I don't disagree with anything you said, but the point I was trying to make earlier was that the phenomena that lead to $150 per barrel oil was NOT a "bubble", i.e. it was not something that was temporary.
Our booming world economy 2 years ago simply ran head-on into the back end of our world's oil supply. Demand began to *seriously* outpace supply and that spooked the oil markets, and its only a matter of time before we reach that point *again*.
GP: War itself will be cheaper to wage due to the low energy costs
This would only be true if "energy" was the most significant input to the building and maintaining of the tools of war. It isn't. Technology and Wealth are.
P: The first world would seem to serve as a counter-example.
I suspect the real reason the "first-world" doesn't fight amongst themselves much anymore is because they're all now armed with *nukes*.:)
Some would argue that power is ultimately about managing scarce resources. If you make resources less scarce you reduce the need/effectiveness of power.
As long as we are unwilling, or unable, to contain the size of our own human population, then "making resources less scarce" will just be a pipe dream, I'm afraid, and as I personally don't see fusion power showing up soon enough to really help us, I think we should just go ahead and prepare for a bountiful harvest of "scarce resources"... coming in the next half century, to a continent near you.
And like scotch pointed out, none of them have the resources to fight more than a guerrilla war.
Who the hell is saying they're going to fight? If their own country is dying of thirst, what the heck would they fight *for*? No, they're going to become *refugees*, tens of *millions* of them, fleeing to anywhere they can that still has food and water. It is those massive migrations and the enormous political ramifications of that much upheaval, *in addition* to a lot of little wars between countries over access to fresh water, that will cause all the problems.
The worst they can do is drag other nations into a fight much like how World War I started.
Bingo!
And if enough 'dominos' start falling as the political instability, chaos, and population pressures spread, we'll end up calling it... *WW3*, just as scotch said.
This WW3 may not look like the WW3 we all were expecting during the Cold War, and it won't all be over in just over 20 minutes, but this WW3 could become almost as grim as the one we were expecting, albeit in slow motion.
Those countries are mostly poor and in no position to be starting www-3.
Not by themselves no, but when the people from those countries start desperately migrating into other countries looking for food and water, guess what happens? Think "Domino Effect".
The OP is right, 'water rights' is a *serious* issue for central Asia, the Middle East, and most of Africa, and to a lesser extent in many other places (whats fresh water going to cost in California when the high Sierra mountain glaciers that support the West Coast population have all but disappeared? They're going the way of the do-do bird as we type). However, he probably should have said that it will be, or will at least start as, a lot nasty *little* fights, rather than just one *big* one.
The price changes are due more to refinery capacity and consumer pressures on the supply at the time.
Or more precisely: the fall of oil prices is the result of a *lack* of consumer pressure on the supply *now*. When the global economy returns to the level it was at less than 2 years ago, guess where gas prices are going to go?
Don't anyone kid yourselves on this, we didn't "dodge a bullet" here, we just got blindsided by *another* bullet. The first one is still out there waiting for us to return to our previous high-water mark.
(a) Nobody is really prepared to "launch on warning" any longer.
Officially, neither side has ever said they would or wouldn't "launch on warning", but true, this strategy did become harder to achieve with the advent of nuke subs. It would all depend on where the incoming ICBMs are coming from, and how many there are. Note however that this doesn't conflict with the MAD doctrine, its merely one of the options available (the other being second strike) to *implement* the MAD doctrine (see the Theory section in the link). See below about my assumption of what the OP was thinking of.
So, until there is actually a first strike, nothing is getting launched.
Well, like I said, that would depend on the nature of the first strike. We've never ruled it out. NORAD is still fully operational, both our and Russia's nuclear forces remain at a relatively high readiness, and there is still a military officer with a very special briefcase following POTUS around at all times...
(b) MAD only works if the opponent fears destruction of their cities and way of life. Most of the current crop of realistic opponents for the US don't think this way. So MAD doesn't work.
That *might* be true, but the examples you give of North Korea and Iran are also incapable, at the moment, of reaching either the US or UK with ICBMs, as they don't have any (yet). Iran doesn't yet even have nukes. The OP refered to an attack on well-mapped "bases", implying to me a large scale attack on multiple targets in the US/UK, and right now there is still only one "realistic opponent" that can do that: Russia. And yes, given the recent behavior of that country, I fear they are still a realistic opponent (or they certainly still consider *us* an opponent).
As for N. Korea and Iran, I'm not actually convinced even they would commit suicide this way. N. Korea against S. Korea, *maybe*. Iran against Isreal, *maybe*. But against the US? Its going to take them a LONG time for them to develop a large enough fleet of ICBMs to even make such a suicide "worthwhile" anyway.
I suspect those 2 countries, especially Iran, of just wanting nukes to strengthen their geo-political position in their regions and with their neighbors. N. Korea wants nukes so they can bully S. Korea & Japan, and Iran has *long* wanted nukes (predating the rise of the Islamic Fundies there) because of who their neighbors are. Check a map of that region and note who borders Iran to the north and east and you'll see what I mean.:)
The one nice thing about that base is that it is underground entrance and is basically a grotto. I am thinking that the west needs to spend some money on doing similar things.
