If I sell you a bill of goods but don't misrepresent it - and give you opportunity to validate my claims - well buyer beware.
That is counted as your stupidity.
If I sell you a bill of goods but I did misrepresent it and you really had no chance to validate my claims - you have me to rights.
That is counted as my taking advantage of you.
OSS is no different than selling used cars. I can sell a used car without telling you about some problems and it is your problem if you buy it from me. What? You are not competent to identify those problems? Sorry - that is why you have the right to get the car inspected by an independent mechanic or to bring in a friend. If you didn't do that, that is your problem.
So whether or not you have the skills to evaluate software, you can hire someone with said skills, so failure to do so is your problem, not mine.
In which case he did not come out of "nowhere". He came out of a PhD program at a respected university. He did his thesis on methods of calculating Avagadro's number.
Cheers, Ben
PS Einstein did extremely well in school. The myth to the contrary is based on a reporter who did not know that the numerical scores used in Austria were reversed from the German - the scores that looked like Einstein failing everything were actually top marks!
Were I to launch attacks against online merchants, I wouldn't do something so silly as just trying to create a lot of traffic. I would try to stress out their system as heavily as I could - say with a Perl script generating random "purchases" with garbage names and garbage credit cards...
Others have addressed your other points, I just want to hit 2 of yours.
You ask, why couldn't the USSR sustain an expensive arms rage with "the most prosperous country in the world?" Well remember your history. In the 80's the USA massively sped up its half of the arms race, and provided a credible threat of developing an anti-missile system to protect itself against the USSR. The resulting over-expenditure was not really affordable by the US, and definitely could not be matched by the USSR.
As for the CIA, I read that article a decade ago, and would love to put my hands on it again. Essentially the policy that the CIA pioneered with the Solidarity movement in Poland was how to make a populace aware of their options for non-violent protest, help them organize, and bridge the gaps to let traditional sources of support (labor unions, Church, etc) be able to effectively help the movement.
These policies (for obvious reasons) can only work when the population is dissatisfied. Furthermore the alliance between the USA and the Catholic Church in the 80's is an open secret. Thirdly the collapse of the Soviet block happened as a series of movements that resembled Solidarity.
So given that in 1984 there were (very complimentary) press reports detailing how the events of 1982 in Poland were partly the result of a successful CIA experiment in encouraging non-violent protest, and given that a few short years later in Soviet country after Soviet country the governments came toppling down after very similar public protests, one cannot help but ask what the connection is.
Note that the CIA activity in Poland, while covert, was not unethical. It was largely a behind-the-scenes informing, teaching, and organizing role to encourage a democratic protest. In a system that blocks such protests, the effects can be quite...startling.
First I don't think that the Soviet system crushed itself. It just could not sustain an arms race with the most prosperous country on Earth. Additionally I cannot prove a thing, but I strongly suspect that the CIA had a part in the collapse of the Soviets. One of the more interesting articles that I have stumbled across is a 1984 article in the Whole Earth Catalog (not known for being a right wing publication) detailing how the 1982 events in Poland were orchestrated by the CIA operating with the Catholic Church in an experiment on using non-violent resistance. Given the events later in the decade I would not consider it beyond belief that said experiment was deemed a success and tried on a larger scale. (Proof, what is that? This is just a theory.)
Regardless of that, you are perfectly correct about what the Russian economy is. However the people were told that they were getting a free market economy, they have been told they have a free market economy, and that is what they are blaming their troubles on.
As for your dismissal, read some history. A signficant portion of economic reality is belief. What people believe is true, really is. Look again at Hitler. No, the Jews didn't hand away Germany in WW I. No, the Jews were not the cause of Germany's economic troubles.
Yet Hitler managed to come to power, and acting at odds with all accepted economic principles really did manage to take a ruined country and put it together (while the rest of the World was collapsing into the Great Depression). He really did rebuild the country. He really did produce the finest highway system ever seen. He really did make Germans proud to be German. He really did restore the military. He really did conquer Europe. Had he not been an idiot and nutcase, he would have kept it as well!
