Now, along comes the missile defense system. Your current stock of missiles is no longer a deterrent. What do you do? Give up? I think it would be more likely that you'd increase your stock of missiles until the missile defense system would be overwhelmed, regaining the stasis that was present before the missile defense system was deployed. The net change is an increase in total armament on both sides.
North Korea has had fifty years to build nuclear missiles. They bought Scuds from the USSR, essentially souped up V2s that the Germans built in a couple of years fifty years ago. Up until very recently they had managed very minor improvements on them, despite having a huge military budget and a paranoid view of the world and a long running high priority program. The missile they fired over Japan apparently broke up. They have a plan for a missile that could just about reach Hawaii, the Taepodong 2 but it has not been tested successfully. The US thinks it might take another decade to be ready.
The US and the USSR managed this in a few years after the end of WWII. Their nuke program is even worse - the device they tested had a suspiciously low yield, which means it might have fizzled - i.e. the fission primary detonated but the fusion secondary did not. Or they might have faked it with TNT. At best they have enough material for 2-6 weapons.
Basically they suck at WMD, despite being obsessed by it. Iran and Syria are even worse. I think they might be able to have a few 50's technology missiles each in a decade or so. But by that point, missile defense should be able to shoot them down.
Say what you like about Kim Il Sung, he certainly knew how to build an effective deterrent. That artillery aimed at Seoul probably makes North Korea immune from a US or South Korean attack even if China abandons them.
"The capabilities of the applications that come with OLPC arent much better than those of modern cell phones"
"In Abiword, the functionality has been crippled to allow only simple formatting (bold, italic, underline, insert image). What is quite astonishing is that the files are saved... in Microsoft.DOC format."
"Basing on my observations, the RAM usage is not lower and not even comparable with the lightweight GNU/Linux distributions like Damn Small Linux (which needs only 31 MB of RAM when booted from the CD)."
"The main issues I see with the current SugarUI are as follows:
* No handy file navigation. Using Firefox we can save an image to a folder and then search for it and open with Abiword but what about file copying and deleting?
* The system is interesting and may be a nice toy for the kids, but it currently lacks the features to be an effective tool in school. No decent calc program, a very poor document editor and no PDF support make it quite unusable for a 12-year old.
* What about multimedia? The Flash plugin is not enough. What about handling the audio and video streams?
* The interface is not clear to me. What are these circles and dots doing on top of the screen? It would be nice to see some KDE-like tool-tips for the not-too-intuitive icons, as well as a simple desktop personalizer."
so how is Bush's little ego war defending my freedom
Not at all.
I'm actually suggesting that the US accept proliferation and relies on missile defense. As far as Iraq goes, I think they should pull out and let the Iraqis fight each other. And they should have left Saddam in power, WMD or not.
Actually there's another argument for overwhelming US military superiority - if it you can intimidate your opponents enough, you can stay free and not actually need to fight them. Even better, if you can convince your allies like Japan that you'll scare off the bad guys for them, you don't risk them doing something stupid and triggering a full scale nuclear war.
A) Why would Japan, the second largest economy in the world, need to be under US patronage? If you not feeding your army you're feeding someone else's.
Because they have a pacifist constitution written by the US after WWII.
And trust me, if you read about what they got up to during WWII and what they could do technically now to China should they need to, and how much the Chinese people hate the Japanese, having the US handle their security needs doesn't seem like a bad solution.
As far as I've read, the raids on the ball bearing factories were considered very successful by the Allies, because they've hit the factories and saw that the buildings had collapsed. However, making ball bearings requires heavy machinery which will survive the building collapse, so all the Germans had to do was remove the rubble and resume production.
Then again, maybe it's a question of what type of bomb to use. An incendiary might work better on a ball bearing plant than a HE.
Speer said that the Allies (RAF I think) dropped a mixture of incendiary and HE. The machines used an oil bath which caught fire and that destroyed them.
Unless you switch to roller bearings, which are more easily made and only slightly degrade the performance of the vehicle. This is what the Germans did later on.
Well yeah, if you have time to ship tanks back to Germany, build new parts and fit them. But all the tanks were used in fighting the Russians, and if they ran out of spares they would basically be captured as the Russians overrun the positions. By this point, German forces lost territory at a fairly disasterous pace and were very short of everything. So it seems if you could do something to cripple them it was very much worth doing.