Why? We're talking about ICBM submarines, whose entire reason for existence is to go out to sea, stay deep and undetected, and be prepared to launch within minutes of getting the go-codes. In the US Navy these nuke subs have 2 different crews, so when one comes in at the end of their tour, the sub is restocked, maintenance is done, and its quickly sent back to sea with the other crew. US Navy nuke subs spend most of their service lifetime at sea where they are invulnerable to attack, and this is what makes them so valuable as a nuclear deterent. A nuke sub in port is useless, which is why only a fraction of them are ever in port at the same time.
will simply do a perl harbor on all the nicely mapped out bases
A "pearl harbor attack" is NOT POSSIBLE anymore, we'd see their incoming nukes and launch our own before theirs got to their targets. As one poster above suggested, try googling "Mutual Assured Destruction". It is this MAD policy which prevents a "nuclear pearl harbor", and is also the reason why there is no point in trying "to defend" against a nuclear attack (even NORAD's HQ, buried inside a mountain, is still believed by some experts to be vulnerable to a "direct hit"), the whole point of MAD is so that no one launches to begin with, because if anyone does, WE ALL LOSE.
Bin Laden is a wise guy not to use any kind of electronic communication.
Did everyone here (from the US) not see the NOVA special on PBS some months ago called the 'The Spy Factory'?
Fact: Bin Laden was using a satellite phone to contact his people.
Fact: The NSA was listening in...
Fact: The FBI was suspicious of one of the 9/11 hijackers' activities in California but didn't know the guy was talking with Bin Laden.
Fact: The NSA did know, but wouldn't tell the FBI
Fact: There is a reasonable possibility that 9/11 could have been stopped if the NSA and FBI had been sharing info from the beginning.
The Problem: The NSA has most of the bright, shiny spy toys of the US government (spy sats, code breakers, super-comps that can sift through thousands of intercepted voice data looking for threat info), but they don't like to share with anyone else.
That's something you just made up. That has never been the definition of "economically viable".
Oh come now, the meaning of words has always been based on context, otherwise the English language wouldn't be filled with so many words with multiple definitions. Most arguments I've seen here on/. tend to be because people often have different ideas of what some words mean.
The only definition that really matters is "can you sell it without making a loss or going out of business?"
Do you really think we and the rest of the *world* would even be *talking* about hybrids and EVs now were it not for the very real problem of CO2 emissions and global warming? There is more at stake here than mere profit, or in other words, there is more than one way to measure "profit" besides pure monetary terms.
Nobody ever said anything about everybody owning an electric car.
But that is *precisely* the goal. Yes, it wasn't explicitly mentioned in this sub-thread, but the impetus moving us towards Hybrids and eventually EVs is to get us *away* from dependency on fossil fuels.
In the larger context, "Economically viable" here means "its cheap enough that *everyone* can switch to it".
Opel were also manufacturing jet engines for the German Me-262 jet fighter, which was much faster than its American rival Mustang (powered by the British-made Merlin).
At the risk of getting an OT tag here (as we're both dangerously off topic at this point), but this is close to an apple-n-orange comparision. The Me262 was a *jet-driven* fighter, while the Mustang, along with *all* other Allied fighter planes, were propeller driven. You're simply comparing planes of two different technological generations, and more importantly, both the US and UK had jets in development (the Brits put theirs into full production in '46 I believe), so the Me262 was woefully too little and too late.
First the war went all ugly
From Germany's perspective, that war went "ugly" *long* before the Me262 took to the skies. In hindsight, they had already *lost* the war by the Soviet Winter Offensive in '42-'43. The 262 didn't show up in any significant numbers until late '44, by which time they no longer had the industrial capacity to build them in numbers that would have made a *difference*, and never mind that they no longer had a ground army of sufficient strength to hold off the Russian steam-roller coming from the East, and the US/UK from the West.
By '43, WW2 was more than anything a war of *industrial attrition*, and that kind of war was not one that the Axis could ever have won.
Just like this summer when nearly everyone was predicting $200+/barrel oil.
Only because they didn't predict the current global downturn, oil is down only because demand is down, and that low demand is temporary.
As soon as the global economy reaches its previous high water mark, oil will go up too. Why? Because when the world's economy is going full tilt, the world can't find/pump enough oil to meet demand. $200 per barrel oil is still coming, its just been delayed by a couple of years.
Not arguing about the <1% part, but the "declining" part is questionable given the obviously small sample base. If you throw out the two high and low numbers then the trend is slowly upward. I suspect the high 0.9x numbers in August and September were just statistical noise.
Of course, this metric is skewed somewhat by the fact that Firefox users can fake their user agent
Ya think?
And not just Firefox, KDE's browser has the same ability, I'm guessing just about any browser running on Linux has to allow this because of broken (IE+Windows only) websites.
Precisely why relying on the User Agent ID is so unreliable, its just a text string that can be user-modified like anything else in a browser's configuration.
However, there was clearly a lot of opposition to the war at the time, much more so than our current military action. (After all, do you see many newspapers or even crazy bloggers advocating treason?)
Exactly.:)
That's why I believe its *somewhat* unfair to try to hold Abe to the standards we have today. We now have 150 years of judicial prudence concerning habeas corpus that didn't exist then, nor have we since been in a situation where half of all Americans where willing (if not eager) to kill the other half. And anyone who thinks today's political speech is too harsh or "over the line" should go back and read what got said during the Civil War!:)
What worries me is that W has said many times that "history will judge him" (or something to that effect), and it seems like he expects to be the same sort of American hero as Abe, but for "bringing democracy" instead of "ending slavery."
W. is still living in a bubble. There's a fine line between being strong-willed, and simply being out of touch with reality. W crossed that line long ago.
