Iraq (or specifically Saddam Hussein) felt that Kuwait was collaborating with destabilizing influences and possibly pursuing weapons programs that could be used in an attack against Iraq. Also, Kuwait is an oil-rich nation and controlling Kuwaits oil would make Iraq more powerful.
The danger of "WMD"'s has been seriously exaggerated. Look at the second world war. All the major warring nations had or could have quickly developed chemical weapons. Yet they didn't use them -- simply because such weapons are not very effective. Or look at the sarin attack in a subway in Tokyo. It killed 12 people. Or take a look at the anthrax attacks in the US. Pretty weak for a WMD, I'd say.
The only WMD's that actually cause Mass Destruction are nuclear. Saddam Hussein never got close to developing any of those. They are the only reason that the US could claim a credible threat making it necessary to invade preemptively. Yet it was entirely clear that they didn't exit.
Just be glad we don't use carpet-bombing as a tactic anymore.
Is this really what we have come to? Arguments that we should be grateful that the benevolent US has been kind enough to not turn Iraq into glass even though it could have?
If, for instance, Canada suddenly just bombed Detroit, I would find it had to believe, even in this case, that we would get overwhemling support in the U.N. to retaliate.
Why do you find that hard to believe? I think you should note how rare it is for a country to invade another country these days. One of the reasons is that UN would be quick to condemn it. Instead, nations tend to "support freedom fighters" in neighbouring countries.
But anyway, as you say "same tired old objections to wind power", that implies people have brought up this concern long before me.
Sure they have. Read any random front page article on Slashdot on wind power.
And if so then the wind-power people and/or climatologists should have well-reasoned scientific explanations to easily refute it.
I can't imagine that anyone would pay for such a study. The slow down of the wind is simply negligible. That is why you can place turbines in row behind row. Wind turbines increase the surface roughness, that is all, much like a forest does. Surely you're not saying that global climate would be dramatically altered if say Denmark got covered by forest again?
You will notice that there are no scientific studies showing that there is no significant harm to humanity if an asteroid strikes the moon -- yet that same worry comes up every time an asteroid story is posted on Slashdot. "Could an asteroid hitting the moon stop the tides, and if so, would we all die?" "No, and no."
But then, the populace is generally far too stupid to understand how utterly tiny the wind power potential really is.
Denmark is currently getting 20% of its electricity from wind power. Personally I find wind turbines to be beautiful -- as long as they're the modern kind with "massive" towers, like the ones in the foreground in that picture. The ones in the background with the "grid" towers are indeed ugly.
Over a decade ago someone put a goodly sized wind turbine up near their home (in Ohio, I think in Deerfield off of route 14). I'd estimate its height off the ground around 30 feet, and from the tip of one blade to the end of the other was probably around 15-20 feet.
I'm sorry, that is not goodly sized. That is tiny. It sounds like an experimental or home-built turbine. There were lots of those in Denmark 20 years ago, and yes, they tended to be down for maintenance more than they were producing power. Things are much improved.
Primarily, it seems I'm being shot down not for faulty scientific hypotheses, but for having the gall to even think that wind power might not be perfectly 'green'.
I would imagine that you were modded down for rehashing the same tired old objections to wind power. There are legitimate concerns about wind power (check my posting history for some), but yours aren't. Also, I would recommend that any study of wind power effects not be done by cosmetologists, whether they are decent or not.
Abu Ghraib kind of burst the bubble that the Americans went into Iraq to stop torture. At least the current US government has taken effective steps to avoid a recurrence of torture evidence reaching the public.
I wasn't exactly the only one hitting that problem. Dozens of people hit it. The Freenet developers recommended going back to 1.4.1 where the bug is harder to hit.
They have the test case. Run a specific version of Freenet for 10 minutes and you get the crash. Completely reproducable. What they don't have is a small test case.
Freenet was regularly able to crash the JVM. Sometimes due to bugs in Freenet, but either way, the JVM should never crash. If it does, it is useless as a sandbox. When bugs were reported to Sun, the response was either silence or "produce a small test case showing the problem". Right, I'm going to spend my energy trying to find security bugs in closed-source software. Not.
Sun has the source to the JVM and the source to Freenet. They are the only people who can fix the problem.
I have really really tried to love Java. I mean seriously tried. It is a quite convenient language to write in, for sure. However, it is just too much of a pain to actually use whatever you develop. Deployment is a mess at least on Linux and having to fix up CLASSPATH or use shell scripts for invocation of the application is just not acceptable. Then there is the slowness and bloat which people claim is gone. Except it isn't gone. Sure, tight little loops run just as fast in Java as in C, but the rest of the program kills you on cache misses and paging. The only acceptable way to run Java is to compile it to native code with gcj. Unfortunately libgcj is still the weak point there, although it is certainly improving rapidly. Sometimes you can work around that issue by using libraries from Sun's Java with gcj, but the licensing issues of doing that seem rather daunting.
