Actually, even Iran and NK don't stand to gain much from open warfare, though they do benefit from sabre-rattling.
Picture what would happen in a war between NK and SK, or Iran and Israel. All involved would find themselves mired in a conflict that would wreck their economies, alienate their allies, deplete their armed forces and generally fuck things up. Victory would not gain much of anything, defeat would be a terrible risk, and the rational reasons for war would be outweighed by the rational reasons against.
They'd be just as screwed over as the US and China would be if they went to war, just on a more localized scale (a US-China war would be global, NK-SK would be limited in scope to southeast Asia). This doesn't even get into nukes; a conventional war is bad enough.
The only factor that makes a renewed Korea or middle eastern war more likely than a US-China one is the lack of stable political leadership. If the parties involved were all operating on pure self interest, the closest we'd get to war would be border incidents and sabre-rattling, which is actually the status quo at present.
Infantry forces do like to have new tech as an option, but they also favour holding on to their existing hardware. Part of this is adherence to tradition, but another element is reliability. If $gun_type_x works just fine in it's role, the troops know how to use it, and no external circumstance has drastically changed, why replace it with $gun_type_y?
What's far more common is for new tech to build on or improve existing tech. If you look at the difference between a Vietnam era M16 and a current era M4, the differences are almost entirely incremental improvements based on advancing technology and field-tested solutions. One small thing changed at a time until the end result is distinct from the beginning.
Novel weapons like the one in TFA, where the main intent is to use them in specialized situations, will be adopted long before the military seriously considers replacing existing, general-purpose hardware.
IIRC, the figure for the total number of rounds expended since the start of the Iraq war divided by the number of confirmed kills works out to a couple hundred thousand bullets per kill. And yes, that includes rounds fired during training. The figure if you exclude training shots is still in the tens of thousands however.
I'll need to go back and look for where I found the figure of tens of thousands of rounds fired in combat per kill. But that's counting suppressing fire and inconclusive engagements (where fire was exchanged and nobody died), not to mention automatic fire from fixed or crew-serviced machine guns, both of which can suck back ammo like nobodies business.
Essentially, for every round that took a life in warfare, thousands more were fired in combat that did not, and tens of thousands more were fired teaching the soldier how to shoot.
Why? I'm not trying to be a smartass but why would the government get 10-20% off? I've never seen an instance where a government organisation got a "bulk discount"
What do you mean you've never seen a government bulk discount? Happens all the time. For any item where the number needed by the government is in the thousands or more, you can bet they're paying less per unit than you would be if you wanted to purchase just one of the same item from a store. It's no different than when big companies buy in bulk.
Besides which, for certain firearms, the cost is driven up by the strong regulations in place. For anything fully automatic, the only option if you want to legally buy one is to get it from an existing owner whose gun was grandfathered in before the law changed, which obviously drives the price up. Hell, there are a few fully functional miniguns in the hands of private owners in the US, any one of which would cost at least as much as most people make in a year to purchase, even assuming you could find an owner willing to part with theirs.
Folks if we have this in our hands now doesn't it beg the question of "how long will it be before the enemy has it too?"?
Well, to answer that question, ask yourself who the enemy is and what sort of weapons they have now.
If we're using Iraq and Afghanistan as our examples, the "enemy" is a bunch of locals with very little by way of military resources, whose current stock of weapons are either A) homemade, i.e. IEDs or B) designed in what was once the Soviet Union, i.e. rifles like the AK-47 and missile launchers like the RPG-7. Weapons that are more than one technological generation behind the curve in other words. So, no, I wouldn't worry about them getting ahold of current generation NATO military hardware, since they don't even have anything from the last generation.
If the "enemy" in your question is a developing nation like North Korea or Iran, then you're still looking at military tech a generation or so behind the curve, albeit superior to what the Taliban has. Remember, you need an entire logistical support chain to maintain and supply your forces, and if you don't have the manufacturing capability to fabricate parts and ammo for a weapon, you won't bother using it.
China is the only nation with sufficient resources to field current generation military tech that isn't a military ally of the US. And they are perfectly capable of doing their own R&D if they choose to, meaning they're not dependant on hand-me-downs from more developed nations. They might reverse engineer US military hardware given the opportunity, but since it is singularly unlikely the US and China will ever go to war, it's hard to consider them "the enemy", per your argument.
OTOH, a majority of ammunition fired from automatic weapons in combat is used in suppressing fire. I've heard an official figure of tens of thousands of rounds fired per confirmed kill. Even if a single 5.56mm is cheap, ten thousand of them ain't.
Suppressing fire, for those who don't want to go google it, is firing on the enemy's position to keep them "suppressed", i.e. scared shitless and behind cover. Or, put another way, if you can keep firing on them, they won't be able to return fire on you without sticking their heads out into a blizzard of incoming lead. An application of the principle that the best defence is a good offence. Most of those shots won't actually hit any enemy targets, because a sensible opponent will stay out of the line of fire for as long as the suppression is maintained.
Obviously, this costs a ton and a half of ammunition, which adds up in cost, and raises the risk of hitting other targets downrange (like civilians or friendly soldiers). A weapon that allows you to eliminate an opponent in cover with a single (expensive) shot might actually be cheaper, and certainly would be more precise, reducing the risk of collateral damage.
In the future: We can carry on with our fixed population size, imposed via whatever methods are "acceptable" and we will have options:
hate that I have to keep pointing this out, but clinical immortality will not lead to overpopulation, as counter-intuitive as that statement sounds, regardless of whether we limit our reproduction as a matter of public policy.
I'll break it down into three scenarios, in order of most to least likely. All three are based around methods for extending the human lifespan. In the first scenario, let's imagine a world where telomerase treatments reverse or mitigate cellular ageing.