All of this despite the fact that his description of the causes of the existing troubles were completely loony, and despite (because of?) complete ignorance of how economics was supposed to work.
Just because someone is utterly mistaken does not mean that they cannot be very effective. Particularly in areas where belief is so critical.
Please quote the place in my writing I am, whining all day is that everything non-western (in this case Russia) is evil or where I had the audacity to claim that Nazi Germany is not western.
You cannot for the simple reason that I did not say that. I did point out that Zhirinovsky appeals to a segment of the Russian population that is explicitly anti-Western. This is a statement of fact, and I believe that I did a pretty good job of summing up why they are anti-Western.
There were only two things that my post directly criticized. One was the ability for a a rabble-rouser with a convenient, disillusioned, and potentially violent minority to seize control. This is a pattern that has shown up in the establishment of dictatorships the world over. The other is the tendancy of people to dismiss out of hand the effects of a position that seems crazy to them. Well the position may seem crazy, but craziness is no obstacle to power.
Now please go back and read the post that I wrote rather than the one you thought I did. When you get through reading it and sorting out my writing from your fantasy, perhaps you will have the guts to both apologize and sign your name to that.
Around 40% of Russian male prisoners have drug-resistant TB. Given the size of the prison system and the huge turnover, Russia is turning into the epicenter of an epidemic.
Here in the US we can usually treat drug-resistant TB, even if it does cost thousands/person. In Russia? Not a chance. They get a shipment of drugs, throw it at the prisoners, run out and thereby produce perfect conditions to breed resistant diseases.
The US has forgotten TB, "consumption" is a quaint word that most people don't really recognize.
Well until the 40's it was the leading cause of death in the US. It is back in Russia, with a vengeance. Over the next 5-10 years a significant fraction of Russia will experience that endless cough, and watch their bodies slowly waste away as they are "consumed" by a disease that Western medicine is going to be helpless to prevent.
Don't be too complacent - it is coming here as well and public health officials don't have a clue how to handle it. The death rate has been rising since the 80's. Unless we have a miracle, we will experience what happens when diseases evolve past our ability to treat them. Welcome back to seeing your once young and healthy friend Johnny die for no greater crime than encountering "bad air".
Today this plague is theoretical in the West. But not in Russia. Russia once boasted universal health care. It was not great, but it was available, and people trusted it. No longer. The free market (and corruption, but people hear the words free market) changed all that.
Take a second look at Russia. The social chaos. The poverty. The diseases. The crime. The drugs.
They blame it all on the West.
Sure, the West claims to have sent money. What money? They never saw the money. They saw lots of other things come from the West though. Bite the hand that fed them you say? Many of them would see it as justifiable self-defence!
He isn't stupid or crazy though. Never think that. His core constituency is anti-West. They have seen the West crush the Soviet system, lose them their empire, have a free market thrust down their throats only to bring utter poverty, disease, and hunger to them, and they don't like it. The more that he can make it seem that the West is afraid of him, the more they love him.
The resulting antics seem foolish, stupid, and bizarre to Western eyes. But don't dismiss him lightly. A violent, dispossessed, and easily manipulated minority in the hands of a rabble-rouser is a very effective hand to produce a dictatorship. May I remind everyone of a similarly audacious "lunatic" who unified a country, restored its economy, hope, and pride? I am speaking, of course, of a once-Austrian who wound up leading Germany, Adolf Hitler.
The US and Canada have a treaty known as NAFTA. Under that treaty preferential behaviour for US companies against Canadian bidders is not allowed.
In any case the Corel case would make it easier for smaller American companies to compete against other American companies as well. The nationality of Corel is a non-issue in this case. (As you would have known had you read the article.)
Andrew is the head of the Samba project, which is what allows other operating systems to play with the Microsoft file-sharing system. Therefore he really does need to have Windows up to work on Linux - because what he is working on is getting Linux to do a better job of talking to Windows.
