China might nuke them first. They are an impediment to the growth of China's hegemony and if they start to try to muscle in with a nuke threat - China loses, too.
That's about as likely as the US nuking one of its allies.
As for "there's not much the US can do about NK's Nukes" is pure horsepucky.
We are still at war with that nation - we merely signed a cease fire agreement on July 27, 1953. We could easily decimate that nation with cruise missiles (loaded with the nukes that they were designed to carry) and simply exterminate the entire nation. They have done nothing yet to call for such a show of force, but it could easily occur as we only nuke Asia.
The fallout, both actual and political, would be massive and vastly negative for the US. So perhaps carpet bombing with MOAB & Bunker Busters an entire nation with the goal of genocide would be a "kinder, gentler" way of telling the world not to screw with the last superpower.
But we still don't need that ABL system!
Meh, the US can't do anything to NK because of China, and because they have a load of artillery pointed at Seoul and missiles pointed at Japan. That's the reason they're able to test nukes with complete impunity.
Face it, the US is completely impotent when it comes to NK, your creepy genocidal fantasies notwithstanding. That's right, yankieboy. You may have bigger missiles than the Asians, but you can't erect them.
This Sarbanes Oxley is a pain. My company told me that once an employee is is fired or resigns under Sarbanes Oxley there's no way to pay them termination because that would be an illegal expense as they are no longer receiving an benefit from that employee. Since they are worried someone who doesn't understand SOx might sue them they have told the security guards to just beat people who are leaving to death with a monitor and bury them under the flowerbeds out back.
All this is due to SOx, the management would much rather we walked out alive with the termination money but they have no choice but to monitor them. If you check your contract your company most likely works the same way - employees have to give consent to being monitored to work there.
Put those launchers on the surface and several subs stationed in the Yellow Sea will nuke the launchers in under 10 min.
That would end N. Korea as an adversary and a nation.
I think China would have something to say about this. Even if they don't NK can level Seoul before the US can destroy their artillery. An attack on NK means a major war and I don't think it is something any US President has considered since the end of the Korean War.
What you propose is a threat by a few nukes with delivery systems that (1) do not exist; and (2) at most they could field 3-4 warheads; and (3) the preparation of those non-existent delivery systems to fire would trigger our first strike.
What - you got stock in the development of ABL?
Well I think the ABL is cool and maybe that biases me a bit. Still saying "NO PROBLEMS WE WILL JUST NUKE 'EM" when they have a superpower guarantor and can kill millions in Japan or SK is a bit simplistic. Realistically there's not much the US can do about NK's nukes. Sooner or later they will get them and preemptive military action against NK is not something the US will do. The regime is bonkers enough that they may decide to threaten the US or Japan at some point. Seems like the ability to shoot down their missiles might come in handy at that point because it lets the US avoid a preemptive strike (and likely WWIII) while still knowing that the missiles are not a threat.
It's easier to negotiate with a crazy man with a gun if you know said gun can't hurt you.
They're also much cheaper in real terms - i.e. work out how many hours an average worker needs to work to buy a radio now compared to 35 years ago. That being said I'm sure there are people still making clock radios that will last a long time, they're just more expensive.
Kim Jong-il is 68 years old. N. Korea has no ICBM technology. The nation is the poorest excuse for an enemy that the US has had in hundreds of years.
N. Korea is under constant scrutiny - we can, and would, eliminate that nation with a first strike. We don't need to develop yet another weapons system to deal with a caveman....
They haven't tested succesfully, but that doesn't mean they never will.
David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists has done an excellent analysis of the Taepodong-2 based on the CSS/Nodong configuration. He calculates that the Taepodong-2, used as a ballistic missile, could deliver a one ton payload to a range of 6,000 kilometers, which would allow it to reach Anchorage, Alaska, and, with a 500 kg payload, the missile would have a range of 9,000 kilometers, putting San Francisco within range and all U.S. cities along the Pacific coast north of there.
