of America and the "They" is all the devil's spawn who oppose her.
First, Dude, you need to stop kidding yourself.
OK here is the first hint, just a little clue, what nation refers to itself as the worlds sole remaining superPOWER. You see superPOWER means they have a whole lot of POWER. If the U.S. isn't seeking to expand its POWER the only explanation is because it already has all the POWER so its no longer possible to expand the POWER any further.
Maybe you could have sold the "we stand for freedom" part if you'd stopped there. But I assure you if there is one entity completely devoted to expanding its power in the world its the United States.
You don't spend $500 billion a year on weapons, wars and intelligence unless you are planning on using it to expand your power. You dont put troops in like 120 countries unless you are intent on expanding your power. You don't have a dozen aircraft carriers and thousands of nukes unless you are bent on expanding your power.
You don't invade a country every 5 years or so and change their government unless you want power, well maybe if you installed freedom you would have a case but we have installed more dictatorships than democracies over the last 100 years. You don't stage coups every few years, topple sovereign governments, and install puppets, often ruthless and despotic dictators as puppets if you "stand for freedom" and are disinterested in power. I assure you the list of countries where the U.S has installed or kept in power ruthless dictators is long and well documented. The mess that is Iran today is entirely due to the United States installing and keeping in power the Shah of Iran, a ruthless dictator who was the antithesis of freedom. Marcos in the Phillipines, Diem in Vietnam, Pinochet in Chile, Samosa in Nicaragua, Guatamala, El Salvador, Argentina, this list goes on for a while, all places where the U.S. sold freedom down the river, and peoples in to slavery, in the pursuit of wealth and POWER.
So Saddam, was paying PLO terrorists, lets spend $500 billion dollars, kill a couple thousand American soldiers, and piss off the entire world doing Israel's dirty work for them. Hate to break it to you the Saudi's pay PLO terrorists too, why aren't we taking them down too. All the Arab states support the Palastinians. The Palastinians were thrown out of their homes, off their land and out of their homeland, and have been sitting in squalid refugee camps for most of the last 50 years, homeless and stateless. They need some help.
;)
"Add to that his threats and weapons programs"
Dude, you seem to be stuck in 2001. Everyone, including the Bush administration has admited there were no weapons programs worth anything any time recently. Saddam's aids maybe told them there were some, and Chalibi set up a scam in which people like CurveBall lied and told the Bush administration there were weapons programs, and the Bushists were all to willing to believe the lies. If Saddam, had any weapons "programs" they must have been bad ones because they didn't keep him in power.
"War crimes?!? Please...you are so out of the mainstream. Bush's policies are key to eliminating the slime on this planet."
Well it aint working because your apparently still here
Out of the mainstream huh, well if you've read the Downing Street Memo, Blair's inner circle openly discussed the risk that they would be open to war crimes charges if they invaded Iraq based on fabrication, which is exactly what happened.
We have a problem in this world if a country like the U.S. can fabricate a case for war against any country they choose, take the country down on the whim of a cracked, power mad, President and Vice President, and never have to answer for it. Whose next, Syria or Iran?
"I don't know where you live, but I guarantee in the long run it will be a better place because of these policies."
Well you just proved you have no clue what you are talking about and how stuck you are on yourself, because I guarantee you, that you, me nor anyone else, has a clue where these policies are going to take us in the long run.
Well to be honest I think a "pop quiz" is a perfectly correct thing to do in an interview, I don't care who the interviewee is. I think Microsoft is kind of lucky the guy walked because he apparently has a prima donna attitude that he is way to "good" to be subjected to a basic test to see if he knows his stuff. He would probably be way to "good" to work in a team where people aren't worshipping his PhD'ness.
I've met more than few PhD's over the years who are so disconnected from reality, due in part to spending most of their adult life in a university, that they need to stay in an ivory tower because they will be useless to you if you are trying to develop and ship a product in the dirty, ugly, nasty, imperfect real world. They apparently nailed the process of getting grades and doing dissertations but some of them start coasting once they have the PhD, and just think "big thoughts". From them on they settle in to the concept they just have to say, look I have a PhD, so I don't really need to do anything to earn the paycheck.
Its a lot easier than you think for people to do a snow job to get through college, and then on references, resumes and interviews so you think they will perform for you and then once you hire them it turns out they don't. If you actually challenge their knowledge though, with something they can't snow you on, that is a good interviewer.
