After that, the non-work traffic dwindles to next to nil.
No, that's when they grumble under their breath and just plug in their Wifi USB sticks and use a nearby network:)
It's not difficult to cut the company out of the loop when you have Wifi access.
There are so many annoying restrictions at work, that a few people I know just take their own laptops. They then just plug in the monitor and keyboard to the laptop so that everything looks normal. I don't really like the idea of people being able to remotely look at my screen. You may as well just put video cameras behind everyone and remind people that "we can switch to your camera at any time". Just because technology makes snooping easier, it doesn't mean we should take advantage of it.
I think what is more important is the field of view you cram that amazing resolution into. People buy these huge expensive TVs but when you look at the size and distance they sit away from them, it often works out less that the field of view you get sitting in front of a 19" Monitor.
When it comes to head mounted displays (which we will see more and more of in years to come) the advertisers deliberately disguise the size of the screen. They start saying how the picture is like looking at a 90" screen 50 feet away, or some other awkward combination of figures you have no feel for. What you do have a feel for is a screen that is 2 feet away, your computer monitor. If a company said...
Our amazing new Viso-Glasses give true cinema performance. They are like watching a 14 inch screen, 2 feet away.
You would be pretty unimpressed since you know how crappy a 14" monitor looks (especially if you worked for the same cheapskate software company I did:) ). If on the other hand they say...
They are like watching a 70 inch screen, 10 feet away.
Then you will be much more impressed, yet it is the same field of view (it's just linear, double the distance and you double the screen size to get the same FOV). Now 70 inches at 10 feet sounds quite a bit like what you might get in your home if you've just spent $4000 on 70 inch plasma screen and put it in your living room. I suggest that you save your money and instead buy a good computer monitor and put it 2 feet away. You can get a bigger FOV and the same resolution for a much lower cost than those crazy 70" screens. We can all save a fortune by moving things closer to our eyes!
Tension between the Islamic world and the west will remain...
Imagine that by chance the Middle East had turned out to be mostly Hindu, and Islam was confined to poor resourceless areas of Africa. Do you still think that Islam would be a problem? Do you think that for some reason those Islamic people in the depths of Africa would have some irrational hatred of the US?
Of course not. We would instead be asking why Hindus hate the west so much. The fact is that there has been so much western meddling in the Middle East over the oil resources that a large number of people there are against the west. Back in the 50s Eisenhower wanted to know why there was a campaign of hatred against the US by the people of the Middle East. He was told that there was a perception that the US was supporting dictators and stifling democracy. He was also told that it was a difficult opinion to counter because it was correct.
Even now, some 50 years after Ike asked the question, we find ourselves occupying Iraq with a million Iraqis on the streets telling us to get out. This was after kicking out a dictator that we had supported for many years in full knowledge of the crimes he was committing. We even supported/encouraged him in his war on Iran as punishment for kicking out the dictator we had installed there. Aside from Iraq (which I'm sure everyone is tired of) we are still supporting a brutal regime in Saudi Arabia. Imagine how the Saudi people feel about the US and UK. We are actively supporting the people who are oppressing them and they are well aware of it. Do you think that for some reason they might be angry with the US and UK? If so, do you think it is because they are Islamic, or because we are supporting their dictators?
Thanks to John Bolton (as much as it pains me to thank him) there is now no doubt why the US kept blocking a ceasefire in the Lebanon conflict last year. While the conflict was going on and the carnage was clear on all our TV screens, the US was resupplying Israel with new weapons via UK airports and blocking any ceasefire so that Israel could "win". Do you think that this will have generated much anger in the region, and will that anger be due to the fact that they are Islamic or rather due to the events that occurred?
My point is that it's not Islam that is the issue, it's really the people of the Middle East, who just happen to be mostly Islamic. It is their anger over the things we have done and the things we continue to do. If you have a whole region that's quite angry at the west, it stands to reason there will be a fair number who are insanely angry with the west. Those are the people we are now (supposedly) fighting and in the process generating more of. If you want to reduce terrorism you have to stop generating so much anger. That means no more invasions, coups, support for brutal dictatorships or other aggressive interference in the Middle East.
The company I used to work for had absolutely no concept of the value of employees time whatsoever. They would happily waste several thousand pounds of man time trying to fix a crappy old machine rather than spend a few hundred buying a new one.