Now, to begin with, this isn't "immortality", even in the ageless sense, as there would still be terminal illnesses and cumulative damage. Lifespans would increase, but would not be infinite. Cancer would probably beat out all other natural causes put together. So, let's say the average lifespan is a century or two.
The window of opportunity for having kids would remain mostly where it is now. This is because gametes age and run out regardless of the ageing going on in your other bodily tissues. A woman is born with a finite number of eggs, and they have an best-before date that has nothing to do with telomeres. Men would stay fertile longer, though not indefinitely, but the population growth rate is capped by the number of fertile females, not males.
Thus, the most likely scenario for anti-ageing drugs would not affect the rate of population growth rate, and would only increase the average lifespan by a limited margin. Given that the developed world is already at or below replacement level fertility, this would not pose a problem for the global population. And the developing world would need to modernize before they could implement this kind of medical care regardless, so they would probably also see a decline in growth to match our own, if history is any precedent.
Now, a second scenario would be perfect clinical immortality. No disease is terminal, no age related damage irreversible, no injury permanent. People only die traumatic deaths, whether by accident, violence or suicide.
The population still wouldn't skyrocket. People in the western world put off having kids already, generally waiting as long as natural fertility allows. How long would we put off having kids if we had no biological clock counting down? Decades? Centuries? A long time, regardless.
People still wouldn't live forever either. I've seen estimate that state that if death by old age vanished tomorrow, the average life expectancy would work out to about 300-500 years. Might be less if suicide became a common cause of death. And while the population might level out, the growth rate would slow to a crawl.
Now, the final option would be complete immortality. To accomplish this, we'd need to be able to make backups, against the risk of traumatic death. The mechanism for backing up a human being would almost certainly entail whole brain uploading.
With the capacity to upload brains comes the capacity to live without bodies. Overpopulation becomes supremely irrelevant if many or most of us live inside virtual worlds. And as far as that goes, given how technologically unlikely this scenario is, who's to say we'd even need Earth at this stage?
Actually, the whole overpopulation argument against immortality is a red herring. Partly because of the reasons you listed, but also for reasons specific to the nature of clinical immortality. To wit:
1. Gamete cells don't last forever, especially in women, and the number of fertile women is the key factor in population growth (can't have more babies than there are wombs). Live long enough, and even men start to get age related infertility, as the cells in the testes that produce sperm die off. In a future where telomerase treatments extend life indefinitely, natural childbearing age would not increase, even if all other aspects of ageing (including menopause) were averted. You could solve this with artificial implantation, which would make every pregnancy involving a woman over fifty planned, and likely expensive.
2. People in the western world have kids in their thirties precisely because they don't feel they'll have the chance later. If we solved the gamete problem I raised in point 1, then the pressure is off. Meaning, the population growth rate might actually drop further. People could, and probably would, wait to have kids a very long time.
3. Any future solution to ageing that allows the body to regenerate from injury completely (a necessary step for clinical immortality) also, by definition, makes surgical sterilization completely reversible. If anyone could get a vasectomy or tubal ligation with the knowledge that a simple medical treatment would allow them to be fertile again, the main reason not to do so would be history. Accidental pregnancy could be eliminated entirely.
So really, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, a general purpose anti-ageing treatment would just about be the best way to stop overpopulation from getting any worse.
If YOU get to live forever, you're going to have to deal with THEM forever too.
Fair trade off, as far as I'm concerned. After all, we're all "THEM" from somebody else's point of view, right?
Besides, "they" aren't individual people, "they" are other people. Douchebags come in all ages, all groups and all eras. If you and your least favourite person both lived without ageing, would your life be improved by their death? No. You'd find someone else to take their place.
Learning to live with other human beings you dislike is a skill. I've met people who never learned it in the first place. I certainly didn't have it a 15. I was much better at it by 25. Perhaps I'll be able to tolerate anyone at 250. Assuming the human lifespan gets that long before I die of old age (unlikely, but there's always hope).
Yeah, but Assange is high profile and isn't Russian. Being in the spotlight offers a measure of protection, and most of the folks on that list lived in Russia (and were therefor more easily killed and swept under the rug). The guy I was replying to obliquely referenced Litvinenko, who was different from Assange, and a far more likely target of assassination.
My point is, they wouldn't kill Assange. They'd make an example of his source as a guard against future leaks. You could even argue that by showing their willingness to use murder as a tool of extralegal censorship (which the list of dead journalists adequately demonstrates), they've guaranteed that nobody will dare supply wikileaks with information.
Actually, if Russia were going to "plug" a leak, Assange wouldn't be the target, the person who leaked the information in the first place would. Meaning, if someone in the Russian government had, say, documents about Vladimir Putin doing something illegal/immoral/embarrassing a decade ago, they'd be disinclined to share them with wikileaks for fear of being given a 9mm retirement present.
I can well believe that Assange has nothing in his files that could embarrass Russia or any similarly scary governments, because nothing has been given to him. Especially since nobody in their right mind would submit information to wikileaks and assume that the information in question would be scrubbed of anything that could leak back to the informant before being published.
You did get to the part at the bottom of my post where I pointed out it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, right? I didn't think I needed to make that clear, since the whole thing is written tongue-in-cheek, but I put the disclaimer in anyway in case anyone had a broken sarcasm detector.
Anyway, if someone want so become the first terrorist to successfully smuggle explosives lodged up their backside, I encourage them to got for it. Their recruitment would be interesting to see.
"Okay, here's the plan. We've hidden a block of C4 and a detonator inside this 11 inch buttplug. You're going to, uh, 'hide' this and take it aboard the flight. Here's a bottle of lube and some instructions translated from english that we got off the net. Good luck!"
