The $10 million per year funds development of an advanced, lightweight carbon-fiber device, the Primitive Orbital UNit Cargo Holder, or POUCH. This device is attached to the side of US and Russian launch vehicles, and the Australians can then place tiny rockets and satellites in the POUCH to launch them into orbit. Launch vehicles are recovered using a novel mechanism. Giant steel springs are attached to the bottom of the launch vehicles; after reentering the atmosphere, the vehicles hit the ground, compressing the springs, and the energy is then dissipated as the vehicle bounces across the Australian outback using a hopping motion.
The problem isn't the basic idea of having a 'czar', which is a good idea. The issue is that we have too many czars appointed, so it has become difficult to keep track of them all and coordinate their efforts. What we need is a single individual given the executive power to oversee all of these czars, and appoint them, discipline them, and fire them at will, so as to centralize control of the czars. That person will be the Czar Czar.
Wait a minute, so Pluto is not named after the dog in the Disney cartoons? So would that mean that Pluto's moon isn't actually named Goofy? Aw, hell... I guess I just got an F on that paper for my astronomy class.
Am I the only person who read the summary and instantly thought of the Simpsons episode "Marge vs. the Monorail" where a fast-talking salesman sells a malfunctioning solar-powered monorail to Springfield?
I don't really get why Apple, Google or IBM would get any anti-trust charges.
Don't be silly, of *course* Google is a monopoly! When people google, who do they use? Google. Google has a complete monopoly when it comes to googling. That's why we have to split the company in two. I propose the creation of two companies, "Go" and "Ogle". Or perhaps "Goo" and "Gle", or even "G" and "Oogle". Anyhow you get my point.
$600,000,000? That's insane. I could easily secure the border for *half* of that. Consider: if there are 24 hours in the day, and 365 days a year, and labor costs 5$ an hour, then it would cost 43,800 dollars to have a section of border guarded 24/7/365, presumably employing three different guys in eight-hour shifts. With $300,000,000, you could employ 6,849 guys at those rates. The U.S.-Mexico border is only 4,000 miles long, so that's more than one guy for every mile of the border (and this is on top of the existing border patrol).
So now you've got round-the-clock, year-long border security, just by paying a bunch of guys five dollars an hour. Now, I admit that it might sound difficult to find people who would be willing to patrol the border, facing off against smugglers and drug runners, enduring cold nights and scorching hot days, all for just $5.00 an hour. But here's the really ingenious part of the plan: we employ illegal aliens from Mexico to do the work for us!
Re:What do you get combining Apple + gaming compan
on
Apple Eyeing EA?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you want to know what direction Apple is taking, look at how they got to where they are now. Quite a few years ago, in fact this may have been pre- iPod (which is so long long ago in internet years that it's practically the Ice Age) Steve Jobs made an interesting statement about the future of Apple Computer. He was trying to explain where he saw Apple going. And the company he held out as a model wasn't Microsoft, or Dell, or any other software or hardware company. Steve Jobs said he wanted Apple to be the new Sony, that is, to be the leader in consumer electronics. At the time, I thought Jobs was either out of it, or being typically grandiose. But over the past ten years, this is exactly what Apple has done. They've moved from being a company that just makes desktop computers, to a company that makes digital music players, smartphones, laptops and desktops- almost all the devices you need to live, work, and play in the digital age.
My prediction is that Apple will continue to do that. They want to be a leader in the consumer electronics field, and so they are going to spend those billions in a way that helps them do that. Does buying Twitter, a company without a business model, help them be a leader in the industry? If not, they're not gonna buy Twitter. Does buying EA help them be a leader in the industry? Apple makes hardware and software to operate that hardware, but they've never been much of a software company, so it doesn't help them.
True, games is a huge market, and one that Apple has missed out on. But Jobs' ego dictates that Apple is a technology leader, not a follower. They don't want to be a 'me-too!' company by jumping into a market with a shiny white console when the console market is already saturated between the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii. Apple conquered a new market with the iPod and is a serious contender in the emerging smartphone market. Apple will continue to tackle emerging technologies, not established technologies like game consoles. My guess is that Apple will (1) expanded into portable, networked electronics that fill the gap between phone and laptop, and (2) try to do for the TV what they already did for music. They've already tried that with Apple TV. It hasn't taken off yet, but it's a step in the right direction.