Part of the point of the pop quiz isn't necessarily if they even know the answer. its how they handle the pressure, and if they don't know the answer if they can convince you that they know how to find the answer. This guy handled it by showing he was to f**kin good to even be quizzed. Thank you, don't want you buddy, will call if we need an egotistical opera singer.
When I interview I give pop quizes but they are usally open book or open computer rather. I want to see that the person can find the answer, without having to crutch off the people around them.
If its for a programming job I routinely ask them to find a bug or bugs in a simple program. If you cant do that then you are more con artist than programmer.
"My only beef with the Afghanistan situation is that we're dropping the ball now."
Hate to break it to you but the problem started when the U.S. installed Karzai as a puppet to run the country for the U.S. He is an ex Conoco employee, which was a big plus to the oil men in the White House when they picked him. He is a total kiss up to the Bush administration. The U.S. spent liberally flying around the country in a helicopter, handing out money to tribal leaders to make sure he got elected. You can't really expect a puppet like Karzai to get tough and demand the U.S. fulfill its aid promises, or for example threaten to kick the U.S. out of Bagram for instance. If he got to tough with the U.S. they would see that he was replaced with a more compliant puppet. You see Afghanistan is EXACTLY like every puppet regime the U.S. has abused over the last century.
I think you would have to go further and say the U.S. completely botched the whole Afghan war, not juse the aftermath.
Instead of going in to Afghanistan fast and hard and smacking down the Taliban and Al Qaeda they sent in a few special forces and fought pretty much the entire ground war using unreliable proxy armies, mostly from warlords with decidely mixed, agendas and they mostly let the Taliban and Al Qaeda scatter. The warlords were both easily bribed and more converned about maintaining their private armies and growing the profits from their opium farms.
Instead of fighting an enemy that was somewhat centralized in Afghanistan they are now well scattered around the world, and many have returned to the tribal areas in Pakistan where they have as much of a haven as they did under the Taliban, since Pakistan wont let anyone near them there.
Why was Afghanistan botched so badly, because George had a fixation on Saddam and Iraq, and had issues with his daddy's unfinished business. So he redirected most of the forces he should have used to ruthless liquidate Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, into Iraq. As a result Al Qaeda is alive, well and going strong, and Iraq is a bloody mess, and a recruiting poster for Islamic revolution. It sends a really bad message when you are attacked as badly as the U.S. was on 9/11 and you let the people responsible get away and go hammer some guy that had nothing to do with it.
I know George is supposed to be a "war" president and he used to score his highest marks in the polls for fighting the war on "Terrorism", and thats how he got reelected, but if you really look at his record he completely botched both Afghanistan and Iraq, and Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are as strong as every, so I really don't know what is is he's done to deserve street cred for being tough on terrorism, other than maybe robbing people of their civil liberties, for example snatching people around the world and spiriting them off to be tortured, or locking American citizens up indefinitely with no due process.
Another interesting tidbit I saw this week, Uzbekistan and Kyrgistan I think, backed by Russia and China are telling the U.S. to get the hell out of the bases they loaned to the U.S. to invade Afghanistan. It turns out the U.S. has been using the bases to incite the overthrow of the respective governments, Uzbekistan in particular, which has had some violent internal strife recently. They are oppresive dictatorships to be sure, but its kind of a case study in how to piss off people, or maybe piss on people, when a country helps you out with a military base to avenge 9/11, you let Bin Laden get away and then you focus your energy on trying and overthrow the government that loaned the base to you instead of on Al Qaeda.
Damn. You tell me the U.S. and Britain don't intentionally kill civilians. I point out they have, numerous times, throughout the last century. Then you say well in the "majority" of instances their actions were noble, especially lately. You conceed the U.S. and Britain have intentionally killed civilians, but somehow in your morale caluclus those killings were "justified", but you've unilaterally decided Palastinain suicide bombers, teens growin up in squalid refugee camps fenced in by Isreal so they are more like ghettos, with nothing to live for can never be "justified" when they do what they do.
I'm sorry you just lost the arguement. Fact is "terrorists" intentionally kill civilians to "terrorize" them. America and Britain have intentionally killed civilians to "terrorize" them. Simple fact, they are in the long historical view no better or any different from today's suicide bombers.