I can just see someone trying to explain to the ultra-conservative muslim recruit that he's going to need to lose his virginity to a pound of high explosives in order to get his martyr status.
I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work. To begin with, if the liquid explosive in question is toxic, you're boned before you even get on the plane. And yes, if you're intent on committing suicide you won't care, but you have to actually stay alive long enough to get airborne. Storing it rectally in a baggy the way drug mules do might work better, assuming it doesn't leak. The rectal bomb option has been tried, unsuccessfully I might add, using solid explosives.
Further to that, the type of liquid explosives the TSA is interested in are generally meant to work as a mixture, e.g. liquid A mixed with liquid B to form unstable explosive mixture C, so you need to get a couple of unmixed fluids on board. Storing them together, even if they're in separate baggies, is just asking for premature detonation.
Also, IIRC, the problem with the TSA's current threshold for liquids is that the amount of liquid explosive needed to take down a plane is much larger than most people realize. I don't know, or care to find out, the liquid storage capacity of an average human bladder or rectum, but there's an excellent chance you'd need more than one person to smuggle a sufficient quantity of explosives aboard.
I'm not saying this scheme is impossible, but I will say it sounds like it would fail, possibly hilariously.
(Note: The above post is not meant to be taken seriously.)
According to some of the sites you just linked to, they aren't allowed to eat dogs, and some of the more hardline ones don't keep them as pets. Working dogs are allowed, with sheepdogs and guide dogs for the blind both being cited as examples of this. This is what I found the first time I tried to google your point, and it's what the first links in the search you just made shows.
Which means muslims should have no problem with sniffer dogs on a religious level. Now, a hypothetical terrorist might claim that being sniffed violates his religion, in the hopes of circumventing the sniffer dogs. Which is fine, because I covered that in my post: people who don't want to go the dog route can instead opt for the scanners.
Congratulations, you're a fucking moron.
Whereas you are incapable of polite discourse. If you can't frame your argument without resorting to ad homs, don't bother making it.
Piece of advice: whenever a neutral party reads an argument between two people, they will almost always side with the one being less belligerent. You cannot convince a reader that your view is correct if you can only express your view by mouthing off. If faced with a debate where the other person hasn't insulted you yet, stay polite, and you'll sound more like a reasonable person.
Wow, this is an eerie coincidence. We both posted the same thought, in the same thread, and at the same time (3:08 according to the timestamps).
I'm 100% in favour of the sniffer dog approach to the problem, and honestly can't see why the TSA hasn't opted for them. The only reason for not using metal detectors as the primary line of defence is that they don't detect explosives. Using metal detectors and dogs in tandem should stop both hijackings and bombings far more reliably than the scanners would, and without the attendant invasion of privacy.
The only way they can make the scanners work, legally speaking, is by the passengers "consenting" as a condition of boarding the plane. Either you let yourself being scanned, or you don't board. I see no reason why swapping "either you let some TSA perv see you naked or you don't fly" with "either you let a TSA dog sniff you for two seconds or you don't fly". And the latter option will bother far fewer people.
Moreover, a few minutes on google, snopes and wikipedia couldn't confirm either your claim about Iraq or your claim that muslims find dogs unclean. The fact that dogs are kept as pets in middle eastern nations would seem like an obvious rebuttal to the latter. In religious dietary laws "unclean" means "don't eat this", not "don't let this anywhere near you". I can well believe that there's some muslim rule about not eating dog meat, as opposed to a rule against dogs period.
Now, that was only about ten minutes of searching; I might have simply missed it. So, I would ask for a citation on your point. And by "citation", I mean something reputable and first-hand, like a news site.
You know, all this talk of profiling, scanning, and the rest of the controversial methods makes me wonder: Why aren't we using sniffer dogs as our primary defence against bombs?
Dogs, especially those bred for it, can be trained to sniff out explosives. The article makes it clear there's a minimum threshold for a bomb big enough to structurally damage an airplane, presumably the dogs can reliably find something at or below that threshold.
So far as I know, nobody finds the dogs offensive or controversial. The scans and pat-downs are borderline sexual assault, profiling is either invasion of privacy or racism depending on what's being profiled (i.e. personal history or race). Getting sniffed by a dog doesn't have those problems.
Now, this won't help find guns. But a metal detector is adequate for those. Knives are a minimal problem, considering that most of them will also set off a metal detector, and irrespective of that, it's been pointed out there are no shortage of sharp objects already on the plane. And the only real use of a gun or knife on an airplane is hijacking it, something that the reinforced cockpit doors and paranoid post 9/11 passengers will prevent.
Airport security using luggage x-rays, passenger metal detectors and a few agents with trained dogs should be sufficient against all threats.
Well, I agree with you that we need to take the nuclear option much more seriously, for power generation purposes. Something needs to replace all those coal fired power plants, and we're still a ways off from being able to build commercial fusion reactors.
However, I'm a realist. I can't imaging nuclear power ever winning points on cost. And the reason for this is not just that the current crop of 40 year old+ reactors is expensive to operate.
If you want to make any piece of technology virtually failure safe, you can do so. You can make a building that will survive every earthquake. Or a computer that cannot crash. Or (insert-imaginary-perfect-machine-here).
What you can't do is make such technology cheap. Systematic redundancy, backups upon backups, religious levels of maintenance, every piece of equipment built to specifications that vastly exceed the operational reality - all of these are possible, and they all cost a fortune.
There are only a couple of areas of human engineering where we build with such precise paranoia around failure. Nuclear power is one of them. And the reason for doing this with nuclear power is that we're properly paranoid about it, because failure carries with it such consequences. An excellent study in this is to contrast Three Mile Island (where the safeties were well designed) with Chernobyl (not so much).
Nuclear power done right is going to be expense. We can cut more corners with anything else. Now, this doesn't mean we shouldn't use nuclear power, but it does mean that the best use for it is in large commercial power plants.