All that stuff about thermal sensors, nitrogen-filled rooms, making love on a bed surrounded by moon rocks... it sounds like something straight out of a Hollywood heist movie. Probably, in the years behind bars, he's embellished the story in hopes of selling it as a book or a movie script. My guess is that he's a bad combination of highly imaginative and dishonest, and he's just trying to use those qualities as best he can now that he has few other hopes of legitimate employment.
particularly like the bit where the interns in question laid the moonrocks down and a mattress and screwed on top of them, thereby making the contamination of the spent samples even worse.
In a related story, NASA announced a groundbreaking discovery today, with some startling implications. The good news is, they have discovered that the Moon supports microbial life. The bad news is, it's chlamydia.
I think this policy is racist policy. Is discrimination against Balkan people and people of Serbia ancestry! Am lodging complaint with your government.
Maybe they're getting into the Twitter craze like everyone else? It would make sense. I mean would you rather get a message about what Ashton Kutcher is eating, or what color of socks Oprah is wearing, or messages describing the life of an honest-to-goodness pirate?
Religions do tend to be larger than cults, but I'd suggest that it's not necessarily the only distinction between cults and religions. The organizations we consider cults- such as Scientology- tend to be full of recent converts. These are people who made an active choice to join the organization. With an established religion, however, you have a lot of people who are basically there by default, rather than active choice. They are there because their parents, their community, and perhaps their government have told them to, so they aren't necessarily true believers and zealots. I'd say that's the biggest difference: being part of a cult is going enthusiastically against the mainstream, being part of a religion is going with it, with degrees of enthusiasm that vary from "Hallelujah, brothers!" to "meh".
Apple is pretty cultish, because for a long time you had to go out of the way to purchase and use Apple products when it was often cheaper and easier to use Windows, like everyone else. Windows is a religion, something you just sort of went along with because that's what everyone else was doing. But as people have pointed out, with Apple increasingly becoming dominant in certain markets (smartphones, music players) it's less and less a cult, and more and more a religion. Not that we can't still dress up in black turtlenecks and sacrifice goats in secret chambers in our hidden crypts. Our hip, stylish, lucite-and-brushed-aluminum crypts.
Many kinds of animals survived, after all. Why shouldn't dinosaurs have, too? I'm certainly not saying they must have, but just on the face of things, it seems more likely that their extinction was gradual and drawn-out over a long period of time. (And yes, I know the K-T extinction is not thought to have happened in the blink of an eye, anyway, but you know what I mean.)
In the wake of the asteroid/comet impact, few if any groups were unscathed. In his 1996 book, Archibald (who is actually an *opponent* of the impact hypothesis)lists the following extinction percentages for vertebrates in Montana:
sharks - 100%
ray-finned fish - 40%
amphibians - 0%
mammals - 50%
turtles - 12%
lizards - 70%
champsosaurs - 0%
crocodiles - 20%
dinosaurs - 100%
That's by no means a complete list! Archibald leaves out pterosaurs, enantiornithine birds, and hesperornithiform birds, which all suffer 100% extinction. There is also evidence that insects were hit hard (based on the disappearance of certain types of feeding traces from leaf fossils), the plants show extinctions at the boundary, and freshwater clams also show a major extinction. Also, although the amphibians supposedly don't suffer any extinction, keep in mind that their fossil record for this period is based entirely on scrappy isolated bones. We probably don't have a good handle on exactly how many amphibian species were around, so it's possible that they suffered some extinctions, and we just don't realize it.
