Not just that, but also the level of myoglobin in their muscle tissue. Sperm whales have incredible oxygen storage capabilities, and actually collapse their lungs when diving deep.
Your own link shows that the convention is, in point of fact, an annex to the GCs. You even bolded the relevant text. I would consider that a separate entity, but YMMV. Apart from that, what the GP meant was the International Code of Medical Ethics, which is neither part of the GC, nor an annex.
Moreover, the singular term "Geneva Convention" generally refers only to the fourth (and most recent) GC, circa 1949. "Geneva Conventions" plural can refer to all four treaties, however precise usage should involve referring to the specific annex you listed as "The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons". And yes, that is pedantic legal nitpicking on my part, but any lawyer worth his or her salt will back me when I say that precision matters a hell of a lot more in law than in any other part of language.
My point stands that using the singular phrase "Geneva Convention" to refer to all four treaties and their annexes is incorrect, never mind referring to other unconnected laws as such. Moreover, most of the things attached to the GCs have their own identifiers. If it is absolutely necessary to refer to the entire body of international laws of war, other terms should be used instead.
I will concede however that I should have used a phrase other than "literally all there is to them", since it's clear to me now that those words can be interpreted as "there is nothing else remotely connected to the GCs other than the above", which is not quite what I had in mind when I posted.
Noted, thank you. I'll make sure to pay closer attention to the wording, as I'm only marginally familiar with the convention. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the doctors were somehow connected to the state.
For future reference, whenever somebody tells you that "the Geneva Convention says you can/can't do X", that should immediately set off your bullshit detector. The conventions have become a kind of layperson shorthand for "international regulations", so everybody and their dog has some pretty weird notions about what they cover. People see these references to the GCs, assume the person making the reference knows better than they do, and the cycle continues.
The Geneva Conventions cover the treatment, in wartime, of prisoners, wounded, civilians and medics. That is literally all there is to them.
Now, back on to the topic at hand, medical tourism is one of those intractable problems that nobody wants to admit can't be fixed, irrespective of whether they ought to be. The US cannot control where its citizens travel, or what they do in other countries - look for example at the number of American tourists in Cuba, most of whom stopped over somewhere else en route to circumvent the restrictions on traveling there. Actually, this isn't specific to the US; no first world democracy can effectively regulate the actions of their citizens going abroad.
Thus, the only party in this whole affair who have any say in what Americans visiting Thailand can and cannot do is the Thai government. Meaning the only way Americans will stop going to Thai hospitals for dodgy untried treatments is if said hospitals are no longer allowed to offer them (either due to Thailand adopting USFDA style regulations, or by it prosecuting the purveyors of said treatments under existing laws).
Well, industrial welding laser may leave sucking chest wounds. I'm not totally sure though. It would seem that it would burn everything in it's path, so bleeding wouldn't be a problem, but the extra holes for air probably wouldn't be all that good for you.:)
Nah, that's a common misconception. People have it in their head that a laser powerful enough to be considered a weapon would leave a neat little cauterized hole in a person. Like getting stabbed with a razor sharp superheated stiletto. Crops up in science fiction all the time, especially when the author is trying to get away from the pulpy "Raygun" image. This is probably reinforced by the (mis)use of magnifying glasses at high noon that we all dimly remember from our youth.
A high powered laser will do a number of things depending on what wavelength it uses, and how tightly focused the beam is. What it won't do is leave the area surrounding the burn untouched. You won't get a burn here, and perfectly undamaged skin an inch to the left. It could happen that way if the laser is tightly focused in order to leave a very small heat affected zone (important in some industrial applications), but I wouldn't bet on it even then. On a laser powerful enough to cut or weld, you'll get a wide circle of flesh damaged to an increasing degree as you near the center, a deep burn at the point of focus, and water at the wound site flash vaporized to steam, which may further aggravate the injury. Bleeding, and more importantly internal bleeding, may be present, and if the damaged area includes a major blood vessel, then you're about as screwed as if the damaged were caused by anything else.
If flying cars could be made to blow up the enemy, or even just humiliate them, we'd have flying cars. Not to take anything away from the folks at Cal Poly, but I'm still waiting for the next Teflon.
Helicopters fly, can land or take off from a pad not much bigger than your average driveway, and can be less massive than most trucks. For most values of the word, they are "flying cars". Granted, they don't look like a sedan with jump jets (which is what most people think when they hear the phrase), but it's silly to expect a flying car to resemble a ground car in basic shape. And yes, the military does spend loads on designing, testing, building and fielding choppers for use in war.
The problem with the '50s vision of flying cars has never been technological. It's been a host of practical issues, from safety, to cost, to fuel consumption, to piloting versus driving skills, to simple common sense that's kept the flying car fictional.
Nah, they wouldn't be that subtle. Recall that they made a big fuss over "we have the bomb now", only to have their first actual test detonation fizzle.
Besides, if they were testing H-bombs, there would be third party confirmation. They cannot set off a nuke, never mind a big nuke, without setting off seismic detectors from India to California.
Not even. Read the GP's wiki link for a description of a "Farnsworth fusor" (not the Farnsworth you're thinking of, but rather his namesake). Making fusion reactions occur is trivially easy, to the point where there exists at least one hobbyist who's made a fusor in his basement. Betcha that's what NK has built, and the claim of it being a "unique thermo-nuclear reaction device" was likely tacked on by some lackey in the propaganda department. Again, old news in the fusion world, as fusors aren't useful for much other than proof of concept.
