Yeah, I can't believe people are seriously thinking of implementing this "solution". In the face of such nuttiness, I suppose defending tall buildings with AA missiles as a counter to highjacked jets is a logical next step. People, listen up: you cannot ever, ever be perfectly safe. All you can do is let the government frighten you into taking ever more control over your lives in the name of "security", and putting ever more tax dollars into the pockets of the "defense" industry to protect you from every conceivable hypothetical threat. Of course it's possible that somebody will shoot down an airliner with a shoulder-launched missile. How many other possible ways are there to do what amounts to the same thing? Will you pay to protect against every one of those other possibilities?
The U.S. has gone nuts over one successful terrorist attack. I remind you that the method employed was to hijack jet liners, and crash them into buildings, not to shoot them down. Furthermore, there is a simple and practical countermeasure to such tactics that has (I hope) been put into effect—armor the cockpit cabin door and keep it locked during flight. Yet, there has been a continual spate of "security measures" designed to make us "safe" in the skies—like banning one of the three states of matter (liquid), because someone realized you can make a bomb out of liquids. No one has ever explained to me satisfactorily why solids aren't banned for the same reason...
You might want to take a look at the Wikipedia entry about that incident to get your facts straight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655). The Iranian airliner was shot down by a USN AEGIS cruiser, the Vincennes, which was in Iranian waters at the time. The airliner was most definitely targeted and hit by anti-aircraft missiles. There was no firefight underway. The airliner was flying in its scheduled flight corridor, emitting its alotted transponder code. The Navy has had a very difficult time explaining how, despite its highly sophisticated electronics, the Vincennes managed to mistake an Airbus for an F-14 Tomcat fighter.
In the early 1980's, an Iranian airliner was shot down by an American missile. The American destroyer was off-shore an Iranian city (Abidan, I believe) and was being attacked at the time by several Iranian PT boats. The US destroyer's captain ordered a missile launch against the PT boats, but the missile locked onto a commercial airliner that was on its final approach and blew it up.
I always get stopped going through customs & immigration because I can't help looking guilty...
Are you sure it's your facial expression, and not something else? Long hair? Ornaments dangling from pierced body parts? Weird tatoos? Clothes that make you stand out? Obviously, I'm not saying you don't have a right to any and all of the above, but you might want to consider if there is something about your appearance other than your facial expression that makes you noticeable. The key to survival in the new fascist camps known as "airports" is, above all, not to be noticed.
Of course, you shouldn't neglect your facial expression entirely.
Best is, of course, the complete blankness of a stupefied sheep. If you can't manage stupefaction (I've found tranquilizers to be a great aid here), try for moderate friendliness. Really: make eye contact and smile at the person in uniform. It's hard to look guilty while your face is doing something else.
How about this...offset the carbon released by burning "fossil fuels" by burying trees. Well...let me qualify that: let's plant a lot of trees, let them grow for a while, then bury them and plant some more. We should concentrate on planting as many of the fastest-growing varieties of trees (like those they make paper out of), then harvest them every twenty years and bury them deep underground (maybe in old mine shafts). That way, the carbon would stay out of circulation for a long time. Think of it as putting coal back into the ground. Plus we'd have the added benefit of lots more trees everywhere, and jobs for all those unemployed loggers in the Pacific Northwest.
Of course, it's heresy to suggest this, but recycling paper is a really dumb idea for pretty much the same reasons. The best thing that you can do with old newspapers is bury them in a landfill. Buried paper is buried carbon. You might as well use some of those pulp trees to make new paper, then bury it later.
OK, so this is probably a crazy scheme...but it's no crazier than a lot of the stuff I've heard suggested lately.
Heck, this could do wonders for working from home. You could log into the virtual office on Mount Olympus, levitate to your workstation that is set up on an otherwise inaccessible crag, and do your work. I don't know about you, but I could write great code a mile above the Aegean Sea, with eagles hovering nearby. If people wanted to talk to me, they could always levitate on up to my aerie...as long as their level is high enough to have the Levitate spell, anyway. I'd still avoid meetings, though—I don't care whether they're held on top of clouds or caves full of glowing lava, meetings suck.
There would be some drawbacks, of course: for instance, my PBH would insist on an avatar that looks like Zeus. Ah, no problemo--I'll just hack the system so he looks like Goofy to everyone else...he'll never notice. While I'm at it, I'll make some...er...enhancements to the female avatars.
Seriously, I'm sorta serious. The tech is getting better, and gas prices ain't going down. Sooner rather than later, businesses are going to have to make the adjustment to letting those who have jobs that can be done from home do so.
It was a GREEN laser, which puts out a lot more power than your standard red keychain ornament. One of the advertised uses for a green laser is as a "sky pointer".
I feel obliged to point out that the color of a laser has nothing to do with how much "power" it emits. Because the human eye is much more sensitive to green than red light, a green laser will appear more powerful than a red laser--even though both are emitting the same amount of power. I happen to have a couple of laser pointers--one green and one red, and the green one appears much brighter, though they are both rated at the same power--too low to do any damage even if you look straight into them. (I'm not at home right now, or I'd go look at them to see what their power rating is.)
I suppose there's a greater risk of temporarily blinding someone with the green laser, just due to the relative brightness, especially at night—but there's no greater potential of actual harm to the eye.
I think pointing lasers at people and vehicles should be classed as "damn stupid annoying behavior that should get your butt kicked good" but I don't know if I'd want to see the offenders do more than a few months of jail time.
They say that political infighting in academic circles is so notoriously vicious "because the stakes are so low". Something like this must be going on at Wikipedia. What was so important about any of this? What horrible deed did the banned offender commit?