In particular I he might be firing up Windows 98 because Microsoft has been taking advantage of the fact that the Samba developers had been concentrating on NT to come up with some embarassing benchmarks (*cough* Mindcraft *cough*). Also 95/95 is a far faster client for NT than NT is, and I bet he wants to know what makes the difference.
You will note that EROS takes the idea of reducing the number of nodes closer to the root of the tree as far as possible. (The introductory essays are particularly valuable to read.) Every program is passed exactly the access it needs to have which means that there are far fewer programs which run as root or something close to root (the pun with the root of the attack tree is unintended) and therefore there are a lot fewer potential ways to try to break the security.
For those who do not want to read the essays in detail, here is an explanation "from 20,000 feet" to give you a sense. Unix is based on the idea of an access control list. You have permissions based on who you are, and every process you run will (by default) have permissions to do on your behalf anything that you can do. EROS is based on the idea of a capability. Capabilities can be thought of as handles through which you can request some action and you can do nothing without explicitly being handed the appropriate capability.
The difference is obvious when you consider trying to cat a file. In Unix you hand a program like cat the names of the files you want it to open and trust it to do nothing other than what you asked. In EROS you have the capability to produce capabilities which we will call file-handles would hand cat the open file-handles from which it could read those files and be guaranteed that it is unable to talk to anything other than you, or read anything other than those files, since it has no other capabilities (not even the ability to produce another file-handle). Note that in Unix you explicitly have to trust that cat won't do anything else while in EROS there is no way that it could.
This ensuring that processes never have any ability that they do not need to have results in far fewer processes with sufficient permission to cause damage, and therefore results in the attack tree by default being substantially pared down from what is possible even in a heavily locked down Unix system. As a result verifying the security of the operating system becomes a far simpler task. While attempting to verify the security of a Unix system is possible, the OpenBSD folks have done an extremely good job of it, the equivalent task for a capability system is far simpler.
There is more than just the one post there. There is a discussion of a sort that you no longer see on/. because the pace here does not lend itself to serious discussion.
Although it does make reading the book a very different experience.
The book is based on short stories that he told Alice + other female friends to keep them interested in him. Alice (at the age of 7) is the person the story is being told to. The Red Queen appears to be based on the chaperone. So on and so forth.
So while you can read the book without knowing the background, the background definitely affects how you interpret the book!
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) did not make up Alice. Alice was a real girl, full name of Alice Pleasance Liddell, and Dr Dodgeson is widely believed to be a paedophile.
There is no evidence that he ever consummated his relationship with young Alice, he was quite proper about it and all, but you can judge his interest from the fact that he took pictures of female children (including Alice) as scantily clad as he could arrange and eventually proposed marriage to Alice.
For some reason this gets glossed over in a lot of places...
There are a lot of very stupid dependencies on undocumented "features" in Star Office. If they worked on getting rid of those they would do wonders to improve their stability and portability...
In my experience customized content is inevitably of the form, "Browser foo on platform bar gets to see the real page. Everyone else gets told to upgrade."
Now there are times when it is justified. But by and large it clearly is not. Don't believe me? See www.fox.com for an example!
China and the USSR got on bad relations decades ago. I don't think that the "collapse of communism" changed that much.
Even so, you would NOT want to send troops over the Bering strait. Why not? Terrain! Go look at a map, count mountain ranges. That is *not* territory through which you want to maintain an overland supply train.
No, the idea of China invading the US any time soon is sheer idiocy. They are far better advised to just wait. The US today is the largest debtor nation in the world, and it has held that title for over a decade. The current economic boom is hiding it, but eventually the markets will wake up to the fundamental economic reality, and in due course of time military might will follow the money.
The days of the US single-handedly dominating the planet are numbered, and the Chinese leadership knows it. This is not to say that the US will be toothless any time soon. But, like the British Empire before it, the Spanish empire before that, and so on through history, economics is catching up to current World Superpower.