Getting a net gain in energy with a fusion reaction? Hard. The only way we've done it to date is in a thermonuclear warhead, and I guarantee Pyongyang doesn't have one of those yet, since they've had enough trouble getting basic fission bombs built.
The difference between a user and an addict is, when you take their whatever away, the user is okay, and the addict is not.
Not good enough. The user of anything presumably derives a benefit from using it; that's why they use it. Take that away and of course they're not as well off, and will seek substitutes. If that's addiction, the term is too broad to be of any use.
Actually, the point is more in the sense of substance abuse, rather than the "addictions" listed in TFA. To reiterate, take a hard drinker's booze away for a month, and he's okay (perhaps a bit ornery, but otherwise fine). Take an alkies booze away for a month, and he will suffer a breakdown, complete with DTs. Not a bad way to tell the two apart.
Note the distinction here between inconvenience and withdrawal. The hard drinker will be inconvenienced by the lack of booze, which we're presuming he enjoys, and he'll respond to the lack with annoyance. The addict will undergo withdrawal, which has a concise, physiological definition, and is altogether a disproportionate response to the loss. We're talking hallucinations, motor control problems, mood swings, pain - they aren't missing something they "derive benefit" from, they're literally unable to function.
Along similar lines (and getting slightly more ontopic), your average internet user will be inconvenienced if their net access is revoked. They'll be cut off from significant avenues of communication and entertainment. I've gone weeks offline on several occasions, and been bored out of my skull. This is not addiction.
If there is such a beast as an "internet addict" (and I can think of a few folks who probably are), then their response to the loss of net access will be quite a bit more severe than yours or mine. So, if someone claims that an individual is suffering from net addiction, my question would be what happened when they went cold turkey.
I would say that it's only an addiction if it's actively interfering with your normal life. That is, your job, your education, your family, and your interpersonal relationships.
Doesn't really work as a definition for "addicted". To provide a counter example, there are "high-functioning" alcoholics - just as fucked up as regular alkies, but able to hold it together enough to keep a job, maintain relationships (albeit often dysfunctional ones), etc. Often the shit hits the fan for them eventually, though this isn't guaranteed.
A better defining question for addiction is: can you quit? The oft-modified joke "I can quit anytime I want, honest" has a grounding in reality. An addict would be very hard pressed to quit. Quitting would hurt too much. When they do ditch the thing to which they are addicted, they usually have to cut it out of their life altogether, and can't (safely) go back. As an added drawback, half the time "quitting" involves trading a crippling addiction for a less serious one.
The difference between a user and an addict is, when you take their whatever away, the user is okay, and the addict is not.
See, the pope would probably drag the whole "moral relativism" angle into the debate anyway, as that's something of a fixation for Catholic dogma, for more or less the reasons you state. So I wasn't surprised to see that brought up. It's also something of a red herring.
It's transparently obvious that real issue here is the abuse scandals. You'll note that they did in fact keep a lid on the whole thing for decades - many current alleged cases of priesthood pedophilia date from the 80's and 90's, and there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the actual problems stretch back further than the memories of anyone alive today. This is not a new problem.
But back in the old days, shuffling the offending priests off to different diocese, and quietly denying that any wrongdoing took place was enough to keep the matter buried. They relied on the victims and their families shame, and on the rare cases where that wasn't enough, the fact that gossip rarely spread any further than the affected community. Does that last part sound like it would work today? Small wonder the pope is worried.
I'm with you WRT the person behind the gun having an itchy trigger finger. For the rest however...
They aren't super far away. They seem to get dust on the camera from dust coming off their gunfire.
Time the delay between the first shot fired and the first puff of dust when it hits. Then, factor in the speed of the shell. Trust me, they're a ways off.
And having not been on an apache airship I assume that they don't have to look through the shitty b/w camera. I also assume that there are multiple people in the heli which could look.
Yes and no. Their optics are better than what you see in the video (it is, after all, youtube). They aren't that much better, however.
Per the multiple people comment, if it was an Apache, and not an AC-130 as some have speculated, then there were no other people on board. The crew of an Apache consists of the pilot, and the gunner. And the pilot needs to, you know, pilot the heli, not look at the ground (hence the need for a gunner in the first place).
I also assume that they could use shitty regular 10$ binoculars if they didn't feel like using their high quality army binoculars that i assume they have.
Actually... no. Granted, they do have better binoculars than you can get for $10, but there isn't any secret high tech binoculars reserved for army use. Hell you wouldn't want ultra high tech ones anyway - you want something simple and reliable.
But back on point, you're correct in that they did have a better view of the action than the people watching it on youtube. But their view wasn't as much better than you seem to think it was. Moreover, we have the luxury of pause and rewind, two things that make ID a hell of a lot easier than high resolution, not to even mention hindsight. We know the whole story, we can watch the event repeatedly, and pause to determine than no, that isn't a rocket launcher, it's a camera.
I think all of these are fairly safe assumptions.
I'd suggest doing a bit of research on the subject. Most of what you want to know isn't classified, hard to find, or particularly technical. You needn't take my word for any of this.
I would agree that the gunner (and as far as I can tell, it was the gunner talking) was overeager. Where you and I disagree is the extent to which he had a better vantage point to determine who was armed. And since they'd been called in to look for someone who'd attacked a ground force in the vicinity, it isn't hard to imagine that, from a distance, they mistook the reporters for the people they were supposed to shoot.