Anyhow Speer writing after WWII reckoned that bombing ball bearing factories came very close to winning the war early for the allies.
You do realise the only reason you're free to post this sort of thing on the Internet is because people have fought for that freedom in the past, right?
There are far nastier regimes in the world than the US one, and none of them have any tolerance for pacifists, except for ones in countries they consider an enemy. Come to think of it, they're not too keen on people talking about politics at all.
Why don't you go there and find out then? I have been there and I say most people in Taiwan and Israel. Japanese people tend to see US protection as a necessary evil, since it allows them to have a pacifist foreign policy.
All of them have tried to get nukes in case they US ceases to support them. Taiwan was prevented by the US (so I was told when I was there), Japan has renounced nukes but built up a huge stockpile of plutonium and Israel is an undeclared nuclear power.
Taiwanese people talked fondly of the days when US troops were stationed there 'to protect Taiwan'.
No. It wouldn't. All of those countries live right next door to their enemies. An ICBM would hardly be necessary to inflict devastating damage upon any of them. Yeah but if you're China, North Korea or Iran then your best idea is to get the US to abandon your chosen victim. And the best way to do that is to threaten the US directly. My argument is that if the US wants to have a moral foreign policy of protecting small democracies from large dictatorships they need to neutralise China's nukes.
China has a big enough army to march over Taiwan and Japan simultaneously, and would very likely win by sheer numbers alone without much of a fight. Well if the US wasn't protecting Taiwan they would likely have tried. In fact Clinton had to send aircraft carriers to show that they US was still protecting Taiwan. But numbers aren't everything - big dictatorships frequently lose wars against small democracies due to overconfidence and bad planning.
Japan is a tougher target than most people realise. They have 40-100 tonnes of plutonium and a vast industial base. If the US abandoned them, they could build enough nukes to level China quite quickly.
Exactly, and it seems like the US can win a missile technology race against Iran, North Korea or even China pretty much indefinitely. I.e. it can have a system which can shoot down any missiles they can build, probably from outside their airspace and outpace their R&D.
And it's far cheaper to do this than to try to stop them getting nukes in the first place. The US has spent a fortune on anti proliferation, arguably including the Iraq war but certainly a lot of other stuff, and it seems to me to be a lost battle.
Of course with a bit of luck China will liberalise and North Korea will get absorbed into South Korean in the long run. But you'll always have a few retard regimes stuck spending vast sums to make a few 1950's style ICBMs to cause havoc with, and my idea is that you let them do it, but make sure you can shoot down anything they could possibly build in the next couple of decades.
"Bomber" Harris in WW2 tried to destroy Nazi Germany by air bombing of cities. Actually, in his autobiography, Albert Speer said of a raid on Hamburg that destroyed most of Germany's ball bearing factories "if they had kept bombing for another two days, the war would have been over". The problem with Harris is that he was trying to destroy german civillian morale which is both morally wrong and non workable. If the Allies had been targetting choke points in the German war economy it could have caused a very quick collapse. Ball bearings are a special case. The factories take a long time but are very easy to destroy because they apparently used flammable oil baths. And armoured vehicles need regular spare parts that need ball bearings. All of this information was available to the Allies, it's almost common sense.
Personally I would have threatened to bomb Swedish ball bearing factories too, if they continued to sell to the Nazis.
And it's very noticable that bombing gradually crippled the german war economy despite the targetting being wrong. When you read about the development of V2s for example, it's quite clear that the German economy at the end of the war was chronically short of everything, mainly because of bombed out factories and railways. Same with all of the Nazi weapons work near the end of the war.
Well, that's just dandy if you're an American. But if you lived in Taiwan, South Korea or Israel, or Japan then America having the ability to shoot down ICBMs might come in handy.
Because at the moment all those countries are menaced by a neighbour who is kept in check largely by the US. And all those neighbours either have or are very close to having ICBMs. And some of them are maybe crazy enough to threaten the US with those ICBMS or their neighbours. Now if the US can shoot them down there's much less incentive for them to do that. So missile defense is actually a geopolitical stabiliser.