Of course the realization of this status may take a while. Look at the British Empire. Between WW I and WW II the stage was set for its collapse. WW II demonstrated that it would not last, and the years following saw Britain quickly losing its territory. Yet the British public didn't realize this for decades after. They even went to war defending a corner of the Empire as late as the 1980s, and we still have as a last cultural hurrah the James Bond movies...
This technology appears to be picking up planes by looking at the turbulence that they leave behind.
Why can't a series of unmanned rockets leaving turbulence all around jam this?
Another issue: if you are following the trail, how good is your fix on its current location? If it was in straight-line flight, OK. But if it was in defensive maneuvers?
Hmmm...how well does it work in different weather conditions?
There are a lot of questions here. Sure it is a cute step, but this is not the final solution and the race will continue.
My background is in math but I do have a course in GR under my belt...
Isn't the cosmological constant just a constant of integration? In a logical sense it doesn't need any explanation - you integrate and you have a constant left over whose value has to be measured!
Animal ethologists long ago worked out how to train birds to attack specific objects. It is really simple. You take a room, put a bird on one side, and a bunch more on the other. In the first side you put something that the bird will attack (say a sleeping owl) and on the other you put something innocuous (say a brand of detergent). The bird attacks, calling out, the others hear the first bird, come to the conclusion that it is the innocuous object and voila! They are trained!
I periodically think that someone should train starlings to attack the waving flags you see on fancy limos, and turn a flock of them loose on an important parade...
Slashdot Mirror
If I sell you a bill of goods but don't misrepresent it - and give you opportunity to validate my claims - well buyer beware.
That is counted as your stupidity.
If I sell you a bill of goods but I did misrepresent it and you really had no chance to validate my claims - you have me to rights.
That is counted as my taking advantage of you.
OSS is no different than selling used cars. I can sell a used car without telling you about some problems and it is your problem if you buy it from me. What? You are not competent to identify those problems? Sorry - that is why you have the right to get the car inspected by an independent mechanic or to bring in a friend. If you didn't do that, that is your problem.
So whether or not you have the skills to evaluate software, you can hire someone with said skills, so failure to do so is your problem, not mine.
Cheers,
Ben
The way that I do it is
jkl;jkl;jkl;jkl;jkl;
Cheers,
Ben
No more drumming my fingers on the table when I am thinking!
Cheers,
Ben
MIT has a tradition of elaborate hoaxes.
Either some officer was seriously bribed, or else this is a hoax.
Cheers,
Ben
I assume that is an Einstein reference?
In which case he did not come out of "nowhere". He came out of a PhD program at a respected university. He did his thesis on methods of calculating Avagadro's number.
Cheers,
Ben
PS Einstein did extremely well in school. The myth to the contrary is based on a reporter who did not know that the numerical scores used in Austria were reversed from the German - the scores that looked like Einstein failing everything were actually top marks!
Were I to launch attacks against online merchants, I wouldn't do something so silly as just trying to create a lot of traffic. I would try to stress out their system as heavily as I could - say with a Perl script generating random "purchases" with garbage names and garbage credit cards...
Cheers,
Ben
Others have addressed your other points, I just want to hit 2 of yours.
You ask, why couldn't the USSR sustain an expensive arms rage with "the most prosperous country in the world?" Well remember your history. In the 80's the USA massively sped up its half of the arms race, and provided a credible threat of developing an anti-missile system to protect itself against the USSR. The resulting over-expenditure was not really affordable by the US, and definitely could not be matched by the USSR.
As for the CIA, I read that article a decade ago, and would love to put my hands on it again. Essentially the policy that the CIA pioneered with the Solidarity movement in Poland was how to make a populace aware of their options for non-violent protest, help them organize, and bridge the gaps to let traditional sources of support (labor unions, Church, etc) be able to effectively help the movement.
These policies (for obvious reasons) can only work when the population is dissatisfied. Furthermore the alliance between the USA and the Catholic Church in the 80's is an open secret. Thirdly the collapse of the Soviet block happened as a series of movements that resembled Solidarity.