As I believe I've mentioned, the turning point from my view of things was firing on the van. Up to that point, it was a case of misidentification of camera carrying reporters and armed civilians for an actual threat. Once they had ground forces en route to mop up, they should have ceased fire and left the van alone. Firing on unarmed civilians giving medical aid to a wounded person is a big no-no.
Hey, just saw you ask the same thing on Wikipedia's talk page.
I also thought it looked a lot like a 130 when I saw the video, but everything I've seen identifies the air support as having been Apaches.
Granted, the orbiting the target is much more like an AC-130 than an AH-64, however it is still possible for either. In the latter case, the M230 can turn far enough to the left to allow the gunner to fire sideways like that, and the video is expressly identified as being from the gun-sight (meaning we don't see the direction of the aircraft's nose).
Still, it would not be impossible that the people who received the video to have misidentified the aircraft it came from, and for that misidentification to carry over into other reports on the incident.
The Apache, at least, is multipurpose. It can take out tanks, but is also used against infantry, defensive emplacements, buildings - basically anything on the ground, soft or hard.
The M230 is actually the least of its weapons. Yes, you read that right, it doesn't have anything smaller than 30mm. Next step up are Hydra rockets. Given that they were inside a city, I can see why they'd use the auto-cannon in lieu of rockets - less risk of setting something on fire, or blowing up a building.
As for why the designers don't include something smaller caliber for dealing with soft targets, that's probably mostly a weight restriction. More weapon systems would require displacing something else to maintain maneuverability. The existing weapons are overkill for soft targets, but the general attitude of the army is better overkill than underpowered.
(Note: I'm not addressing anything specific to the video, as I've discussed that elsewhere already, I'm merely trying to explain the rationale behind the AH-64's design/role.)
I don't think it hurts the image of the Apache crew, just of whoever ordered them to fire. I'm willing to assume they were given faulty information of the threat on the ground. The question is who decided it was a good idea to use large caliber weaponry very near civilians?
They weren't given faulty data; they were the ones collecting the data. The Apache's gunner was the one with the first eyeballs on the crowd (consisting of around a dozen people, including two reporters).
It's possible some people in the crowd were in fact armed with rifles. Hell, they may have been an armed escort, given that this was a war zone. However the "RPGs" the gunner thought he saw were, in fact, TV cameras. Bear in mind, this is the assessment of a human being in a moving aircraft, looking through a zoomed in camera, at obscured targets, so that isn't as unlikely as it sounds.
The gunship asked permission to engage. They were given it, based on the assessment of that gunner. That part, at least, was an understandable mistake. The part that got me angry was when a civilian van showed up, started evacuating the wounded survivors, and got blown to smithereens - one of the first rules of warfare is "don't fire on the wounded or the people providing aid". Hell, I'm much more pissed that they fired on the van at all than I am they hurt a couple kids inside - they never should have engaged the van in the first place.
No, seriously, go look it up. The GC covers wounded soldiers, POWS, civilians, noncombatant forces and the like. That's it. Nothing in there at all about weapons. If you think this is a mistake, then might I ask you what section of which convention limits the use of such weapons?
Now, your problem is simple. You've seen others make the same claim about the GC and have made the easy mistake of assuming they were right without confirming it for yourself. It's a very widespread myth, so you've likely seen it repeated.
There are international conventions on the use of weapons above a certain caliber, or made to expand or explode on impact, or leave undetectable fragments inside a human body, etc. The Hague Convention is one, the much more recent Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons is another, and there are probably more that I've forgotten about. None of them are the GC.
I could follow the actions of the gunship operators up to a certain point YOU knew they had cameras, they did not. However, the targets in question did not seem hostile nor did the threat of an RPG seem very real. The firing on the van though, without question, was a mistake. They were clearly evacuating a wounded man, something I thought was pretty much a universal no-no for engagement.
Second on that. Firing on people you mistake for the enemy (and who look armed, might even have been armed) is understandable. Firing on a civilian vehicle trying to rescue the wounded is not. A better solution, given that they did have ground assets in the area at the time (as evidenced by the arrival of a group of IFVs shortly after the engagement) would have been to let the ground forces intercept the van. They have the option of stopping it without killing the people inside.
Moreover, if you watch the video, it's pretty obvious that the people who get out of the van aren't armed. At the stage where the van is evacing the wounded reporter, the gunships crew has no reason to assume they pose any threat, to them or the IFVs and infantry about to arrive. What was the point in opening fire?
This is precisely the sort of scenario you want to avoid. If you have a situation like that, you need eyes on the ground. The air crew couldn't see the kids in their downrange; a ground of infantry stopping the vehicle surely would have.
Can you imagine what this would do for the STD worries of people involved in "One Night Stands"?
Won't help very much. You can't tell if you've got an STD a few hours after having sex. It can take days or weeks for a test to come up positive in an infected individual post-exposure, depending on a wide variety of factors. Hell, that applies to any disease, not just the sexual ones.
So, a hypochondriac might want one, purely for peace of mind, but your average person wouldn't be any better off than if they waited for a trip to a clinic. Mind you, and this is purely for STDs not other diseases, complete anonymity for testing could be attractive, for those people who are easily embarrassed.
You never confirm with just one test that you have HIV. A first positive gives a reason to do a second, more thorough, test to determine if the infection is present. Also, if your T-cells are low enough to give a false positive, you probably want to find out why, as other conditions could be present.