I'm also not sure that rebellion or invasion is an appropriate word to use in place of secession. There was no threat to anyone in the North's safety
It wasn't about anyone's individual safety or rights, it was about "preserving the Union" on one side, and "preserving a way of life" on the other. Ironically, I had a very similar conversation nearby that you may want to read.
Of course, that leaves slavery as a separate issue
No, not a seperate issue, an *unresolved* issue, and obviously this was *the* driving force behind the conflict.
, but with the opposition that people have to being the World Police today, I'm not sure how invading another territory
But this wasn't another territory, it was part of "our Union". Don't make the mistake of trying to apply modern political thinking to a very different historical time. There was *real ANGER* on *both* sides back then, and this had nothing to do with being the world's policemen (that only came after WW2), this was an intra-family feud of the *worst* kind. Sure, there were folks on both sides wanting to avoid a conflict, unfortunately their voices, at least initially, were drowned out by *jubilant* war cries. Like it or not, a majority of Americans on both sides *wanted* this fight (not surprising when you look at the background, this feud had been building for a *long time*, see my last post in that other conversation).
The Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery in the South but not the North definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth though
Are you familiar with that famous quote of Abe where he said, in effect, that if he could preserve the Union without freeing a single slave, he would have done so? Abe consistently denied any plan to force an end to slavery in the Old South, the issue up to this point, indeed, the issue that had been festering from the very beginning of this country, had been the *containment* of slavery (no new Slave States).
If you ever get the chance, watch Ken Burn's documentary on the Civil War, especially the first couple of hours of it, concerning the beginning and background, its a real eye-opener about the state of mind of both sides back then.
reminding me of our current military insistence on fair democratic elections in other countries while using sketchy electronic voting machines here.
Oh Lord, don't get me started. I've been disgusted with our country's behavior for the last 8 years. Diebold is just one bullet point on my frustration/anger list.:)
Those who wrote it had just recently embarked on an act of secession themselves.
Right, and unfortunately, though they went to great lengths to describe the process for entering the Union, they didn't say anything about *secceeding* from the very entity they were in the process of creating. This, and the wording of the earlier legal document our infant country was operating under, The Articles of Confederation, which used the very unfortunate phrase of "perpetual Union" in its language, are the main arguments used to make the claim that the Constitution doesn't allow for *unilateral* seccession (that it was in effect a multi-lateral treaty, a contract, which could be abridged only by unanymous consent of ALL parties to the treaty), because its authors, who were in the succession business big-time themselves, amazingly never even mentioned it. Of course, it was the outcome of the Civil War itself that ultimately decided the issue, with brutal, and bloody, clarity.
If you want to get technical it came with the formation of the government itself. Governments only exist to take from some and give to others
Oh come on, if that were *truly* the only reason, the more enterprising amongst us would have found a way to make governments obsolete by now. Some form of government seems to be necessary as its complete absence, contray to the wild pipe dreams of the Anarchists, inevitably leads to something very disturbing (anarchy of the real ugly kind). Maybe if the human species ever grows the hell up (yea, yea, another pipe dream), then government won't be necessary any more. But until then...
Putting that aside, the civil war was clearly not "of", "by", or "for" the southern states, or (by extension) their citizens.
No, of course not, it wasn't *for* any *individual*, excepting the profiteers who make money on war, it was to "preserve the Union" or "preserve our way of life". It matters not whether we think that these were/are valid reasons. What matters, is there were enough people then (on both sides) who believed their side was so just in their stand, that they were even willing to wage war for that belief. This was NOT Abe's own little private war to end the "freedoms" of the South, if a majority of the North had not AGREED with him, there would have been no bloody, 4 year long massacre.
No, the issue that was finally settled once and for all on a battlefield had been a gigantic wart on our "more perfect Union" from Day One. Check the history - threats of succession over various issues (but mainly over "containing slavery's spread") began almost immediately after the Constitution's ratification! In fact, less than a year later, one of the Southern states threatened to secceed over a slavery related issue. Less than a year!
So if you want to blame someone, blame our founding fathers, who *knew* this problem was coming (one of them even predicted it may come to violence!), and who ducked the whole issue of slavery (because they believed they had too, else the Union would never have formed to begin with!), as well as omitting from our Union's founding legal document any formal mechanism for leaving the Union. Not so perfect after all, it seems, as our founding fathers' deliberate omissions nearly destroyed the thing they gave birth to, but at least it survived, allbeit after much bloodshed.
or under a candidate who took the time to pass some anti-corporate legislature
What do you mean by "anti-corporate"? I'd just settle for them requiring the banks and financial institutions to abide by the laws already on the books (but not enforced), and putting back the regulatory controls they've stripped away over the last 10 years (which would have prevented most of the excesses we are suffering from now).
"Oh, but we don't need government oversight, because the 'Market' is Self-Correcting(TM), just get government out of their way and everything will be hunky-dory!"
Yea, that self-correction seems to have worked out real well for all of us, don't you think?:)
Whose asking for anti-corporate? I'm just asking for Common Sense(TM). Greed is NOT inheriently good, it has to be regulated just like any other disruptive, base human emotion/tendency is.
will in effect encourage multinationals to take their business elsewhere
They're already taking their jobs elsewhere (to any place where the labor market is even more exploitable then it is here), so their "business" is actually costing us more in the long run anyway (a net negative as wealth is leaving our country and NOT returning).
How long can the middle class go on buying their widgets without a middle-class level of income? So how long?
