Let's just be clear about the shareholders that matter.
If you hold a few Apple shares in your 401K/IRA accounts, you do not matter. If int(my_apple_shares) > 0 then you might matter. Since that includes probably 0.0000001% of slashdot readers, it's essentially a strawman argument.
Since Steve probably has a good chunk of voting Apple shares, his opinion does matter. But Steve's job really depends on the Board of Directors and their confidence in his direction of the company. So he manipulates that perception through wall street results, shareholder meetings, product buzz, corporate karma and brand management, etc., but he's really only concerned about the Board. And Steve J.
What about software support? Will there be periodic updates, and what will pay for the development?
You mean, like, you send out a CD with software upgrades to your registered customers, or make it available by mail for $5 or $10?
But what if it works just fine out of the box?
I've yet to see a firmware upgrade to improve the "software" for PS/2 or XBox from their respective sellers, but they could sure do it if they wanted to.
As far as operating on razor-thin margins, well, do you not think that this would entail someone in Taiwan, India, Korea or China that could put said boxes together for $100-200, leaving you with some room for a decent per-item margin?
It obviously would have to be someone who also puts together "normal" PCs, so as to leech off of their big bulk-buying efficiencies for parts, but it could be done.
For subscription, charge to have the device hooked up to broadband. Hard-wire the website for it to get software from in such a way that it would be hard to spoof with a proxy server. Then, accessing your servers for software "updates" would incur a $5-10 fee. Make this part of the contract.
If your software for the box is even half decent, people might actually go for this, especially if you actually only fix what is broken or remove what is not used (hey, the box could chat back what features are used...). And if people don't want the upgrades, well, that's their choice.
Well, by thriving, no matter how great Microsoft Media Center is, it's not happening in my household.
Not only does it mean yet more money to Microsoft, but it also probably means throwing some money into the black stinking hole that HP has been turned into.
If I get anything, it'll be a DirecTivo box, or I'll build a MythTV box (and wish I had bought that HD tuner card before they put the "broadcast flag" recognizer on it).
Well, you pay for cable/satellite TV for plenty of stations that STILL have commercials. Do you not think that the broadcasters/cable channel programmers will stop enjoying taking $$$ from both sides (i.e., broadcast "fees" for satellite/cable, and take advertisement $$$)?
Even the Disney channel finally started slipping commercials for non-Disney shit into their needless half-hour breaks. So they're doing it ala PBS, but it's still a commercial (the one I noticed was for McCrapald's).
Advertisements will eventually creep into Sirius/XM channels as well. It's too hard to resist getting money from both ends, subscribers as well as advertisers.
Opteron won't compete with compute-intensive or database-critical applications....I think most database-critical applications and systems are I/O-intensive, not compute-intensive. Otherwise, things like partitioned tables, physical database layout (spread as many different I/O operations on as much I/O hardware -- disks, RAID controllers, SCSI, etc as possible to parallelize disk I/O), etc. would be a secondary issue.
Sorry, recompiling code for a new processor is...well, it can be a pain in the ass.
Pull your head back into reality. The same argument was made when the Alpha was rolled out. It kicked the universe in every benchmark, even its "peers". Yet where is it now?
Sorry, the x86 dinosaur-Borg continues to roll on in the Opteron, due to its massive inertia of software already written for it, that still works on it reasonably well. Intel did the "forced upgrade" path for 286->386, 386->486 and 486->Pentium. Of the 3, only the '286->386 looks like it was a 0.5->1.0 implementation path. There were cool things on the 286, but they were sort of half-assed/half-baked that worked right on the '386. The other ones seem almost like "point" releases.
How fast could a 90nm strained silicon '486 with 2MB Level 2 Cache run? What if you could put 4 of them in the same package?
It's almost like cars. It's hard to beat the good ol' rusty American push-rod V-8. Sure, some engines come close (the engine in the S-2000, several others) in some areas, but...dang me, that dinosaur tech V-8 just keeps rolling on. We (include me) decry how "inefficient" they appear to be, but...compared to a 180HP/170 ft-lb torque 350 V-8 that would get *maybe* 15 mpg on the highway in the 70's now has been tricked and tuned with modern engine controls to put out over 300 HP *and* get over 20mpg on the highway.