Besides, the whole "Run Anywhere" thing is a failure. The only platforms where you have a decent chance that an end user might have Java installed is Windows and Solaris, and I am not sure about the latter -- I no longer know anyone who uses Solaris on the desktop. This basically leaves Windows, and if you're targeting just Windows there are certainly better options than Java. Besides, if you use gcj, you're already compiling specifically for each target platform -- but running for sure on one platform is better than not running at all.
They use the RealPlayer or WinAmp that was installed by the OEM. That is what this is really about -- the freedom of OEMs to change which software is installed.
Exactly... Same AH with two smaller batteries, with double the voltage.
You are confusing yourself with selective reading again. Do I have to explicitly put "as the smaller battery" and "as the larger battery" into each sentence so you are unable to quotefuck? Not that it would stop you, probably.
What is the optimal energy needed to do a commute to work and back? Well, the perfect car would have no drag at all, and since the car begins and ends at the same place (and therefore gains or loses no potential energy), the optimal energy is zero. Since most cars use at least a little energy, their efficiency is zero percent. And therefore you have just made statements about efficiency meaningless.
Since power is watts (not only AHs), that most certainly is "much more power".
You cut away the rest. Let me repeat it then:
It is twice the stored energy [in Wh or J] of the smaller battery from before, and exactly the same amount of stored energy [in Wh or J] as the full-size battery we started with.
Mainstream physics has shown with reasonable certainty that local hidden variable theories are impossible. However, it is impossible to disprove that there isn't some guy outside the universe with a predetermined list of "random" numbers who gets called whenever quantum mechanics need "randomness". You can (succesfully, IMHO) argue that this falls for Occam's Razor, of course.
It's easy to find many examples where batteries of half the size are almost half the AMPs as well, but the same voltage.
Hopefully you mean amp-hours; that's the interesting thing when it comes to batteries. If so, you're saying that a battery half the size stores half the energy. Not all that surprising, really.
By using two of the smaller batteries (wired in serial, but of course you knew that, right?), you get much more power out of the deal...
No, I get twice the voltage but the same number of amp-hours. That isn't "much more power". It is twice the stored energy of the smaller battery from before, and exactly the same amount of stored energy as the full-size battery we started with.
The average car is 0% efficient. It starts the day in the garage, and at the end of the day it sits in the garage again.
Anyway, the point is that you can't include air resistance in the efficiency measurement. Remember, work = force times distance. If you reduce air resistance, you reduce the force and therefore the work done by the car. Hopefully the fuel consumption lowers proportionally, leaving you with the same efficiency you started with.
There really is no need to lecture me on electricity, but feel free to continue for my amusement. You were implying that you could somehow magically increase the voltage without decreasing the amp-hours stored in the batteries. How do you plan to do that?
Methane is being produced from manure and waste here (in Denmark). The amount of methane produced seems to be far less than you believe. At least it hasn't made a significant dent in the consumption of natural gas.
Anyway, in the context of energy sources, "running out" means that we're unable to get any more energy from that source. Since the amount of free hydrogen is negligible on Earth, we ran out.
Biodiesel and bioethanol are very viable and proven technologies. However, there are still chemical plants producing ethanol from from acetaldehyde made from acetylene or from ethylene made from petroleum. So from an economic viewpoint bioethanol cannot be competitive -- yet.
Slashdot Mirror
So there you have it: terrorists, WMD's, and oil.
The only WMD's that actually cause Mass Destruction are nuclear. Saddam Hussein never got close to developing any of those. They are the only reason that the US could claim a credible threat making it necessary to invade preemptively. Yet it was entirely clear that they didn't exit.
Is this really what we have come to? Arguments that we should be grateful that the benevolent US has been kind enough to not turn Iraq into glass even though it could have?
Why do you find that hard to believe? I think you should note how rare it is for a country to invade another country these days. One of the reasons is that UN would be quick to condemn it. Instead, nations tend to "support freedom fighters" in neighbouring countries.
Sure they have. Read any random front page article on Slashdot on wind power.
And if so then the wind-power people and/or climatologists should have well-reasoned scientific explanations to easily refute it.
I can't imagine that anyone would pay for such a study. The slow down of the wind is simply negligible. That is why you can place turbines in row behind row. Wind turbines increase the surface roughness, that is all, much like a forest does. Surely you're not saying that global climate would be dramatically altered if say Denmark got covered by forest again?