I read the article and the comments, and I'm still very fuzzy on what all this was about. Apparently, there was a squabble of the sort often referred to as a "urination contest", and the Virgin won. I guess the controversy centered on "naked pantsing", or something like that. (Note to self: must research involvement of Thin Virgin with Naked Pantsing. And why does Mr. Wales oppose said activity? Is he, perhaps, a secret practioner?)
OK...seriously...isn't there some kind of conflict resolution policy in place at Wikipedia? Aren't there procedures that must be followed before drastic action is taken against an individual who offends against Wikipedia policies—let alone collective punishment of a range of IP addresses? I'm thinking something like this:
Offender is notified by Wiki staff that he has violated published policies, and that he should cease and desist from these proscribed activities, or explain why he is not in violation.
If offender repeats his offenses and fails to provide a convincing defense, his case should be reviewed by at least 3 Wiki staff members, or adjudicators appointed by the Wiki organization for this purpose.
The adjudicators publish their findings in a venue dedicated to this purpose, and sanction the offender. Such sanction might consist of revoking the offender's editing or contribution privileges for a limited time, or forever. Most importantly, the published findings must describe the offenses committed by the accused, and the evidence that supports the allegations.
The offender may appeal a ban once. A set of different adjudicators would "hear" the case, and perhaps the Wiki community at large would be consulted. The following decision would be final.
Now, that's how I think a serious enterprise of the sort that Wikipedia claims to be would proceed. What's happening now doesn't look serious to me. Indeed, it appears to me that the people in charge over there think that Wikipedia is their own private plaything. That's hardly going to encourage me to become a contributor.
Hard to understand how there could be such harsh mistreatment in some places while also having such lax security in others.
The difference can probably be attributed to two circumstances:
This was the end of the war, and the Allies were raking in hundreds of thousands of German prisoners. Caring for such a huge "bag" of P.O.W.s was a logistical challenge. Still, more could have been done, and the fact that Eisenhower made this decision months before actually issuing the proclamation shows he was aware of the problem and did nothing to prepare for it.
The Germans were no longer in a position to retaliate--they'd lost the war, and no German commander was going to order reprisals at this point.
In fairness, it's important to note that the German treatment of Russian prisoners was far worse than that accorded to the Germans by Eisenhower. Like the Americans, the Germans had their excuses, of course—too many prisoners all at once, and of course the Russians never signed the Geneva conventions in the first place...not to mention that the Russians didn't treat German prisoners with great kindness. No love lost on either side there.
Your story about German P.O.W.s "escaping" overnight rings true. I remember reading about a German general who did just that—broke out of camp one night, then came back the next day. Unfortunately for the camp commander—and ultimately for the General—the purpose of this excursion was to mail a letter to the U.S. Senators from the state in which the camp was located, complaining of "violations" of the Geneva conventions (minor stuff, like not enough mail, etc.). This got the camp commander in a great deal of hot water, but ultimately got the General handed over to the French on "war crimes" charges that amounted to "waging war". He served over a decade in prison for that little outing.
It's pretty clear that Bacque's estimate of German P.O.W. deaths by starvation is greatly exaggerated; the article I cited said so and I never said otherwise. It remains an incontrovertible fact that huge numbers of German prisoners of war were confined without shelter, adequate food, or medical attention for months. It remains established historical fact that they were denied their rights as prisoners of war by Eisenhower's rather cynical proclamation. (I say "cynical" because the Germans were no longer in a position to retaliate against American P.O.W.s at this point.) It remains true that this treatment is a parallel to the treatment accorded to our "non-prisoners" today.
As for the post-war use of torture against German P.O.W.s, I cite The Devil's Adjutant: Jochen Peiper, Panzer Leader by Michael Reynolds. The author is British, and by no means a Nazi apologist. This isn't the place to debate whether the "Malmedy Massacre" took place, or whether it was truly a massacre, but the author's account of the techniques used to obtain "confessions" from Colonel Peiper's men made me feel ashamed to be an American.
As for "mountains of evidence"...yes there were mounds of paper. Does that mean that everyone who was brought up on war crimes charges was guilty? Not even the various tribunals (Nüremberg was just one) thought so.
Many of them were apprehended while shooting at US troops. I understand that while, in those situations, collecting forensic evidence can be hard, if a couple soldiers that were exchanging fire with the accused took depositions, there would be enough evidence to pursue a proper trial. That is a huge nuisance in times of war and that's why we have a simplified process in the form of the Geneva Convention
The Geneva Conventions aren't meant to be a substitute for criminal proceedings...a soldier who shoots at the enemy does not thereby commit a crime. The condition of "legal limbo" has arisen because prisoners taken after the conclusion of "official" hostilities in Iraq and during our Afghan incursion are not part of any state military. Under international law, they're not really soldiers. But, even given that fact, is it necessarily a crime for a denizen of some far-off land to shoot at American soldiers?
It might be profitable to ask by what right do American soldiers shoot at them? We send our soldiers to far-off countries for reasons that may or may not be good ones, and then the locals shoot at those soldiers. Isn't it a bit hypocritical to say that their shooting is criminal, but ours is legally justified? What laws are in play here? Does it make a difference that our soldiers wear uniforms and follow orders from Washington? (To put the situation in perspective, you might want to ask yourself what you would do if foreign soldiers—say, a French U.N. force—started patrolling U.S. streets to "keep the peace"?)