It's also a freakin' flexible engine. More torque? easy enough to do. More HP? Because it's so ubiquitous, taking a regular ol' V-8 and throwing a couple of thousand dollars' worth of parts and time at it, and it's a 500 HP, 8000 max RPM racing engine, *without* using various gee-gaws that are popular in the import tuner market, including go-fast stickers.
Sure, a 4 liter DOHC V-12 that redlines at 11000 RPM puts out more HP and torque than the engine in a Corvette, is more flexible (i.e., pulling from 4th gear or something insane like that), etc., but the 'Vette's engine costs less than a valve adjustment on the Ferarri engine.
What this loss for HP really means is that HP's legacy system customers have just about lost their upgrade path to stay with HP.
Were not several Linux groups heavily involved with getting Linux to run/compile on Itanium? I think there *is* an OS for Itanium, there are no real general software applications for it that justify its cost.
As far as software written for it running better, isn't this almost the same argument as software written to take advantage of Altivec on IBM's Power chips?
Sorry, recompiling code for a new processor is...well, it can be a pain in the ass.
Pull your head back into reality. The same argument was made when the Alpha was rolled out. It kicked the universe in every benchmark, even its "peers". Yet where is it now?
Sorry, the x86 dinosaur-Borg continues to roll on in the Opteron, due to its massive inertia of software already written for it, that still works on it reasonably well. Intel did the "forced upgrade" path for 286->386, 386->486 and 486->Pentium. Of the 3, only the '286->386 looks like it was a 0.5->1.0 implementation path. There were cool things on the 286, but they were sort of half-assed/half-baked that worked right on the '386. The other ones seem almost like "point" releases.
How fast could a 90nm strained silicon '486 with 2MB Level 2 Cache run? What if you could put 4 of them in the same package?
At least on Winblows, the Mozilla installer, if you choose the "custom" install option, lets you install, or not, the E-mail portion of mozilla, etc. Since I don't use IRC, I don't install the chatZilla part of it.
Gee, I wonder why Blago got heat from Illinois' legislature regarding drugs from Canada.
Hmm... Searle, Lilly, Abbott Laboratories, Baxtor Intl... There are just a few big pharma/medical companies in Illinois that stand to lose a little bit from this.
Truckers? Well, as much as they are necessary, have you driven on I-80 much? Or been stuck behind a big truck on I-294 (a toll way), etc.?
They can't raise the passenger car toll, so they have to go for the smaller group that actually makes money off of using the highways.
How will it also stop the many parents who just give in?
And how have these "violent" games actually hurt society?
Even after the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" movie, and "Doom", I can't recall ever anyone going on a chainsaw murder spree.
The people who do bad things are just fucked up. How they got there is a different issue, but by the time they're fucked up, it's pretty much immaterial anyways. Whether they use porn, violent video games or Bible verses to fuel their fire, does it matter?
Do we ban churches and TBN because a few paranoid schizophrenics kill a bunch of people because God was telling them to do it?
And, while an FX5200 may *seem* like a crap card, when I bought mine last year for $120, it seemed like a good price point.
There is just no fucking way I could ever justify buying a $400 video card, not even to myself.
Besides, Halo runs just fine with it, once I turned off most of the essential crap (like antialiasing, etc), on my Athlon 1400 to boot.
If I were to recommend a "training" program to FPS players, it would be to play on-line using a slow system with framerate and lag issues. You tend to get VERY good at anticipating where your character might actually be in game space, so that when you do go play on a "real" computer, the game is just so much slower for you it's sick at how easy the game becomes.
Sorry, it's hard to beat a $800 system from Dell, Gateway, HPaq, EMachines that also includes a printer, a 17" lcd monitor, and a decent 3GHz P4.
It's just not possible to do this on your own. Maybe spec from a whitebox seller you could, but not if you're getting your parts off of the retail bin, even if you're buying OEM parts.
For one, buying XP Home/Pro retail eats a good chunk of your budget right there.