You can try to rationalize Hiroshima and Nagasaki in some sick calculus that by intentionally killing hundreds of thousands of civilians we saved so many lives. Well:
A. You could have accomplised that with one bomb, the second was gratuitous killing and terrorism. There is a new book out on Oppenheimer by one of his kids and it says just that. Most of the scientists could have lived with Hiroshima but they were appalled when the second one was dropped so quickly after the first. It accelerated their opposition to nuclear proliferation.
B. They could have dropped them on remote military bases, killed mostly soliders and Japan still would have capitulated. They dropped them on cities to maximize the terror and to insure quick and unconditional surrender, to send a message to the Russians, and no doubt to exact revenge for Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
" I believe that in the majority of these instances, and on the whole, the general goal is an overall reduction in loss of life;"
In World War II the general goal of bombing cities was NEVER an overall reduction in a loss of life. It was a war where the gloves were off, Germany bombed London and Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, so The U.S. and Britain were of the opinion their enemies got what they deserved. For Britain, once they decided daylight bombing was to dangerous, they had no option left but to carpet bomb and fire bomb cities because they couldn't find specific targets at night. They intentionally opted to kill and terrorize civilians to "minimize" the risk to their flyers. There is no such excuse in Japan. The U.S. was proficient at precision daylight bombing. They opted for carpet bombing cities with incendiaries to maximize civilian casualties and to terrorize the population.
Again I'm not saying suicide bombers are "right" I'm just sick of countries like America and the U.K. acting like they are pure as driven snow and would never do such thing. Well they have, and a lot worse. In my book people who kill for religion, wealth, politics and power are all equally contemtible. I have no use for the people who rationalize when they do it its cool, but anyone else does it they are no better than animals. Hate to break it to you but you are all animals.
I think you missed some of the subtelty in my post, I didn't say he WAS an anarchist. I just, correctly, said he was widely refered to as an anarchist. Like I said, in the early 20th century everyone opposed to "the powers that be" was called an "anarchist" just like today they are called "terrorists". The power that be defined anyone who was opposed to their grip on power as an "anarchist" so they made it look sound they were the preservers of "order" and anyone who opposed them was advocating chaos (a.k.a. anarchy). Most people don't like the sound of anarchy which is why it was an effective term to use in propaganda.
The definition of an anarchist they were using, was someone who was trying to overthrow the established powers. "The Black Hand" were revolutionaries and nationalists trying to drive the Habsburgs out of the Balkans. To the Habsburgs, their allies and royal kin throughout Europe that meant they were "anarchists" because they were trying to topple the Habsburgs.
Most muslim groups we brand as "terrorists" today are really nationalists, with a heavy religion angle, trying to topple governments they dont like. Al Qaeda was born out of the effort to throw the Russian infidel invaders out of a Muslim state, Afghanistan. Many of their members are dedicated to toppling the governments of Saudi Arabi and Egypt, using terminology of the early 20th century they would be called "anarchists", versus the terminology of the early 21st century where they are called "terrorists", same, same. Most of the middle east groups we brand as "terrorist" like Hamas are nationalists trying to drive Israel out of Palestine to regain control of the homeland they were driven out of in stages after World War II.
See the similarity.
"The difference is intent."
Uh, dude the intent is the same. Its to win a political and military victory and break the will of a civilian population, by killing and terrorizing civilians.
If a strategic bombing campaign is targeting factories, military bases, and industrial capacity then you are correct, there is a difference in intent. When you are fire bombing or nuking cities with the express intent of killing and terrorizing a civilian population the intent is exactly the same as a "terrorist" and again the U.S. and Britain have killed millions more people by intentionally bombing civilians, than Muslim "terrorists" every will.
You are just doing what people always do, practicing selective memory and only remembering the parts of war you like, and can rationalize, and blocking out all the times America and Britain have indiscriminately and intentionally killed civilians. You say our reasons for doing something atrocious are always justified, you guys on the other side will never be justified if you do exactly the same thing.
Free fire zone in Vietnam were another great example. Civilians in them weren't killed by accident. The military's express goal was to indiscriminately terrorize and kill civilians in areas of Vietnam the military decided were sympathetic to the Viet Cong.