False positives aren't as big an issue as false negatives. There's a reason why, if a person is thought to have been exposed to an HIV vector, they get multiple tests spaced out over the course of weeks or months; there is a gap between infection and lowered T-cell count. Mind you, this isn't really a new problem, or specific to the device from TFA. If the new detector is as reliable, or nearly as reliable, as current testing procedures, but cheap enough to be deployed widely in the third world, it is a very useful development.
Ahh well. On subject. The morality of these unmanned killing machine? They don't appeal to me very much. Somehow, it seems a bit cowardly.
Comments like this (and yours is better thought out than many others in this thread) make me wonder if anyone gets how your average UAV actually works.
You've got a spotter (human) on the ground. He lights up a target to destroy. You've got a Reaper overhead, armed with Hellfire missiles. The pilot of the Reaper (also human) is on the ground somewhere, controlling it remotely. The pilot sees the target illuminated by the spotter, locks on, and fires a missile. Boom.
Take the UAV and replace it with a manned aircraft and what changes? Nothing. Same spotter, same pilot, same missile. You might argue that the pilot isn't at risk in this instance, but hell, most US pilots are only put at risk when someone on their side screws up. Nobody the US is currently at war with has a hope in hell of threatening their aircraft.
Just so we're clear, with or without the UAV, you've still got the same human decision makers. We're not at the stage yet where we can trust an armed and autonomous war machine not to screw up. This isn't Skynet, and the spotter on the ground is the one at the greatest risk, and the one deciding what gets cratered.
If you wanted to argue that using any air support is cowardly, then I'd remind you that war has far less to do with bravery than it does with practicality.
Kind of like asking $sexual_preference people if they would like to be cured? Or perhaps asking $skin_colour people if they would like to be cured? Perhaps the "problem" is identifying colour blindness as a defect that needs a cure and trying to make all humans meet some baseline or be classified as defective.
*Sigh*
Apart from falling into the much abused "slippery slope" argument there, you're also completely failing to realize that one of your two examples is already a reality.
We can change skin colour. It's not even that difficult. See: Micheal Jackson (not the best example, as he's dead, but the best known). Granted, it's also not cheap or immediate, unlike hair dye, but it's not science fiction either. If a $skin_colour individual wanted to be $other_skin_colour, they could.
Why doesn't this happen often? Because almost nobody wants a change that drastic. You do get all manner of commercial products intended to lighten or darken skin temporarily (bleaching or tanning creams), but few folk want to be some colour other than that of their families, birth or what have you - usually people persecuted to the point of self-loathing.
And let's take your other example. Lets say we could change sexual orientation. 99%+ of the population wouldn't be in the slightest bit interested, even if it were free and reversible. The 1% exception would be, again, motivated by self-loathing (think heavily closeted Fundies who view being gay as a curse).
Most people want the identities they've got.
The only way - and I mean the only way - such treatments become morally questionable, is when they aren't voluntary. The ability to change skin colour is a non issue, while forcing someone to undergo such a procedure violates all manner of medical ethics.
So, no, your examples undermine your point. Want a fair way to determine who gets the treatment? Ask. Offer, but do not force. And anyone who wants to be colourblind will be perfectly fine. Most people who are colourblind would probably view this treatment in the exact same light as people with myopia (like me) view laser eye surgery - as a simple, uncomplicated fix. A moral non-issue if I ever saw one.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Conventional warheads on ballistic missiles are pretty damn rare compared to nuclear ones, for the exact reason the GP mentioned - missile to payload mass ratio.
Conversely, nuclear warheads can very easily be delivered via cruise missile. The Tomahawk (his example, not mine) was designed to carry the W80 before SALT. That's a good deal more than 1000 lb of "boom".
I see your point, but doubt its applicability to the discussion.
The first way of detecting missile launches at long range is from orbit, and has been since the middle of the cold war. Radar hasn't been our first line of detection since the days where strategic bombers and land based ICBMs reigned.
Cruise missiles can go "below the radar" for a short range launch, or to evade interception - one advantage the Exocet anti-shipping missile had was more or less exactly that - but can't hide their thermal signature from a satellite. Moreover, going below the radar requires staying fairly proximate to the surface; too high, and you'll show up just like anything else. Works better for subsonic anti-shipping missiles where the ocean's surface doesn't vary much in height, but over land, and at long range, while moving at supersonic speed - yeah, you get the picture.
Your suggested system (nuclear cruise missiles as a first strike weapon) was seriously considered in the early stages of the cold war before the widespread use of satellites. It became impractical once the space race got into full swing. By around 1970 a first strike on the US using cruise missiles wasn't going to work, and isn't going to work now. Sorry.
Mind you, I can understand where you'd get that idea, if you're familiar with the use of cruise missiles in other contexts. Radar stealth is indeed possible when the intent is to hit a target at medium range, with minimal warning at a low altitude. It just doesn't scale up.
A final note for those less familiar with stealth technology: We cannot hide a fast moving airborne object for a heat sensor in orbit. Hiding from radar is possible with the right shape and materials, and hiding a heat source underground or underwater works just fine (think subs or bunkers), but anything airborne and either jet or rocket propelled is going to show up on a thermal scan like a flare.
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IIRC, it's more about their blood.
Not just that, but also the level of myoglobin in their muscle tissue. Sperm whales have incredible oxygen storage capabilities, and actually collapse their lungs when diving deep.
Your own link shows that the convention is, in point of fact, an annex to the GCs. You even bolded the relevant text. I would consider that a separate entity, but YMMV. Apart from that, what the GP meant was the International Code of Medical Ethics, which is neither part of the GC, nor an annex.