Also, keep in mind that the fact that a species survived does not mean that it was unaffected. If 99.9% of the individuals of a mammal species are incinerated by the fireball or starve to death in the ensuing ecosystem collapse, but 1000 individuals survive (eating cockroaches or whatever) to perpetuate the species, then the species survives. In an asteroid impact and ensuing impact winter, the difference between winners and losers might be that the losers are completely wiped out, whereas the 'winners' are almost completelywiped out. There would be survivors, but it's gonna be so bleak and grim that the living would envy the dead (assuming the mammals are capable of such philosophical sentiments, which is of course doubtful). Ever read Cormack McCarthy's "The Road"? That's what it would probably be like. Cold, dark, everything burnt, nothing growing, and the survivors scavenging off of whatever is left from the old world... and preying on each other.
More evidence is always good, but once you actually start to think about it, "a small population of some dinosaurs survived in remote areas until it eventually petered out" is actually more plausible than "every single last dinosaur died at once in a gigantic catastrophe that nevertheless was not large enough to affect other animals such as mammals to the same extent".
Many kinds of animals survived, after all. Why shouldn't dinosaurs have, too? I'm certainly not saying they must have, but just on the face of things, it seems more likely that their extinction was gradual and drawn-out over a long period of time. (And yes, I know the K-T extinction is not thought to have happened in the blink of an eye, anyway, but you know what I mean.)
It's a bit telling that the study is published in an obscure web-only paleontology journal called "Palaeontologica Electronica". I'm not saying that good work can't be published in obscure journals, but I would argue that if you had really strong evidence for post-Cretaceous dinosaurs, you wouldn't publish it in a journal that nobody's ever heard of. You'd be publishing in Nature, Science, or PNAS. That suggests that he published here because he didn't have a lot of options, because the scientific community was pretty unreceptive to evidence presented in this study. Obviously, the conventional wisdom isn't everything. Geologists hated the idea of continental drift, and the asteroid impact hypothesis got a very cold reception before the Chicxulub crater was found. But it's worth asking whether the evidence here is any good or not.
First off, it's not as if they've suddenly discovered dinosaurs where nobody expected them. Paleontologists have known for decades that these rock beds contain dinosaurs (as well as typical Cretaceous mammals). It's just that everyone else has always interpreted these rocks as being of Cretaceous age, rather than post-Cretaceous. What he's doing is arguing that the rocks are older than we thought.
Second, what's his evidence for saying these are post-Cretaceous rocks? The best evidence would be a marker bed- if you could show that a skeleton lay above the iridium layer formed by the fallout of the asteroid, then it would be pretty much unrefutable. However, the iridium layer has *not* been recognized in this area. The second best evidence would be a layer of volcanic ash which can be dated using radioactive dating. There are no ashes under the bones which are younger than 65.5 million years old (the date of the impact). In fact all the ashes under the bones are around 75-73 million years old. So his evidence is the pollen grains. He says they look like post-Cretaceous pollen, not Cretaceous pollen. That doesn't seem terribly convincing in my mind. Given that the mammals seen in the same rocks are pretty clearly Cretaceous type mammals, the fossil evidence is contradictory here. His other evidence is something called magnetostratigraphy- the Earth's magnetic poles reverse every few hundred thousand or million years, with series of normal and reversed polarities. If you can match up a series of polarity changes, you can *sometimes* figure out how old the rocks are. But it's not a very precise method, and it's a bit tricky to figure out where a particular sequence going "normal-reversed-normal-reversed" fits into the geological record. It's a bit like trying to figure out the time and date by whether your neighbor has his house lights on or off, or whether the trash has been picked up recently or not.
In short, it would take a lot more than this one paper to overturn the consensus that has resulted from one hundred years of scientific research. I mean, if someone published an experiment tomorrow saying that Einstein was wrong, what would your reaction be? To reject Einstein? Or to think that the experimenter might have screwed up? Currently, the bulk of the evidence says that the extinction took place 65.5 million years ago, and that (with the exception of birds) the dinosaurs didn't make it.
It seems to me that there are two questions here. First, is attacking civilian infrastructure to cause discomfort, fear, or inflict economic hardship a morally just tactic? Second, is it actually effective?