So given that in 1984 there were (very complimentary) press reports detailing how the events of 1982 in Poland were partly the result of a successful CIA experiment in encouraging non-violent protest, and given that a few short years later in Soviet country after Soviet country the governments came toppling down after very similar public protests, one cannot help but ask what the connection is.
Note that the CIA activity in Poland, while covert, was not unethical. It was largely a behind-the-scenes informing, teaching, and organizing role to encourage a democratic protest. In a system that blocks such protests, the effects can be quite...startling.
Cheers,
Ben
First I don't think that the Soviet system crushed itself. It just could not sustain an arms race with the most prosperous country on Earth. Additionally I cannot prove a thing, but I strongly suspect that the CIA had a part in the collapse of the Soviets. One of the more interesting articles that I have stumbled across is a 1984 article in the Whole Earth Catalog (not known for being a right wing publication) detailing how the 1982 events in Poland were orchestrated by the CIA operating with the Catholic Church in an experiment on using non-violent resistance. Given the events later in the decade I would not consider it beyond belief that said experiment was deemed a success and tried on a larger scale. (Proof, what is that? This is just a theory.)
Regardless of that, you are perfectly correct about what the Russian economy is. However the people were told that they were getting a free market economy, they have been told they have a free market economy, and that is what they are blaming their troubles on.
As for your dismissal, read some history. A signficant portion of economic reality is belief. What people believe is true, really is. Look again at Hitler. No, the Jews didn't hand away Germany in WW I. No, the Jews were not the cause of Germany's economic troubles.
Yet Hitler managed to come to power, and acting at odds with all accepted economic principles really did manage to take a ruined country and put it together (while the rest of the World was collapsing into the Great Depression). He really did rebuild the country. He really did produce the finest highway system ever seen. He really did make Germans proud to be German. He really did restore the military. He really did conquer Europe. Had he not been an idiot and nutcase, he would have kept it as well!
All of this despite the fact that his description of the causes of the existing troubles were completely loony, and despite (because of?) complete ignorance of how economics was supposed to work.
Just because someone is utterly mistaken does not mean that they cannot be very effective. Particularly in areas where belief is so critical.
Regards,
Ben
Please quote the place in my writing I am, whining all day is that everything non-western (in this case Russia) is evil or where I had the audacity to claim that Nazi Germany is not western.
You cannot for the simple reason that I did not say that. I did point out that Zhirinovsky appeals to a segment of the Russian population that is explicitly anti-Western. This is a statement of fact, and I believe that I did a pretty good job of summing up why they are anti-Western.
There were only two things that my post directly criticized. One was the ability for a a rabble-rouser with a convenient, disillusioned, and potentially violent minority to seize control. This is a pattern that has shown up in the establishment of dictatorships the world over. The other is the tendancy of people to dismiss out of hand the effects of a position that seems crazy to them. Well the position may seem crazy, but craziness is no obstacle to power.
Now please go back and read the post that I wrote rather than the one you thought I did. When you get through reading it and sorting out my writing from your fantasy, perhaps you will have the guts to both apologize and sign your name to that.
Sincerely,
Benjamin J. Tilly
They don't see it.
The help we sent got swallowed up in the general corruption. Despite our claims of sending help the average Russian peasant has never seen it so bad.
Let me give one example.
Around 40% of Russian male prisoners have drug-resistant TB. Given the size of the prison system and the huge turnover, Russia is turning into the epicenter of an epidemic.
Here in the US we can usually treat drug-resistant TB, even if it does cost thousands/person. In Russia? Not a chance. They get a shipment of drugs, throw it at the prisoners, run out and thereby produce perfect conditions to breed resistant diseases.
The US has forgotten TB, "consumption" is a quaint word that most people don't really recognize.
Well until the 40's it was the leading cause of death in the US. It is back in Russia, with a vengeance. Over the next 5-10 years a significant fraction of Russia will experience that endless cough, and watch their bodies slowly waste away as they are "consumed" by a disease that Western medicine is going to be helpless to prevent.