Our middle class is shrinking, wages have been stagnant for more than a decade while the cost of living skyrockets, but the government keeps spending money (to bailout the rich from their own greedy excesses, no less!) as if it were still the 1950's and our middle-class (and economy as a whole) was still in the post-WW2 boom cycle. So how long before the rest of the world stops buying up our debt, because they've lost faith in our ability to pay back the 10 trillion we already owe them? Try this if big numbers don't depress you (3.5 BILLION USD PER FSCKING DAY! - Just Incredible).
They're starting to fear we can no longer recognize Common Sense(TM) anymore even if it came up and bit us on the nose. We are ALL living a lifestyle paid for with *borrowed* money, a gravy train that can't last forever (its under severe stress now). So how long?
On the other end of the scale you have bleeding-edge distributions like Gentoo, which always have the latest and greatest everything
Nitpick: Just because the latest and greatest is available doesn't mean you have to install it. Technically what you just said is incorrect because distros like Gentoo and Debian Sid only have the latest and greatest if you want it and specifically ask for it.
I've routinely held up updates for weeks just because they weren't essential for me, so I waited to give the things time to settle out any unforeseen bugs. I did the same kind of thing back when my system was running Debian Sid (Unstable), back then I'd go a week or more before running a resync, and once having done so, I'd only upgrade sparingly.
The advantage (IMO) of this is having access to those more/most recent things that *are* important to you. Obviously, no matter how careful you are, you'll end up seeing more bugs than any stable distro that doesn't change for 2 years, but if you are very conservative in what you allow to update (and always wait a couple of days before doing an update of anything), you can achieve very good stability without being frozen in place for a long period. And if the worst case happens, and something is buggy, you can either wait for it to be fixed if the bug is not a major problem, or just downgrade to the previous version if it is. If you're conservative in your updating, then this will not happen often enough to become an annoyance.
There's still a trade-off to be made here, but at least now you have some choice in the matter.
Truly ironic, following as it does an war against the exercise of freedom
This would only make sense if our Constitution allowed for seccession, but since it does not, what you are calling a "freedom" was treated (correctly, like it or not) by the other half of our country as an illegal action. Right or wrong, for better or worse, the issue decided in that war was what power the States of the Union did and did not have, not what anyone's idea of what "freedom" meant for anyone else.
one which proved once and for all that said government is of, by, and for only some of its people.
No, this came later, with the rise of the mega-corporations, who can now buy far more "representation" from the government than most Americans can get by any means at all.
... "Naw, you don't have to give them a civilian trial... just because you're 'at war,' and ignore any court rulings that say you can't. It worked for me!"
I know its really popular nowadays to try and turn Abe into some kind of 2-bit dictator bad guy, but it "worked for him" because the USA *was* in a *real* Civil War, a REBELLION of the Southern States, and the Constitution specifically allows for that exception:
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
The only question at the time was whether the President could do this himself (he couldn't), but that became irrelevent when the US Congress passed the "Habeas Corpus Act of 1863", which suspended Habeas Corpus until the end of the war. In other words, Congress ultimately backed him up on this one, which is why he could ignore the initial attacks on his position, he was not the out-of-control, would-be dictator you're trying to make him out to be: He had Congress's support on this, it just took Congress some time after the split to get reorganized.
As for the rest of what he did, keep in mind this was a dangerous and difficult time for the country (some of those newpaper editors you referred to weren't simply "anti-war", they were openly advocating treason), like nothing we've ever faced since, and for that matter, this was not even the only time Habeas Corpus was suspended, as U.S. Grant and F.D.R. did the same in more limited circumstances (more limited because their situation wasn't as desperate as what Lincoln faced).
Note that since the Constitution only refers to "rebellion" or "invasion", our current dictator-wanna-be President doesn't have nearly as good an excuse as old Abe did.
So you keep a close watch on those manufacturing plants
When was the last time we had a government that was good at keeping a close watch on anything?
Hell, if those manufacturing plants are owned by a large multinational with a US subsidary, then the ranking chairmen of all congressional committees with jurisdiction over said manufacturing plants will, through generous campaign contributions, just get paid to look the other way.
Americans hate the way it is, but regard the way the rest of the world does it as being worse.
Only the ignorant ones see the rest of the world as being worse, but since that is a majority of the population, your main point is still correct, alas.
PS: To your earlier claim that Gore should be blamed for all that has happened since: if you really think our government's current sad state of affairs is the responsibility of any one person, then you really don't understand what the problem is.
The problem is systemic, because the problem is MONEY, which is why, though the Democrats give lip service to the poor and the Republicans give lip service to the religious right, both our political parties right now have only one true constituent: Corporate America, because they are the only ones rich enough to buy off BOTH sides.
I'm sure there's at least one independent candidate hell bent on bringing down the multinational corporation based US economy. Don't despair!
Given the relative average stupidity of our population (they seem to have been very well trained by our corporate-controlled media), I don't see 51% of them willing to vote for someone other than a 'D' or an 'R' anytime soon (especially not all the way down a ballot which is what we really need), so realistically, despair, along with stagnant wages, a falling quality of life, and recession, are the only things we have to look forward to.
Slashdot Mirror
However, all bubbles eventually burst.
I don't disagree with anything you said, but the point I was trying to make earlier was that the phenomena that lead to $150 per barrel oil was NOT a "bubble", i.e. it was not something that was temporary.
Our booming world economy 2 years ago simply ran head-on into the back end of our world's oil supply. Demand began to *seriously* outpace supply and that spooked the oil markets, and its only a matter of time before we reach that point *again*.
and even if we did manage to produce enough energy to cause Global Warming 2.0
Aren't we getting a little ahead of ourselves here? We still don't know yet if we're going to survive "Global Warming 1.0".