Eventually they announced that there would be no more sick pay either, which resulted in sick people coming in sneezing everywhere. Another brilliant cost-cutting measure. Needless to say, I left soon after.
On the net, the police can't really intimidate you, tazer you, kick you in the ribs while you're down or corral you into a "Free Speech Zone". The only question is whether you can generate as much publicity as with a protest. I think the answer is yes. After all, just look at the successes of propaganda.
This may be the way to go really because our governments are increasingly trying to prevent protests via new laws. In the UK we have a wide protest exclusion Zone around Parliament, which is really designed to push protests away into areas that will attract less media attention. Suddenly you find that you can be arrested under terrorism legislation just for having a T-Shirt with an anti-Bush or Blair slogan.
The other problem with physical protests is that even if you manage to get some press, the media often has it in for the protesters. They only have to find one protester out of 100,000 who picks up a brick and he will be on all the front pages.
Police around the world use intimidation to discourage people from attending protests. The article states that the intelligence reports "chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law". They must have known this would come out at some point. Having your name end up on police files for no good reason is precisely the sort of thing that scares many people away from protesting in the first place. One common tactic in the UK is for police forward intelligence units to photograph protesters, making them feel like criminals. This going on all the time.
Now, people may say that what the police did is ok and legal because the meetings were all public, but think about it for a moment. In democratic countries we are supposed to have the right to protest and the purpose of protesting is to make a big noise, attract media attention and make governments change their minds about things. If everyone is arrested on route because the police knew exactly what train people were going to use, no big noise is made at all. That is an affront to our right to protest. The police are not there to protect governments or political parties from embarrassment. That is a complete misuse of the police force, yet it happens routinely. The easier it is for the police to stop people protesting, the worse it is for our democracies.
In the UK we now have the wonderful protest exclusion zone for a kilometer or so around parliament. Although you can apply for permission to protest, any effective protest is now impossible since the police dictate how many people you can have, how many signs you can have etc. It's not so much the protests themselves that the government fears, but rather the media attention that a protest draws. A protest outside parliament is much more attractive to the media than one in some random field, and the government knows this full well. It seems that the police are also briefed to avoid drawing media attention to protests. You will find that when celebrities attend protests, the police tend to keep their distance since their intervention could only result in more media attention.
Nothing they do carries any weight now either, and at least it would serve to highlight the current structural unfairness of the UN.
The only reason the security council's word is law is because it is made up of the superpowers that have the money and military strength to enforce that law.
Is that how you think it should be though? Is that how we as people of the world should organise things? Having the UN actually designed to be unfair from the ground up is no way to go about things. It may be true that the rich and powerful end up having more influence, but you should at least try to organise things in a fair way. For example, in the US Donald Trump probably has more influence over the country than the average man in the street, but at least officially he only gets one vote. Do you think it would be acceptable for society to acknowledge his wealth and power and give him a million votes, whereas everyone else only gets one? Noone would accept that, and neither should the countries of the world.
The rest of the world could form their own UN, but it would be even more of a joke than the current one.
The joke status of the UN is largely down to the actions of the big 5. Many of the very public failures have been down to one or more of them vetoing or threatening to veto. The Rwandan genocide is a case in point. People blame the UN, but they should really be blaming the countries responsible. In the case of Rwanda it was the US and France preventing even the word "Genocide" being used in any of the official documents. The big 5 actually want the UN to be an ineffective joke. If it was not, it would be a threat to their power.
Without the money and power to back their resolutions, the resolutions themselves are meaningless in the real world
The collective power of the rest of the world might not be as pathetic as you think, especially when you consider India. Perhaps if they felt they were getting an equal say in things, countries would be more prepared to offer military support. They may not be able to deal with large scale invasions of Iran, but frankly we can do without that sort of thing. Something like a crisis in an African country might be manageable though, and those are the things over which the UN (read the big 5) is typical inactive.
"Is there even a point to voting any more if the will of the people can so easily be subverted by two people?"
Sadly it's just a microcosm of the wider world. The UN General Assembly (i.e. The rest of the world) can vote all it likes but it's resolutions are non-binding. Yet when just a handful of countries vote (the Security Council) their word is law. The 5 permanent members ("permanent" already being an affront to any kind of democracy) also have veto power over everyone else. It's so ridiculously undemocratic, I'm not really sure why anyone bothers turning up. I think the rest of the world should set up their own UN, where countries have an equal say. If you think that countries should have unequal representation, it should be based on population count not wealth since you would not like rich people in your own country to have more votes than you, would you?