Mmm...they didn't. They knew how to navigate. It was not hard to miss the WTC or the Pentagram, because they definitely stand/stood out, especially on a clear, cloudless day. In the WTC's case, it was on the edge of Manhattan Island. They didn't have to navigate through a forest of skyscrapers to get a clean shot at the buildings.
Besides, the "moving map" displays probably did not use GPS, but just simple ol' inertial navigation systems. Knowing you're here, and that NYC is 23deg to the left, is not that hard to do, especially when you just need to get close enough to see the target.
Play around with "Flight Simulator", and you'll see.
funny, a power outage, which, lacking the big cloud of smoke, caused the exact scenario, didn't cause massive problems for most of hte people, it was just a huge pain in the ass, to one degree or another.
The iraqi insurgents are fighting for the US to get the fck out of their country.
No, the "insurgents" are fighting to keep things chaotic, because then they stay in power. The US is just a convenient strawman for them. How many of these so-called insurgents are Iraqis anyways?
To go back to the parent's analogy: seatbelts save lives. Mandatory seatbelt laws violate our freedom. Are such laws wrong?
Hmm... on one hand, yes. One could look at wearing seatbelts while driving as a sign of enlightenment, of interest in one's self-preservation, a prudent safety measure, etc.
On the other hand, too many people *still* think it's safer to be "thrown out" of the car in an accident, and don't wear them. Of course, since most accidents do not involve roll-overs, but instead head-on crashes into other cars or inanimate objects, this is a silly meme, but still a strong one.
A true Darwinist would say that the seat belt laws are bad because it reduces the rate of the population to rid itself of stupidity, and did insurance rates go down in states where these laws were passed? No?
But this doesn't equate to 'jumping to the gun against "terrorism"'. Do we have or not have investigative, legal and other systems to find out about, stop and punish criminal activity? Yes? Did we need the PATRIOT ACT to fight the Mob in the 20's? No, but RICO helped.
I can see pumping money and resources into better intelligence gathering, and all that. The laws should be adequate, no? Did we need these laws to fight espionage against the US during the Cold War? Would they have prevented all the big spy cases of Americans giving info to the USSR? No?
Would 9/11 have happened had the airlines actually accepted simple security measures that had been proposed since the 70's (remember, skyjacking was a pretty common occurance in the 70's)? Probably.
What are the bigger threats? Here in Oregon, it's from methamphetamine addicts and their stupid, half-thought out crimes of intent, or even their stupid random crimes, to support their habit or meth labs.
In other areas, it's from gangs.
But Terrorism is a big bugaboo these days, even though it is just not a plausible threat really for most of the US.
A "dirty bomb" is detonated in Chicago? Bad for Chicago, but not really all that bad for the rest of the US.
The bigger threat of terrorism is just what is happening right now. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
We are reacting now, instead of acting. Our government is acting as much against its own people as it is against any external threat.
The arguments are the same, the contexts are the same, as they have been for every big government powergrab the world over.
How many will die if UBL manages to poison the water supply of a major city?
Come on. Get practical. Do you know how hard it would be to insert a bad chemical compound into the water supply to poison even a small town? Very difficult.
More likely, sabotage to defeat chlorination/ozonation equipment, and just let natural bad stuff like cholera and typhoid eventually run its course, especially if they can redirect some sewage back into the system.
But would this be any worse than a natural disaster affecting the water treatment center of a large city, and the "boil all water before using it for drinking or cooking" orders that come out when this happens?
Poisoning a large lake with a chemical compound seems like a big deal. While it may only take a truck tank load or two of pure poison to kill every fish, it takes quite amount of time for that water to actually make it to a water tap. It not only has to make it past the water treatment center, but along the way, it's exposed to ultraviolet radiation, oxygen and ozone, natural processes, evaporation, etc.
The possibility, though of denying a major city access to a large chunk of its water supply for a period of time, though, has got to be real, but it can only be seen as a short-term threat. But it's no worse, really, than natural bad things that affect it also, like droughts.
Draining a water supply reservoir quickly is probably the biggest problem. It probably wouldn't take much of a truck bomb (water-proofed, of course), with a pressure detonator, to "fall off" of a flat-bed truck on the wet side of Hoover Dam, etc., to detonate about 100' underwater, but it would probably need high velocity explosives, not ammonia nitrate-fuel oil, to do it.