In World War II, the U.S. bombed civilian targets in Germany and Japan, the rationale being that stopping the Third Reich and the Japanese empire justified the cost in lives and suffering. We had 50 years to think about that decision before the U.S. became involved in the Kosovo War in 1999. Then, the U.S. and NATO bombed a number of civilian targets, including Serbia's electrical grid, TV stations, bridges, and factories. Again, nobody is going to argue that this is noble and chivalrous, but while it's distasteful, it's arguably preferable to letting a dictator get away with murder, or rather, genocide. Given the lack of outrage in the United States, I'd argue that we've long since decided as a society that it's OK to deliberately attack civilian infrastructure if the the suffering caused is less than the suffering averted. Where it becomes questionable is when attacks on civilian infrastructure are meant to be purely punitive, out of revenge rather than a need to protect yourself or others. Then, I'd argue that it's not justifiable.
But it's also important to ask: are such attacks really effective? Hitler tried to break the will of the British people by attacking civilian populations with bombers, buzz-bombs, and V-2 rockets. However, the Brits rallied around Churchill. And arguably, Hitler's decision to attack civilian targets in the Battle of Britain was one of his biggest mistakes, because it took pressure off of the Royal Air Force. The destruction caused to German cities by Allied bombing runs didn't lead to the surrender of the Germans, and I suspect that Japan would have struggled on despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki if they had thought that they had a serious chance of winning the war. So, I'm not a military historian, but I'd argue that attacking the civilian population is counterproductive. Generally, it will enrage your enemy and make them more determined to fight on. The loss of life and financial loss caused by the 9-11 attacks didn't break the will of the American people or destabilize the Bush Administration, instead it caused people to rally around the administration and let them do whatever they wanted.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that equipping our troops with the iPod Touch and iPhone provides them with something that no other technology can: that smug, hipper-than-thou sense of superiority that comes with being an Apple user. If Al Qaeda and the Taliban are still using Microsoft products, then their morale will suffer because they don't have the latest, cutting-edge gadgets, and they will lose tactical effectiveness on the battlefield.
Right so, English is a virus. Cmp. Ireland, they still stick to the colonial language.
It is better when people stick to their mother tongue. It is all about culture.
No, you guys should all learn English. And if you foreigners have trouble understanding our code, we American programmers can be helpful and WE CAN WRITE OUR COMMENTS LOUDER, BY TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
I find it very telling that Steve Ballmer won't let his kids use an iPod, and Bill Gates won't let Melinda use an iPhone. Instead of saying, "hm, maybe I should build a product my own family members would want to use" they're trying to push their own family members into using Microsoft products. They're using their position to force a market to accept a Microsoft product that it doesn't really want... only in this case it's their position as a husband and father, and the "market" is their own family.
I'm not saying that denying your family iPods and iPhones constitutes some kind of spousal abuse or child abuse. But I am saying that this attitude is counterproductive as a corporate leader. Your family and your market is telling you something about the kind of products they enjoy using and will pay money for. Instead of listening, and producing products that emulate the best qualities of Apple's products, you're trying to tell your family and your customers that no, you don't really want the things you think you want. You actually want what we're giving you.
Hrm. How about we call the mystery particle the "Obamaton"? Or perhaps it's a new type of quark, closely related to the 'strange' quark, the 'change' quark?
Well, at least pimps, hos and playas are merely indifferent to science. They don't actively work to discredit it, suppress it or redefine it as something else.
Yo man, why you down on us playas and our science skills? We gotta use some mad science skills to get the honeys. For instance ya gotta know the correlation coefficient that describes the relationship between yo bling and yo hos, to maximize the amount of hos per dollar of bling. And is the relationship between those sweet rims on yo pimped out ride, and gettin the honeys best modeled by a linear or logistic model? Mendelian genetics is important to know so you can figure out whether a girl's sister gonna be hot. We playas all about the science.
Slashdot Mirror
The $10 million per year funds development of an advanced, lightweight carbon-fiber device, the Primitive Orbital UNit Cargo Holder, or POUCH. This device is attached to the side of US and Russian launch vehicles, and the Australians can then place tiny rockets and satellites in the POUCH to launch them into orbit. Launch vehicles are recovered using a novel mechanism. Giant steel springs are attached to the bottom of the launch vehicles; after reentering the atmosphere, the vehicles hit the ground, compressing the springs, and the energy is then dissipated as the vehicle bounces across the Australian outback using a hopping motion.