" US soldier following all procedures accidentally killing civilians with an errant round"
Nice bending of what I said. I wasn't talking about an "accident" and an "errant round". I'm talking about dropping bombs in civilian areas where the military KNOWS they can't differentiate between civilians and insurgents. Flattening Fallujah was a prefect example. A lot of civilians left before it started but many didn't and when they didn't it was open season on them.
Note that when the U.S. produces an insurgent "body count" out of Iraq which they dont do often but they do still do, all thed dead are counted as insurgents, and the never counted as civilians, though a high percentage are certain to be innocent civilians.
Its a fact of life in war, you are going to kill people I'm just saying I don't think you can get all holier than thou when people use the only means at their disposal to return the favor. Its the price of overwhelming military superiority, only stupid people would try to stand toe to toe with the U.S. and Britain by standing out in a field. They would be incinerated and it would be an act of futility. Only thing they would get out of it is some sympathy. Therefore its inevitable they retaliate with the only means that will work, IED's and suicide bombers.
I'm not saying they are right, some of them are totally whacked in the head thanks to years of religious indoctrination, but thats true of all religious fanatics not just Muslim ones. Jews and Christian can be just as bad. But you should appreciate that why the do what they do is totally understandable. It is the only way to fight a war against a country that spends $500 billion a year on wearpons and wars.
"Except for the minor detail that the terrorists are doing everything they can to inflict maximum civilian casualities"
Bzzzzzzzt. Wrong. Try again. The U.S and Britain were doing everything they could to maximize civilian casualties during World War II. How else can you explain the fire bombing of cities like Dresden and pretty much every city in Japan. Japanese cities were all built from wood so mass incendiary bombing created some wonderous fire storms that killed almost nothing but civilians which is mostly what you find in most citites.
Or lets take Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If the U.S. had been trying to minimize civilian casualties they would have dropped them on military targets that weren't in the middle of large cities. They also probably could have dropped one not two. The Nagasaki bomb was gratuitous killing of civilians designed to "terrorize" Japan in to unconditional surrender. It was precisely "terrorism" American's cherish their double standards though, like most people, though more so.
Militaries will SAY they are trying to minimize casualties, and they probably do try more now than they used to, partially because the global press scrutiny is harsher than it once was. Still the U.S. routinely kills people from high altitude and long distance with no real knowledge of weather the target is full of civlians or insurgents. There are only two options, in a guerilla war:
- Dont kill insurgents so you don't kill civilians
- Kill insurgents and you are going to civilians
There isn't a third option.
Another example, its well documented that the U.S. declared regions of Vietnam as free fire zones, which meant the U.S. military was licensed to kill everyone in those zones, full well knowing many if not most were innocent civilians.
Uh, I don't know, maybe because Iraq and Saddam HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH 9/11.
:)
I guess maybe your right, the Iraq war couldn't have been an overreaction to 9/11 since its wasn't a reaction to it at all since there was no connection between the two outside of the fabrications of the Bush administration.
But on the other hand as recently as Bush's prime time speech a week ago he was STILL trying to tie Iraq to 9/11 and using 9/11 to justify a largely unprovoked invasion. I could have seen taking down Saddam back in the early 90's when he invaded Kuwait, but to wait more than a decade and then do it with no real justification put the U.S. and Britain dangerously close to war crimes charges because thats what people who launch unprovoked aggressive wars are branded as these days, Saddam was one when he invaded Kuqait, Hitler was one, now the U.S. and Britain are in the same league. How sad
"A terrorist attack is a deliberate decision on the part of another human to kill as many people, usually innocent, in the target site as is practical or possible."
... intentionally. As did nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bombing Hiroshima might have been justified and ended further blooshed but Nagasaki was gratuitous and intentional killing of civilians to stoke "terror" in the minds of the Japanese. If that wasn't terrorism I don't know what is.
So is pressing the bomb release in a bomber, especially when you are bombing cities you know are full of civilians, or firing a howitzer on a city, or the guns on a tank, its just cleaner than being a suicide bomber and you can keep doing it day after day. Suicide bombers are self punishing and one shot deals.