I think there's enough moral and legal murkiness to go around. Let's pretend that the people who surrender to our troops after shooting at them are prisoners of war, and treat them as such. As for those not taken prisoner in actual combat, but captured because we suspect them of plotting evil against our native soil, let's put them on trial in the United States, under U.S. law.
I know it's not a perfect solution, but it's the best I can think of.
In this context, it might be relevant to note that our use of such legal reasoning to avoid giving captured enemy combatants the protection of either the Geneva conventions—or any other sort of law—is not without precedent. In 1941, General Eisenhower declared all captured German soldiers to be "Disarmed Enemy Forces", and not prisoners of war. This meant that the United States was free to ignore international laws that required such niceties as feeding prisoners (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinwiesenlager or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_and_German_POWs for some background). It also meant that "extraordinary" interrogation methods could be used to obtain evidence for the upcoming war crimes trials. The justification for Eisenhower's action was that the German state no longer existed, and that the prisoners were thus no longer the soldiers of any such state. I guess they were "non-state actors".
The major difference between 1941 and today is that this treatment of German prisoners was temporary, lasting only a matter of months, while now we have the Never-Ending War on Terror.
The problem is there is no one else to give your vote to anymore. It's all the same bullshit.
Well yes...that's right. Have you ever wondered why it's like that? Why don't either of the parties give us real alternatives that differentiate them from the other guys? The answer is actually pretty simple. Political parties—and politicians—do not formulate their platforms so that they reflect either their own principles or their constituent's real wishes and needs. At election time, they say what is most likely to get them elected. That is the only criterion that is used by almost all of the politicians who run for national office.
And what do they say at election time? Well, practically nothing. They say that they are for national security, and favor prosperity. They do take a position on a very few "controversial" issues that have become identifiers for one party or the other. You can count these issues on the fingers of one hand: abortion, gun control, and...I must be leaving one out. Mostly, the Democrats favor gun control and oppose regulating abortion, while the Republicans oppose regulating guns and want to forbid abortions. There are some exceptions to this. For example, only a very dumb Democrat would advocate gun control when he's running for office in Texas—but these exceptions "prove the rule": a candidate's position on these standard issues is meant to establish that he has an opinion (or even two), while risking as little as possible.
This state of affairs—while in no way good for the country—is the outcome of solid rational thinking by the party strategists. Let's take drug policy as an example. Suppose the Democrats came out for legalizing marijuana. Would this enhance their chances of winning? Would it enhance the chances of any Democrat to get elected to Congress or the Senate? You might think that the answer would clearly be "no" in some of the more conservative districts and states of the U.S.--Alabama, say. But you might think that it would help out a Democrat in San Francisco, wouldn't you?
Ah, but it would not. You see, a far left liberal district is already NOT going to vote for a Republican. The Democrat has it sewn up. Why should he take the slightest risk that might rock the boat? There's going to be some people in his district who are turned off by the idea of legalized dope. Maybe they won't vote for the Republican, but they just might stay home on election day. As for the dopers, they're likely to forget when election day is, or get lost on their way to the polling place. Also, what about poor Democrat Shmoe who's trying to get elected in some rural Texas district? Maybe his opponent was just caught in bed with the entire complement of Noah's Ark, and the Democrat actually has a wisp of a chance of getting sent to Congress. Then the Republicans hit back with a full-page ad in the local paper: "Democrat Comes out For Free Dope!" (the fact that it's not Shmoe but the guy in California is mentioned in paragraph 16 on page 10). Alas, another Democrat who doesn't get elected.
It's the same for both parties, of course. The Republicans aren't going to come out for gay marriage any time soon for very similar reasons. Nobody in San Francisco is going to vote for a Republican (especially since his opponent is probably a trans-gendered person who has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with a sexually ambivalent hamster), but the voters in Bismarck, North Dakota aren't going to like hearing about this.
This situation is described as an "equilibrium state" in game theory. Basically, it's a condition in which both sides have analayzed the strategies available to them, and have adopted the optimum strategy—the strategy that offers the greatest likelyhood of winning and the least likelyhood of loss. Once this condition is reached, it is to the advantage of neither side to ever change their strategy. That's why it's called the
...OTOH, people and enterprises are slowly but sure upgrading to vista. The university where I work just took the step and upgraded 25 computer labs...Seeing the users that have Vista just make the rest of us realize that Vista is not the horror that somepeople seem to be. Knowledge is the best medicine, so people see "oh, it works well"...so slowly, more and more people are willing to upgrade. This is our case, and i think this is happening everywhere.
So Vista works. But does it work better than XP? Just how is Vista better than XP SP2? If it's not better, why call the conversion to the new MS OS "upgrading"? I think you've been brainwashed by MS's marketeers; a more appropriate (and delicately neutral) term might be "switching". But if you are merely switching from one OS to another, the question arises, why switch? If the new OS is not better...what's the point? In truth, the only point is to increase revenue for MS, and to create the illusion of progress—an illusion that the MS marketing department hopes to exploit to make more sales. Do you like being manipulated this way?
For the company in which I work, MS's churning of new operating systems is a big headache. We distribute lab instruments that are controlled by software written in-house for PCs running...Windows 2000. About a year ago, there was a spate of criticism that we should switch the product to XP, though 2K works just fine for our purposes. Note that I call this a "switch" and not an "upgrade" for that very reason: the only reason to switch is that MS is sooner or later going to stop letting us sell Windows 2K licenses. Of course, the switching argument foundered on the fact that now there's an even newer OS...shouldn't we switch to that instead? But nobody wants to expend a bunch of effort to make our software run on a completely new OS with an unknown number of completely new bugs, and programming gotchas. I suspect we'd switch to that other OS...except that the software development group is so heavily invested (and infested) with.NET programmers that they'd have to fire every one of them and start over. Hmm...