"Male seeking... anything."
The problem isn't the basic idea of having a 'czar', which is a good idea. The issue is that we have too many czars appointed, so it has become difficult to keep track of them all and coordinate their efforts. What we need is a single individual given the executive power to oversee all of these czars, and appoint them, discipline them, and fire them at will, so as to centralize control of the czars. That person will be the Czar Czar.
Wait a minute, so Pluto is not named after the dog in the Disney cartoons? So would that mean that Pluto's moon isn't actually named Goofy? Aw, hell... I guess I just got an F on that paper for my astronomy class.
Am I the only person who read the summary and instantly thought of the Simpsons episode "Marge vs. the Monorail" where a fast-talking salesman sells a malfunctioning solar-powered monorail to Springfield?
Don't be silly, of *course* Google is a monopoly! When people google, who do they use? Google. Google has a complete monopoly when it comes to googling. That's why we have to split the company in two. I propose the creation of two companies, "Go" and "Ogle". Or perhaps "Goo" and "Gle", or even "G" and "Oogle". Anyhow you get my point.
So now you've got round-the-clock, year-long border security, just by paying a bunch of guys five dollars an hour. Now, I admit that it might sound difficult to find people who would be willing to patrol the border, facing off against smugglers and drug runners, enduring cold nights and scorching hot days, all for just $5.00 an hour. But here's the really ingenious part of the plan: we employ illegal aliens from Mexico to do the work for us!
My prediction is that Apple will continue to do that. They want to be a leader in the consumer electronics field, and so they are going to spend those billions in a way that helps them do that. Does buying Twitter, a company without a business model, help them be a leader in the industry? If not, they're not gonna buy Twitter. Does buying EA help them be a leader in the industry? Apple makes hardware and software to operate that hardware, but they've never been much of a software company, so it doesn't help them.
True, games is a huge market, and one that Apple has missed out on. But Jobs' ego dictates that Apple is a technology leader, not a follower. They don't want to be a 'me-too!' company by jumping into a market with a shiny white console when the console market is already saturated between the Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii. Apple conquered a new market with the iPod and is a serious contender in the emerging smartphone market. Apple will continue to tackle emerging technologies, not established technologies like game consoles. My guess is that Apple will (1) expanded into portable, networked electronics that fill the gap between phone and laptop, and (2) try to do for the TV what they already did for music. They've already tried that with Apple TV. It hasn't taken off yet, but it's a step in the right direction.
All that stuff about thermal sensors, nitrogen-filled rooms, making love on a bed surrounded by moon rocks... it sounds like something straight out of a Hollywood heist movie. Probably, in the years behind bars, he's embellished the story in hopes of selling it as a book or a movie script. My guess is that he's a bad combination of highly imaginative and dishonest, and he's just trying to use those qualities as best he can now that he has few other hopes of legitimate employment.
In a related story, NASA announced a groundbreaking discovery today, with some startling implications. The good news is, they have discovered that the Moon supports microbial life. The bad news is, it's chlamydia.
with most sincerity,
Serbian Ambassador to the United States,
Mr. Srjc Osrjce Srjcvic
Maybe they're getting into the Twitter craze like everyone else? It would make sense. I mean would you rather get a message about what Ashton Kutcher is eating, or what color of socks Oprah is wearing, or messages describing the life of an honest-to-goodness pirate?
NCSoft is crazy to pick this fight. I guess they've never played Ultima, or they'd know that Lord British cannot be defeated.
Apple is pretty cultish, because for a long time you had to go out of the way to purchase and use Apple products when it was often cheaper and easier to use Windows, like everyone else. Windows is a religion, something you just sort of went along with because that's what everyone else was doing. But as people have pointed out, with Apple increasingly becoming dominant in certain markets (smartphones, music players) it's less and less a cult, and more and more a religion. Not that we can't still dress up in black turtlenecks and sacrifice goats in secret chambers in our hidden crypts. Our hip, stylish, lucite-and-brushed-aluminum crypts.