The Threat
The Taepodongs are large liquid-fueled missiles. As currently configured, they are operated like space launchers, with long assembly times, and launched from fixed, above-ground launch pads. The missiles are expensive for a country as impoverished as North Korea so unlikely to ever be produced in large numbers. These missiles only make strategic sense if they are intended for a limited number of high leverage targets. Almost nothing is known about the accuracy of either of the Taepodongs. Even with a one ton payload, if the payload is a conventional explosive, accuracy of at least several tens of meters is needed before the weapon becomes useful in a direct military role. A conventional warhead could be used to target cities and kill civilians to terrorize a population.
A one ton payload of chemical or biological agent could have a much broader effect and the accuracy of the missile is far less critical. North Korea is known to have the ability to produce both chemical and biological agents. South Korean and U.S. military forces are well protected against chemical and biological attack so, again, the direct military effect would be limited while civilians would remain vulnerable.
The North Koreans have tested a nuclear explosive. The yield of their single test was equivalent to 400 tons of TNT, or 0.4 kilotons. This is less than a tenth the explosive power of most first nuclear tests, yet still a large explosion by conventional standards. Nothing is known publicly about the extent to which the explosive has been weaponized, for example, the size and weight of a potential nuclear warhead. Some have speculated that the small yield indicates a failed test, especially given that North Koreans previously alerted some Chinese officials of a test and predicted a much higher yield. Others have suggest that the explosion might not have been so much of a test as an experiment; The North Koreans might have approached the problem from the perspective of fitting a warhead on an available missile, they made due by designing a warhead as large as would fit on the missile, and then tested it to measure the yield. If this is the case, then their weaponization process could be far advanced. Building a heat shield for the warhead that can survive reentry is a technical challenge and the Koreans would almost certainly want to test that with a missile flight test. Even with an explosive force of 400 tons of TNT, the Taepodongs would have limited direct military application, especially in the very limited numbers and with the accuracy they are likely to have. But a 400 ton warhead would be a frightening weapon if used against civilians in a city, likely to destroy many city blocks and create a lethal cloud of radioactive fallout.
Actually NK is pretty much the optimal adversary for the ABL. Even when they get the missile to work they will have a small number. The US could pro
Of course, the real point is that flying 747s around with fricking lasers is not a serious military project, it's performance art paid for with your tax dollars.
It's hard to name a single plausible scenario for which this absurdity makes any economic sense.
North Korea or Iran might decide to field a missile system which consists of a small number of 50's technology ICBMs because that is all they can manage. It's plausible that these could be downed by the ABL operating 300-600km away, out of range of NK or Irans weapons systems.
Against a real adversary - thousands of high tech missiles and the ability to shoot down enemy aircraft hundreds of kilometres away - it's not much use of course, but then no practical ABM system is. My guess is with an adversary with a small number of missiles that can't control more than its own airspace the ABL would be quite handy - one ABL could shoot down 20 missiles. There'd be ships at see firing SM3 missiles at any that got through.
Another possibility would be to use it to shoot down Chinese tactical ballistic missiles fired at Taiwan.
Chrome has the fewest amount of buttons. I also like that the default "home" page isn't a traditional page, but rather thumbnails of the pages you go to most frequently. I don't even have to bother typing in my favorite sites, or going to a bookmark/favorite menu.
Hey Opera has had this for ages. It's called Speed Dial.
Didn't people say that about the martians in Mars Attacks? Maybe said entity is like an internet troll or those martians, tormenting people just for the hell of it.
Of course if we listen to "liberals, intellectuals and peacemongers" like you we'll end up getting wiped out. Why do you hate humanity so much?
The whole point of the Cylons as machines was to "soften up the violence". They weren't meant to be intelligent creatures. They were meant to be like your toaster to gloss over the fact that they were being blown out of the sky by the hundreds every week.
I'm sure that is true, but the show undermines that by having individual Cylons talk in a way that implies they are certainly self aware.