Oh wait, we probably won't actually get all the bugs worked out of the product until about v2.0 or thereabouts, so you're probably right.
Carry on...
GP: War itself will be cheaper to wage due to the low energy costs
This would only be true if "energy" was the most significant input to the building and maintaining of the tools of war. It isn't. Technology and Wealth are.
P: The first world would seem to serve as a counter-example.
I suspect the real reason the "first-world" doesn't fight amongst themselves much anymore is because they're all now armed with *nukes*. :)
Some would argue that power is ultimately about managing scarce resources. If you make resources less scarce you reduce the need/effectiveness of power.
As long as we are unwilling, or unable, to contain the size of our own human population, then "making resources less scarce" will just be a pipe dream, I'm afraid, and as I personally don't see fusion power showing up soon enough to really help us, I think we should just go ahead and prepare for a bountiful harvest of "scarce resources"... coming in the next half century, to a continent near you.
And like scotch pointed out, none of them have the resources to fight more than a guerrilla war.
Who the hell is saying they're going to fight? If their own country is dying of thirst, what the heck would they fight *for*? No, they're going to become *refugees*, tens of *millions* of them, fleeing to anywhere they can that still has food and water. It is those massive migrations and the enormous political ramifications of that much upheaval, *in addition* to a lot of little wars between countries over access to fresh water, that will cause all the problems.
The worst they can do is drag other nations into a fight much like how World War I started.
Bingo!
And if enough 'dominos' start falling as the political instability, chaos, and population pressures spread, we'll end up calling it... *WW3*, just as scotch said.
This WW3 may not look like the WW3 we all were expecting during the Cold War, and it won't all be over in just over 20 minutes, but this WW3 could become almost as grim as the one we were expecting, albeit in slow motion.
Those countries are mostly poor and in no position to be starting www-3.
Not by themselves no, but when the people from those countries start desperately migrating into other countries looking for food and water, guess what happens? Think "Domino Effect".
The OP is right, 'water rights' is a *serious* issue for central Asia, the Middle East, and most of Africa, and to a lesser extent in many other places (whats fresh water going to cost in California when the high Sierra mountain glaciers that support the West Coast population have all but disappeared? They're going the way of the do-do bird as we type). However, he probably should have said that it will be, or will at least start as, a lot nasty *little* fights, rather than just one *big* one.
The price changes are due more to refinery capacity and consumer pressures on the supply at the time.
Or more precisely: the fall of oil prices is the result of a *lack* of consumer pressure on the supply *now*. When the global economy returns to the level it was at less than 2 years ago, guess where gas prices are going to go?
Don't anyone kid yourselves on this, we didn't "dodge a bullet" here, we just got blindsided by *another* bullet. The first one is still out there waiting for us to return to our previous high-water mark.
(a) Nobody is really prepared to "launch on warning" any longer.
Officially, neither side has ever said they would or wouldn't "launch on warning", but true, this strategy did become harder to achieve with the advent of nuke subs. It would all depend on where the incoming ICBMs are coming from, and how many there are. Note however that this doesn't conflict with the MAD doctrine, its merely one of the options available (the other being second strike) to *implement* the MAD doctrine (see the Theory section in the link). See below about my assumption of what the OP was thinking of.
So, until there is actually a first strike, nothing is getting launched.
Well, like I said, that would depend on the nature of the first strike. We've never ruled it out. NORAD is still fully operational, both our and Russia's nuclear forces remain at a relatively high readiness, and there is still a military officer with a very special briefcase following POTUS around at all times...
(b) MAD only works if the opponent fears destruction of their cities and way of life. Most of the current crop of realistic opponents for the US don't think this way. So MAD doesn't work.
That *might* be true, but the examples you give of North Korea and Iran are also incapable, at the moment, of reaching either the US or UK with ICBMs, as they don't have any (yet). Iran doesn't yet even have nukes. The OP refered to an attack on well-mapped "bases", implying to me a large scale attack on multiple targets in the US/UK, and right now there is still only one "realistic opponent" that can do that: Russia. And yes, given the recent behavior of that country, I fear they are still a realistic opponent (or they certainly still consider *us* an opponent).
As for N. Korea and Iran, I'm not actually convinced even they would commit suicide this way. N. Korea against S. Korea, *maybe*. Iran against Isreal, *maybe*. But against the US? Its going to take them a LONG time for them to develop a large enough fleet of ICBMs to even make such a suicide "worthwhile" anyway.
I suspect those 2 countries, especially Iran, of just wanting nukes to strengthen their geo-political position in their regions and with their neighbors. N. Korea wants nukes so they can bully S. Korea & Japan, and Iran has *long* wanted nukes (predating the rise of the Islamic Fundies there) because of who their neighbors are. Check a map of that region and note who borders Iran to the north and east and you'll see what I mean. :)
The one nice thing about that base is that it is underground entrance and is basically a grotto. I am thinking that the west needs to spend some money on doing similar things.