Nasty, nasty fanses! The fanses violates the preciouss.... the preciousss copyrightses!
In the wake of the asteroid/comet impact, few if any groups were unscathed. In his 1996 book, Archibald (who is actually an *opponent* of the impact hypothesis)lists the following extinction percentages for vertebrates in Montana:
sharks - 100%
ray-finned fish - 40%
amphibians - 0%
mammals - 50%
turtles - 12%
lizards - 70%
champsosaurs - 0%
crocodiles - 20%
dinosaurs - 100%
That's by no means a complete list! Archibald leaves out pterosaurs, enantiornithine birds, and hesperornithiform birds, which all suffer 100% extinction. There is also evidence that insects were hit hard (based on the disappearance of certain types of feeding traces from leaf fossils), the plants show extinctions at the boundary, and freshwater clams also show a major extinction. Also, although the amphibians supposedly don't suffer any extinction, keep in mind that their fossil record for this period is based entirely on scrappy isolated bones. We probably don't have a good handle on exactly how many amphibian species were around, so it's possible that they suffered some extinctions, and we just don't realize it.
Also, keep in mind that the fact that a species survived does not mean that it was unaffected. If 99.9% of the individuals of a mammal species are incinerated by the fireball or starve to death in the ensuing ecosystem collapse, but 1000 individuals survive (eating cockroaches or whatever) to perpetuate the species, then the species survives. In an asteroid impact and ensuing impact winter, the difference between winners and losers might be that the losers are completely wiped out, whereas the 'winners' are almost completelywiped out. There would be survivors, but it's gonna be so bleak and grim that the living would envy the dead (assuming the mammals are capable of such philosophical sentiments, which is of course doubtful). Ever read Cormack McCarthy's "The Road"? That's what it would probably be like. Cold, dark, everything burnt, nothing growing, and the survivors scavenging off of whatever is left from the old world... and preying on each other.
It's a bit telling that the study is published in an obscure web-only paleontology journal called "Palaeontologica Electronica". I'm not saying that good work can't be published in obscure journals, but I would argue that if you had really strong evidence for post-Cretaceous dinosaurs, you wouldn't publish it in a journal that nobody's ever heard of. You'd be publishing in Nature, Science, or PNAS. That suggests that he published here because he didn't have a lot of options, because the scientific community was pretty unreceptive to evidence presented in this study. Obviously, the conventional wisdom isn't everything. Geologists hated the idea of continental drift, and the asteroid impact hypothesis got a very cold reception before the Chicxulub crater was found. But it's worth asking whether the evidence here is any good or not.
First off, it's not as if they've suddenly discovered dinosaurs where nobody expected them. Paleontologists have known for decades that these rock beds contain dinosaurs (as well as typical Cretaceous mammals). It's just that everyone else has always interpreted these rocks as being of Cretaceous age, rather than post-Cretaceous. What he's doing is arguing that the rocks are older than we thought.
Second, what's his evidence for saying these are post-Cretaceous rocks? The best evidence would be a marker bed- if you could show that a skeleton lay above the iridium layer formed by the fallout of the asteroid, then it would be pretty much unrefutable. However, the iridium layer has *not* been recognized in this area. The second best evidence would be a layer of volcanic ash which can be dated using radioactive dating. There are no ashes under the bones which are younger than 65.5 million years old (the date of the impact). In fact all the ashes under the bones are around 75-73 million years old. So his evidence is the pollen grains. He says they look like post-Cretaceous pollen, not Cretaceous pollen. That doesn't seem terribly convincing in my mind. Given that the mammals seen in the same rocks are pretty clearly Cretaceous type mammals, the fossil evidence is contradictory here. His other evidence is something called magnetostratigraphy- the Earth's magnetic poles reverse every few hundred thousand or million years, with series of normal and reversed polarities. If you can match up a series of polarity changes, you can *sometimes* figure out how old the rocks are. But it's not a very precise method, and it's a bit tricky to figure out where a particular sequence going "normal-reversed-normal-reversed" fits into the geological record. It's a bit like trying to figure out the time and date by whether your neighbor has his house lights on or off, or whether the trash has been picked up recently or not.