The colonials capture Baltar and two Cylons. Cylons are certainly self aware, but they basically take them to bits to see how they work. Later on they put them back together and the Cylons are malfunctional and the humans joke about it. And even when I was nine it struck me that "how funny would humans find it if the Cylons had done the same thing to a human, i.e. chopped her up, put her back together and her IQ was permanently impaired by the abuse". In the old series it seemed the people writing it were just too brutish to think of this sort of thing. I mean if you're something not obviously human and they captured you in a war then God help you basically. The whole thing seemed to be highly disturbing, especially as in the real world humans have regarded other races/nations as subhuman quite recently.
Say what you like about the new series and in retrospect it was a lot of portentous nonsense that seemed to hint at a depth that it didn't have, but at least the people writing it didn't seem to be capable of vivisecting their prisoners Mengele style and then joking about the fact that the prisoners are messed up by the experience.
Counter revolutions don't really need to be armed.
When there are people, there is power. You can win wars by sheer numbers -- a few tanks cannot keep a billion people under control. Heck, even military officers are humans. They are not killing machines, but humans who can and would be swayed and deflect too. (and you and GP illustrated that already)
This is probably what most people don't understand when trying to differentiate "armed soldiers" with "innocent civilians".
Wow so if say Americans had demonstrated in favour of Obama and against Bush were counter revolutionaries and Bush would have been entitled to crush them? Really? Any demonstration against the government is "counter revolutionary" and should be crushed with extreme violence.
The fact that Chinese people believe things like this explains why the Chinese government is so murderous and China is so backward.
> someday the tank drivers will refuse to crush the heads of the nation's children.
From what I've read the soldiers from near Beijing did. There were pictures of trucks full of tanks that ran into people lying in the road and stopped. The students aparently went and negotiated with them and they turned back.
At this point there was more or less a coup. Zhao Ziyang who had sympathized with the students was removed as leader and placed under house arrest. The new Chinese government got armoured divisions which had fought in Vietnam and told them there was an armed counter revolution going on and that they should go in in tanks and shooting to kill. The residents of Beijing reacted pretty much like you'd expect - Molotov cocktails, road blocks and so on and killed soldiers they caught. Obviously by that point the soldiers were in a Black Hawk down type situation and shot anything that moved.
Of course it wasn't an armed counter revolution. The interesting thing is that the government's ability to lie like this seems to have declined over the years so it would be much harder for them to do this now.
China had it's 60's in the 80's. Unfortunately the lying government ran the hippies over with tanks and terrified everyone else into not talking about it.
That's the tip of the iceberg. There are loads of situations where most of the Chinese population know the Chinese government is guilty of vast crimes but they also know that even alluding to it obliquely will get you locked up if someone informs on you.
I dunno about that. The Chinese government has won the censorship war for most of the last twenty years. If people are scared enough that they self censor, the government wins. Of course this is not something you can do technologically - you pretty much need to run people over with tanks, ship them off to camps and the like. But it's sadly it is naive to say that government can't win if they are ruthless enought.
> So why not have a mechanism for moving articles to the relevant specialised wiki and adding a stub page in Wikipedia (or a redirect to an index page) with a link to that specialised wiki, rather than just delete someone else's work?
Because deleting someone's article is about power - it's about showing them that you have it and they don't. All the rhetoric about notability and "reaching a consensus" is just a cover for demonstrating that you can shaft them. Moving the article to a specialised Wiki wouldn't achieve this.
In fact articles about specialised Wikis keep getting deleted as "non notable", because the people that run Wiki don't have any power of them.
Everyone likes to think that we're an evolved species interested in knowledge but actually everything is about hierarchies, chimp style. Actually if wikipedia stopped being about consensus and switched to voting a lot of these problems would disappear.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah right. Commodore went bankrupt in 1992 and Mark Williams Company shut down in 1995.
You'd be better off forcing coke up the bankers' noses at gunpoint. Or maybe suffocating them in vast silos of coke on national TV.
Does he need to?
Does that mean cell phone transmission is 4D? How do we visualize that?
Don't try. The Universe might explode.
China might nuke them first. They are an impediment to the growth of China's hegemony and if they start to try to muscle in with a nuke threat - China loses, too.
That's about as likely as the US nuking one of its allies.
As for "there's not much the US can do about NK's Nukes" is pure horsepucky.