Wallis' "Dam buster" bombs probably have enough research out in the open to make a good conservative guess about what explosive to use, how big to make it, and how far under water given thickness of the dam at that point for maximum effect.
The "war against islamic fundamentalism" is a joke, a propaganda war, at least as far as the US goes. What next, kicking out everyone of Islamic descent? What do you think 7-11 will have to say about that?
It's been going on for longer than most people here realize, it's just finally starting to reach some amount of critical mass.
I fear more in my neck of the woods the establishment of various neo-Christian (intentional link to neo Nazi) groups getting ahold of local and regional governments, and working up from there.
With their cries of intolerance toward Christianity justifying their intolerant view of only their vision of Christianity to be imposed on everyone, they end up just sounding and acting like the Taliban et al.
What will be fun is when the Assembly of God towns have to fight the Methodist county government.
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, while good for the short term, ultimately fail.
The Internet was initially a military system, also. But civilian (originally, just academic) purposes dwarfed the military's use, but the concept was proven enough to justify at least two Military-only versions of the Internet.
The Military also has its own phone network, Autovon. There are actually 16 DTMF sounds, not 12. Autovon uses the other 4. It's possible, from the right phone, to kick everyone off of Autovon so you can make a phone call from that phone...
Which may or may not bother me a bit. When we do something we think is in OUR national interest I couldn't care less what our enemies in Paris think.
It's one thing to not care about the rest of the world. It's quite another to stop caring one drop about your own citizens.
Besides, how does this affect differential GPS?
Besides, isn't one of the things the "terrorists" are good at is long-term observations of their planned targets, and NOT using things like GPS, cell phones, etc. to carry out their attacks?
Is geocaching now perceived to be a terrorist threat?
"Go to 94deg, 53' 54.934" W, 49deg 34' 17.2534". You'll find a nice supply of RPG-7s and Semtex. Have a good day! Allah Akbar."
Oh, I don't know. Go find a coal-fired power plant, and stand down-wind of it.
These things spew far more radioactive material into the atmosphere...
Remember the nuclear-powered Cosmos satellite that crash-landed in Alberta 20 or so years ago? Hmm... REAL significant radiation damage from that. Not.
Well, I would say that in most scenarios, living to see another day is the most basic of successes. In this case, it's having another day to do the test, instead of sending up a very expensive piece of hardware while disregarding any indications that the test should be scrubbed because that piece of hardware was not working right and would have failed misearably (in this case, it probably means launching the interceptor while having to destroy it before it gets a chance to do its thing, or an important telemetry system not working, etc., in other words, there was no purpose to launch the thing).
Do we launch the Space Shuttle because four risk-averse computers can't agree on whether to launch 5 seconds before liftoff? Is that a failure, or in light of Shuttle history, really a big sigh of relief?
Do you think it's easier to tell millions of people "sorry, we'll try again next month", or the obvious "something has happened. Please stay calm. We will let you know as soon as we can"?
And more nations are pursuing nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip to keep the U.S.
No, they're doing it because of their own regional political headgames with their neighbors.
Do you REALLY think Iran's program is to keep the US at bay? Nope. It's to usurp regional dominance when Iraq implodes in a year or two. Keep the Iraqi Shi'ite and Sunnis at each other's throats...
Yes, an anti-SAM device surreptitiously installed on a TWA 747 screwed it up. Instead of a 747 crashing in Long Island Sound, well, the Pentagon's baby got messed up.
The national debt went from $1 trillion or so to over $4 trillion under Reagan.
Perot got the credit, to which the Republicans co-opted the idea to try and screw up Clinton, who then proceeded to co-opt the whole notion himself to help screw over the Republicans in Congress. If you can't fight them, join them.
Budget deficit was shrinking under Clinton, even with a Rebublican-focused Congress.
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shareholders
Let's just be clear about the shareholders that matter.
If you hold a few Apple shares in your 401K/IRA accounts, you do not matter.
If int(my_apple_shares) > 0 then you might matter. Since that includes probably 0.0000001% of slashdot readers, it's essentially a strawman argument.