If you show keenness or interest in a subject at school, you are already likely to be treated as an outsider. You don't have to be a genius to be an outcast. I think the pressure to conform to the "hive mind" at school is the thing that really holds children back.
If you UKers really cared about it, you'd go into the streets and protest.
Depends what streets you are talking about. If you mean out of the way streets that the media would not be very interested in, then yes. If you are talking about protesting within a kilometre of Parliament, then no. Protests have effectively been made illegal outside parliament and no satisfactory reason has been given. I suspect the real reason is the million strong anti-war march that occurred. That rattled them and they do not want a repeat performance. You can apply to protest, but they give you all kinds of conditions such as you can only have a small group, your placards can only be so big etc etc. Basically the kind of mass protests we have seen in the past will be no more. Not so long ago, a young woman was arrested for simply reading out the names of dead soldiers outside parliament, so they really are enforcing it.
You have the power, you elected those people. Well only 35% or so actually voted for Labour, but due to the crazy "first past the post" system, they won. The problem is that many peoples votes count for nothing if they live in the wrong area. Labour once promised to change the system, but have gone quiet about it.
The other problem is that privacy issues are not really protest material, although they should be. The best we can hope for is lots of negative coverage about it in the press, and other parties coming forward opposed to the measures.
It would be a bit of a dull film since there are really no guns in the UK. You can't want into a shop and buy some and most police don't carry them. It would be down to fist fights or knife fights.
Just because something becomes technologically possible (i.e. mass screening of emails) does not suddenly make it ok. No-one would have accepted such things in the days of snail nail. Can you imagine a democratic leader in the 80s explaining why everyone's letters needed to be steamed open and photocopied to counter the threat of the Soviet Union?
You're much more likely to be killed in a violent mugging than by terrorists. Does that mean we should allow mass email screening to identify muggers? Would they be stupid enough to discuss mugging people in emails if they knew everything was being screened? Of course not, and terrorists aren't stupid enough to discuss terrorism either.
Even if it did catch a few terrorists it's not worth giving up your freedoms for anymore that it would be worth giving them up for the possibility of catching a few more violent criminals. It doesn't take much for a democratic system to lurch towards tyranny and it is the height of stupidity to provide the facilities that make it possible.
Most of the time it is journalists who are prevented from filming violence, particularly when it is possibly criminal and perpetrated by their own countries.
Some SciFi is getting better at this, e.g. the new Battlestar Galactica, but it's still a staple of Hollywood effects.
Normal Guns Don't produce Huge Muzzleflash
Muzzle flash is bad for all kinds of reasons, e.g. It gives your position away. Yet, whenever someone fires a gun on TV there is a huge flame-thrower effect coming out the front. Real weapons tend not to do that, but they probably just look pathetic on film.
As I look out of my window in Thurrock (15 Miles east of London), there are not to many clouds in the sky. However, you can rest assured that as soon as they hear about the Lunar eclipse they will be out in force.
Surely the encoded information (although useful to us) is completely useless in terms of increasing the likelihood of survival. So surely it would naturally decay away due to mutations etc. i.e. There would be no selection pressure for keeping the sequence.
Even "enemies" of the US still sell oil to the US. With Saudi Arabia there is a bit more of a special relationship which makes sure the money flows to New York and London rather than the Saudi people.
When was the last time the United States expressed a serious intent to launch a first strike with ICBMs against civilian targets? Or Russia? Or Franch? Or Britain? Or Israel?
We actually Geoff Hoon did in the commons in 2003. He threatened to use them against Iraq "under the right conditions". It was quite serious really since it broke the unwritten rule that non-nuclear states would not be nuked, and thus ended one of the main incentives for remaining non-nuclear. In fact non-nuclear states have been trying for years to get formal assurances that they would never be targeted by the nuclear powers, but so far the big 5 have been reluctant to offer such guarantees.
The Israelis have nukes as a form of deterrance against nuclear or non-nuclear attack by surrounding nations-it's that simple. So only some countries are allowed to have deterrents then? Responsible countries that drop tonnes of cluster bombs in civilian areas?
Do the Israelis have a cultural or political drive to try to annihilate the Middle East?