We are still at war with that nation - we merely signed a cease fire agreement on July 27, 1953. We could easily decimate that nation with cruise missiles (loaded with the nukes that they were designed to carry) and simply exterminate the entire nation. They have done nothing yet to call for such a show of force, but it could easily occur as we only nuke Asia.
The fallout, both actual and political, would be massive and vastly negative for the US. So perhaps carpet bombing with MOAB & Bunker Busters an entire nation with the goal of genocide would be a "kinder, gentler" way of telling the world not to screw with the last superpower.
But we still don't need that ABL system!
Meh, the US can't do anything to NK because of China, and because they have a load of artillery pointed at Seoul and missiles pointed at Japan. That's the reason they're able to test nukes with complete impunity.
Face it, the US is completely impotent when it comes to NK, your creepy genocidal fantasies notwithstanding. That's right, yankieboy. You may have bigger missiles than the Asians, but you can't erect them.
This Sarbanes Oxley is a pain. My company told me that once an employee is is fired or resigns under Sarbanes Oxley there's no way to pay them termination because that would be an illegal expense as they are no longer receiving an benefit from that employee. Since they are worried someone who doesn't understand SOx might sue them they have told the security guards to just beat people who are leaving to death with a monitor and bury them under the flowerbeds out back.
All this is due to SOx, the management would much rather we walked out alive with the termination money but they have no choice but to monitor them. If you check your contract your company most likely works the same way - employees have to give consent to being monitored to work there.
You are clearly easily excited.
Put those launchers on the surface and several subs stationed in the Yellow Sea will nuke the launchers in under 10 min.
That would end N. Korea as an adversary and a nation.
I think China would have something to say about this. Even if they don't NK can level Seoul before the US can destroy their artillery. An attack on NK means a major war and I don't think it is something any US President has considered since the end of the Korean War.
What you propose is a threat by a few nukes with delivery systems that (1) do not exist; and (2) at most they could field 3-4 warheads; and (3) the preparation of those non-existent delivery systems to fire would trigger our first strike.
What - you got stock in the development of ABL?
Well I think the ABL is cool and maybe that biases me a bit. Still saying "NO PROBLEMS WE WILL JUST NUKE 'EM" when they have a superpower guarantor and can kill millions in Japan or SK is a bit simplistic. Realistically there's not much the US can do about NK's nukes. Sooner or later they will get them and preemptive military action against NK is not something the US will do. The regime is bonkers enough that they may decide to threaten the US or Japan at some point. Seems like the ability to shoot down their missiles might come in handy at that point because it lets the US avoid a preemptive strike (and likely WWIII) while still knowing that the missiles are not a threat.
It's easier to negotiate with a crazy man with a gun if you know said gun can't hurt you.
They're also much cheaper in real terms - i.e. work out how many hours an average worker needs to work to buy a radio now compared to 35 years ago. That being said I'm sure there are people still making clock radios that will last a long time, they're just more expensive.
Kim Jong-il is 68 years old. N. Korea has no ICBM technology. The nation is the poorest excuse for an enemy that the US has had in hundreds of years.
N. Korea is under constant scrutiny - we can, and would, eliminate that nation with a first strike. We don't need to develop yet another weapons system to deal with a caveman....
They haven't tested succesfully, but that doesn't mean they never will.
http://www.fas.org/programs/ssp/nukes/nuclearweapons/Taepodong.html
David Wright at the Union of Concerned Scientists has done an excellent analysis of the Taepodong-2 based on the CSS/Nodong configuration. He calculates that the Taepodong-2, used as a ballistic missile, could deliver a one ton payload to a range of 6,000 kilometers, which would allow it to reach Anchorage, Alaska, and, with a 500 kg payload, the missile would have a range of 9,000 kilometers, putting San Francisco within range and all U.S. cities along the Pacific coast north of there.