IIRC September began in 1993 when AOL gave its lusers Usenet access. AOL went off Usenet a couple years ago, but there's still Google Groups for the cluebies to use.
Hmm, perhaps September is relative, just like Einstein said. I do remember the arrival of the AOLers, and making cruel fun of them. It was like shooting fish in a barrel--no challenge. They'd just whimper and stop posting. So I guess that for me September began a few years later, when the volume just got overwhelming.
Actually, I'm not as mean as all that. But it was a good feature of USENET that it was pretty much self-policing. You either obeyed the rules, or people would laugh at you. Evidently, that system works up to a certain population density.
Wow, people still use USENET? I pretty much stopped paying attention to it in the late 90s, when the signal/noise ratio exceeded my tolerances. USENET was great fun from the late 80s 'til about 97 (when exactly did Eternal September hit? Wasn't it 97?). And heck, the flamewars were part of the fun. Ah, rec.arts.sf-written, rec.guns, alt.buggery-barnfowl, how I miss thee!
What turned me off wasn't a sudden increase in rudeness, but the avalanche of useless and clueless posts.
I suppose it's solipsistic of me to assume that things go away when I stop paying attention to them. But seriously, how can anyone wade through all that crap? (I was just kidding about the alt newsgroup...really...)
Seriously... this sort of myth was really born of the "Hitler Miracle", about, how the Nazi regime supposedly turned the German economy around in the midst of the Great Depression. Sure, Nazi propaganda would have us believe the in the midth of Hitler's German economic juggernaut, but the truth is, if you look at the statistics - EVEN THE BRITISH WERE OUT PRODUCING THE GERMANS.
If you mean in terms of military production, then that's true. However, the Nazi government made no real effort to ramp up military production until the war was well under way, and it was abundantly clear that it was not going to be short--not before 1941, at any rate. By that time, it was far too late. Everybody seems to think that Hitler had a "time-table for the conquest of Europe, and that he planned WWII because he was some sort of Hollywood villain who loved to cackle madly while the world burned.
Actually, he screwed up very badly, even in terms of his own stated objectives. Nobody wanted another Great War--not the people, certainly not the German generals, and not even Hitler. He had been in the trenches, and knew what it was like. Sure, he had his plans of conquest, but they involved expansion toward the East, against Poland and Russia—countries that he thought would not be aided by the Western powers. The truth is that he got intoxicated by his own success, and started to believe in his own infallibility. He thought he could attain his objectives both by acting according to his immediate impulses and without a major war. You have to remember that though Hitler was by no means stupid, he was ignorant of the world outside Central Europe. He didn't understand, for example, the effect his abrogation of the Munich treaty (breached when he occupied Bohemia and Moravia--the Czech "rump" state) would have on domestic politics in Britain. The result--total loss of face by the British "peace" party, led by Chamberlain, and rise of the "war" party under Churchill--set the stage for the Anglo-French reaction to Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939.
It is only in the light of this interpretation that Germany's total lack of economic war preparation can be understood. The Nazi government didn't expect another major war, so it made no effort to build up war production. Projections by German generals and government ministers held that Germany might be prepared for a major war in the mid 1950s...NOT in 1939!
So the argument that Fascism is not good for the economy can't be supported by the (true) allegation that Germany's war production was woefully inadequate. They weren't trying. In terms of normal economic production, the Germans were doing quite well--especially if you consider the fact that the industrial heart of Germany—the Ruhr region—was under Anglo-French occupation until the mid 1920s, and that Germany was struggling under the enormous demands for "reparations" made at Versailles.
I agree totally that the Nazi regime was a bunch of crooked bullies. But since when have the terms "crooked" and "busines" been incompatible? —Indeed, the barons of industry found the Führer quite congenial.
Although the data is still being analysed, researchers at Boston University believe they can correctly identify the sound Mr Ramsay's brain is imagining some 80% of the time...In the next few weeks, a computer will start the task of translating his thoughts into sounds.
As is usual with any pop sci article, we have to guess what's going on, but I'd say that they've given the subject a set of "sounds", like "buh", "ah", "kuh" "la" and so on, and then instructed him to try to speak them. The instruments were then able to identify instances of this subset with 80% reliability. The next step will be to get the computer to reproduce the sounds audibly...to babble, in effect. As the article says, "Conversation is what we're hoping for, but we're pretty far from that."
It would be nice to know how large the set of "sounds" is that they're using, and how much effort and training has to be undertaken by the subject. It could turn out that the effort of "talking" like this is far greater than arranging a blinking eye code, or something on that order. Then again, it could be a wonderful thing. We'll have to wait and see.
I've toyed with the question of "What would you take back in time with you to make yourself wealthy no matter where you land?" Best answer I could come up with: stainless steel needles. Yes...sewing needles. You can carry an amazing amount and variety of needles in a relatively small container. Do you have any idea what a single fine steel needle would cost back in 1100 AD...assuming you get such a thing?
Well, maybe you want to bring the Glock too, just in case the local powers don't feel compelled to treat a traveling salesman with due courtesy and respect...
This is the second time (at least). Take a look at this article from last year: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/14/world/main2179694.shtml. Clearly, there's a lot of journalistic hyperventilation going on in the current article. Nobody should have been that surprised.
One could ask, of course, whether the sub was truly undetected. One of the objectives of this type of war gaming is to determine the capabilities of the opposing force, so it's not likely that the U.S. Navy would tell the truth, either way. If the carrier group had detected the sub, they'd keep quiet about it, and let the Chinese think what they wanted. In any case, there's nothing the carrier group could--or would have wanted--to do about the sub. We're not at war with China, and the sub had as much right to be where it was as the U.S. ships. Like Somalia, for instance.