Perhaps not, but neither does Iran. Aside from the unwanted US-Backed Iran-Iraq war, when has Iran attacked its neighbours? When has Iran flown jets over another country and bombed its facilities?
The treaty itself is pretty clear, it demands disarmament. However, your right in the sense that the nuclear powers never had any intention of disarming and that they intended to use the treaty for their own ends.
You say the Russians disregarded it, but what real evidence is there of that? The Russians were happy with the treaty since it meant they did not have to compete in an Anti-Ballistic missile race at the same time as competing in a missile race. It may be the case that MIRVs (Multiple Warheads) make ABM systems fairly useless, but the Russians cannot take that risk. They, and China, will have to take steps.
So Iran, a country with no nuclear weapons at all, is the threat? There is no evidence of a weapons program, only vague allegations. Why are we so focused on Iran when it is the existing nuclear powers that present the real nuclear threat. None of the nuclear powers have any intention of disarming, which they are required to due under article VI of the NPT. And I mean fully disarm, not get rid of a few missiles as a token gesture.
The US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 based on the flimsy excuse that the Soviet Union non longer existed, when we all knew Russia was effectively taking over in that role. Now the US is actively pursuing an ABM system and the Russians are getting quite twitchy about it. This presents much more of a nuclear threat than Iran's civilian nuclear program. Why are the media not continually harassing the US over the issue and accusing them of threatening world peace?
Clearly the US sets the news agenda, so perhaps the relative silence over the ABM threat is not surprising (even if it should be). If it is taboo to talk about the existing nuclear powers as the real threat, what about Saudi Arabia? There have been a number of independent reports over several years which claim Saudi Arabia is pursuing a secret nuclear program with Pakistan. Why is this being ignored. Could it possibly be because they are an ally?
To wit, the US, Britain, and the other original nuclear powers must work to reduce their nuclear weapons stockpiles (which they are doing), and every other signatory must not undertake to obtain nuclear weapons. Article VI of the NPT says...
Each of the Parties to the Treaty undertakes to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a Treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control. None of the Nuclear powers have any intention of disarming themselves of nuclear weapons. That much is clear. The NPT was never meant to be an agreement which permanently legitimises nuclear apartheid. It is the failure to disarm that presents the real nuclear threat, not Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons program.
The IAEA and the UN are not satisfied as to Iran's intentions vis a vis nuclear weapons research. Well it's difficult to guess what peoples intention are. You can't base policy around that. Neither the IAEA or CIA have any real evidence of a nuclear weapons program.
I'm talking about reflected rays hitting other soldiers. Imagine if you had a powerful laser pistol. You could shoot the man in front of you, but the reflected light would also blind you and anyone near you. Unless you were wearing goggles that block that wavelength.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's when they grumble under their breath and just plug in their Wifi USB sticks and use a nearby network
There are so many annoying restrictions at work, that a few people I know just take their own laptops. They then just plug in the monitor and keyboard to the laptop so that everything looks normal. I don't really like the idea of people being able to remotely look at my screen. You may as well just put video cameras behind everyone and remind people that "we can switch to your camera at any time". Just because technology makes snooping easier, it doesn't mean we should take advantage of it.
When it comes to head mounted displays (which we will see more and more of in years to come) the advertisers deliberately disguise the size of the screen. They start saying how the picture is like looking at a 90" screen 50 feet away, or some other awkward combination of figures you have no feel for. What you do have a feel for is a screen that is 2 feet away, your computer monitor. If a company said...
Our amazing new Viso-Glasses give true cinema performance. They are like watching a 14 inch screen, 2 feet away.
You would be pretty unimpressed since you know how crappy a 14" monitor looks (especially if you worked for the same cheapskate software company I did
They are like watching a 70 inch screen, 10 feet away.
Then you will be much more impressed, yet it is the same field of view (it's just linear, double the distance and you double the screen size to get the same FOV). Now 70 inches at 10 feet sounds quite a bit like what you might get in your home if you've just spent $4000 on 70 inch plasma screen and put it in your living room. I suggest that you save your money and instead buy a good computer monitor and put it 2 feet away. You can get a bigger FOV and the same resolution for a much lower cost than those crazy 70" screens. We can all save a fortune by moving things closer to our eyes!