Moreover, the singular term "Geneva Convention" generally refers only to the fourth (and most recent) GC, circa 1949. "Geneva Conventions" plural can refer to all four treaties, however precise usage should involve referring to the specific annex you listed as "The Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons". And yes, that is pedantic legal nitpicking on my part, but any lawyer worth his or her salt will back me when I say that precision matters a hell of a lot more in law than in any other part of language.
My point stands that using the singular phrase "Geneva Convention" to refer to all four treaties and their annexes is incorrect, never mind referring to other unconnected laws as such. Moreover, most of the things attached to the GCs have their own identifiers. If it is absolutely necessary to refer to the entire body of international laws of war, other terms should be used instead.
I will concede however that I should have used a phrase other than "literally all there is to them", since it's clear to me now that those words can be interpreted as "there is nothing else remotely connected to the GCs other than the above", which is not quite what I had in mind when I posted.
Noted, thank you. I'll make sure to pay closer attention to the wording, as I'm only marginally familiar with the convention. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the doctors were somehow connected to the state.
For future reference, whenever somebody tells you that "the Geneva Convention says you can/can't do X", that should immediately set off your bullshit detector. The conventions have become a kind of layperson shorthand for "international regulations", so everybody and their dog has some pretty weird notions about what they cover. People see these references to the GCs, assume the person making the reference knows better than they do, and the cycle continues.
The Geneva Conventions cover the treatment, in wartime, of prisoners, wounded, civilians and medics. That is literally all there is to them.
Now, back on to the topic at hand, medical tourism is one of those intractable problems that nobody wants to admit can't be fixed, irrespective of whether they ought to be. The US cannot control where its citizens travel, or what they do in other countries - look for example at the number of American tourists in Cuba, most of whom stopped over somewhere else en route to circumvent the restrictions on traveling there. Actually, this isn't specific to the US; no first world democracy can effectively regulate the actions of their citizens going abroad.
Thus, the only party in this whole affair who have any say in what Americans visiting Thailand can and cannot do is the Thai government. Meaning the only way Americans will stop going to Thai hospitals for dodgy untried treatments is if said hospitals are no longer allowed to offer them (either due to Thailand adopting USFDA style regulations, or by it prosecuting the purveyors of said treatments under existing laws).
Well, industrial welding laser may leave sucking chest wounds. I'm not totally sure though. It would seem that it would burn everything in it's path, so bleeding wouldn't be a problem, but the extra holes for air probably wouldn't be all that good for you. :)
Nah, that's a common misconception. People have it in their head that a laser powerful enough to be considered a weapon would leave a neat little cauterized hole in a person. Like getting stabbed with a razor sharp superheated stiletto. Crops up in science fiction all the time, especially when the author is trying to get away from the pulpy "Raygun" image. This is probably reinforced by the (mis)use of magnifying glasses at high noon that we all dimly remember from our youth.
A high powered laser will do a number of things depending on what wavelength it uses, and how tightly focused the beam is. What it won't do is leave the area surrounding the burn untouched. You won't get a burn here, and perfectly undamaged skin an inch to the left. It could happen that way if the laser is tightly focused in order to leave a very small heat affected zone (important in some industrial applications), but I wouldn't bet on it even then. On a laser powerful enough to cut or weld, you'll get a wide circle of flesh damaged to an increasing degree as you near the center, a deep burn at the point of focus, and water at the wound site flash vaporized to steam, which may further aggravate the injury. Bleeding, and more importantly internal bleeding, may be present, and if the damaged area includes a major blood vessel, then you're about as screwed as if the damaged were caused by anything else.
If flying cars could be made to blow up the enemy, or even just humiliate them, we'd have flying cars. Not to take anything away from the folks at Cal Poly, but I'm still waiting for the next Teflon.
Helicopters fly, can land or take off from a pad not much bigger than your average driveway, and can be less massive than most trucks. For most values of the word, they are "flying cars". Granted, they don't look like a sedan with jump jets (which is what most people think when they hear the phrase), but it's silly to expect a flying car to resemble a ground car in basic shape. And yes, the military does spend loads on designing, testing, building and fielding choppers for use in war.
The problem with the '50s vision of flying cars has never been technological. It's been a host of practical issues, from safety, to cost, to fuel consumption, to piloting versus driving skills, to simple common sense that's kept the flying car fictional.
This is slashdot. I don't need telepathy to know that the moment you read "Farnsworth", a little voice in your head piped up "good news everyone!" :-P
Nah, they wouldn't be that subtle. Recall that they made a big fuss over "we have the bomb now", only to have their first actual test detonation fizzle.
Besides, if they were testing H-bombs, there would be third party confirmation. They cannot set off a nuke, never mind a big nuke, without setting off seismic detectors from India to California.
it just takes a fission to get the fuse lit...
Not even. Read the GP's wiki link for a description of a "Farnsworth fusor" (not the Farnsworth you're thinking of, but rather his namesake). Making fusion reactions occur is trivially easy, to the point where there exists at least one hobbyist who's made a fusor in his basement. Betcha that's what NK has built, and the claim of it being a "unique thermo-nuclear reaction device" was likely tacked on by some lackey in the propaganda department. Again, old news in the fusion world, as fusors aren't useful for much other than proof of concept.