Militaries and terrorists are more similar than they are different, the only real differentiators are one is state sponsored, one is better equipped and one claims an aura of legitimacy, that isn't really there, just because it is run by a nation state. At the end of the day they both knowingly kill innocent civilians. Strategic bombing in World War II and Vietnam killed millions of civilians
Western militaries will claim these days that they do everything in their power to avoid civilian casualties and sometimes they do, but in a war where the other side doesn't wear pretty uniforms and the war is happening in cities full of civilians, the fact is militaries do kil civilians, they know it, all they can say is oops, sorry, didn't mean to, here is a $100 for the death of your relative.
In a well reported incident in Israel they dropped a bomb from an F-16 in the middle of an apartment complex full of women and children in order to assassinate an adversary. They knew they were going to kill civilians, they did it anwyay intentionally. Does that make them terrorists? By your definition it does.
As soon as nation states start strategic bombing campaigns there isn't even a pretense that killing civilians is unintentional, it is usually the object, they are trying to break an adversaries will through terrorizing the civilian population. The key differenence between terrorist and armies is armies can kill vastly larger numbers of people than rag tag terrorists ever will.
"Anarchist groups haven't been involved in terrorism since the nineteenth Century and it's hard to believe they'd suddenly start now."
I'm pretty sure Anarchists were still quite active in the early 20th century. In the early twentieth century "anarchist" was the blanket condemnation applied to enemies of the state as was "communist" in the 50's and "terrorist" is today. There is something about political propaganda that mandates there be some in vogue term ending in "ist" which politicians can use to brand and denigrate all their enemies without having to think to much.
Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by someone usually refered to as an "anarchist", and in an important lesson we should learn from today, the overreaction by nation states to that act of terrorism did vastly more damage to those nation states than the act of terrorism itself. It triggered World War I, millions of casualties, the Russian Revolution, and the end of the Habsberg empire of which Ferdinand was an heir.
Kind of shows how one relatively easy to execute act can lead to widespread devestation when politicians go nuts in response.
9/11 as tragic as it was, lead to an overreaction by the U.S. that resulted in the Iraq war which has killed far more people than 9/11 did and will cost the U.S. far more than 9/11 did before its done.
The use of bombs against civilians as happened in Madrid and London is tragic. But, I'm afraid you really can't to holier than though about it when you drop bombs on civilians as the U.S., Britain and Israel have done as a matter of routine over the years. There isn't really any difference between the two acts other than the attempt by the U.S, Britain and Israel to rationalize it, the fact is the civilians are just as dead and maimed whether you use a suicide bomber or an F-16 to deliver the payload.
I think you all are missing the point.
- IBM wants a patent regime in the EU
- EU wants high paying tech jobs in the EU
- IBM has lots of high paying tech jobs they can locate pretty much where they want
- IBM tries to blackmail the EU in to passing a patent regime otherwise they move jobs out of the EU
Didn't necessarily say it made sense, it was just a way for software companies to try to pressure the EU in to doing what they want. It apparently didn't work. There is a blurb on the GNU web site indicating an IBM lobbiest did in fact try it.
Of course, I don't imagine IBM wants to leave any software deve jobs in the EU anyway so maybe it was an idle threat since all the jobs are toast anyway. Maybe the EU didn't fall for the threat because they know IBM is moving the jobs to India and China whatever.
An software deve office in the EU is expensive and European workers aren't exactly the hardest working on the planet. Its no accident France has a 10% unemployment rate in the newly globalized world.
And as the fruits of your victory, IBM, Microsoft and other big software companies will continue to, or will accelerate closing down their software development divisions in the EU and continue migrating all those high tech jobs to India and China. IBM announced layoffs for 10K+ recently mostly in the EU and just happened to announce they were hiring about the same number in India.
An IBM lobbyist, used this as an explicit threat against the EU to try to coerce them in to passing software patents, either give us software patents or we continue to shutdown operations and drain high tech jobs out of the EU. Of course the paradox is China respects IP rights even less than the EU does, but hey they work cheap.
Chances are most of the software companies have will drained all the software jobs out of the EU anyway, wages in Europe and the U.S are to high, benefits to good, work weeks to short, cost of living to high, workers spoiled, and labor is organized, compared to India and China.
The only hope is that workers in China and India are now being corrupted by their new affluence and will soon be whiling away their time surfing the net, playing video games, driving around in cars, and watching TV so maybe in another 20-30 years they will be as messed up as U.S. and European workers are.