As I understand it, gold based currencies can be devalued if the market supply of gold increases a lot (happened to the Roman empire, once). Otherwise, they are stuck in a deflation cycle which tends to make long-term loans very very expensive. As a state, to borrow against a nation's future earnings, you need an inflating currency and that's how fiat currencies came to be.
Fine irony. Woud you rather those kids learn school stuff and a bit of python on the side, or a 30 000 page manual for a SDK that will be obsolete in two years?
No, I'm not. I said MRBM-sized rockets, not actual mrbm's. Heck, you could probably get 50 kilos of something into LEO with just a Scud D and an undergrad to do the math.
You are missing the point. The neighbors thing, as you call it, is the foundation of all good (and bad) police work and basically the only way to crack down on organized resistance.
The state can pick you up, yes - but does it want to? Does the state know what you think? Does it know who you love? Does it know with any amount of certainty if you could someday pick up a weapon and head for the hills? Rhetorical questions all. It doesn't, but your friends and neighbors do.
Look, the best way to put it is by sending you to read your Tolkien again: the eye of the Enemy is indeed all-seeing - but its attention and field of view is limited. A few hobbits wandering far enough from the Shire, on a tortuous and random enough path, *might* escape its gaze for just long enough - but eorlingen standing guard at the fords of Isen will certainly not.
You don't need an ICBM to whack out satellites. You need either: a. a way to lift and detonate a huge-ass (in terms of radiation yeld) nuke beyond the ionosphere b. a way to lift and disperse buckets of birdshot (literally) into likely satellite orbits c. a way to VERY accurately chart a satellite's course and send a couple hundred grams of tungsten flechettes on an intercept course. Option A is high-tech (what with it involving nukes and all) and it was tested by the US in the 1960's (google for starfish prime). Option B is very low tech and probably the way Iran would do it if they ever really really have to (seeing as it would interdict space for everyone for a long, long time, it's not an option that any nation with space ambitions would pursue). Option C is very high tech, it's the best option strategically speaking (no messy "omg you just nuked everybody" reactions, no shutting off humanity from space) and was tested by the US in the seventies (in the form of a modified (two-stage) AA rocket shot from a high-flying jet). Options A and B can be pursued with MRBM-sized missiles, but are way easier on the precision requirements than actual ICBM shots, since you don't intend for the payload to come back down at any particular spot.
Also, fighter jets arguably date back to at most the 1940's (campini caproni CC. 1) if not the 1910's (coanda 1910).
One caveat from someone who spent some time on the red side of the Curtain: in a dictatorship, the "human connection" is what gets you sent to the Gulag every damn time.
That neighbor who always claims you've failed to return his garden hose umpteen years ago? He'll report on you the first chance he gets. The friendly postman? He's paid minimum wage or thereabouts, so bounties for ratting on people who receive "suspicious" mail always come in handy. The parish priest? Had his confession booth wired for sound "voluntarily" years ago.
Nowhere is perfectly safe but zero stable social connections, a sub-let shithole of a flat that you move out of once a year and a string of low-profile, non-unionized jobs in the big city will keep you much safer than any amount of friendship you may have with the locals of Smallville, USA who, collectively, know everything there is to know about you.
Just be sure to have your papers ever-so-slightly out of order for when the police checks them - and they will, often; citizens with papers in perfect order and squeaky clean slates are suspicious, as the system is designed to make everyone break some little law at some point.
That way, if you're unlucky or you forget to grease the right palms, you'll be picked up at some point, you'll get a fine, a bitchslap and maybe get recruited as an informant, but you'll stay out of the camps. If some random joe fingers you for an enemy of the state, you're screwed. Your best bet is to try and make sure that no random joe will think to name your name while being waterboarded.
You left too early - there are three (I think) baddies lurking in the lobby with LAM's by that point. If you don't bust our with your brother (or booby trap the lobby on your way in) they usually manage to whack him.
They got the story just a wee bit wrong, your scientist friends did. Yes, the main ingredient for "zombification" is a venom - pufferfish venom or some other analogous neurotoxin) for the paralysis bit and clinical depression as an added bonus, but the traditional cocktails which have been studied also contain a lysergine and some THC to complete "operation mindfuck", plus additional bits of stuff that inhibit the autonomous nervous system and slow down metabolic processes - sometimes in non-obvious ways. This is something that's been in development since the stone age began. If some obscure herb is in there, it's in there for a reason.
Btw, if you ever meet a zombie, make her a nice cup of St John's wort tea.