Why? We're talking about ICBM submarines, whose entire reason for existence is to go out to sea, stay deep and undetected, and be prepared to launch within minutes of getting the go-codes. In the US Navy these nuke subs have 2 different crews, so when one comes in at the end of their tour, the sub is restocked, maintenance is done, and its quickly sent back to sea with the other crew. US Navy nuke subs spend most of their service lifetime at sea where they are invulnerable to attack, and this is what makes them so valuable as a nuclear deterent. A nuke sub in port is useless, which is why only a fraction of them are ever in port at the same time.
will simply do a perl harbor on all the nicely mapped out bases
A "pearl harbor attack" is NOT POSSIBLE anymore, we'd see their incoming nukes and launch our own before theirs got to their targets. As one poster above suggested, try googling "Mutual Assured Destruction". It is this MAD policy which prevents a "nuclear pearl harbor", and is also the reason why there is no point in trying "to defend" against a nuclear attack (even NORAD's HQ, buried inside a mountain, is still believed by some experts to be vulnerable to a "direct hit"), the whole point of MAD is so that no one launches to begin with, because if anyone does, WE ALL LOSE.
Bin Laden is a wise guy not to use any kind of electronic communication.
Did everyone here (from the US) not see the NOVA special on PBS some months ago called the 'The Spy Factory'?
Fact: Bin Laden was using a satellite phone to contact his people.
Fact: The NSA was listening in...
Fact: The FBI was suspicious of one of the 9/11 hijackers' activities in California but didn't know the guy was talking with Bin Laden.
Fact: The NSA did know, but wouldn't tell the FBI
Fact: There is a reasonable possibility that 9/11 could have been stopped if the NSA and FBI had been sharing info from the beginning.
The Problem: The NSA has most of the bright, shiny spy toys of the US government (spy sats, code breakers, super-comps that can sift through thousands of intercepted voice data looking for threat info), but they don't like to share with anyone else.
Conclusion: I'll let you decide this one....
That's something you just made up. That has never been the definition of "economically viable".
Oh come now, the meaning of words has always been based on context, otherwise the English language wouldn't be filled with so many words with multiple definitions. Most arguments I've seen here on /. tend to be because people often have different ideas of what some words mean.
The only definition that really matters is "can you sell it without making a loss or going out of business?"
Do you really think we and the rest of the *world* would even be *talking* about hybrids and EVs now were it not for the very real problem of CO2 emissions and global warming? There is more at stake here than mere profit, or in other words, there is more than one way to measure "profit" besides pure monetary terms.
1991 called. It wants its Gulf War rhetoric back.
1991 was put on indefinite hold because 2009 loves, and is still using, that rhetoric.
Nobody ever said anything about everybody owning an electric car.
But that is *precisely* the goal. Yes, it wasn't explicitly mentioned in this sub-thread, but the impetus moving us towards Hybrids and eventually EVs is to get us *away* from dependency on fossil fuels.
In the larger context, "Economically viable" here means "its cheap enough that *everyone* can switch to it".
Opel were also manufacturing jet engines for the German Me-262 jet fighter, which was much faster than its American rival Mustang (powered by the British-made Merlin).
At the risk of getting an OT tag here (as we're both dangerously off topic at this point), but this is close to an apple-n-orange comparision. The Me262 was a *jet-driven* fighter, while the Mustang, along with *all* other Allied fighter planes, were propeller driven. You're simply comparing planes of two different technological generations, and more importantly, both the US and UK had jets in development (the Brits put theirs into full production in '46 I believe), so the Me262 was woefully too little and too late.
First the war went all ugly
From Germany's perspective, that war went "ugly" *long* before the Me262 took to the skies. In hindsight, they had already *lost* the war by the Soviet Winter Offensive in '42-'43. The 262 didn't show up in any significant numbers until late '44, by which time they no longer had the industrial capacity to build them in numbers that would have made a *difference*, and never mind that they no longer had a ground army of sufficient strength to hold off the Russian steam-roller coming from the East, and the US/UK from the West.
By '43, WW2 was more than anything a war of *industrial attrition*, and that kind of war was not one that the Axis could ever have won.
Just like this summer when nearly everyone was predicting $200+/barrel oil.
Only because they didn't predict the current global downturn, oil is down only because demand is down, and that low demand is temporary.
As soon as the global economy reaches its previous high water mark, oil will go up too. Why? Because when the world's economy is going full tilt, the world can't find/pump enough oil to meet demand. $200 per barrel oil is still coming, its just been delayed by a couple of years.
The current favored method is tracking web users across large collections of websites through cookies and the browser's User Agent.
But since cookies can be blocked and User Agent Strings can be munged, "favored" != "accurate".
Linux has <1% marketshare and declining
Not arguing about the <1% part, but the "declining" part is questionable given the obviously small sample base. If you throw out the two high and low numbers then the trend is slowly upward. I suspect the high 0.9x numbers in August and September were just statistical noise.
Of course, this metric is skewed somewhat by the fact that Firefox users can fake their user agent
Ya think?
And not just Firefox, KDE's browser has the same ability, I'm guessing just about any browser running on Linux has to allow this because of broken (IE+Windows only) websites.
Precisely why relying on the User Agent ID is so unreliable, its just a text string that can be user-modified like anything else in a browser's configuration.
However, there was clearly a lot of opposition to the war at the time, much more so than our current military action. (After all, do you see many newspapers or even crazy bloggers advocating treason?)
Exactly. :)
That's why I believe its *somewhat* unfair to try to hold Abe to the standards we have today. We now have 150 years of judicial prudence concerning habeas corpus that didn't exist then, nor have we since been in a situation where half of all Americans where willing (if not eager) to kill the other half. And anyone who thinks today's political speech is too harsh or "over the line" should go back and read what got said during the Civil War! :)
What worries me is that W has said many times that "history will judge him" (or something to that effect), and it seems like he expects to be the same sort of American hero as Abe, but for "bringing democracy" instead of "ending slavery."