My guess is that it would not be that difficult for a modern electric sub to get within torpedo or missile range of a U.S.N. carrier. Carriers exist for two purposes: to provide career advancement opportunities for the naval officers who command them (you have to command a capital ship to make admiral), and to "project force"—against inconvenient third-rate powers that lack the capability to actually damage one of these very expensive ships.
The problem with a weapon as expensive as an aircraft carrier is that one absolutely cannot afford to lose one. That means they can be employed only if the risk of using them is very close to zero. And of course, that's the point the Chinese are making: maybe you'll detect the next sub before it comes into striking range, and maybe you won't. But if you ever go to war with those carriers near the strait of Taiwan, you had better be feeling very lucky indeed. Given the present mentality of the U.S. "defense" establishment, that's a very powerful argument.
I think in the next 10 years when we really start seeing the results of this type of thing, we will see a lot of lives that can reach less that what they potentially could have, or more acceptance of a person's past behavior that was a bit childish.
As a consequence, there will be a grass-roots surge of enthusiasm for "internet privacy legislation", as all the young dolts who have posted videos of their misdeeds start to seriously worry about getting a job.
The other, slightly less, logical explanation is that the difference in mass can simply be explained by the number of missing ballpoint pens in the universe.
But that doesn't explain where all those goddamned clothes hangers come from.
Clothes hangers are the larval form of the fully adult right sock. The amazing life cycle of this organism begins, of course, with the egg—often mistaken for "paper clips". Corpses are indistinguishable from old technical journals.
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Yeah, I can't believe people are seriously thinking of implementing this "solution". In the face of such nuttiness, I suppose defending tall buildings with AA missiles as a counter to highjacked jets is a logical next step. People, listen up: you cannot ever, ever be perfectly safe. All you can do is let the government frighten you into taking ever more control over your lives in the name of "security", and putting ever more tax dollars into the pockets of the "defense" industry to protect you from every conceivable hypothetical threat. Of course it's possible that somebody will shoot down an airliner with a shoulder-launched missile. How many other possible ways are there to do what amounts to the same thing? Will you pay to protect against every one of those other possibilities?
The U.S. has gone nuts over one successful terrorist attack. I remind you that the method employed was to hijack jet liners, and crash them into buildings, not to shoot them down. Furthermore, there is a simple and practical countermeasure to such tactics that has (I hope) been put into effect—armor the cockpit cabin door and keep it locked during flight. Yet, there has been a continual spate of "security measures" designed to make us "safe" in the skies—like banning one of the three states of matter (liquid), because someone realized you can make a bomb out of liquids. No one has ever explained to me satisfactorily why solids aren't banned for the same reason...
Sorry, hit "Submit" instead of "Preview"
You might want to take a look at the Wikipedia entry about that incident to get your facts straight (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655). The Iranian airliner was shot down by a USN AEGIS cruiser, the Vincennes, which was in Iranian waters at the time. The airliner was most definitely targeted and hit by anti-aircraft missiles. There was no firefight underway. The airliner was flying in its scheduled flight corridor, emitting its alotted transponder code. The Navy has had a very difficult time explaining how, despite its highly sophisticated electronics, the Vincennes managed to mistake an Airbus for an F-14 Tomcat fighter.
Are you sure it's your facial expression, and not something else? Long hair? Ornaments dangling from pierced body parts? Weird tatoos? Clothes that make you stand out? Obviously, I'm not saying you don't have a right to any and all of the above, but you might want to consider if there is something about your appearance other than your facial expression that makes you noticeable. The key to survival in the new fascist camps known as "airports" is, above all, not to be noticed.
Of course, you shouldn't neglect your facial expression entirely. Best is, of course, the complete blankness of a stupefied sheep. If you can't manage stupefaction (I've found tranquilizers to be a great aid here), try for moderate friendliness. Really: make eye contact and smile at the person in uniform. It's hard to look guilty while your face is doing something else.
Jeez, I hate traveling.
How about this...offset the carbon released by burning "fossil fuels" by burying trees. Well...let me qualify that: let's plant a lot of trees, let them grow for a while, then bury them and plant some more. We should concentrate on planting as many of the fastest-growing varieties of trees (like those they make paper out of), then harvest them every twenty years and bury them deep underground (maybe in old mine shafts). That way, the carbon would stay out of circulation for a long time. Think of it as putting coal back into the ground. Plus we'd have the added benefit of lots more trees everywhere, and jobs for all those unemployed loggers in the Pacific Northwest.
Of course, it's heresy to suggest this, but recycling paper is a really dumb idea for pretty much the same reasons. The best thing that you can do with old newspapers is bury them in a landfill. Buried paper is buried carbon. You might as well use some of those pulp trees to make new paper, then bury it later.
OK, so this is probably a crazy scheme...but it's no crazier than a lot of the stuff I've heard suggested lately.
Heck, this could do wonders for working from home. You could log into the virtual office on Mount Olympus, levitate to your workstation that is set up on an otherwise inaccessible crag, and do your work. I don't know about you, but I could write great code a mile above the Aegean Sea, with eagles hovering nearby. If people wanted to talk to me, they could always levitate on up to my aerie...as long as their level is high enough to have the Levitate spell, anyway. I'd still avoid meetings, though—I don't care whether they're held on top of clouds or caves full of glowing lava, meetings suck.