Don't believe everything you're told. The Irakis just decided they should get rid of all the foreigners first. Al Qaeda groups are sponsored by Saudi wahhabites, which neither the sunni nor the shi'a like one bit. Therefore, the wise mullahs are ratting on Al Qaeda groups so the US will kill them and drive them out of the country - after which they will get back to killing US soliders every day (while publicizing the fact that they get assistance in men and materials from Iran) until the US goes away to fight Iran, leaving a token force in place and the country in the oh-so-capable hands of the new Iraki army. After that, it will finally be business as usual - sunni and shi'a backstabbing each other in a free country. Isn't that just grand? It's stupid to presume that there is an Iraki insurgency - what the US is up against is the actual power structure of the country - a patchwork of tribal and family connections backed up by the loose network of Islamic clergy.
Disabling satellites is very very easy (read: can be done with 1970's tech). No satellites means no talking over the horizon if you want to stay relatively un-jammed. That poses a bit of a logistical challenge.
Spoken like one who's only played Deus Ex 2. Correct me if I'm wrong. If I'm not, go do yourself a favor and play the original. It's good enough yet flawed enough that it should teach you a bit about plot, backstory, background info and how to make them integral to gameplay, rather than cheap tacky window-dressing.
No-one except for the whole Eastern Block, that is. I seem to remeber bootleg Polish tapes with "Nether Earth" and "Elite" on them. Now get off my lawn!
Oh I'm so tired of all this crapola about how GIMP is great once you get used to the weird "lotsa windows" interface thingy. It's not. It sucks salty, hairy monkey balls because -drumroll- IT HAS NO CMYK SUPPORT. Everything else is fixable with a few hundred man-hours of work. Unfortunately, given the GIMP's architecture (or lack of) and the arcaneness of the knowledge required, adding CMYK support is non-trivial. In fact, it has proven to be an effort the open-source "community" is either unwilling or unable to make.
I'm not sitting here stuffing my face full of expensed food - and if I am, I'm usually working. I live, breathe and exude this job 24/7. Too bad for you. Get a life. You might enjoy it.
Rights must be asserted and protected, or they disappear. That, fortunately, is not true. What needs protecting is the ability of people to enjoy those rights. The rights themselves are concepts, ideas, y'know? Inalienable, were it not for people such as yourself trying to muddle their meaning.
Of these three, only murder has anything to do with human rights Not so. First example pertains the right to property, second to habeas corpus. The fact that we discern between, say, murder and death from natural causes proves that the right to life cannot be taken from a person simply by killing them - only life itself, just as, say, the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual treatments would not simply disappear even if you were to be subjected to such.
I'm glad to see you are such a big proponent of human rights for everyone. I never heard of basic human rights including the right to be willfuly ignorant and advocate murder. I sincerely hope you get educated out of these beliefs, but that doesn't make me like you one bit.
It is impossible for the simple reason that rights aren't real in the way a person's life is real. In fact, from a legal standpoint, their applicability is not limited by the lifespan of the person who has them. If it were not so, the will and testament of a dead person, for instance, would amount to nothing, you'd be free to harvest any corpses you can lay your hands on for transplants and murder would probably not be punishable. Mmkay?
I hope you learn a lesson about how human rights are inalienable the hard way - by having them violated, preferably with a rubber hose. We'll see then if you feel they are worthless just because they were infringed upon.
Yes, it does. However, many users run into one of three very common issues: 1. lack of an answer. (esoteric app, very new bug/misfeature, experts have no time to answer, whatever). Tough luck. RTFM, RTFS, if all else fails drop a message to the devs. 2. lack of patience. When someone tells you to go RTFM, there's a good chance that they have done that themselves in their greenhorn days and found the answer in there, so stomping off in a rage for being snubbed is not a good idea in this case. 3. perceived competence. Users who start by making assumptions about what is broken, like so: "frobozzation of the ion flux generators may have triggered an alpha transform in the phase-space of the solution, causing erratic pixelation of the main visual conduit; here is the full syslog for the past three days and a strace of every relevant application recorded immediately after the event, as well as a core dump just in case" get ignored more often than those who state bluntly "X version so-and-so doesn't start properly on such-and-such a system".
Congratulations, you appear to have learned something about the history of military weapons and countermeasures. Well, that history of weapons and countermeasures should tell you something... Yes, there are advantages to armor, but in the end what really counts is firepower and manpower is a good proxy for that, especially in these crappy lil' LICs the US Army seems so fond of fighting.