Actually, fossil fuels have trace levels of mercury in them. Which, when burned as fuel, becomes methylmercury, also known as organic mercury.
Now, for those not knowledgeable about heavy metal poisoning, organic mercury is one of the nasties. Mercury poisoning is bad, organic mercury poisoning is much, much worse. Look up Minimata in Japan if you doubt me.
Methylmercury is bioaccumulative, meaning that animals higher up the food chain have more of it in their flesh than the ones lower down. If you've ever been cautioned not to eat shark or swordfish, this is the reason why. Moreover, just as it is an accumulative toxin in the food chain, so too is it a cumulative toxin in humans. You don't excrete it or break it down into harmless products. Even if you could break it down, you'd still be left with elemental mercury, which is no picnic.
Ergo, yes indeed, pollutants dissolved in sea water can wreck your health, even if the source of pollution happened nowhere near you.
I suspect the resistance to using a nuclear cargo vessel has less to do with anti-nuclear fears and more to do with the cost of operating them.
This has come up before, and I'll say it again for good measure: naval nuclear reactors are expensive. If they weren't, you can be sure the military would use them on cruisers and destroyers. As it stands the only vessels that use a nuke plant are carriers and subs, both expensive as hell, and the latter only use nuke plants because they don't need to surface for oxygen (on a pure operating cost basis diesel-electric subs win out).
Plans for nuclear surface ships below carrier weight have been put forward, and axed repeatedly, almost always on the basis of cost alone. And if the American navy says something is too expensive, believe me, it's too expensive.
Now, what I wonder is, would a cargo vessel be less polluting if it used a multi-hull design to reduce drag and was fitted with more advanced filtration system to mitigate the worst of its exhaust? That's a lot more achievable than the nuclear option, and wouldn't sacrifice cargo capacity, unlike the sail option put forward earlier in the thread.
No, I cheer because the jurisdiction I'm in doesn't go along with that kind of bullshit. Hereabouts, you need more than just an IP address to get the lawsuit rolling.
Your concern is valid for people living in the United States and a number of other jurisdictions that have acceded to American demands regarding copyright enforcement. Doesn't apply to me.
You recall I mentioned that I had an "Ideal World" where copyright law was concerned? My ideal would be for all jurisdictions (particularly the US) to favour a rational, technologically savvy approach to the law. I dislike seeing people sued unjustly over alleged copyright infringement. Ideally, the courts would be staffed with people who don't fall for the argument that an IP address is conclusive.
Also, as a final counterpoint, your argument is built around fear mongering. "Oh sure, you say that now, but wait until the eeevvil lawyers come knocking", that kind of bullshit. I don't consider arguments framed around attempted emotional manipulation to be compelling or valid. I'm not saying your underlying point (that not all lawsuits are correctly targeted) is wrong, I'm saying that your chosen way of phrasing that argument undermines your point.
My "Ideal Future" is no DRM whatsoever, with the game companies selling their product through digital downloads, and possibly brick-and-mortar/snail-mail retailers for those who want physical media.
I want this future specifically so that I can be sure the games I buy today are still good to go fifteen years from now. Not as unreasonable as it sounds, when you consider that my own collection includes titles like X-Com (1993), Fallout 1&2 (97/98) and the Infinity engine series (late 90's), all of which work, or can be made to work, on a modern PC.
The biggest resistance to the "DRM free" approach comes from the fear of piracy. I don't think this is a particularly rational response to the problem on the part of the devs, as only a single game copy needs to be cracked and torrented to make the DRM irrelevant - you can't reasonably stop that without complete control of the box that runs the game, something you can only partially achieve with consoles, and arguably not even then.
Is suing the pirates in lieu of DRM any more rational? Debatable. But I've no doubt it's an improvement. After all, DRMing the games causes problems for me, the legit user, while anti-piracy suits do not.
There's only a few legitimate medical reasons I can see for making implants with wireless capability, and almost all of those could be made "send-only", or could alternatively be designed such that vital functions are isolated from network ones.
For example, a cardiac implant (pacemaker, artificial heart, whatever) might benefit from a "help, I'm having a heart attack!" mode, sending an alert over a preset network calling for paramedics. But such an option does not require that the implant be vulnerable to being screwed with.
For anything military, it seems to me you'd want zero RF emissions anyway, if only because there are times when the troops need to operate under radio silence. As far as that goes, I could see some reasons for shielding implants from outside interference completely, so as to make a hypothetical combat cyborg less vulnerable to electronic warfare. Faraday cage perhaps?
Hell, even a brain-computer interface could be isolated by making the interface port wired, thus requiring physical access to the hypothetical net-head's skull if you're going to do anything nasty, brain-wise (and if you're that close, less exotic methods can do the same job). Or, if it's got to be wireless to minimize the risk of bacterial infection, fit the receiver just below the skin, and make it optical - the transmitter would sit on the surface and beam light through the skin, but signals from a distance would be ineffective, obvious and directional.
This started out with the little shit claiming someone was an idiot for saying life was ubiquitous. He was utterly failed to prove his initial point.
Which is because he's a troll.
Note the username, which has a string of numbers at the end, numbers which aren't part of the UID. Further note that he's posting with more than one account, same name, different numbers, in this thread.
Do a search on the name, without the numbers. You'll find it's sock puppets all the way down. Check the posting history for any of his accounts, nothing but -1 Trolls. You'll also see him repeating a few lines ad nauseam, arguing with himself and generally crying out for attention.
It's just some script kiddie with too much time on his hands getting around the moderation system for shits and giggles.
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Actually, even Iran and NK don't stand to gain much from open warfare, though they do benefit from sabre-rattling.