There would be some drawbacks, of course: for instance, my PBH would insist on an avatar that looks like Zeus. Ah, no problemo--I'll just hack the system so he looks like Goofy to everyone else...he'll never notice. While I'm at it, I'll make some...er...enhancements to the female avatars.
Seriously, I'm sorta serious. The tech is getting better, and gas prices ain't going down. Sooner rather than later, businesses are going to have to make the adjustment to letting those who have jobs that can be done from home do so.
I feel obliged to point out that the color of a laser has nothing to do with how much "power" it emits. Because the human eye is much more sensitive to green than red light, a green laser will appear more powerful than a red laser--even though both are emitting the same amount of power. I happen to have a couple of laser pointers--one green and one red, and the green one appears much brighter, though they are both rated at the same power--too low to do any damage even if you look straight into them. (I'm not at home right now, or I'd go look at them to see what their power rating is.)
I suppose there's a greater risk of temporarily blinding someone with the green laser, just due to the relative brightness, especially at night—but there's no greater potential of actual harm to the eye.
I think pointing lasers at people and vehicles should be classed as "damn stupid annoying behavior that should get your butt kicked good" but I don't know if I'd want to see the offenders do more than a few months of jail time.
They say that political infighting in academic circles is so notoriously vicious "because the stakes are so low". Something like this must be going on at Wikipedia. What was so important about any of this? What horrible deed did the banned offender commit?
I read the article and the comments, and I'm still very fuzzy on what all this was about. Apparently, there was a squabble of the sort often referred to as a "urination contest", and the Virgin won. I guess the controversy centered on "naked pantsing", or something like that. (Note to self: must research involvement of Thin Virgin with Naked Pantsing. And why does Mr. Wales oppose said activity? Is he, perhaps, a secret practioner?)
OK...seriously...isn't there some kind of conflict resolution policy in place at Wikipedia? Aren't there procedures that must be followed before drastic action is taken against an individual who offends against Wikipedia policies—let alone collective punishment of a range of IP addresses? I'm thinking something like this:
Now, that's how I think a serious enterprise of the sort that Wikipedia claims to be would proceed. What's happening now doesn't look serious to me. Indeed, it appears to me that the people in charge over there think that Wikipedia is their own private plaything. That's hardly going to encourage me to become a contributor.
The difference can probably be attributed to two circumstances:
In fairness, it's important to note that the German treatment of Russian prisoners was far worse than that accorded to the Germans by Eisenhower. Like the Americans, the Germans had their excuses, of course—too many prisoners all at once, and of course the Russians never signed the Geneva conventions in the first place...not to mention that the Russians didn't treat German prisoners with great kindness. No love lost on either side there.
Your story about German P.O.W.s "escaping" overnight rings true. I remember reading about a German general who did just that—broke out of camp one night, then came back the next day. Unfortunately for the camp commander—and ultimately for the General—the purpose of this excursion was to mail a letter to the U.S. Senators from the state in which the camp was located, complaining of "violations" of the Geneva conventions (minor stuff, like not enough mail, etc.). This got the camp commander in a great deal of hot water, but ultimately got the General handed over to the French on "war crimes" charges that amounted to "waging war". He served over a decade in prison for that little outing.
It's pretty clear that Bacque's estimate of German P.O.W. deaths by starvation is greatly exaggerated; the article I cited said so and I never said otherwise. It remains an incontrovertible fact that huge numbers of German prisoners of war were confined without shelter, adequate food, or medical attention for months. It remains established historical fact that they were denied their rights as prisoners of war by Eisenhower's rather cynical proclamation. (I say "cynical" because the Germans were no longer in a position to retaliate against American P.O.W.s at this point.) It remains true that this treatment is a parallel to the treatment accorded to our "non-prisoners" today.
As for the post-war use of torture against German P.O.W.s, I cite The Devil's Adjutant: Jochen Peiper, Panzer Leader by Michael Reynolds. The author is British, and by no means a Nazi apologist. This isn't the place to debate whether the "Malmedy Massacre" took place, or whether it was truly a massacre, but the author's account of the techniques used to obtain "confessions" from Colonel Peiper's men made me feel ashamed to be an American.
As for "mountains of evidence"...yes there were mounds of paper. Does that mean that everyone who was brought up on war crimes charges was guilty? Not even the various tribunals (Nüremberg was just one) thought so.
Sorry, the events I describe took place in 1945, not, of course, 1941.
The Geneva Conventions aren't meant to be a substitute for criminal proceedings...a soldier who shoots at the enemy does not thereby commit a crime. The condition of "legal limbo" has arisen because prisoners taken after the conclusion of "official" hostilities in Iraq and during our Afghan incursion are not part of any state military. Under international law, they're not really soldiers. But, even given that fact, is it necessarily a crime for a denizen of some far-off land to shoot at American soldiers?
It might be profitable to ask by what right do American soldiers shoot at them ? We send our soldiers to far-off countries for reasons that may or may not be good ones, and then the locals shoot at those soldiers. Isn't it a bit hypocritical to say that their shooting is criminal, but ours is legally justified? What laws are in play here? Does it make a difference that our soldiers wear uniforms and follow orders from Washington? (To put the situation in perspective, you might want to ask yourself what you would do if foreign soldiers—say, a French U.N. force—started patrolling U.S. streets to "keep the peace"?)
I think there's enough moral and legal murkiness to go around. Let's pretend that the people who surrender to our troops after shooting at them are prisoners of war, and treat them as such. As for those not taken prisoner in actual combat, but captured because we suspect them of plotting evil against our native soil, let's put them on trial in the United States, under U.S. law.