Since Steve probably has a good chunk of voting Apple shares, his opinion does matter. But Steve's job really depends on the Board of Directors and their confidence in his direction of the company. So he manipulates that perception through wall street results, shareholder meetings, product buzz, corporate karma and brand management, etc., but he's really only concerned about the Board. And Steve J.
What about software support? Will there be periodic updates, and what will pay for the development?
You mean, like, you send out a CD with software upgrades to your registered customers, or make it available by mail for $5 or $10?
But what if it works just fine out of the box?
I've yet to see a firmware upgrade to improve the "software" for PS/2 or XBox from their respective sellers, but they could sure do it if they wanted to.
As far as operating on razor-thin margins, well, do you not think that this would entail someone in Taiwan, India, Korea or China that could put said boxes together for $100-200, leaving you with some room for a decent per-item margin?
It obviously would have to be someone who also puts together "normal" PCs, so as to leech off of their big bulk-buying efficiencies for parts, but it could be done.
For subscription, charge to have the device hooked up to broadband. Hard-wire the website for it to get software from in such a way that it would be hard to spoof with a proxy server. Then, accessing your servers for software "updates" would incur a $5-10 fee. Make this part of the contract.
If your software for the box is even half decent, people might actually go for this, especially if you actually only fix what is broken or remove what is not used (hey, the box could chat back what features are used...). And if people don't want the upgrades, well, that's their choice.
Well, by thriving, no matter how great Microsoft Media Center is, it's not happening in my household.
Not only does it mean yet more money to Microsoft, but it also probably means throwing some money into the black stinking hole that HP has been turned into.
If I get anything, it'll be a DirecTivo box, or I'll build a MythTV box (and wish I had bought that HD tuner card before they put the "broadcast flag" recognizer on it).
Well, you pay for cable/satellite TV for plenty of stations that STILL have commercials. Do you not think that the broadcasters/cable channel programmers will stop enjoying taking $$$ from both sides (i.e., broadcast "fees" for satellite/cable, and take advertisement $$$)?
Even the Disney channel finally started slipping commercials for non-Disney shit into their needless half-hour breaks. So they're doing it ala PBS, but it's still a commercial (the one I noticed was for McCrapald's).
Advertisements will eventually creep into Sirius/XM channels as well. It's too hard to resist getting money from both ends, subscribers as well as advertisers.
Opteron won't compete with compute-intensive or database-critical applications. ...I think most database-critical applications and systems are I/O-intensive, not compute-intensive.
Otherwise, things like partitioned tables, physical database layout (spread as many different I/O operations on as much I/O hardware -- disks, RAID controllers, SCSI, etc as possible to parallelize disk I/O), etc. would be a secondary issue.
Err, I should have done this...
Sorry, recompiling code for a new processor is...well, it can be a pain in the ass.
Pull your head back into reality. The same argument was made when the Alpha was rolled out. It kicked the universe in every benchmark, even its "peers". Yet where is it now?
Sorry, the x86 dinosaur-Borg continues to roll on in the Opteron, due to its massive inertia of software already written for it, that still works on it reasonably well. Intel did the "forced upgrade" path for 286->386, 386->486 and 486->Pentium. Of the 3, only the '286->386 looks like it was a 0.5->1.0 implementation path. There were cool things on the 286, but they were sort of half-assed/half-baked that worked right on the '386. The other ones seem almost like "point" releases.
How fast could a 90nm strained silicon '486 with 2MB Level 2 Cache run? What if you could put 4 of them in the same package?
It's almost like cars. It's hard to beat the good ol' rusty American push-rod V-8. Sure, some engines come close (the engine in the S-2000, several others) in some areas, but...dang me, that dinosaur tech V-8 just keeps rolling on. We (include me) decry how "inefficient" they appear to be, but...compared to a 180HP/170 ft-lb torque 350 V-8 that would get *maybe* 15 mpg on the highway in the 70's now has been tricked and tuned with modern engine controls to put out over 300 HP *and* get over 20mpg on the highway.