W. is still living in a bubble. There's a fine line between being strong-willed, and simply being out of touch with reality. W crossed that line long ago.
I'm also not sure that rebellion or invasion is an appropriate word to use in place of secession. There was no threat to anyone in the North's safety
It wasn't about anyone's individual safety or rights, it was about "preserving the Union" on one side, and "preserving a way of life" on the other. Ironically, I had a very similar conversation nearby that you may want to read.
Of course, that leaves slavery as a separate issue
No, not a seperate issue, an *unresolved* issue, and obviously this was *the* driving force behind the conflict.
, but with the opposition that people have to being the World Police today, I'm not sure how invading another territory
But this wasn't another territory, it was part of "our Union". Don't make the mistake of trying to apply modern political thinking to a very different historical time. There was *real ANGER* on *both* sides back then, and this had nothing to do with being the world's policemen (that only came after WW2), this was an intra-family feud of the *worst* kind. Sure, there were folks on both sides wanting to avoid a conflict, unfortunately their voices, at least initially, were drowned out by *jubilant* war cries. Like it or not, a majority of Americans on both sides *wanted* this fight (not surprising when you look at the background, this feud had been building for a *long time*, see my last post in that other conversation).
The Emancipation Proclamation that ended slavery in the South but not the North definitely leaves a bad taste in my mouth though
Are you familiar with that famous quote of Abe where he said, in effect, that if he could preserve the Union without freeing a single slave, he would have done so? Abe consistently denied any plan to force an end to slavery in the Old South, the issue up to this point, indeed, the issue that had been festering from the very beginning of this country, had been the *containment* of slavery (no new Slave States).
If you ever get the chance, watch Ken Burn's documentary on the Civil War, especially the first couple of hours of it, concerning the beginning and background, its a real eye-opener about the state of mind of both sides back then.
reminding me of our current military insistence on fair democratic elections in other countries while using sketchy electronic voting machines here.
Oh Lord, don't get me started. I've been disgusted with our country's behavior for the last 8 years. Diebold is just one bullet point on my frustration/anger list. :)
Those who wrote it had just recently embarked on an act of secession themselves.
Right, and unfortunately, though they went to great lengths to describe the process for entering the Union, they didn't say anything about *secceeding* from the very entity they were in the process of creating. This, and the wording of the earlier legal document our infant country was operating under, The Articles of Confederation, which used the very unfortunate phrase of "perpetual Union" in its language, are the main arguments used to make the claim that the Constitution doesn't allow for *unilateral* seccession (that it was in effect a multi-lateral treaty, a contract, which could be abridged only by unanymous consent of ALL parties to the treaty), because its authors, who were in the succession business big-time themselves, amazingly never even mentioned it. Of course, it was the outcome of the Civil War itself that ultimately decided the issue, with brutal, and bloody, clarity.
If you want to get technical it came with the formation of the government itself. Governments only exist to take from some and give to others
Oh come on, if that were *truly* the only reason, the more enterprising amongst us would have found a way to make governments obsolete by now. Some form of government seems to be necessary as its complete absence, contray to the wild pipe dreams of the Anarchists, inevitably leads to something very disturbing (anarchy of the real ugly kind). Maybe if the human species ever grows the hell up (yea, yea, another pipe dream), then government won't be necessary any more. But until then...
Putting that aside, the civil war was clearly not "of", "by", or "for" the southern states, or (by extension) their citizens.
No, of course not, it wasn't *for* any *individual*, excepting the profiteers who make money on war, it was to "preserve the Union" or "preserve our way of life". It matters not whether we think that these were/are valid reasons. What matters, is there were enough people then (on both sides) who believed their side was so just in their stand, that they were even willing to wage war for that belief. This was NOT Abe's own little private war to end the "freedoms" of the South, if a majority of the North had not AGREED with him, there would have been no bloody, 4 year long massacre.
No, the issue that was finally settled once and for all on a battlefield had been a gigantic wart on our "more perfect Union" from Day One. Check the history - threats of succession over various issues (but mainly over "containing slavery's spread") began almost immediately after the Constitution's ratification! In fact, less than a year later, one of the Southern states threatened to secceed over a slavery related issue. Less than a year!
So if you want to blame someone, blame our founding fathers, who *knew* this problem was coming (one of them even predicted it may come to violence!), and who ducked the whole issue of slavery (because they believed they had too, else the Union would never have formed to begin with!), as well as omitting from our Union's founding legal document any formal mechanism for leaving the Union. Not so perfect after all, it seems, as our founding fathers' deliberate omissions nearly destroyed the thing they gave birth to, but at least it survived, allbeit after much bloodshed.
Call me a dewey eyed optimist
I was that once, but it was so long ago.... :)
or under a candidate who took the time to pass some anti-corporate legislature
What do you mean by "anti-corporate"? I'd just settle for them requiring the banks and financial institutions to abide by the laws already on the books (but not enforced), and putting back the regulatory controls they've stripped away over the last 10 years (which would have prevented most of the excesses we are suffering from now).
"Oh, but we don't need government oversight, because the 'Market' is Self-Correcting(TM), just get government out of their way and everything will be hunky-dory!"
Yea, that self-correction seems to have worked out real well for all of us, don't you think? :)
Whose asking for anti-corporate? I'm just asking for Common Sense(TM). Greed is NOT inheriently good, it has to be regulated just like any other disruptive, base human emotion/tendency is.
will in effect encourage multinationals to take their business elsewhere
They're already taking their jobs elsewhere (to any place where the labor market is even more exploitable then it is here), so their "business" is actually costing us more in the long run anyway (a net negative as wealth is leaving our country and NOT returning).