Don't be too complacent - it is coming here as well and public health officials don't have a clue how to handle it. The death rate has been rising since the 80's. Unless we have a miracle, we will experience what happens when diseases evolve past our ability to treat them. Welcome back to seeing your once young and healthy friend Johnny die for no greater crime than encountering "bad air".
Today this plague is theoretical in the West. But not in Russia. Russia once boasted universal health care. It was not great, but it was available, and people trusted it. No longer. The free market (and corruption, but people hear the words free market) changed all that.
Take a second look at Russia. The social chaos. The poverty. The diseases. The crime. The drugs.
They blame it all on the West.
Sure, the West claims to have sent money. What money? They never saw the money. They saw lots of other things come from the West though. Bite the hand that fed them you say? Many of them would see it as justifiable self-defence!
Regards,
Ben
He isn't stupid or crazy though. Never think that. His core constituency is anti-West. They have seen the West crush the Soviet system, lose them their empire, have a free market thrust down their throats only to bring utter poverty, disease, and hunger to them, and they don't like it. The more that he can make it seem that the West is afraid of him, the more they love him.
The resulting antics seem foolish, stupid, and bizarre to Western eyes. But don't dismiss him lightly. A violent, dispossessed, and easily manipulated minority in the hands of a rabble-rouser is a very effective hand to produce a dictatorship. May I remind everyone of a similarly audacious "lunatic" who unified a country, restored its economy, hope, and pride? I am speaking, of course, of a once-Austrian who wound up leading Germany, Adolf Hitler.
Sleep tight...
Ben
I was talking about Microsoft vs Corel bidding for the DOL's services. Preferential treatment for Microsoft because of its nationality is not allowed.
Cheers,
Ben
The US and Canada have a treaty known as NAFTA. Under that treaty preferential behaviour for US companies against Canadian bidders is not allowed.
In any case the Corel case would make it easier for smaller American companies to compete against other American companies as well. The nationality of Corel is a non-issue in this case. (As you would have known had you read the article.)
Regards,
Ben
Andrew is the head of the Samba project, which is what allows other operating systems to play with the Microsoft file-sharing system. Therefore he really does need to have Windows up to work on Linux - because what he is working on is getting Linux to do a better job of talking to Windows.
In particular I he might be firing up Windows 98 because Microsoft has been taking advantage of the fact that the Samba developers had been concentrating on NT to come up with some embarassing benchmarks (*cough* Mindcraft *cough*). Also 95/95 is a far faster client for NT than NT is, and I bet he wants to know what makes the difference.
Cheers,
Ben
You will note that EROS takes the idea of reducing the number of nodes closer to the root of the tree as far as possible. (The introductory essays are particularly valuable to read.) Every program is passed exactly the access it needs to have which means that there are far fewer programs which run as root or something close to root (the pun with the root of the attack tree is unintended) and therefore there are a lot fewer potential ways to try to break the security.
:-)
For those who do not want to read the essays in detail, here is an explanation "from 20,000 feet" to give you a sense. Unix is based on the idea of an access control list. You have permissions based on who you are, and every process you run will (by default) have permissions to do on your behalf anything that you can do. EROS is based on the idea of a capability. Capabilities can be thought of as handles through which you can request some action and you can do nothing without explicitly being handed the appropriate capability.
The difference is obvious when you consider trying to cat a file. In Unix you hand a program like cat the names of the files you want it to open and trust it to do nothing other than what you asked. In EROS you have the capability to produce capabilities which we will call file-handles would hand cat the open file-handles from which it could read those files and be guaranteed that it is unable to talk to anything other than you, or read anything other than those files, since it has no other capabilities (not even the ability to produce another file-handle). Note that in Unix you explicitly have to trust that cat won't do anything else while in EROS there is no way that it could.
This ensuring that processes never have any ability that they do not need to have results in far fewer processes with sufficient permission to cause damage, and therefore results in the attack tree by default being substantially pared down from what is possible even in a heavily locked down Unix system. As a result verifying the security of the operating system becomes a far simpler task. While attempting to verify the security of a Unix system is possible, the OpenBSD folks have done an extremely good job of it, the equivalent task for a capability system is far simpler.