It's also a freakin' flexible engine. More torque? easy enough to do. More HP? Because it's so ubiquitous, taking a regular ol' V-8 and throwing a couple of thousand dollars' worth of parts and time at it, and it's a 500 HP, 8000 max RPM racing engine, *without* using various gee-gaws that are popular in the import tuner market, including go-fast stickers.
Sure, a 4 liter DOHC V-12 that redlines at 11000 RPM puts out more HP and torque than the engine in a Corvette, is more flexible (i.e., pulling from 4th gear or something insane like that), etc., but the 'Vette's engine costs less than a valve adjustment on the Ferarri engine.
What this loss for HP really means is that HP's legacy system customers have just about lost their upgrade path to stay with HP.
Were not several Linux groups heavily involved with getting Linux to run/compile on Itanium? I think there *is* an OS for Itanium, there are no real general software applications for it that justify its cost.
As far as software written for it running better, isn't this almost the same argument as software written to take advantage of Altivec on IBM's Power chips?
Sorry, recompiling code for a new processor is...well, it can be a pain in the ass.
Pull your head back into reality. The same argument was made when the Alpha was rolled out. It kicked the universe in every benchmark, even its "peers". Yet where is it now?
Sorry, the x86 dinosaur-Borg continues to roll on in the Opteron, due to its massive inertia of software already written for it, that still works on it reasonably well. Intel did the "forced upgrade" path for 286->386, 386->486 and 486->Pentium. Of the 3, only the '286->386 looks like it was a 0.5->1.0 implementation path. There were cool things on the 286, but they were sort of half-assed/half-baked that worked right on the '386. The other ones seem almost like "point" releases.
How fast could a 90nm strained silicon '486 with 2MB Level 2 Cache run? What if you could put 4 of them in the same package?
At least on Winblows, the Mozilla installer, if you choose the "custom" install option, lets you install, or not, the E-mail portion of mozilla, etc. Since I don't use IRC, I don't install the chatZilla part of it.
...then make a bunch of cod liver oil cookies (replace vegie oil/shortening with cod liver oil), and let them loose on those puppies.
Sure, there are benefits from the cod liver oil...
Convince them that the dinner tastes better than dessert, and you'll be OK.
Gee, I wonder why Blago got heat from Illinois' legislature regarding drugs from Canada.
Hmm... Searle, Lilly, Abbott Laboratories, Baxtor Intl... There are just a few big pharma/medical companies in Illinois that stand to lose a little bit from this.
Truckers? Well, as much as they are necessary, have you driven on I-80 much? Or been stuck behind a big truck on I-294 (a toll way), etc.?
They can't raise the passenger car toll, so they have to go for the smaller group that actually makes money off of using the highways.
And, hurt arcades? Get out of here. Really.
...and how will this stop on-line sales?
How will it also stop the many parents who just give in?
And how have these "violent" games actually hurt society?
Even after the "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" movie, and "Doom", I can't recall ever anyone going on a chainsaw murder spree.
The people who do bad things are just fucked up. How they got there is a different issue, but by the time they're fucked up, it's pretty much immaterial anyways. Whether they use porn, violent video games or Bible verses to fuel their fire, does it matter?
Do we ban churches and TBN because a few paranoid schizophrenics kill a bunch of people because God was telling them to do it?
And, while an FX5200 may *seem* like a crap card, when I bought mine last year for $120, it seemed like a good price point.
There is just no fucking way I could ever justify buying a $400 video card, not even to myself.
Besides, Halo runs just fine with it, once I turned off most of the essential crap (like antialiasing, etc), on my Athlon 1400 to boot.
If I were to recommend a "training" program to FPS players, it would be to play on-line using a slow system with framerate and lag issues. You tend to get VERY good at anticipating where your character might actually be in game space, so that when you do go play on a "real" computer, the game is just so much slower for you it's sick at how easy the game becomes.
Sorry, it's hard to beat a $800 system from Dell, Gateway, HPaq, EMachines that also includes a printer, a 17" lcd monitor, and a decent 3GHz P4.
It's just not possible to do this on your own. Maybe spec from a whitebox seller you could, but not if you're getting your parts off of the retail bin, even if you're buying OEM parts.
For one, buying XP Home/Pro retail eats a good chunk of your budget right there.