I know it's not a perfect solution, but it's the best I can think of.
In this context, it might be relevant to note that our use of such legal reasoning to avoid giving captured enemy combatants the protection of either the Geneva conventions—or any other sort of law—is not without precedent. In 1941, General Eisenhower declared all captured German soldiers to be "Disarmed Enemy Forces", and not prisoners of war. This meant that the United States was free to ignore international laws that required such niceties as feeding prisoners (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rheinwiesenlager or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenhower_and_German_POWs for some background). It also meant that "extraordinary" interrogation methods could be used to obtain evidence for the upcoming war crimes trials. The justification for Eisenhower's action was that the German state no longer existed, and that the prisoners were thus no longer the soldiers of any such state. I guess they were "non-state actors".
The major difference between 1941 and today is that this treatment of German prisoners was temporary, lasting only a matter of months, while now we have the Never-Ending War on Terror.
Well yes...that's right. Have you ever wondered why it's like that? Why don't either of the parties give us real alternatives that differentiate them from the other guys? The answer is actually pretty simple. Political parties—and politicians—do not formulate their platforms so that they reflect either their own principles or their constituent's real wishes and needs. At election time, they say what is most likely to get them elected. That is the only criterion that is used by almost all of the politicians who run for national office.
And what do they say at election time? Well, practically nothing. They say that they are for national security, and favor prosperity. They do take a position on a very few "controversial" issues that have become identifiers for one party or the other. You can count these issues on the fingers of one hand: abortion, gun control, and...I must be leaving one out. Mostly, the Democrats favor gun control and oppose regulating abortion, while the Republicans oppose regulating guns and want to forbid abortions. There are some exceptions to this. For example, only a very dumb Democrat would advocate gun control when he's running for office in Texas—but these exceptions "prove the rule": a candidate's position on these standard issues is meant to establish that he has an opinion (or even two), while risking as little as possible.
This state of affairs—while in no way good for the country—is the outcome of solid rational thinking by the party strategists. Let's take drug policy as an example. Suppose the Democrats came out for legalizing marijuana. Would this enhance their chances of winning? Would it enhance the chances of any Democrat to get elected to Congress or the Senate? You might think that the answer would clearly be "no" in some of the more conservative districts and states of the U.S.--Alabama, say. But you might think that it would help out a Democrat in San Francisco, wouldn't you?
Ah, but it would not. You see, a far left liberal district is already NOT going to vote for a Republican. The Democrat has it sewn up. Why should he take the slightest risk that might rock the boat? There's going to be some people in his district who are turned off by the idea of legalized dope. Maybe they won't vote for the Republican, but they just might stay home on election day. As for the dopers, they're likely to forget when election day is, or get lost on their way to the polling place. Also, what about poor Democrat Shmoe who's trying to get elected in some rural Texas district? Maybe his opponent was just caught in bed with the entire complement of Noah's Ark, and the Democrat actually has a wisp of a chance of getting sent to Congress. Then the Republicans hit back with a full-page ad in the local paper: "Democrat Comes out For Free Dope!" (the fact that it's not Shmoe but the guy in California is mentioned in paragraph 16 on page 10). Alas, another Democrat who doesn't get elected.
It's the same for both parties, of course. The Republicans aren't going to come out for gay marriage any time soon for very similar reasons. Nobody in San Francisco is going to vote for a Republican (especially since his opponent is probably a trans-gendered person who has enjoyed a long-standing relationship with a sexually ambivalent hamster), but the voters in Bismarck, North Dakota aren't going to like hearing about this.
This situation is described as an "equilibrium state" in game theory. Basically, it's a condition in which both sides have analayzed the strategies available to them, and have adopted the optimum strategy—the strategy that offers the greatest likelyhood of winning and the least likelyhood of loss. Once this condition is reached, it is to the advantage of neither side to ever change their strategy. That's why it's called the
So Vista works. But does it work better than XP? Just how is Vista better than XP SP2? If it's not better, why call the conversion to the new MS OS "upgrading"? I think you've been brainwashed by MS's marketeers; a more appropriate (and delicately neutral) term might be "switching". But if you are merely switching from one OS to another, the question arises, why switch? If the new OS is not better...what's the point? In truth, the only point is to increase revenue for MS, and to create the illusion of progress—an illusion that the MS marketing department hopes to exploit to make more sales. Do you like being manipulated this way?
For the company in which I work, MS's churning of new operating systems is a big headache. We distribute lab instruments that are controlled by software written in-house for PCs running...Windows 2000. About a year ago, there was a spate of criticism that we should switch the product to XP, though 2K works just fine for our purposes. Note that I call this a "switch" and not an "upgrade" for that very reason: the only reason to switch is that MS is sooner or later going to stop letting us sell Windows 2K licenses. Of course, the switching argument foundered on the fact that now there's an even newer OS...shouldn't we switch to that instead? But nobody wants to expend a bunch of effort to make our software run on a completely new OS with an unknown number of completely new bugs, and programming gotchas. I suspect we'd switch to that other OS...except that the software development group is so heavily invested (and infested) with .NET programmers that they'd have to fire every one of them and start over. Hmm...
Hmm, perhaps September is relative, just like Einstein said. I do remember the arrival of the AOLers, and making cruel fun of them. It was like shooting fish in a barrel--no challenge. They'd just whimper and stop posting. So I guess that for me September began a few years later, when the volume just got overwhelming.
Actually, I'm not as mean as all that. But it was a good feature of USENET that it was pretty much self-policing. You either obeyed the rules, or people would laugh at you. Evidently, that system works up to a certain population density.