Picture what would happen in a war between NK and SK, or Iran and Israel. All involved would find themselves mired in a conflict that would wreck their economies, alienate their allies, deplete their armed forces and generally fuck things up. Victory would not gain much of anything, defeat would be a terrible risk, and the rational reasons for war would be outweighed by the rational reasons against.
They'd be just as screwed over as the US and China would be if they went to war, just on a more localized scale (a US-China war would be global, NK-SK would be limited in scope to southeast Asia). This doesn't even get into nukes; a conventional war is bad enough.
The only factor that makes a renewed Korea or middle eastern war more likely than a US-China one is the lack of stable political leadership. If the parties involved were all operating on pure self interest, the closest we'd get to war would be border incidents and sabre-rattling, which is actually the status quo at present.
Bingo! Somebody who gets it.
Infantry forces do like to have new tech as an option, but they also favour holding on to their existing hardware. Part of this is adherence to tradition, but another element is reliability. If $gun_type_x works just fine in it's role, the troops know how to use it, and no external circumstance has drastically changed, why replace it with $gun_type_y?
What's far more common is for new tech to build on or improve existing tech. If you look at the difference between a Vietnam era M16 and a current era M4, the differences are almost entirely incremental improvements based on advancing technology and field-tested solutions. One small thing changed at a time until the end result is distinct from the beginning.
Novel weapons like the one in TFA, where the main intent is to use them in specialized situations, will be adopted long before the military seriously considers replacing existing, general-purpose hardware.
IIRC, the figure for the total number of rounds expended since the start of the Iraq war divided by the number of confirmed kills works out to a couple hundred thousand bullets per kill. And yes, that includes rounds fired during training. The figure if you exclude training shots is still in the tens of thousands however.
I'll need to go back and look for where I found the figure of tens of thousands of rounds fired in combat per kill. But that's counting suppressing fire and inconclusive engagements (where fire was exchanged and nobody died), not to mention automatic fire from fixed or crew-serviced machine guns, both of which can suck back ammo like nobodies business.
Essentially, for every round that took a life in warfare, thousands more were fired in combat that did not, and tens of thousands more were fired teaching the soldier how to shoot.
Why? I'm not trying to be a smartass but why would the government get 10-20% off? I've never seen an instance where a government organisation got a "bulk discount"
What do you mean you've never seen a government bulk discount? Happens all the time. For any item where the number needed by the government is in the thousands or more, you can bet they're paying less per unit than you would be if you wanted to purchase just one of the same item from a store. It's no different than when big companies buy in bulk.
Besides which, for certain firearms, the cost is driven up by the strong regulations in place. For anything fully automatic, the only option if you want to legally buy one is to get it from an existing owner whose gun was grandfathered in before the law changed, which obviously drives the price up. Hell, there are a few fully functional miniguns in the hands of private owners in the US, any one of which would cost at least as much as most people make in a year to purchase, even assuming you could find an owner willing to part with theirs.
Folks if we have this in our hands now doesn't it beg the question of "how long will it be before the enemy has it too?"?
Well, to answer that question, ask yourself who the enemy is and what sort of weapons they have now.
If we're using Iraq and Afghanistan as our examples, the "enemy" is a bunch of locals with very little by way of military resources, whose current stock of weapons are either A) homemade, i.e. IEDs or B) designed in what was once the Soviet Union, i.e. rifles like the AK-47 and missile launchers like the RPG-7. Weapons that are more than one technological generation behind the curve in other words. So, no, I wouldn't worry about them getting ahold of current generation NATO military hardware, since they don't even have anything from the last generation.
If the "enemy" in your question is a developing nation like North Korea or Iran, then you're still looking at military tech a generation or so behind the curve, albeit superior to what the Taliban has. Remember, you need an entire logistical support chain to maintain and supply your forces, and if you don't have the manufacturing capability to fabricate parts and ammo for a weapon, you won't bother using it.
China is the only nation with sufficient resources to field current generation military tech that isn't a military ally of the US. And they are perfectly capable of doing their own R&D if they choose to, meaning they're not dependant on hand-me-downs from more developed nations. They might reverse engineer US military hardware given the opportunity, but since it is singularly unlikely the US and China will ever go to war, it's hard to consider them "the enemy", per your argument.
OTOH, a majority of ammunition fired from automatic weapons in combat is used in suppressing fire. I've heard an official figure of tens of thousands of rounds fired per confirmed kill. Even if a single 5.56mm is cheap, ten thousand of them ain't.
Suppressing fire, for those who don't want to go google it, is firing on the enemy's position to keep them "suppressed", i.e. scared shitless and behind cover. Or, put another way, if you can keep firing on them, they won't be able to return fire on you without sticking their heads out into a blizzard of incoming lead. An application of the principle that the best defence is a good offence. Most of those shots won't actually hit any enemy targets, because a sensible opponent will stay out of the line of fire for as long as the suppression is maintained.
Obviously, this costs a ton and a half of ammunition, which adds up in cost, and raises the risk of hitting other targets downrange (like civilians or friendly soldiers). A weapon that allows you to eliminate an opponent in cover with a single (expensive) shot might actually be cheaper, and certainly would be more precise, reducing the risk of collateral damage.
In the future: We can carry on with our fixed population size, imposed via whatever methods are "acceptable" and we will have options:
hate that I have to keep pointing this out, but clinical immortality will not lead to overpopulation, as counter-intuitive as that statement sounds, regardless of whether we limit our reproduction as a matter of public policy.
I'll break it down into three scenarios, in order of most to least likely. All three are based around methods for extending the human lifespan. In the first scenario, let's imagine a world where telomerase treatments reverse or mitigate cellular ageing.