Come to think of it, even if you're in America it's far better that America is far ahead of any conceivable rival, because that deters them from a sprint to parity and then a Pearl Harbour style attack on the US or even engaging in brinksmanship and messing it up so that they end up swapping ICBMs with the US. Which would be far more expensive than current US defense policy, even ignoring the fact that millions of innocent people would die, many of them Americans.
Most of these regimes seem to engage in brinksmanship with the US all the time. It seems likely that they view ICBMs as a tool to strengthen their hand, rather than just a defense to hunker down behind. And most of them have little or no understanding of US politics, so it's quite likely that they would miscalculate and get into a war with the US even if it were to make concessions to them. Arguably starting to make concessions to appease them would simply embolden then and make them start to demand things which the US cannot concede.
So if I were you I'd vote to keep spending on defense. Come to think of it, the good old US military industrial complex will probably managed to get the dollars somehow regardless of how you vote.
Actually, Winmodems aren't a bad idea per se. They are cheaper to make than full modems, and you don't need to update the hardware much when new modulation standards appear since they are basically a soundcard. Microsoft basically worked out they could make something that hardware manufacturers would like because it was cheap. And rival OS vendors would hate it since the specification wasn't published.
There are valid reasons for this (it would be easy to cause interference for only the purpose of being annoying) and good reasons against (my device means my responsibility, it's an unlicensed part of the spectrum). Isn't that Prior Restraint though? I mean if I want to broadcast speech over the radio, don't I have a First Amendment right to do so?
But the minority is not oppressing anyone. People are infringing on their legal rights and they are trying to stop them. Whether they are doing this in a wise way is another question of course.
And before you start complaining about fair use, sharing stuff with the entire world is not fair use. It's copyright infringement and it is not exactly surprising that the music industry has set up the RIAA to try and stop it.
E.g. from your first link http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/0436215
"In an Arizona case against a defendant who has no legal representation, Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA is now arguing contrary to its lawyers' statements to the United States Supreme Court in 2005 MGM v. Grokster that the defendant's ripping of personal MP3 copies onto his computer is a copyright infringement. At page 15 of its brief (PDF) it states the following: 'It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies... Virtually all of the sound recordings... are in the ".mp3" format for his and his wife's use... Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed.mp3 format and they are in his shared folder, they are no longer the authorized copies...'" Italics mine. It's the sharing that they complain about. In fact here someone pointed out he shared them with much more than his wife.
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=385319&cid=21664615
I think the issue here is that the article was a troll:-D The guy who is getting sued for infringement (1)space-shifted the files from his CDs to his computer, and then (2)he posted those files on Kazaa for other people to download. Part 1 is OK. Part 2 is not.
No, you've completely missed my point. My point is that if your computer collects a log of you breaking the law and passes it to another machine at Microsoft which analyzes the log to collect data on something other than lawbreaking - in the Microsoft case usage data - then Microsoft Inc doesn't know you've broken the law. The machine could see bittorrent.exe call socket functions and read files, but it doesn't know what these mean because it's just programmed to check performance and collect usage patterns, not catch bittorrent piracy.
But let's suppose that log shows you doing something illegal and a Microsoft employee sees it and recognizes what the log means. He does have that insight - he notices from the filename that you're uploading some song by Metallica which you clearly don't have the right to copy.
Now at this point he goes to ask the legal department whether he should report it to the police. At this point Microsoft Inc does know. My guess is that they would tell him to report it just to cover themselves.
If a quad-amputee employee sat an monitored evidence of a crime, it would count, right? Despite the employee being limited in some way?
What the GP is talking about is Majority Rule(aka Pure Democracy) and not a Representative Democracy(which the US is). The latter is there to prevent(hopefully) things like a majority trying to enslave a minority, the founding fathers hated the idea of a pure democracy which is why they set things up the way they did. Which is the point I'm trying to make - majorities don't have the moral right to take away rights selectively from unpopular majorities, in this case record labels. Which is something the founding fathers understood (and the GP doesn't) and is why the US is not a pure democracy. Most modern democracies actually protect minorities from the majority in some way, by having constitutions, an independent judiciary or a lobby system.
Slashdot Mirror
English old chap! are you perchance familiar with it?