Getting a net gain in energy with a fusion reaction? Hard. The only way we've done it to date is in a thermonuclear warhead, and I guarantee Pyongyang doesn't have one of those yet, since they've had enough trouble getting basic fission bombs built.
The difference between a user and an addict is, when you take their whatever away, the user is okay, and the addict is not.
Not good enough. The user of anything presumably derives a benefit from using it; that's why they use it. Take that away and of course they're not as well off, and will seek substitutes. If that's addiction, the term is too broad to be of any use.
Actually, the point is more in the sense of substance abuse, rather than the "addictions" listed in TFA. To reiterate, take a hard drinker's booze away for a month, and he's okay (perhaps a bit ornery, but otherwise fine). Take an alkies booze away for a month, and he will suffer a breakdown, complete with DTs. Not a bad way to tell the two apart.
Note the distinction here between inconvenience and withdrawal. The hard drinker will be inconvenienced by the lack of booze, which we're presuming he enjoys, and he'll respond to the lack with annoyance. The addict will undergo withdrawal, which has a concise, physiological definition, and is altogether a disproportionate response to the loss. We're talking hallucinations, motor control problems, mood swings, pain - they aren't missing something they "derive benefit" from, they're literally unable to function.
Along similar lines (and getting slightly more ontopic), your average internet user will be inconvenienced if their net access is revoked. They'll be cut off from significant avenues of communication and entertainment. I've gone weeks offline on several occasions, and been bored out of my skull. This is not addiction.
If there is such a beast as an "internet addict" (and I can think of a few folks who probably are), then their response to the loss of net access will be quite a bit more severe than yours or mine. So, if someone claims that an individual is suffering from net addiction, my question would be what happened when they went cold turkey.
I would say that it's only an addiction if it's actively interfering with your normal life. That is, your job, your education, your family, and your interpersonal relationships.
Doesn't really work as a definition for "addicted". To provide a counter example, there are "high-functioning" alcoholics - just as fucked up as regular alkies, but able to hold it together enough to keep a job, maintain relationships (albeit often dysfunctional ones), etc. Often the shit hits the fan for them eventually, though this isn't guaranteed.
A better defining question for addiction is: can you quit? The oft-modified joke "I can quit anytime I want, honest" has a grounding in reality. An addict would be very hard pressed to quit. Quitting would hurt too much. When they do ditch the thing to which they are addicted, they usually have to cut it out of their life altogether, and can't (safely) go back. As an added drawback, half the time "quitting" involves trading a crippling addiction for a less serious one.
The difference between a user and an addict is, when you take their whatever away, the user is okay, and the addict is not.
See, the pope would probably drag the whole "moral relativism" angle into the debate anyway, as that's something of a fixation for Catholic dogma, for more or less the reasons you state. So I wasn't surprised to see that brought up. It's also something of a red herring.
It's transparently obvious that real issue here is the abuse scandals. You'll note that they did in fact keep a lid on the whole thing for decades - many current alleged cases of priesthood pedophilia date from the 80's and 90's, and there is no doubt in anyone's mind that the actual problems stretch back further than the memories of anyone alive today. This is not a new problem.
But back in the old days, shuffling the offending priests off to different diocese, and quietly denying that any wrongdoing took place was enough to keep the matter buried. They relied on the victims and their families shame, and on the rare cases where that wasn't enough, the fact that gossip rarely spread any further than the affected community. Does that last part sound like it would work today? Small wonder the pope is worried.
Surprise surprise. It's hard to lie when everyone can see right through you.
Perhaps more to the point, cover-ups are much harder to perpetrate when a single leak can plaster all your dirty laundry all over the net.
Gee, I can't imagine why the pope would object to that... Nope, can't think of a single reason *sigh*
I'm with you WRT the person behind the gun having an itchy trigger finger. For the rest however...
They aren't super far away. They seem to get dust on the camera from dust coming off their gunfire.
Time the delay between the first shot fired and the first puff of dust when it hits. Then, factor in the speed of the shell. Trust me, they're a ways off.
And having not been on an apache airship I assume that they don't have to look through the shitty b/w camera. I also assume that there are multiple people in the heli which could look.
Yes and no. Their optics are better than what you see in the video (it is, after all, youtube). They aren't that much better, however.
Per the multiple people comment, if it was an Apache, and not an AC-130 as some have speculated, then there were no other people on board. The crew of an Apache consists of the pilot, and the gunner. And the pilot needs to, you know, pilot the heli, not look at the ground (hence the need for a gunner in the first place).
I also assume that they could use shitty regular 10$ binoculars if they didn't feel like using their high quality army binoculars that i assume they have.
Actually... no. Granted, they do have better binoculars than you can get for $10, but there isn't any secret high tech binoculars reserved for army use. Hell you wouldn't want ultra high tech ones anyway - you want something simple and reliable.
But back on point, you're correct in that they did have a better view of the action than the people watching it on youtube. But their view wasn't as much better than you seem to think it was. Moreover, we have the luxury of pause and rewind, two things that make ID a hell of a lot easier than high resolution, not to even mention hindsight. We know the whole story, we can watch the event repeatedly, and pause to determine than no, that isn't a rocket launcher, it's a camera.
I think all of these are fairly safe assumptions.
I'd suggest doing a bit of research on the subject. Most of what you want to know isn't classified, hard to find, or particularly technical. You needn't take my word for any of this.
I would agree that the gunner (and as far as I can tell, it was the gunner talking) was overeager. Where you and I disagree is the extent to which he had a better vantage point to determine who was armed. And since they'd been called in to look for someone who'd attacked a ground force in the vicinity, it isn't hard to imagine that, from a distance, they mistook the reporters for the people they were supposed to shoot.