Imagine that by chance the Middle East had turned out to be mostly Hindu, and Islam was confined to poor resourceless areas of Africa. Do you still think that Islam would be a problem? Do you think that for some reason those Islamic people in the depths of Africa would have some irrational hatred of the US?
Of course not. We would instead be asking why Hindus hate the west so much. The fact is that there has been so much western meddling in the Middle East over the oil resources that a large number of people there are against the west. Back in the 50s Eisenhower wanted to know why there was a campaign of hatred against the US by the people of the Middle East. He was told that there was a perception that the US was supporting dictators and stifling democracy. He was also told that it was a difficult opinion to counter because it was correct.
Even now, some 50 years after Ike asked the question, we find ourselves occupying Iraq with a million Iraqis on the streets telling us to get out. This was after kicking out a dictator that we had supported for many years in full knowledge of the crimes he was committing. We even supported/encouraged him in his war on Iran as punishment for kicking out the dictator we had installed there. Aside from Iraq (which I'm sure everyone is tired of) we are still supporting a brutal regime in Saudi Arabia. Imagine how the Saudi people feel about the US and UK. We are actively supporting the people who are oppressing them and they are well aware of it. Do you think that for some reason they might be angry with the US and UK? If so, do you think it is because they are Islamic, or because we are supporting their dictators?
Thanks to John Bolton (as much as it pains me to thank him) there is now no doubt why the US kept blocking a ceasefire in the Lebanon conflict last year. While the conflict was going on and the carnage was clear on all our TV screens, the US was resupplying Israel with new weapons via UK airports and blocking any ceasefire so that Israel could "win". Do you think that this will have generated much anger in the region, and will that anger be due to the fact that they are Islamic or rather due to the events that occurred?
My point is that it's not Islam that is the issue, it's really the people of the Middle East, who just happen to be mostly Islamic. It is their anger over the things we have done and the things we continue to do. If you have a whole region that's quite angry at the west, it stands to reason there will be a fair number who are insanely angry with the west. Those are the people we are now (supposedly) fighting and in the process generating more of. If you want to reduce terrorism you have to stop generating so much anger. That means no more invasions, coups, support for brutal dictatorships or other aggressive interference in the Middle East.
The company I used to work for had absolutely no concept of the value of employees time whatsoever. They would happily waste several thousand pounds of man time trying to fix a crappy old machine rather than spend a few hundred buying a new one.
Eventually they announced that there would be no more sick pay either, which resulted in sick people coming in sneezing everywhere. Another brilliant cost-cutting measure. Needless to say, I left soon after.
How would the planet orbit them though?
Would it have to be far enough away so they appeared as one, or go into some crazy chaotic close orbit?
On the net, the police can't really intimidate you, tazer you, kick you in the ribs while you're down or corral you into a "Free Speech Zone". The only question is whether you can generate as much publicity as with a protest. I think the answer is yes. After all, just look at the successes of propaganda.
This may be the way to go really because our governments are increasingly trying to prevent protests via new laws. In the UK we have a wide protest exclusion Zone around Parliament, which is really designed to push protests away into areas that will attract less media attention. Suddenly you find that you can be arrested under terrorism legislation just for having a T-Shirt with an anti-Bush or Blair slogan.
The other problem with physical protests is that even if you manage to get some press, the media often has it in for the protesters. They only have to find one protester out of 100,000 who picks up a brick and he will be on all the front pages.
Police around the world use intimidation to discourage people from attending protests. The article states that the intelligence reports "chronicled the views and plans of people who had no apparent intention of breaking the law". They must have known this would come out at some point. Having your name end up on police files for no good reason is precisely the sort of thing that scares many people away from protesting in the first place. One common tactic in the UK is for police forward intelligence units to photograph protesters, making them feel like criminals. This going on all the time.
Now, people may say that what the police did is ok and legal because the meetings were all public, but think about it for a moment. In democratic countries we are supposed to have the right to protest and the purpose of protesting is to make a big noise, attract media attention and make governments change their minds about things. If everyone is arrested on route because the police knew exactly what train people were going to use, no big noise is made at all. That is an affront to our right to protest. The police are not there to protect governments or political parties from embarrassment. That is a complete misuse of the police force, yet it happens routinely. The easier it is for the police to stop people protesting, the worse it is for our democracies.