Food for thought.
Cheers,
Ben
There is more than just the one post there. There is a discussion of a sort that you no longer see on /. because the pace here does not lend itself to serious discussion.
Cheers,
Ben
It gets going here. Worth skimming. (OK, so I am biased, but I don't feel like retyping all of those points I made..:-)
Cheers,
Ben
Although it does make reading the book a very different experience.
The book is based on short stories that he told Alice + other female friends to keep them interested in him. Alice (at the age of 7) is the person the story is being told to. The Red Queen appears to be based on the chaperone. So on and so forth.
So while you can read the book without knowing the background, the background definitely affects how you interpret the book!
Regards,
Ben
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (better known as Lewis Carroll) did not make up Alice. Alice was a real girl, full name of Alice Pleasance Liddell, and Dr Dodgeson is widely believed to be a paedophile.
There is no evidence that he ever consummated his relationship with young Alice, he was quite proper about it and all, but you can judge his interest from the fact that he took pictures of female children (including Alice) as scantily clad as he could arrange and eventually proposed marriage to Alice.
For some reason this gets glossed over in a lot of places...
Regards,
Ben
There are a lot of very stupid dependencies on undocumented "features" in Star Office. If they worked on getting rid of those they would do wonders to improve their stability and portability...
Regards,
Ben
In my experience customized content is inevitably of the form, "Browser foo on platform bar gets to see the real page. Everyone else gets told to upgrade."
Now there are times when it is justified. But by and large it clearly is not. Don't believe me? See www.fox.com for an example!
Regards,
Ben Tilly
China and the USSR got on bad relations decades ago. I don't think that the "collapse of communism" changed that much.
Even so, you would NOT want to send troops over the Bering strait. Why not? Terrain! Go look at a map, count mountain ranges. That is *not* territory through which you want to maintain an overland supply train.
No, the idea of China invading the US any time soon is sheer idiocy. They are far better advised to just wait. The US today is the largest debtor nation in the world, and it has held that title for over a decade. The current economic boom is hiding it, but eventually the markets will wake up to the fundamental economic reality, and in due course of time military might will follow the money.
The days of the US single-handedly dominating the planet are numbered, and the Chinese leadership knows it. This is not to say that the US will be toothless any time soon. But, like the British Empire before it, the Spanish empire before that, and so on through history, economics is catching up to current World Superpower.
Of course the realization of this status may take a while. Look at the British Empire. Between WW I and WW II the stage was set for its collapse. WW II demonstrated that it would not last, and the years following saw Britain quickly losing its territory. Yet the British public didn't realize this for decades after. They even went to war defending a corner of the Empire as late as the 1980s, and we still have as a last cultural hurrah the James Bond movies...
Cheers,
Ben
This technology appears to be picking up planes by looking at the turbulence that they leave behind.
Why can't a series of unmanned rockets leaving turbulence all around jam this?
Another issue: if you are following the trail, how good is your fix on its current location? If it was in straight-line flight, OK. But if it was in defensive maneuvers?
Hmmm...how well does it work in different weather conditions?
There are a lot of questions here. Sure it is a cute step, but this is not the final solution and the race will continue.
Cheers,
Ben
My background is in math but I do have a course in GR under my belt...
Isn't the cosmological constant just a constant of integration? In a logical sense it doesn't need any explanation - you integrate and you have a constant left over whose value has to be measured!
Cheers,
Ben
Animal ethologists long ago worked out how to train birds to attack specific objects. It is really simple. You take a room, put a bird on one side, and a bunch more on the other. In the first side you put something that the bird will attack (say a sleeping owl) and on the other you put something innocuous (say a brand of detergent). The bird attacks, calling out, the others hear the first bird, come to the conclusion that it is the innocuous object and voila! They are trained!
I periodically think that someone should train starlings to attack the waving flags you see on fancy limos, and turn a flock of them loose on an important parade...
:-)
Cheers,
Ben