Mmm...they didn't. They knew how to navigate. It was not hard to miss the WTC or the Pentagram, because they definitely stand/stood out, especially on a clear, cloudless day. In the WTC's case, it was on the edge of Manhattan Island. They didn't have to navigate through a forest of skyscrapers to get a clean shot at the buildings.
Besides, the "moving map" displays probably did not use GPS, but just simple ol' inertial navigation systems. Knowing you're here, and that NYC is 23deg to the left, is not that hard to do, especially when you just need to get close enough to see the target.
Play around with "Flight Simulator", and you'll see.
funny, a power outage, which, lacking the big cloud of smoke, caused the exact scenario, didn't cause massive problems for most of hte people, it was just a huge pain in the ass, to one degree or another.
The iraqi insurgents are fighting for the US to get the fck out of their country.
No, the "insurgents" are fighting to keep things chaotic, because then they stay in power. The US is just a convenient strawman for them. How many of these so-called insurgents are Iraqis anyways?
The key words are: Power.
Everything else is irrelevant.
To go back to the parent's analogy: seatbelts save lives. Mandatory seatbelt laws violate our freedom. Are such laws wrong?
Hmm... on one hand, yes. One could look at wearing seatbelts while driving as a sign of enlightenment, of interest in one's self-preservation, a prudent safety measure, etc.
On the other hand, too many people *still* think it's safer to be "thrown out" of the car in an accident, and don't wear them. Of course, since most accidents do not involve roll-overs, but instead head-on crashes into other cars or inanimate objects, this is a silly meme, but still a strong one.
A true Darwinist would say that the seat belt laws are bad because it reduces the rate of the population to rid itself of stupidity, and did insurance rates go down in states where these laws were passed? No?
But this doesn't equate to 'jumping to the gun against "terrorism"'. Do we have or not have investigative, legal and other systems to find out about, stop and punish criminal activity? Yes? Did we need the PATRIOT ACT to fight the Mob in the 20's? No, but RICO helped.
I can see pumping money and resources into better intelligence gathering, and all that. The laws should be adequate, no? Did we need these laws to fight espionage against the US during the Cold War? Would they have prevented all the big spy cases of Americans giving info to the USSR? No?
Would 9/11 have happened had the airlines actually accepted simple security measures that had been proposed since the 70's (remember, skyjacking was a pretty common occurance in the 70's)? Probably.
What are the bigger threats? Here in Oregon, it's from methamphetamine addicts and their stupid, half-thought out crimes of intent, or even their stupid random crimes, to support their habit or meth labs.
In other areas, it's from gangs.
But Terrorism is a big bugaboo these days, even though it is just not a plausible threat really for most of the US.
A "dirty bomb" is detonated in Chicago? Bad for Chicago, but not really all that bad for the rest of the US.
The bigger threat of terrorism is just what is happening right now. Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.
We are reacting now, instead of acting. Our government is acting as much against its own people as it is against any external threat.
The arguments are the same, the contexts are the same, as they have been for every big government powergrab the world over.
How many will die if UBL manages to poison the water supply of a major city?
Come on. Get practical. Do you know how hard it would be to insert a bad chemical compound into the water supply to poison even a small town? Very difficult.
More likely, sabotage to defeat chlorination/ozonation equipment, and just let natural bad stuff like cholera and typhoid eventually run its course, especially if they can redirect some sewage back into the system.
But would this be any worse than a natural disaster affecting the water treatment center of a large city, and the "boil all water before using it for drinking or cooking" orders that come out when this happens?
Poisoning a large lake with a chemical compound seems like a big deal. While it may only take a truck tank load or two of pure poison to kill every fish, it takes quite amount of time for that water to actually make it to a water tap. It not only has to make it past the water treatment center, but along the way, it's exposed to ultraviolet radiation, oxygen and ozone, natural processes, evaporation, etc.
The possibility, though of denying a major city access to a large chunk of its water supply for a period of time, though, has got to be real, but it can only be seen as a short-term threat. But it's no worse, really, than natural bad things that affect it also, like droughts.