Now, to begin with, this isn't "immortality", even in the ageless sense, as there would still be terminal illnesses and cumulative damage. Lifespans would increase, but would not be infinite. Cancer would probably beat out all other natural causes put together. So, let's say the average lifespan is a century or two.
The window of opportunity for having kids would remain mostly where it is now. This is because gametes age and run out regardless of the ageing going on in your other bodily tissues. A woman is born with a finite number of eggs, and they have an best-before date that has nothing to do with telomeres. Men would stay fertile longer, though not indefinitely, but the population growth rate is capped by the number of fertile females, not males.
Thus, the most likely scenario for anti-ageing drugs would not affect the rate of population growth rate, and would only increase the average lifespan by a limited margin. Given that the developed world is already at or below replacement level fertility, this would not pose a problem for the global population. And the developing world would need to modernize before they could implement this kind of medical care regardless, so they would probably also see a decline in growth to match our own, if history is any precedent.
Now, a second scenario would be perfect clinical immortality. No disease is terminal, no age related damage irreversible, no injury permanent. People only die traumatic deaths, whether by accident, violence or suicide.
The population still wouldn't skyrocket. People in the western world put off having kids already, generally waiting as long as natural fertility allows. How long would we put off having kids if we had no biological clock counting down? Decades? Centuries? A long time, regardless.
People still wouldn't live forever either. I've seen estimate that state that if death by old age vanished tomorrow, the average life expectancy would work out to about 300-500 years. Might be less if suicide became a common cause of death. And while the population might level out, the growth rate would slow to a crawl.
Now, the final option would be complete immortality. To accomplish this, we'd need to be able to make backups, against the risk of traumatic death. The mechanism for backing up a human being would almost certainly entail whole brain uploading.
With the capacity to upload brains comes the capacity to live without bodies. Overpopulation becomes supremely irrelevant if many or most of us live inside virtual worlds. And as far as that goes, given how technologically unlikely this scenario is, who's to say we'd even need Earth at this stage?
Actually, the whole overpopulation argument against immortality is a red herring. Partly because of the reasons you listed, but also for reasons specific to the nature of clinical immortality. To wit:
1. Gamete cells don't last forever, especially in women, and the number of fertile women is the key factor in population growth (can't have more babies than there are wombs). Live long enough, and even men start to get age related infertility, as the cells in the testes that produce sperm die off. In a future where telomerase treatments extend life indefinitely, natural childbearing age would not increase, even if all other aspects of ageing (including menopause) were averted. You could solve this with artificial implantation, which would make every pregnancy involving a woman over fifty planned, and likely expensive.
2. People in the western world have kids in their thirties precisely because they don't feel they'll have the chance later. If we solved the gamete problem I raised in point 1, then the pressure is off. Meaning, the population growth rate might actually drop further. People could, and probably would, wait to have kids a very long time.
3. Any future solution to ageing that allows the body to regenerate from injury completely (a necessary step for clinical immortality) also, by definition, makes surgical sterilization completely reversible. If anyone could get a vasectomy or tubal ligation with the knowledge that a simple medical treatment would allow them to be fertile again, the main reason not to do so would be history. Accidental pregnancy could be eliminated entirely.
So really, as counter-intuitive as it sounds, a general purpose anti-ageing treatment would just about be the best way to stop overpopulation from getting any worse.
If YOU get to live forever, you're going to have to deal with THEM forever too.
Fair trade off, as far as I'm concerned. After all, we're all "THEM" from somebody else's point of view, right?
Besides, "they" aren't individual people, "they" are other people. Douchebags come in all ages, all groups and all eras. If you and your least favourite person both lived without ageing, would your life be improved by their death? No. You'd find someone else to take their place.
Learning to live with other human beings you dislike is a skill. I've met people who never learned it in the first place. I certainly didn't have it a 15. I was much better at it by 25. Perhaps I'll be able to tolerate anyone at 250. Assuming the human lifespan gets that long before I die of old age (unlikely, but there's always hope).
Yeah, but Assange is high profile and isn't Russian. Being in the spotlight offers a measure of protection, and most of the folks on that list lived in Russia (and were therefor more easily killed and swept under the rug). The guy I was replying to obliquely referenced Litvinenko, who was different from Assange, and a far more likely target of assassination.
My point is, they wouldn't kill Assange. They'd make an example of his source as a guard against future leaks. You could even argue that by showing their willingness to use murder as a tool of extralegal censorship (which the list of dead journalists adequately demonstrates), they've guaranteed that nobody will dare supply wikileaks with information.
Actually, if Russia were going to "plug" a leak, Assange wouldn't be the target, the person who leaked the information in the first place would. Meaning, if someone in the Russian government had, say, documents about Vladimir Putin doing something illegal/immoral/embarrassing a decade ago, they'd be disinclined to share them with wikileaks for fear of being given a 9mm retirement present.
I can well believe that Assange has nothing in his files that could embarrass Russia or any similarly scary governments, because nothing has been given to him. Especially since nobody in their right mind would submit information to wikileaks and assume that the information in question would be scrubbed of anything that could leak back to the informant before being published.
You did get to the part at the bottom of my post where I pointed out it wasn't meant to be taken seriously, right? I didn't think I needed to make that clear, since the whole thing is written tongue-in-cheek, but I put the disclaimer in anyway in case anyone had a broken sarcasm detector.
Anyway, if someone want so become the first terrorist to successfully smuggle explosives lodged up their backside, I encourage them to got for it. Their recruitment would be interesting to see.
"Okay, here's the plan. We've hidden a block of C4 and a detonator inside this 11 inch buttplug. You're going to, uh, 'hide' this and take it aboard the flight. Here's a bottle of lube and some instructions translated from english that we got off the net. Good luck!"
I can just see someone trying to explain to the ultra-conservative muslim recruit that he's going to need to lose his virginity to a pound of high explosives in order to get his martyr status.