Wow, people still use USENET? I pretty much stopped paying attention to it in the late 90s, when the signal/noise ratio exceeded my tolerances. USENET was great fun from the late 80s 'til about 97 (when exactly did Eternal September hit? Wasn't it 97?). And heck, the flamewars were part of the fun. Ah, rec.arts.sf-written, rec.guns, alt.buggery-barnfowl, how I miss thee!
What turned me off wasn't a sudden increase in rudeness, but the avalanche of useless and clueless posts.
I suppose it's solipsistic of me to assume that things go away when I stop paying attention to them. But seriously, how can anyone wade through all that crap? (I was just kidding about the alt newsgroup...really...)
If you mean in terms of military production, then that's true. However, the Nazi government made no real effort to ramp up military production until the war was well under way, and it was abundantly clear that it was not going to be short--not before 1941, at any rate. By that time, it was far too late. Everybody seems to think that Hitler had a "time-table for the conquest of Europe, and that he planned WWII because he was some sort of Hollywood villain who loved to cackle madly while the world burned.
Actually, he screwed up very badly, even in terms of his own stated objectives. Nobody wanted another Great War--not the people, certainly not the German generals, and not even Hitler. He had been in the trenches, and knew what it was like. Sure, he had his plans of conquest, but they involved expansion toward the East, against Poland and Russia—countries that he thought would not be aided by the Western powers. The truth is that he got intoxicated by his own success, and started to believe in his own infallibility. He thought he could attain his objectives both by acting according to his immediate impulses and without a major war. You have to remember that though Hitler was by no means stupid, he was ignorant of the world outside Central Europe. He didn't understand, for example, the effect his abrogation of the Munich treaty (breached when he occupied Bohemia and Moravia--the Czech "rump" state) would have on domestic politics in Britain. The result--total loss of face by the British "peace" party, led by Chamberlain, and rise of the "war" party under Churchill--set the stage for the Anglo-French reaction to Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939.
It is only in the light of this interpretation that Germany's total lack of economic war preparation can be understood. The Nazi government didn't expect another major war, so it made no effort to build up war production. Projections by German generals and government ministers held that Germany might be prepared for a major war in the mid 1950s...NOT in 1939!
So the argument that Fascism is not good for the economy can't be supported by the (true) allegation that Germany's war production was woefully inadequate. They weren't trying. In terms of normal economic production, the Germans were doing quite well--especially if you consider the fact that the industrial heart of Germany—the Ruhr region—was under Anglo-French occupation until the mid 1920s, and that Germany was struggling under the enormous demands for "reparations" made at Versailles.
I agree totally that the Nazi regime was a bunch of crooked bullies. But since when have the terms "crooked" and "busines" been incompatible? —Indeed, the barons of industry found the Führer quite congenial.
Hmm...I ran it through my Universal Bullshit Evaluator, and all I got was "trivial irony".
From the article:
As is usual with any pop sci article, we have to guess what's going on, but I'd say that they've given the subject a set of "sounds", like "buh", "ah", "kuh" "la" and so on, and then instructed him to try to speak them. The instruments were then able to identify instances of this subset with 80% reliability. The next step will be to get the computer to reproduce the sounds audibly...to babble, in effect. As the article says, "Conversation is what we're hoping for, but we're pretty far from that."
It would be nice to know how large the set of "sounds" is that they're using, and how much effort and training has to be undertaken by the subject. It could turn out that the effort of "talking" like this is far greater than arranging a blinking eye code, or something on that order. Then again, it could be a wonderful thing. We'll have to wait and see.
Well, maybe you want to bring the Glock too, just in case the local powers don't feel compelled to treat a traveling salesman with due courtesy and respect...
Ooops. Last minute edit that went awry. That phrase should have been at the end of the following paragraph.
This is the second time (at least). Take a look at this article from last year: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/11/14/world/main2179694.shtml. Clearly, there's a lot of journalistic hyperventilation going on in the current article. Nobody should have been that surprised.
One could ask, of course, whether the sub was truly undetected. One of the objectives of this type of war gaming is to determine the capabilities of the opposing force, so it's not likely that the U.S. Navy would tell the truth, either way. If the carrier group had detected the sub, they'd keep quiet about it, and let the Chinese think what they wanted. In any case, there's nothing the carrier group could--or would have wanted--to do about the sub. We're not at war with China, and the sub had as much right to be where it was as the U.S. ships. Like Somalia, for instance.
My guess is that it would not be that difficult for a modern electric sub to get within torpedo or missile range of a U.S.N. carrier. Carriers exist for two purposes: to provide career advancement opportunities for the naval officers who command them (you have to command a capital ship to make admiral), and to "project force"—against inconvenient third-rate powers that lack the capability to actually damage one of these very expensive ships.
The problem with a weapon as expensive as an aircraft carrier is that one absolutely cannot afford to lose one. That means they can be employed only if the risk of using them is very close to zero. And of course, that's the point the Chinese are making: maybe you'll detect the next sub before it comes into striking range, and maybe you won't. But if you ever go to war with those carriers near the strait of Taiwan, you had better be feeling very lucky indeed. Given the present mentality of the U.S. "defense" establishment, that's a very powerful argument.
Now consider the strait of Hormuz...
As a consequence, there will be a grass-roots surge of enthusiasm for "internet privacy legislation", as all the young dolts who have posted videos of their misdeeds start to seriously worry about getting a job.
Clothes hangers are the larval form of the fully adult right sock. The amazing life cycle of this organism begins, of course, with the egg—often mistaken for "paper clips". Corpses are indistinguishable from old technical journals.