In the UK we now have the wonderful protest exclusion zone for a kilometer or so around parliament. Although you can apply for permission to protest, any effective protest is now impossible since the police dictate how many people you can have, how many signs you can have etc. It's not so much the protests themselves that the government fears, but rather the media attention that a protest draws. A protest outside parliament is much more attractive to the media than one in some random field, and the government knows this full well. It seems that the police are also briefed to avoid drawing media attention to protests. You will find that when celebrities attend protests, the police tend to keep their distance since their intervention could only result in more media attention.
Nothing they do carries any weight now either, and at least it would serve to highlight the current structural unfairness of the UN.
The only reason the security council's word is law is because it is made up of the superpowers that have the money and military strength to enforce that law.
Is that how you think it should be though? Is that how we as people of the world should organise things? Having the UN actually designed to be unfair from the ground up is no way to go about things. It may be true that the rich and powerful end up having more influence, but you should at least try to organise things in a fair way. For example, in the US Donald Trump probably has more influence over the country than the average man in the street, but at least officially he only gets one vote. Do you think it would be acceptable for society to acknowledge his wealth and power and give him a million votes, whereas everyone else only gets one? Noone would accept that, and neither should the countries of the world.
The rest of the world could form their own UN, but it would be even more of a joke than the current one.
The joke status of the UN is largely down to the actions of the big 5. Many of the very public failures have been down to one or more of them vetoing or threatening to veto. The Rwandan genocide is a case in point. People blame the UN, but they should really be blaming the countries responsible. In the case of Rwanda it was the US and France preventing even the word "Genocide" being used in any of the official documents. The big 5 actually want the UN to be an ineffective joke. If it was not, it would be a threat to their power.
Without the money and power to back their resolutions, the resolutions themselves are meaningless in the real world
The collective power of the rest of the world might not be as pathetic as you think, especially when you consider India. Perhaps if they felt they were getting an equal say in things, countries would be more prepared to offer military support. They may not be able to deal with large scale invasions of Iran, but frankly we can do without that sort of thing. Something like a crisis in an African country might be manageable though, and those are the things over which the UN (read the big 5) is typical inactive.
Sadly it's just a microcosm of the wider world. The UN General Assembly (i.e. The rest of the world) can vote all it likes but it's resolutions are non-binding. Yet when just a handful of countries vote (the Security Council) their word is law. The 5 permanent members ("permanent" already being an affront to any kind of democracy) also have veto power over everyone else. It's so ridiculously undemocratic, I'm not really sure why anyone bothers turning up. I think the rest of the world should set up their own UN, where countries have an equal say. If you think that countries should have unequal representation, it should be based on population count not wealth since you would not like rich people in your own country to have more votes than you, would you?
If you show keenness or interest in a subject at school, you are already likely to be treated as an outsider. You don't have to be a genius to be an outcast. I think the pressure to conform to the "hive mind" at school is the thing that really holds children back.
Depends what streets you are talking about. If you mean out of the way streets that the media would not be very interested in, then yes. If you are talking about protesting within a kilometre of Parliament, then no. Protests have effectively been made illegal outside parliament and no satisfactory reason has been given. I suspect the real reason is the million strong anti-war march that occurred. That rattled them and they do not want a repeat performance. You can apply to protest, but they give you all kinds of conditions such as you can only have a small group, your placards can only be so big etc etc. Basically the kind of mass protests we have seen in the past will be no more. Not so long ago, a young woman was arrested for simply reading out the names of dead soldiers outside parliament, so they really are enforcing it.
You have the power, you elected those people. Well only 35% or so actually voted for Labour, but due to the crazy "first past the post" system, they won. The problem is that many peoples votes count for nothing if they live in the wrong area. Labour once promised to change the system, but have gone quiet about it.
The other problem is that privacy issues are not really protest material, although they should be. The best we can hope for is lots of negative coverage about it in the press, and other parties coming forward opposed to the measures.
Surely the ability for people to address the public anonymously is beneficial and should be protected. e.g. Anonymous whistle-blowers.
It would be a bit of a dull film since there are really no guns in the UK. You can't want into a shop and buy some and most police don't carry them. It would be down to fist fights or knife fights.
Just because something becomes technologically possible (i.e. mass screening of emails) does not suddenly make it ok. No-one would have accepted such things in the days of snail nail. Can you imagine a democratic leader in the 80s explaining why everyone's letters needed to be steamed open and photocopied to counter the threat of the Soviet Union?