Draining a water supply reservoir quickly is probably the biggest problem. It probably wouldn't take much of a truck bomb (water-proofed, of course), with a pressure detonator, to "fall off" of a flat-bed truck on the wet side of Hoover Dam, etc., to detonate about 100' underwater, but it would probably need high velocity explosives, not ammonia nitrate-fuel oil, to do it.
Wallis' "Dam buster" bombs probably have enough research out in the open to make a good conservative guess about what explosive to use, how big to make it, and how far under water given thickness of the dam at that point for maximum effect.
The "war against islamic fundamentalism" is a joke, a propaganda war, at least as far as the US goes. What next, kicking out everyone of Islamic descent? What do you think 7-11 will have to say about that?
It's been going on for longer than most people here realize, it's just finally starting to reach some amount of critical mass.
I fear more in my neck of the woods the establishment of various neo-Christian (intentional link to neo Nazi) groups getting ahold of local and regional governments, and working up from there.
With their cries of intolerance toward Christianity justifying their intolerant view of only their vision of Christianity to be imposed on everyone, they end up just sounding and acting like the Taliban et al.
What will be fun is when the Assembly of God towns have to fight the Methodist county government.
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, while good for the short term, ultimately fail.
The Internet was initially a military system, also. But civilian (originally, just academic) purposes dwarfed the military's use, but the concept was proven enough to justify at least two Military-only versions of the Internet.
The Military also has its own phone network, Autovon. There are actually 16 DTMF sounds, not 12. Autovon uses the other 4. It's possible, from the right phone, to kick everyone off of Autovon so you can make a phone call from that phone...
Which may or may not bother me a bit. When we do something we think is in OUR national interest I couldn't care less what our enemies in Paris think.
It's one thing to not care about the rest of the world. It's quite another to stop caring one drop about your own citizens.
Besides, how does this affect differential GPS?
Besides, isn't one of the things the "terrorists" are good at is long-term observations of their planned targets, and NOT using things like GPS, cell phones, etc. to carry out their attacks?
Is geocaching now perceived to be a terrorist threat?
"Go to 94deg, 53' 54.934" W, 49deg 34' 17.2534". You'll find a nice supply of RPG-7s and Semtex. Have a good day! Allah Akbar."
Oh, I don't know. Go find a coal-fired power plant, and stand down-wind of it.
These things spew far more radioactive material into the atmosphere...
Remember the nuclear-powered Cosmos satellite that crash-landed in Alberta 20 or so years ago? Hmm... REAL significant radiation damage from that. Not.
Well, I would say that in most scenarios, living to see another day is the most basic of successes. In this case, it's having another day to do the test, instead of sending up a very expensive piece of hardware while disregarding any indications that the test should be scrubbed because that piece of hardware was not working right and would have failed misearably (in this case, it probably means launching the interceptor while having to destroy it before it gets a chance to do its thing, or an important telemetry system not working, etc., in other words, there was no purpose to launch the thing).
Do we launch the Space Shuttle because four risk-averse computers can't agree on whether to launch 5 seconds before liftoff? Is that a failure, or in light of Shuttle history, really a big sigh of relief?
Do you think it's easier to tell millions of people "sorry, we'll try again next month", or the obvious "something has happened. Please stay calm. We will let you know as soon as we can"?
And more nations are pursuing nuclear weapons as a bargaining chip to keep the U.S.
No, they're doing it because of their own regional political headgames with their neighbors.
Do you REALLY think Iran's program is to keep the US at bay? Nope. It's to usurp regional dominance when Iraq implodes in a year or two. Keep the Iraqi Shi'ite and Sunnis at each other's throats...
Yes, an anti-SAM device surreptitiously installed on a TWA 747 screwed it up. Instead of a 747 crashing in Long Island Sound, well, the Pentagon's baby got messed up.
The national debt went from $1 trillion or so to over $4 trillion under Reagan.
Perot got the credit, to which the Republicans co-opted the idea to try and screw up Clinton, who then proceeded to co-opt the whole notion himself to help screw over the Republicans in Congress. If you can't fight them, join them.
Budget deficit was shrinking under Clinton, even with a Rebublican-focused Congress.
What is US debt at now, $7.5 Trillion?