The Threat
The Taepodongs are large liquid-fueled missiles. As currently configured, they are operated like space launchers, with long assembly times, and launched from fixed, above-ground launch pads. The missiles are expensive for a country as impoverished as North Korea so unlikely to ever be produced in large numbers. These missiles only make strategic sense if they are intended for a limited number of high leverage targets. Almost nothing is known about the accuracy of either of the Taepodongs. Even with a one ton payload, if the payload is a conventional explosive, accuracy of at least several tens of meters is needed before the weapon becomes useful in a direct military role. A conventional warhead could be used to target cities and kill civilians to terrorize a population.
A one ton payload of chemical or biological agent could have a much broader effect and the accuracy of the missile is far less critical. North Korea is known to have the ability to produce both chemical and biological agents. South Korean and U.S. military forces are well protected against chemical and biological attack so, again, the direct military effect would be limited while civilians would remain vulnerable.
The North Koreans have tested a nuclear explosive. The yield of their single test was equivalent to 400 tons of TNT, or 0.4 kilotons. This is less than a tenth the explosive power of most first nuclear tests, yet still a large explosion by conventional standards. Nothing is known publicly about the extent to which the explosive has been weaponized, for example, the size and weight of a potential nuclear warhead. Some have speculated that the small yield indicates a failed test, especially given that North Koreans previously alerted some Chinese officials of a test and predicted a much higher yield. Others have suggest that the explosion might not have been so much of a test as an experiment; The North Koreans might have approached the problem from the perspective of fitting a warhead on an available missile, they made due by designing a warhead as large as would fit on the missile, and then tested it to measure the yield. If this is the case, then their weaponization process could be far advanced. Building a heat shield for the warhead that can survive reentry is a technical challenge and the Koreans would almost certainly want to test that with a missile flight test. Even with an explosive force of 400 tons of TNT, the Taepodongs would have limited direct military application, especially in the very limited numbers and with the accuracy they are likely to have. But a 400 ton warhead would be a frightening weapon if used against civilians in a city, likely to destroy many city blocks and create a lethal cloud of radioactive fallout.
Actually NK is pretty much the optimal adversary for the ABL. Even when they get the missile to work they will have a small number. The US could pro
China wants to be the planet's manufacturing giant.
I have it on good authority from Chinese expats that China wants to replace America as a hegemonic power in the long run.
Of course, the real point is that flying 747s around with fricking lasers is not a serious military project, it's performance art paid for with your tax dollars.
It's hard to name a single plausible scenario for which this absurdity makes any economic sense.
North Korea or Iran might decide to field a missile system which consists of a small number of 50's technology ICBMs because that is all they can manage. It's plausible that these could be downed by the ABL operating 300-600km away, out of range of NK or Irans weapons systems.
Against a real adversary - thousands of high tech missiles and the ability to shoot down enemy aircraft hundreds of kilometres away - it's not much use of course, but then no practical ABM system is. My guess is with an adversary with a small number of missiles that can't control more than its own airspace the ABL would be quite handy - one ABL could shoot down 20 missiles. There'd be ships at see firing SM3 missiles at any that got through.
Another possibility would be to use it to shoot down Chinese tactical ballistic missiles fired at Taiwan.
I think they're asking questions to make sure you're not a HIPPY.
Chrome has the fewest amount of buttons. I also like that the default "home" page isn't a traditional page, but rather thumbnails of the pages you go to most frequently. I don't even have to bother typing in my favorite sites, or going to a bookmark/favorite menu.
Hey Opera has had this for ages. It's called Speed Dial.
Oh never mind...
It doesn't seem to be working too well
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&safe=off&sa=1&q=Girls+of+Burning+Man&btnG=Search+images
Nor would you expect it too quite frankly.
Burning Man corp is now a wholly owned subsidiary of the Halliburton / Umbrella Corporation. They have a zombie army.
Well but at least in the new series the writers clearly did not approve of this.
Didn't people say that about the martians in Mars Attacks? Maybe said entity is like an internet troll or those martians, tormenting people just for the hell of it.
Of course if we listen to "liberals, intellectuals and peacemongers" like you we'll end up getting wiped out. Why do you hate humanity so much?