I'm pretty sure that wouldn't work. To begin with, if the liquid explosive in question is toxic, you're boned before you even get on the plane. And yes, if you're intent on committing suicide you won't care, but you have to actually stay alive long enough to get airborne. Storing it rectally in a baggy the way drug mules do might work better, assuming it doesn't leak. The rectal bomb option has been tried, unsuccessfully I might add, using solid explosives.
Further to that, the type of liquid explosives the TSA is interested in are generally meant to work as a mixture, e.g. liquid A mixed with liquid B to form unstable explosive mixture C, so you need to get a couple of unmixed fluids on board. Storing them together, even if they're in separate baggies, is just asking for premature detonation.
Also, IIRC, the problem with the TSA's current threshold for liquids is that the amount of liquid explosive needed to take down a plane is much larger than most people realize. I don't know, or care to find out, the liquid storage capacity of an average human bladder or rectum, but there's an excellent chance you'd need more than one person to smuggle a sufficient quantity of explosives aboard.
I'm not saying this scheme is impossible, but I will say it sounds like it would fail, possibly hilariously.
(Note: The above post is not meant to be taken seriously.)
Your link contradicts your points.
According to some of the sites you just linked to, they aren't allowed to eat dogs, and some of the more hardline ones don't keep them as pets. Working dogs are allowed, with sheepdogs and guide dogs for the blind both being cited as examples of this. This is what I found the first time I tried to google your point, and it's what the first links in the search you just made shows.
Which means muslims should have no problem with sniffer dogs on a religious level. Now, a hypothetical terrorist might claim that being sniffed violates his religion, in the hopes of circumventing the sniffer dogs. Which is fine, because I covered that in my post: people who don't want to go the dog route can instead opt for the scanners.
Congratulations, you're a fucking moron.
Whereas you are incapable of polite discourse. If you can't frame your argument without resorting to ad homs, don't bother making it.
Piece of advice: whenever a neutral party reads an argument between two people, they will almost always side with the one being less belligerent. You cannot convince a reader that your view is correct if you can only express your view by mouthing off. If faced with a debate where the other person hasn't insulted you yet, stay polite, and you'll sound more like a reasonable person.
Wow, this is an eerie coincidence. We both posted the same thought, in the same thread, and at the same time (3:08 according to the timestamps).
I'm 100% in favour of the sniffer dog approach to the problem, and honestly can't see why the TSA hasn't opted for them. The only reason for not using metal detectors as the primary line of defence is that they don't detect explosives. Using metal detectors and dogs in tandem should stop both hijackings and bombings far more reliably than the scanners would, and without the attendant invasion of privacy.
Big deal.
The only way they can make the scanners work, legally speaking, is by the passengers "consenting" as a condition of boarding the plane. Either you let yourself being scanned, or you don't board. I see no reason why swapping "either you let some TSA perv see you naked or you don't fly" with "either you let a TSA dog sniff you for two seconds or you don't fly". And the latter option will bother far fewer people.
Moreover, a few minutes on google, snopes and wikipedia couldn't confirm either your claim about Iraq or your claim that muslims find dogs unclean. The fact that dogs are kept as pets in middle eastern nations would seem like an obvious rebuttal to the latter. In religious dietary laws "unclean" means "don't eat this", not "don't let this anywhere near you". I can well believe that there's some muslim rule about not eating dog meat, as opposed to a rule against dogs period.
Now, that was only about ten minutes of searching; I might have simply missed it. So, I would ask for a citation on your point. And by "citation", I mean something reputable and first-hand, like a news site.
You know, all this talk of profiling, scanning, and the rest of the controversial methods makes me wonder: Why aren't we using sniffer dogs as our primary defence against bombs?
Dogs, especially those bred for it, can be trained to sniff out explosives. The article makes it clear there's a minimum threshold for a bomb big enough to structurally damage an airplane, presumably the dogs can reliably find something at or below that threshold.
So far as I know, nobody finds the dogs offensive or controversial. The scans and pat-downs are borderline sexual assault, profiling is either invasion of privacy or racism depending on what's being profiled (i.e. personal history or race). Getting sniffed by a dog doesn't have those problems.
Now, this won't help find guns. But a metal detector is adequate for those. Knives are a minimal problem, considering that most of them will also set off a metal detector, and irrespective of that, it's been pointed out there are no shortage of sharp objects already on the plane. And the only real use of a gun or knife on an airplane is hijacking it, something that the reinforced cockpit doors and paranoid post 9/11 passengers will prevent.
Airport security using luggage x-rays, passenger metal detectors and a few agents with trained dogs should be sufficient against all threats.
Well, I agree with you that we need to take the nuclear option much more seriously, for power generation purposes. Something needs to replace all those coal fired power plants, and we're still a ways off from being able to build commercial fusion reactors.
However, I'm a realist. I can't imaging nuclear power ever winning points on cost. And the reason for this is not just that the current crop of 40 year old+ reactors is expensive to operate.
If you want to make any piece of technology virtually failure safe, you can do so. You can make a building that will survive every earthquake. Or a computer that cannot crash. Or (insert-imaginary-perfect-machine-here).
What you can't do is make such technology cheap. Systematic redundancy, backups upon backups, religious levels of maintenance, every piece of equipment built to specifications that vastly exceed the operational reality - all of these are possible, and they all cost a fortune.
There are only a couple of areas of human engineering where we build with such precise paranoia around failure. Nuclear power is one of them. And the reason for doing this with nuclear power is that we're properly paranoid about it, because failure carries with it such consequences. An excellent study in this is to contrast Three Mile Island (where the safeties were well designed) with Chernobyl (not so much).