And maybe if we take away the rest of their equipment, we can have tens of millions of troops! That worked well for other countries in the past, right? Russia was the big winner of WW2. Its massive low-tech army of conscripts prevailed over Germany's technologically advanced yet much smaller army. China prevailed over the US and its allies in the Korean War by similar means, forcing a stalemate out of what should have been clear defeat. North Vietnam's huge (by local standards) conscript/volunteer guerilla army (whose establishment and continued existence was a feat in itself) evicted the US from the country and practically ended US involvement in regional affairs for a good twenty years. A willingness to accept and a capacity to absorb huge amounts of casualties were key to victory in each case.
The whole point of America's military system is that increased communication, technology, equipment, and training reduce the number of soldiers you need to accomplish an objective. Putting three more US soliders on the ground for each one actually there now would require a draft, which ain't happening - but that's the only reason why expensive, bulky, heavy, cumbersome body armor is a viable alternative.
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All antivirus programs worth their salt already do this (except clamav, afaik, but clamav is free so you're still getting your money's worth).
As I understand it, gold based currencies can be devalued if the market supply of gold increases a lot (happened to the Roman empire, once). Otherwise, they are stuck in a deflation cycle which tends to make long-term loans very very expensive. As a state, to borrow against a nation's future earnings, you need an inflating currency and that's how fiat currencies came to be.
Fine irony. Woud you rather those kids learn school stuff and a bit of python on the side, or a 30 000 page manual for a SDK that will be obsolete in two years?
No, I'm not. I said MRBM-sized rockets, not actual mrbm's. Heck, you could probably get 50 kilos of something into LEO with just a Scud D and an undergrad to do the math.
You are missing the point. The neighbors thing, as you call it, is the foundation of all good (and bad) police work and basically the only way to crack down on organized resistance.
The state can pick you up, yes - but does it want to? Does the state know what you think? Does it know who you love? Does it know with any amount of certainty if you could someday pick up a weapon and head for the hills? Rhetorical questions all. It doesn't, but your friends and neighbors do.
Look, the best way to put it is by sending you to read your Tolkien again: the eye of the Enemy is indeed all-seeing - but its attention and field of view is limited. A few hobbits wandering far enough from the Shire, on a tortuous and random enough path, *might* escape its gaze for just long enough - but eorlingen standing guard at the fords of Isen will certainly not.
You don't need an ICBM to whack out satellites. You need either:
a. a way to lift and detonate a huge-ass (in terms of radiation yeld) nuke beyond the ionosphere
b. a way to lift and disperse buckets of birdshot (literally) into likely satellite orbits
c. a way to VERY accurately chart a satellite's course and send a couple hundred grams of tungsten flechettes on an intercept course.
Option A is high-tech (what with it involving nukes and all) and it was tested by the US in the 1960's (google for starfish prime).
Option B is very low tech and probably the way Iran would do it if they ever really really have to (seeing as it would interdict space for everyone for a long, long time, it's not an option that any nation with space ambitions would pursue).
Option C is very high tech, it's the best option strategically speaking (no messy "omg you just nuked everybody" reactions, no shutting off humanity from space) and was tested by the US in the seventies (in the form of a modified (two-stage) AA rocket shot from a high-flying jet).
Options A and B can be pursued with MRBM-sized missiles, but are way easier on the precision requirements than actual ICBM shots, since you don't intend for the payload to come back down at any particular spot.
Also, fighter jets arguably date back to at most the 1940's (campini caproni CC. 1) if not the 1910's (coanda 1910).
So I'm not quite sure what your point is.
Oh my. I forgot all about jimson weed. Someone mod parent up.
One caveat from someone who spent some time on the red side of the Curtain: in a dictatorship, the "human connection" is what gets you sent to the Gulag every damn time.
That neighbor who always claims you've failed to return his garden hose umpteen years ago? He'll report on you the first chance he gets. The friendly postman? He's paid minimum wage or thereabouts, so bounties for ratting on people who receive "suspicious" mail always come in handy. The parish priest? Had his confession booth wired for sound "voluntarily" years ago.
Nowhere is perfectly safe but zero stable social connections, a sub-let shithole of a flat that you move out of once a year and a string of low-profile, non-unionized jobs in the big city will keep you much safer than any amount of friendship you may have with the locals of Smallville, USA who, collectively, know everything there is to know about you.
Just be sure to have your papers ever-so-slightly out of order for when the police checks them - and they will, often; citizens with papers in perfect order and squeaky clean slates are suspicious, as the system is designed to make everyone break some little law at some point.
That way, if you're unlucky or you forget to grease the right palms, you'll be picked up at some point, you'll get a fine, a bitchslap and maybe get recruited as an informant, but you'll stay out of the camps. If some random joe fingers you for an enemy of the state, you're screwed. Your best bet is to try and make sure that no random joe will think to name your name while being waterboarded.