In short, it would take a lot more than this one paper to overturn the consensus that has resulted from one hundred years of scientific research. I mean, if someone published an experiment tomorrow saying that Einstein was wrong, what would your reaction be? To reject Einstein? Or to think that the experimenter might have screwed up? Currently, the bulk of the evidence says that the extinction took place 65.5 million years ago, and that (with the exception of birds) the dinosaurs didn't make it.
In World War II, the U.S. bombed civilian targets in Germany and Japan, the rationale being that stopping the Third Reich and the Japanese empire justified the cost in lives and suffering. We had 50 years to think about that decision before the U.S. became involved in the Kosovo War in 1999. Then, the U.S. and NATO bombed a number of civilian targets, including Serbia's electrical grid, TV stations, bridges, and factories. Again, nobody is going to argue that this is noble and chivalrous, but while it's distasteful, it's arguably preferable to letting a dictator get away with murder, or rather, genocide. Given the lack of outrage in the United States, I'd argue that we've long since decided as a society that it's OK to deliberately attack civilian infrastructure if the the suffering caused is less than the suffering averted. Where it becomes questionable is when attacks on civilian infrastructure are meant to be purely punitive, out of revenge rather than a need to protect yourself or others. Then, I'd argue that it's not justifiable.
But it's also important to ask: are such attacks really effective? Hitler tried to break the will of the British people by attacking civilian populations with bombers, buzz-bombs, and V-2 rockets. However, the Brits rallied around Churchill. And arguably, Hitler's decision to attack civilian targets in the Battle of Britain was one of his biggest mistakes, because it took pressure off of the Royal Air Force. The destruction caused to German cities by Allied bombing runs didn't lead to the surrender of the Germans, and I suspect that Japan would have struggled on despite Hiroshima and Nagasaki if they had thought that they had a serious chance of winning the war. So, I'm not a military historian, but I'd argue that attacking the civilian population is counterproductive. Generally, it will enrage your enemy and make them more determined to fight on. The loss of life and financial loss caused by the 9-11 attacks didn't break the will of the American people or destabilize the Bush Administration, instead it caused people to rally around the administration and let them do whatever they wanted.
The important thing to keep in mind here is that equipping our troops with the iPod Touch and iPhone provides them with something that no other technology can: that smug, hipper-than-thou sense of superiority that comes with being an Apple user. If Al Qaeda and the Taliban are still using Microsoft products, then their morale will suffer because they don't have the latest, cutting-edge gadgets, and they will lose tactical effectiveness on the battlefield.
No, you guys should all learn English. And if you foreigners have trouble understanding our code, we American programmers can be helpful and WE CAN WRITE OUR COMMENTS LOUDER, BY TYPING IN ALL CAPS.
Don't worry. If the RIAA tries to sue you, just remove them from your friends list. That'll show 'em.
I'm not saying that denying your family iPods and iPhones constitutes some kind of spousal abuse or child abuse. But I am saying that this attitude is counterproductive as a corporate leader. Your family and your market is telling you something about the kind of products they enjoy using and will pay money for. Instead of listening, and producing products that emulate the best qualities of Apple's products, you're trying to tell your family and your customers that no, you don't really want the things you think you want. You actually want what we're giving you.
Hrm. How about we call the mystery particle the "Obamaton"? Or perhaps it's a new type of quark, closely related to the 'strange' quark, the 'change' quark?
Yo man, why you down on us playas and our science skills? We gotta use some mad science skills to get the honeys. For instance ya gotta know the correlation coefficient that describes the relationship between yo bling and yo hos, to maximize the amount of hos per dollar of bling. And is the relationship between those sweet rims on yo pimped out ride, and gettin the honeys best modeled by a linear or logistic model? Mendelian genetics is important to know so you can figure out whether a girl's sister gonna be hot. We playas all about the science.
Arguably, he demonstrated more foresight and planning than the primates running the investment banks on Wall Street.