The whole point of the Cylons as machines was to "soften up the violence". They weren't meant to be intelligent creatures. They were meant to be like your toaster to gloss over the fact that they were being blown out of the sky by the hundreds every week.
I'm sure that is true, but the show undermines that by having individual Cylons talk in a way that implies they are certainly self aware.
You know what bothered me about the original BSG?
The colonials capture Baltar and two Cylons. Cylons are certainly self aware, but they basically take them to bits to see how they work. Later on they put them back together and the Cylons are malfunctional and the humans joke about it. And even when I was nine it struck me that "how funny would humans find it if the Cylons had done the same thing to a human, i.e. chopped her up, put her back together and her IQ was permanently impaired by the abuse". In the old series it seemed the people writing it were just too brutish to think of this sort of thing. I mean if you're something not obviously human and they captured you in a war then God help you basically. The whole thing seemed to be highly disturbing, especially as in the real world humans have regarded other races/nations as subhuman quite recently.
Say what you like about the new series and in retrospect it was a lot of portentous nonsense that seemed to hint at a depth that it didn't have, but at least the people writing it didn't seem to be capable of vivisecting their prisoners Mengele style and then joking about the fact that the prisoners are messed up by the experience.
Counter revolutions don't really need to be armed.
When there are people, there is power. You can win wars by sheer numbers -- a few tanks cannot keep a billion people under control. Heck, even military officers are humans. They are not killing machines, but humans who can and would be swayed and deflect too. (and you and GP illustrated that already)
This is probably what most people don't understand when trying to differentiate "armed soldiers" with "innocent civilians".
Wow so if say Americans had demonstrated in favour of Obama and against Bush were counter revolutionaries and Bush would have been entitled to crush them? Really? Any demonstration against the government is "counter revolutionary" and should be crushed with extreme violence.
The fact that Chinese people believe things like this explains why the Chinese government is so murderous and China is so backward.
> someday the tank drivers will refuse to crush the heads of the nation's children.
From what I've read the soldiers from near Beijing did. There were pictures of trucks full of tanks that ran into people lying in the road and stopped. The students aparently went and negotiated with them and they turned back.
At this point there was more or less a coup. Zhao Ziyang who had sympathized with the students was removed as leader and placed under house arrest. The new Chinese government got armoured divisions which had fought in Vietnam and told them there was an armed counter revolution going on and that they should go in in tanks and shooting to kill. The residents of Beijing reacted pretty much like you'd expect - Molotov cocktails, road blocks and so on and killed soldiers they caught. Obviously by that point the soldiers were in a Black Hawk down type situation and shot anything that moved.
Of course it wasn't an armed counter revolution. The interesting thing is that the government's ability to lie like this seems to have declined over the years so it would be much harder for them to do this now.
China had it's 60's in the 80's. Unfortunately the lying government ran the hippies over with tanks and terrified everyone else into not talking about it.
That's the tip of the iceberg. There are loads of situations where most of the Chinese population know the Chinese government is guilty of vast crimes but they also know that even alluding to it obliquely will get you locked up if someone informs on you.
> You simply cannot win the censorship war.
I dunno about that. The Chinese government has won the censorship war for most of the last twenty years. If people are scared enough that they self censor, the government wins. Of course this is not something you can do technologically - you pretty much need to run people over with tanks, ship them off to camps and the like. But it's sadly it is naive to say that government can't win if they are ruthless enought.
> So why not have a mechanism for moving articles to the relevant specialised wiki and adding a stub page in Wikipedia (or a redirect to an index page) with a link to that specialised wiki, rather than just delete someone else's work?
Because deleting someone's article is about power - it's about showing them that you have it and they don't. All the rhetoric about notability and "reaching a consensus" is just a cover for demonstrating that you can shaft them. Moving the article to a specialised Wiki wouldn't achieve this.
In fact articles about specialised Wikis keep getting deleted as "non notable", because the people that run Wiki don't have any power of them.
Everyone likes to think that we're an evolved species interested in knowledge but actually everything is about hierarchies, chimp style. Actually if wikipedia stopped being about consensus and switched to voting a lot of these problems would disappear.