As I believe I've mentioned, the turning point from my view of things was firing on the van. Up to that point, it was a case of misidentification of camera carrying reporters and armed civilians for an actual threat. Once they had ground forces en route to mop up, they should have ceased fire and left the van alone. Firing on unarmed civilians giving medical aid to a wounded person is a big no-no.
Hey, just saw you ask the same thing on Wikipedia's talk page.
I also thought it looked a lot like a 130 when I saw the video, but everything I've seen identifies the air support as having been Apaches.
Granted, the orbiting the target is much more like an AC-130 than an AH-64, however it is still possible for either. In the latter case, the M230 can turn far enough to the left to allow the gunner to fire sideways like that, and the video is expressly identified as being from the gun-sight (meaning we don't see the direction of the aircraft's nose).
Still, it would not be impossible that the people who received the video to have misidentified the aircraft it came from, and for that misidentification to carry over into other reports on the incident.
The Apache, at least, is multipurpose. It can take out tanks, but is also used against infantry, defensive emplacements, buildings - basically anything on the ground, soft or hard.
The M230 is actually the least of its weapons. Yes, you read that right, it doesn't have anything smaller than 30mm. Next step up are Hydra rockets. Given that they were inside a city, I can see why they'd use the auto-cannon in lieu of rockets - less risk of setting something on fire, or blowing up a building.
As for why the designers don't include something smaller caliber for dealing with soft targets, that's probably mostly a weight restriction. More weapon systems would require displacing something else to maintain maneuverability. The existing weapons are overkill for soft targets, but the general attitude of the army is better overkill than underpowered.
(Note: I'm not addressing anything specific to the video, as I've discussed that elsewhere already, I'm merely trying to explain the rationale behind the AH-64's design/role.)
I don't think it hurts the image of the Apache crew, just of whoever ordered them to fire. I'm willing to assume they were given faulty information of the threat on the ground. The question is who decided it was a good idea to use large caliber weaponry very near civilians?
They weren't given faulty data; they were the ones collecting the data. The Apache's gunner was the one with the first eyeballs on the crowd (consisting of around a dozen people, including two reporters).
It's possible some people in the crowd were in fact armed with rifles. Hell, they may have been an armed escort, given that this was a war zone. However the "RPGs" the gunner thought he saw were, in fact, TV cameras. Bear in mind, this is the assessment of a human being in a moving aircraft, looking through a zoomed in camera, at obscured targets, so that isn't as unlikely as it sounds.
The gunship asked permission to engage. They were given it, based on the assessment of that gunner. That part, at least, was an understandable mistake. The part that got me angry was when a civilian van showed up, started evacuating the wounded survivors, and got blown to smithereens - one of the first rules of warfare is "don't fire on the wounded or the people providing aid". Hell, I'm much more pissed that they fired on the van at all than I am they hurt a couple kids inside - they never should have engaged the van in the first place.
Dammit, you beat me to it by all of four minutes :-)
The Geneva convention has nothing to do with it.
No, seriously, go look it up. The GC covers wounded soldiers, POWS, civilians, noncombatant forces and the like. That's it. Nothing in there at all about weapons. If you think this is a mistake, then might I ask you what section of which convention limits the use of such weapons?
Now, your problem is simple. You've seen others make the same claim about the GC and have made the easy mistake of assuming they were right without confirming it for yourself. It's a very widespread myth, so you've likely seen it repeated.
There are international conventions on the use of weapons above a certain caliber, or made to expand or explode on impact, or leave undetectable fragments inside a human body, etc. The Hague Convention is one, the much more recent Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons is another, and there are probably more that I've forgotten about. None of them are the GC.
I could follow the actions of the gunship operators up to a certain point YOU knew they had cameras, they did not. However, the targets in question did not seem hostile nor did the threat of an RPG seem very real. The firing on the van though, without question, was a mistake. They were clearly evacuating a wounded man, something I thought was pretty much a universal no-no for engagement.
Second on that. Firing on people you mistake for the enemy (and who look armed, might even have been armed) is understandable. Firing on a civilian vehicle trying to rescue the wounded is not. A better solution, given that they did have ground assets in the area at the time (as evidenced by the arrival of a group of IFVs shortly after the engagement) would have been to let the ground forces intercept the van. They have the option of stopping it without killing the people inside.
Moreover, if you watch the video, it's pretty obvious that the people who get out of the van aren't armed. At the stage where the van is evacing the wounded reporter, the gunships crew has no reason to assume they pose any threat, to them or the IFVs and infantry about to arrive. What was the point in opening fire?
This is precisely the sort of scenario you want to avoid. If you have a situation like that, you need eyes on the ground. The air crew couldn't see the kids in their downrange; a ground of infantry stopping the vehicle surely would have.
Can you imagine what this would do for the STD worries of people involved in "One Night Stands"?
Won't help very much. You can't tell if you've got an STD a few hours after having sex. It can take days or weeks for a test to come up positive in an infected individual post-exposure, depending on a wide variety of factors. Hell, that applies to any disease, not just the sexual ones.
So, a hypochondriac might want one, purely for peace of mind, but your average person wouldn't be any better off than if they waited for a trip to a clinic. Mind you, and this is purely for STDs not other diseases, complete anonymity for testing could be attractive, for those people who are easily embarrassed.