You wouldn't kill teenagers in an abandoned warehouse with a thermonuclear warhead. A psycho fisherman with a boat hook would be far more appropriate.
Careful, remember to model the exact opposite of the behaviour you want her to have when she get to about 14.
Oh I dunno, Nicholas seems like a nice chap too. Bit geopolitcally naive perhaps, but essentially well meaning. Soft power has its uses too I suppose.
Now, along comes the missile defense system. Your current stock of missiles is no longer a deterrent. What do you do? Give up? I think it would be more likely that you'd increase your stock of missiles until the missile defense system would be overwhelmed, regaining the stasis that was present before the missile defense system was deployed. The net change is an increase in total armament on both sides.
North Korea has had fifty years to build nuclear missiles. They bought Scuds from the USSR, essentially souped up V2s that the Germans built in a couple of years fifty years ago. Up until very recently they had managed very minor improvements on them, despite having a huge military budget and a paranoid view of the world and a long running high priority program. The missile they fired over Japan apparently broke up. They have a plan for a missile that could just about reach Hawaii, the Taepodong 2 but it has not been tested successfully. The US thinks it might take another decade to be ready.
The US and the USSR managed this in a few years after the end of WWII. Their nuke program is even worse - the device they tested had a suspiciously low yield, which means it might have fizzled - i.e. the fission primary detonated but the fusion secondary did not. Or they might have faked it with TNT. At best they have enough material for 2-6 weapons.
Basically they suck at WMD, despite being obsessed by it. Iran and Syria are even worse. I think they might be able to have a few 50's technology missiles each in a decade or so. But by that point, missile defense should be able to shoot them down.
Yeah, I know.
Say what you like about Kim Il Sung, he certainly knew how to build an effective deterrent. That artillery aimed at Seoul probably makes North Korea immune from a US or South Korean attack even if China abandons them.
You can read a review of Sugar here
... in Microsoft .DOC format."
http://polishlinux.org/apps/window-managers/a-brief-look-at-sugarui-by-redhat/
Choice quotes
"The capabilities of the applications that come with OLPC arent much better than those of modern cell phones"
"In Abiword, the functionality has been crippled to allow only simple formatting (bold, italic, underline, insert image). What is quite astonishing is that the files are saved
"Basing on my observations, the RAM usage is not lower and not even comparable with the lightweight GNU/Linux distributions like Damn Small Linux (which needs only 31 MB of RAM when booted from the CD)."
"The main issues I see with the current SugarUI are as follows:
* No handy file navigation. Using Firefox we can save an image to a folder and then search for it and open with Abiword but what about file copying and deleting?
* The system is interesting and may be a nice toy for the kids, but it currently lacks the features to be an effective tool in school. No decent calc program, a very poor document editor and no PDF support make it quite unusable for a 12-year old.
* What about multimedia? The Flash plugin is not enough. What about handling the audio and video streams?
* The interface is not clear to me. What are these circles and dots doing on top of the screen? It would be nice to see some KDE-like tool-tips for the not-too-intuitive icons, as well as a simple desktop personalizer."
so how is Bush's little ego war defending my freedom
Not at all.
I'm actually suggesting that the US accept proliferation and relies on missile defense. As far as Iraq goes, I think they should pull out and let the Iraqis fight each other. And they should have left Saddam in power, WMD or not.
Actually there's another argument for overwhelming US military superiority - if it you can intimidate your opponents enough, you can stay free and not actually need to fight them. Even better, if you can convince your allies like Japan that you'll scare off the bad guys for them, you don't risk them doing something stupid and triggering a full scale nuclear war.
A) Why would Japan, the second largest economy in the world, need to be under US patronage? If you not feeding your army you're feeding someone else's.
Because they have a pacifist constitution written by the US after WWII.
And trust me, if you read about what they got up to during WWII and what they could do technically now to China should they need to, and how much the Chinese people hate the Japanese, having the US handle their security needs doesn't seem like a bad solution.
Read this
http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/japan/nuke.htm
As far as I've read, the raids on the ball bearing factories were considered very successful by the Allies, because they've hit the factories and saw that the buildings had collapsed. However, making ball bearings requires heavy machinery which will survive the building collapse, so all the Germans had to do was remove the rubble and resume production.