You left too early - there are three (I think) baddies lurking in the lobby with LAM's by that point. If you don't bust our with your brother (or booby trap the lobby on your way in) they usually manage to whack him.
They got the story just a wee bit wrong, your scientist friends did. Yes, the main ingredient for "zombification" is a venom - pufferfish venom or some other analogous neurotoxin) for the paralysis bit and clinical depression as an added bonus, but the traditional cocktails which have been studied also contain a lysergine and some THC to complete "operation mindfuck", plus additional bits of stuff that inhibit the autonomous nervous system and slow down metabolic processes - sometimes in non-obvious ways. This is something that's been in development since the stone age began. If some obscure herb is in there, it's in there for a reason.
Btw, if you ever meet a zombie, make her a nice cup of St John's wort tea.
Don't believe everything you're told. The Irakis just decided they should get rid of all the foreigners first. Al Qaeda groups are sponsored by Saudi wahhabites, which neither the sunni nor the shi'a like one bit. Therefore, the wise mullahs are ratting on Al Qaeda groups so the US will kill them and drive them out of the country - after which they will get back to killing US soliders every day (while publicizing the fact that they get assistance in men and materials from Iran) until the US goes away to fight Iran, leaving a token force in place and the country in the oh-so-capable hands of the new Iraki army. After that, it will finally be business as usual - sunni and shi'a backstabbing each other in a free country. Isn't that just grand?
It's stupid to presume that there is an Iraki insurgency - what the US is up against is the actual power structure of the country - a patchwork of tribal and family connections backed up by the loose network of Islamic clergy.
Disabling satellites is very very easy (read: can be done with 1970's tech). No satellites means no talking over the horizon if you want to stay relatively un-jammed. That poses a bit of a logistical challenge.
Which one do you mean? The FFTF was not a breeder reactor, and I can find no reference to any other being decomissioned during the Clinton years.
Yes, yes. One of the political reasons was that the Superphenix was two to three times over budget when development was halted.
It's in there - in at least two versions, afaicr.
Spoken like one who's only played Deus Ex 2. Correct me if I'm wrong. If I'm not, go do yourself a favor and play the original. It's good enough yet flawed enough that it should teach you a bit about plot, backstory, background info and how to make them integral to gameplay, rather than cheap tacky window-dressing.
No-one except for the whole Eastern Block, that is. I seem to remeber bootleg Polish tapes with "Nether Earth" and "Elite" on them. Now get off my lawn!
Oh I'm so tired of all this crapola about how GIMP is great once you get used to the weird "lotsa windows" interface thingy. It's not. It sucks salty, hairy monkey balls because -drumroll- IT HAS NO CMYK SUPPORT. Everything else is fixable with a few hundred man-hours of work. Unfortunately, given the GIMP's architecture (or lack of) and the arcaneness of the knowledge required, adding CMYK support is non-trivial. In fact, it has proven to be an effort the open-source "community" is either unwilling or unable to make.
One word: Thermite.
Know of a better way to defeat rubber-hose cryptanalysis?
In fact, the two could cross-pollinate nicely.
It is impossible for the simple reason that rights aren't real in the way a person's life is real. In fact, from a legal standpoint, their applicability is not limited by the lifespan of the person who has them. If it were not so, the will and testament of a dead person, for instance, would amount to nothing, you'd be free to harvest any corpses you can lay your hands on for transplants and murder would probably not be punishable. Mmkay?
I hope you learn a lesson about how human rights are inalienable the hard way - by having them violated, preferably with a rubber hose. We'll see then if you feel they are worthless just because they were infringed upon.
Yes, it does. However, many users run into one of three very common issues:
1. lack of an answer. (esoteric app, very new bug/misfeature, experts have no time to answer, whatever). Tough luck. RTFM, RTFS, if all else fails drop a message to the devs.
2. lack of patience. When someone tells you to go RTFM, there's a good chance that they have done that themselves in their greenhorn days and found the answer in there, so stomping off in a rage for being snubbed is not a good idea in this case.
3. perceived competence. Users who start by making assumptions about what is broken, like so: "frobozzation of the ion flux generators may have triggered an alpha transform in the phase-space of the solution, causing erratic pixelation of the main visual conduit; here is the full syslog for the past three days and a strace of every relevant application recorded immediately after the event, as well as a core dump just in case" get ignored more often than those who state bluntly "X version so-and-so doesn't start properly on such-and-such a system".