You never confirm with just one test that you have HIV. A first positive gives a reason to do a second, more thorough, test to determine if the infection is present. Also, if your T-cells are low enough to give a false positive, you probably want to find out why, as other conditions could be present.
False positives aren't as big an issue as false negatives. There's a reason why, if a person is thought to have been exposed to an HIV vector, they get multiple tests spaced out over the course of weeks or months; there is a gap between infection and lowered T-cell count. Mind you, this isn't really a new problem, or specific to the device from TFA. If the new detector is as reliable, or nearly as reliable, as current testing procedures, but cheap enough to be deployed widely in the third world, it is a very useful development.
Ahh well. On subject. The morality of these unmanned killing machine? They don't appeal to me very much. Somehow, it seems a bit cowardly.
Comments like this (and yours is better thought out than many others in this thread) make me wonder if anyone gets how your average UAV actually works.
You've got a spotter (human) on the ground. He lights up a target to destroy. You've got a Reaper overhead, armed with Hellfire missiles. The pilot of the Reaper (also human) is on the ground somewhere, controlling it remotely. The pilot sees the target illuminated by the spotter, locks on, and fires a missile. Boom.
Take the UAV and replace it with a manned aircraft and what changes? Nothing. Same spotter, same pilot, same missile. You might argue that the pilot isn't at risk in this instance, but hell, most US pilots are only put at risk when someone on their side screws up. Nobody the US is currently at war with has a hope in hell of threatening their aircraft.
Just so we're clear, with or without the UAV, you've still got the same human decision makers. We're not at the stage yet where we can trust an armed and autonomous war machine not to screw up. This isn't Skynet, and the spotter on the ground is the one at the greatest risk, and the one deciding what gets cratered.
If you wanted to argue that using any air support is cowardly, then I'd remind you that war has far less to do with bravery than it does with practicality.
"Would you like to be cured?"
Problem solved.
Kind of like asking $sexual_preference people if they would like to be cured? Or perhaps asking $skin_colour people if they would like to be cured? Perhaps the "problem" is identifying colour blindness as a defect that needs a cure and trying to make all humans meet some baseline or be classified as defective.
*Sigh*
Apart from falling into the much abused "slippery slope" argument there, you're also completely failing to realize that one of your two examples is already a reality.
We can change skin colour. It's not even that difficult. See: Micheal Jackson (not the best example, as he's dead, but the best known). Granted, it's also not cheap or immediate, unlike hair dye, but it's not science fiction either. If a $skin_colour individual wanted to be $other_skin_colour, they could.
Why doesn't this happen often? Because almost nobody wants a change that drastic. You do get all manner of commercial products intended to lighten or darken skin temporarily (bleaching or tanning creams), but few folk want to be some colour other than that of their families, birth or what have you - usually people persecuted to the point of self-loathing.
And let's take your other example. Lets say we could change sexual orientation. 99%+ of the population wouldn't be in the slightest bit interested, even if it were free and reversible. The 1% exception would be, again, motivated by self-loathing (think heavily closeted Fundies who view being gay as a curse).
Most people want the identities they've got.
The only way - and I mean the only way - such treatments become morally questionable, is when they aren't voluntary. The ability to change skin colour is a non issue, while forcing someone to undergo such a procedure violates all manner of medical ethics.
So, no, your examples undermine your point. Want a fair way to determine who gets the treatment? Ask. Offer, but do not force. And anyone who wants to be colourblind will be perfectly fine. Most people who are colourblind would probably view this treatment in the exact same light as people with myopia (like me) view laser eye surgery - as a simple, uncomplicated fix. A moral non-issue if I ever saw one.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Conventional warheads on ballistic missiles are pretty damn rare compared to nuclear ones, for the exact reason the GP mentioned - missile to payload mass ratio.
Conversely, nuclear warheads can very easily be delivered via cruise missile. The Tomahawk (his example, not mine) was designed to carry the W80 before SALT. That's a good deal more than 1000 lb of "boom".
I see your point, but doubt its applicability to the discussion.
The first way of detecting missile launches at long range is from orbit, and has been since the middle of the cold war. Radar hasn't been our first line of detection since the days where strategic bombers and land based ICBMs reigned.
Cruise missiles can go "below the radar" for a short range launch, or to evade interception - one advantage the Exocet anti-shipping missile had was more or less exactly that - but can't hide their thermal signature from a satellite. Moreover, going below the radar requires staying fairly proximate to the surface; too high, and you'll show up just like anything else. Works better for subsonic anti-shipping missiles where the ocean's surface doesn't vary much in height, but over land, and at long range, while moving at supersonic speed - yeah, you get the picture.
Your suggested system (nuclear cruise missiles as a first strike weapon) was seriously considered in the early stages of the cold war before the widespread use of satellites. It became impractical once the space race got into full swing. By around 1970 a first strike on the US using cruise missiles wasn't going to work, and isn't going to work now. Sorry.
Mind you, I can understand where you'd get that idea, if you're familiar with the use of cruise missiles in other contexts. Radar stealth is indeed possible when the intent is to hit a target at medium range, with minimal warning at a low altitude. It just doesn't scale up.
A final note for those less familiar with stealth technology: We cannot hide a fast moving airborne object for a heat sensor in orbit. Hiding from radar is possible with the right shape and materials, and hiding a heat source underground or underwater works just fine (think subs or bunkers), but anything airborne and either jet or rocket propelled is going to show up on a thermal scan like a flare.