Nuclear power done right is going to be expense. We can cut more corners with anything else. Now, this doesn't mean we shouldn't use nuclear power, but it does mean that the best use for it is in large commercial power plants.
Actually, fossil fuels have trace levels of mercury in them. Which, when burned as fuel, becomes methylmercury, also known as organic mercury.
Now, for those not knowledgeable about heavy metal poisoning, organic mercury is one of the nasties. Mercury poisoning is bad, organic mercury poisoning is much, much worse. Look up Minimata in Japan if you doubt me.
Methylmercury is bioaccumulative, meaning that animals higher up the food chain have more of it in their flesh than the ones lower down. If you've ever been cautioned not to eat shark or swordfish, this is the reason why. Moreover, just as it is an accumulative toxin in the food chain, so too is it a cumulative toxin in humans. You don't excrete it or break it down into harmless products. Even if you could break it down, you'd still be left with elemental mercury, which is no picnic.
Ergo, yes indeed, pollutants dissolved in sea water can wreck your health, even if the source of pollution happened nowhere near you.
I suspect the resistance to using a nuclear cargo vessel has less to do with anti-nuclear fears and more to do with the cost of operating them.
This has come up before, and I'll say it again for good measure: naval nuclear reactors are expensive. If they weren't, you can be sure the military would use them on cruisers and destroyers. As it stands the only vessels that use a nuke plant are carriers and subs, both expensive as hell, and the latter only use nuke plants because they don't need to surface for oxygen (on a pure operating cost basis diesel-electric subs win out).
Plans for nuclear surface ships below carrier weight have been put forward, and axed repeatedly, almost always on the basis of cost alone. And if the American navy says something is too expensive, believe me, it's too expensive.
Now, what I wonder is, would a cargo vessel be less polluting if it used a multi-hull design to reduce drag and was fitted with more advanced filtration system to mitigate the worst of its exhaust? That's a lot more achievable than the nuclear option, and wouldn't sacrifice cargo capacity, unlike the sail option put forward earlier in the thread.
No, I cheer because the jurisdiction I'm in doesn't go along with that kind of bullshit. Hereabouts, you need more than just an IP address to get the lawsuit rolling.
Your concern is valid for people living in the United States and a number of other jurisdictions that have acceded to American demands regarding copyright enforcement. Doesn't apply to me.
You recall I mentioned that I had an "Ideal World" where copyright law was concerned? My ideal would be for all jurisdictions (particularly the US) to favour a rational, technologically savvy approach to the law. I dislike seeing people sued unjustly over alleged copyright infringement. Ideally, the courts would be staffed with people who don't fall for the argument that an IP address is conclusive.
Also, as a final counterpoint, your argument is built around fear mongering. "Oh sure, you say that now, but wait until the eeevvil lawyers come knocking", that kind of bullshit. I don't consider arguments framed around attempted emotional manipulation to be compelling or valid. I'm not saying your underlying point (that not all lawsuits are correctly targeted) is wrong, I'm saying that your chosen way of phrasing that argument undermines your point.
I'm cheering, tentatively.
My "Ideal Future" is no DRM whatsoever, with the game companies selling their product through digital downloads, and possibly brick-and-mortar/snail-mail retailers for those who want physical media.
I want this future specifically so that I can be sure the games I buy today are still good to go fifteen years from now. Not as unreasonable as it sounds, when you consider that my own collection includes titles like X-Com (1993), Fallout 1&2 (97/98) and the Infinity engine series (late 90's), all of which work, or can be made to work, on a modern PC.
The biggest resistance to the "DRM free" approach comes from the fear of piracy. I don't think this is a particularly rational response to the problem on the part of the devs, as only a single game copy needs to be cracked and torrented to make the DRM irrelevant - you can't reasonably stop that without complete control of the box that runs the game, something you can only partially achieve with consoles, and arguably not even then.
Is suing the pirates in lieu of DRM any more rational? Debatable. But I've no doubt it's an improvement. After all, DRMing the games causes problems for me, the legit user, while anti-piracy suits do not.
There's only a few legitimate medical reasons I can see for making implants with wireless capability, and almost all of those could be made "send-only", or could alternatively be designed such that vital functions are isolated from network ones.
For example, a cardiac implant (pacemaker, artificial heart, whatever) might benefit from a "help, I'm having a heart attack!" mode, sending an alert over a preset network calling for paramedics. But such an option does not require that the implant be vulnerable to being screwed with.
For anything military, it seems to me you'd want zero RF emissions anyway, if only because there are times when the troops need to operate under radio silence. As far as that goes, I could see some reasons for shielding implants from outside interference completely, so as to make a hypothetical combat cyborg less vulnerable to electronic warfare. Faraday cage perhaps?
Hell, even a brain-computer interface could be isolated by making the interface port wired, thus requiring physical access to the hypothetical net-head's skull if you're going to do anything nasty, brain-wise (and if you're that close, less exotic methods can do the same job). Or, if it's got to be wireless to minimize the risk of bacterial infection, fit the receiver just below the skin, and make it optical - the transmitter would sit on the surface and beam light through the skin, but signals from a distance would be ineffective, obvious and directional.
It's like a party in your lungs, and everyone's invited!
This started out with the little shit claiming someone was an idiot for saying life was ubiquitous. He was utterly failed to prove his initial point.
Which is because he's a troll.
Note the username, which has a string of numbers at the end, numbers which aren't part of the UID. Further note that he's posting with more than one account, same name, different numbers, in this thread.
Do a search on the name, without the numbers. You'll find it's sock puppets all the way down. Check the posting history for any of his accounts, nothing but -1 Trolls. You'll also see him repeating a few lines ad nauseam, arguing with himself and generally crying out for attention.
It's just some script kiddie with too much time on his hands getting around the moderation system for shits and giggles.