How long can the middle class go on buying their widgets without a middle-class level of income? So how long?
Our middle class is shrinking, wages have been stagnant for more than a decade while the cost of living skyrockets, but the government keeps spending money (to bailout the rich from their own greedy excesses, no less!) as if it were still the 1950's and our middle-class (and economy as a whole) was still in the post-WW2 boom cycle. So how long before the rest of the world stops buying up our debt, because they've lost faith in our ability to pay back the 10 trillion we already owe them? Try this if big numbers don't depress you (3.5 BILLION USD PER FSCKING DAY! - Just Incredible).
They're starting to fear we can no longer recognize Common Sense(TM) anymore even if it came up and bit us on the nose. We are ALL living a lifestyle paid for with *borrowed* money, a gravy train that can't last forever (its under severe stress now). So how long?
On the other end of the scale you have bleeding-edge distributions like Gentoo, which always have the latest and greatest everything
Nitpick: Just because the latest and greatest is available doesn't mean you have to install it. Technically what you just said is incorrect because distros like Gentoo and Debian Sid only have the latest and greatest if you want it and specifically ask for it.
I've routinely held up updates for weeks just because they weren't essential for me, so I waited to give the things time to settle out any unforeseen bugs. I did the same kind of thing back when my system was running Debian Sid (Unstable), back then I'd go a week or more before running a resync, and once having done so, I'd only upgrade sparingly.
The advantage (IMO) of this is having access to those more/most recent things that *are* important to you. Obviously, no matter how careful you are, you'll end up seeing more bugs than any stable distro that doesn't change for 2 years, but if you are very conservative in what you allow to update (and always wait a couple of days before doing an update of anything), you can achieve very good stability without being frozen in place for a long period. And if the worst case happens, and something is buggy, you can either wait for it to be fixed if the bug is not a major problem, or just downgrade to the previous version if it is. If you're conservative in your updating, then this will not happen often enough to become an annoyance.
There's still a trade-off to be made here, but at least now you have some choice in the matter.
Truly ironic, following as it does an war against the exercise of freedom
This would only make sense if our Constitution allowed for seccession, but since it does not, what you are calling a "freedom" was treated (correctly, like it or not) by the other half of our country as an illegal action. Right or wrong, for better or worse, the issue decided in that war was what power the States of the Union did and did not have, not what anyone's idea of what "freedom" meant for anyone else.
one which proved once and for all that said government is of, by, and for only some of its people.
No, this came later, with the rise of the mega-corporations, who can now buy far more "representation" from the government than most Americans can get by any means at all.
... "Naw, you don't have to give them a civilian trial... just because you're 'at war,' and ignore any court rulings that say you can't. It worked for me!"
I know its really popular nowadays to try and turn Abe into some kind of 2-bit dictator bad guy, but it "worked for him" because the USA *was* in a *real* Civil War, a REBELLION of the Southern States, and the Constitution specifically allows for that exception :
The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.
The only question at the time was whether the President could do this himself (he couldn't), but that became irrelevent when the US Congress passed the "Habeas Corpus Act of 1863", which suspended Habeas Corpus until the end of the war. In other words, Congress ultimately backed him up on this one, which is why he could ignore the initial attacks on his position, he was not the out-of-control, would-be dictator you're trying to make him out to be: He had Congress's support on this, it just took Congress some time after the split to get reorganized.
As for the rest of what he did, keep in mind this was a dangerous and difficult time for the country (some of those newpaper editors you referred to weren't simply "anti-war", they were openly advocating treason), like nothing we've ever faced since, and for that matter, this was not even the only time Habeas Corpus was suspended, as U.S. Grant and F.D.R. did the same in more limited circumstances (more limited because their situation wasn't as desperate as what Lincoln faced).
Note that since the Constitution only refers to "rebellion" or "invasion", our current dictator-wanna-be President doesn't have nearly as good an excuse as old Abe did.
So you keep a close watch on those manufacturing plants
When was the last time we had a government that was good at keeping a close watch on anything?
Hell, if those manufacturing plants are owned by a large multinational with a US subsidary, then the ranking chairmen of all congressional committees with jurisdiction over said manufacturing plants will, through generous campaign contributions, just get paid to look the other way.
Welcome to the United Corporations of America.
Americans hate the way it is, but regard the way the rest of the world does it as being worse.
Only the ignorant ones see the rest of the world as being worse, but since that is a majority of the population, your main point is still correct, alas.
PS: To your earlier claim that Gore should be blamed for all that has happened since: if you really think our government's current sad state of affairs is the responsibility of any one person, then you really don't understand what the problem is.
The problem is systemic, because the problem is MONEY, which is why, though the Democrats give lip service to the poor and the Republicans give lip service to the religious right, both our political parties right now have only one true constituent: Corporate America, because they are the only ones rich enough to buy off BOTH sides.
I'm sure there's at least one independent candidate hell bent on bringing down the multinational corporation based US economy. Don't despair!
Given the relative average stupidity of our population (they seem to have been very well trained by our corporate-controlled media), I don't see 51% of them willing to vote for someone other than a 'D' or an 'R' anytime soon (especially not all the way down a ballot which is what we really need), so realistically, despair, along with stagnant wages, a falling quality of life, and recession, are the only things we have to look forward to.
But have a nice day anyway!