You will notice that there are no scientific studies showing that there is no significant harm to humanity if an asteroid strikes the moon -- yet that same worry comes up every time an asteroid story is posted on Slashdot. "Could an asteroid hitting the moon stop the tides, and if so, would we all die?" "No, and no."
Denmark is currently getting 20% of its electricity from wind power. Personally I find wind turbines to be beautiful -- as long as they're the modern kind with "massive" towers, like the ones in the foreground in that picture. The ones in the background with the "grid" towers are indeed ugly.
I'm sorry, that is not goodly sized. That is tiny. It sounds like an experimental or home-built turbine. There were lots of those in Denmark 20 years ago, and yes, they tended to be down for maintenance more than they were producing power. Things are much improved.
I would imagine that you were modded down for rehashing the same tired old objections to wind power. There are legitimate concerns about wind power (check my posting history for some), but yours aren't. Also, I would recommend that any study of wind power effects not be done by cosmetologists, whether they are decent or not.
Abu Ghraib kind of burst the bubble that the Americans went into Iraq to stop torture. At least the current US government has taken effective steps to avoid a recurrence of torture evidence reaching the public.
You're absolutely right, I've given up the Freenet project a long time ago. That doesn't change the fact that Java is broken too.
So, my system is unlikely to be the culprit.
They have the test case. Run a specific version of Freenet for 10 minutes and you get the crash. Completely reproducable. What they don't have is a small test case.
The VM isn't allowed to crash, even on bad programs. Therefore the problem is in the VM.
Sun has the source to the JVM and the source to Freenet. They are the only people who can fix the problem.
Besides, the whole "Run Anywhere" thing is a failure. The only platforms where you have a decent chance that an end user might have Java installed is Windows and Solaris, and I am not sure about the latter -- I no longer know anyone who uses Solaris on the desktop. This basically leaves Windows, and if you're targeting just Windows there are certainly better options than Java. Besides, if you use gcj, you're already compiling specifically for each target platform -- but running for sure on one platform is better than not running at all.
Yes, I am bitter.
They use the RealPlayer or WinAmp that was installed by the OEM. That is what this is really about -- the freedom of OEMs to change which software is installed.
You are confusing yourself with selective reading again. Do I have to explicitly put "as the smaller battery" and "as the larger battery" into each sentence so you are unable to quotefuck? Not that it would stop you, probably.
What is the optimal energy needed to do a commute to work and back? Well, the perfect car would have no drag at all, and since the car begins and ends at the same place (and therefore gains or loses no potential energy), the optimal energy is zero. Since most cars use at least a little energy, their efficiency is zero percent. And therefore you have just made statements about efficiency meaningless.
Since power is watts (not only AHs), that most certainly is "much more power".
You cut away the rest. Let me repeat it then:It is twice the stored energy [in Wh or J] of the smaller battery from before, and exactly the same amount of stored energy [in Wh or J] as the full-size battery we started with.
Mainstream physics has shown with reasonable certainty that local hidden variable theories are impossible. However, it is impossible to disprove that there isn't some guy outside the universe with a predetermined list of "random" numbers who gets called whenever quantum mechanics need "randomness". You can (succesfully, IMHO) argue that this falls for Occam's Razor, of course.
Hopefully you mean amp-hours; that's the interesting thing when it comes to batteries. If so, you're saying that a battery half the size stores half the energy. Not all that surprising, really.
By using two of the smaller batteries (wired in serial, but of course you knew that, right?), you get much more power out of the deal...
No, I get twice the voltage but the same number of amp-hours. That isn't "much more power". It is twice the stored energy of the smaller battery from before, and exactly the same amount of stored energy as the full-size battery we started with.
Anyway, the point is that you can't include air resistance in the efficiency measurement. Remember, work = force times distance. If you reduce air resistance, you reduce the force and therefore the work done by the car. Hopefully the fuel consumption lowers proportionally, leaving you with the same efficiency you started with.
There really is no need to lecture me on electricity, but feel free to continue for my amusement. You were implying that you could somehow magically increase the voltage without decreasing the amp-hours stored in the batteries. How do you plan to do that?
Anyway, in the context of energy sources, "running out" means that we're unable to get any more energy from that source. Since the amount of free hydrogen is negligible on Earth, we ran out.
Biodiesel and bioethanol are very viable and proven technologies. However, there are still chemical plants producing ethanol from from acetaldehyde made from acetylene or from ethylene made from petroleum. So from an economic viewpoint bioethanol cannot be competitive -- yet.