You're much more likely to be killed in a violent mugging than by terrorists. Does that mean we should allow mass email screening to identify muggers? Would they be stupid enough to discuss mugging people in emails if they knew everything was being screened? Of course not, and terrorists aren't stupid enough to discuss terrorism either.
Even if it did catch a few terrorists it's not worth giving up your freedoms for anymore that it would be worth giving them up for the possibility of catching a few more violent criminals. It doesn't take much for a democratic system to lurch towards tyranny and it is the height of stupidity to provide the facilities that make it possible.
Most of the time it is journalists who are prevented from filming violence, particularly when it is possibly criminal and perpetrated by their own countries.
e.g. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/6419235.stm
People Don't Explode in a Vacuum
Some SciFi is getting better at this, e.g. the new Battlestar Galactica, but it's still a staple of Hollywood effects.
Normal Guns Don't produce Huge Muzzleflash
Muzzle flash is bad for all kinds of reasons, e.g. It gives your position away. Yet, whenever someone fires a gun on TV there is a huge flame-thrower effect coming out the front. Real weapons tend not to do that, but they probably just look pathetic on film.
As I look out of my window in Thurrock (15 Miles east of London), there are not to many clouds in the sky. However, you can rest assured that as soon as they hear about the Lunar eclipse they will be out in force.
Surely the encoded information (although useful to us) is completely useless in terms of increasing the likelihood of survival. So surely it would naturally decay away due to mutations etc. i.e. There would be no selection pressure for keeping the sequence.
Even "enemies" of the US still sell oil to the US. With Saudi Arabia there is a bit more of a special relationship which makes sure the money flows to New York and London rather than the Saudi people.
We actually Geoff Hoon did in the commons in 2003. He threatened to use them against Iraq "under the right conditions". It was quite serious really since it broke the unwritten rule that non-nuclear states would not be nuked, and thus ended one of the main incentives for remaining non-nuclear. In fact non-nuclear states have been trying for years to get formal assurances that they would never be targeted by the nuclear powers, but so far the big 5 have been reluctant to offer such guarantees.
The Israelis have nukes as a form of deterrance against nuclear or non-nuclear attack by surrounding nations-it's that simple. So only some countries are allowed to have deterrents then? Responsible countries that drop tonnes of cluster bombs in civilian areas?
Do the Israelis have a cultural or political drive to try to annihilate the Middle East?
Perhaps not, but neither does Iran. Aside from the unwanted US-Backed Iran-Iraq war, when has Iran attacked its neighbours? When has Iran flown jets over another country and bombed its facilities?
The treaty itself is pretty clear, it demands disarmament. However, your right in the sense that the nuclear powers never had any intention of disarming and that they intended to use the treaty for their own ends.
You say the Russians disregarded it, but what real evidence is there of that? The Russians were happy with the treaty since it meant they did not have to compete in an Anti-Ballistic missile race at the same time as competing in a missile race. It may be the case that MIRVs (Multiple Warheads) make ABM systems fairly useless, but the Russians cannot take that risk. They, and China, will have to take steps.
So Iran, a country with no nuclear weapons at all, is the threat? There is no evidence of a weapons program, only vague allegations. Why are we so focused on Iran when it is the existing nuclear powers that present the real nuclear threat. None of the nuclear powers have any intention of disarming, which they are required to due under article VI of the NPT. And I mean fully disarm, not get rid of a few missiles as a token gesture.
The US withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 based on the flimsy excuse that the Soviet Union non longer existed, when we all knew Russia was effectively taking over in that role. Now the US is actively pursuing an ABM system and the Russians are getting quite twitchy about it. This presents much more of a nuclear threat than Iran's civilian nuclear program. Why are the media not continually harassing the US over the issue and accusing them of threatening world peace?
Clearly the US sets the news agenda, so perhaps the relative silence over the ABM threat is not surprising (even if it should be). If it is taboo to talk about the existing nuclear powers as the real threat, what about Saudi Arabia? There have been a number of independent reports over several years which claim Saudi Arabia is pursuing a secret nuclear program with Pakistan. Why is this being ignored. Could it possibly be because they are an ally?
I'm talking about reflected rays hitting other soldiers. Imagine if you had a powerful laser pistol. You could shoot the man in front of you, but the reflected light would also blind you and anyone near you. Unless you were wearing goggles that block that wavelength.