Then again, maybe it's a question of what type of bomb to use. An incendiary might work better on a ball bearing plant than a HE.
Speer said that the Allies (RAF I think) dropped a mixture of incendiary and HE. The machines used an oil bath which caught fire and that destroyed them.
Unless you switch to roller bearings, which are more easily made and only slightly degrade the performance of the vehicle. This is what the Germans did later on.
Well yeah, if you have time to ship tanks back to Germany, build new parts and fit them. But all the tanks were used in fighting the Russians, and if they ran out of spares they would basically be captured as the Russians overrun the positions. By this point, German forces lost territory at a fairly disasterous pace and were very short of everything. So it seems if you could do something to cripple them it was very much worth doing.
Anyhow Speer writing after WWII reckoned that bombing ball bearing factories came very close to winning the war early for the allies.
You do realise the only reason you're free to post this sort of thing on the Internet is because people have fought for that freedom in the past, right?
There are far nastier regimes in the world than the US one, and none of them have any tolerance for pacifists, except for ones in countries they consider an enemy. Come to think of it, they're not too keen on people talking about politics at all.
Why don't you go there and find out then? I have been there and I say most people in Taiwan and Israel. Japanese people tend to see US protection as a necessary evil, since it allows them to have a pacifist foreign policy.
All of them have tried to get nukes in case they US ceases to support them. Taiwan was prevented by the US (so I was told when I was there), Japan has renounced nukes but built up a huge stockpile of plutonium and Israel is an undeclared nuclear power.
Taiwanese people talked fondly of the days when US troops were stationed there 'to protect Taiwan'.
Japan is a tougher target than most people realise. They have 40-100 tonnes of plutonium and a vast industial base. If the US abandoned them, they could build enough nukes to level China quite quickly.
Exactly, and it seems like the US can win a missile technology race against Iran, North Korea or even China pretty much indefinitely. I.e. it can have a system which can shoot down any missiles they can build, probably from outside their airspace and outpace their R&D.
And it's far cheaper to do this than to try to stop them getting nukes in the first place. The US has spent a fortune on anti proliferation, arguably including the Iraq war but certainly a lot of other stuff, and it seems to me to be a lost battle.
Of course with a bit of luck China will liberalise and North Korea will get absorbed into South Korean in the long run. But you'll always have a few retard regimes stuck spending vast sums to make a few 1950's style ICBMs to cause havoc with, and my idea is that you let them do it, but make sure you can shoot down anything they could possibly build in the next couple of decades.
Personally I would have threatened to bomb Swedish ball bearing factories too, if they continued to sell to the Nazis.
And it's very noticable that bombing gradually crippled the german war economy despite the targetting being wrong. When you read about the development of V2s for example, it's quite clear that the German economy at the end of the war was chronically short of everything, mainly because of bombed out factories and railways. Same with all of the Nazi weapons work near the end of the war.
Would soldering Saddam's ass to the ground instead of invading Iraq count as a peaceful application?
Well, that's just dandy if you're an American. But if you lived in Taiwan, South Korea or Israel, or Japan then America having the ability to shoot down ICBMs might come in handy.
Because at the moment all those countries are menaced by a neighbour who is kept in check largely by the US. And all those neighbours either have or are very close to having ICBMs. And some of them are maybe crazy enough to threaten the US with those ICBMS or their neighbours. Now if the US can shoot them down there's much less incentive for them to do that. So missile defense is actually a geopolitical stabiliser.
Come to think of it, even if you're in America it's far better that America is far ahead of any conceivable rival, because that deters them from a sprint to parity and then a Pearl Harbour style attack on the US or even engaging in brinksmanship and messing it up so that they end up swapping ICBMs with the US. Which would be far more expensive than current US defense policy, even ignoring the fact that millions of innocent people would die, many of them Americans.
Most of these regimes seem to engage in brinksmanship with the US all the time. It seems likely that they view ICBMs as a tool to strengthen their hand, rather than just a defense to hunker down behind. And most of them have little or no understanding of US politics, so it's quite likely that they would miscalculate and get into a war with the US even if it were to make concessions to them. Arguably starting to make concessions to appease them would simply embolden then and make them start to demand things which the US cannot concede.
So if I were you I'd vote to keep spending on defense. Come to think of it, the good old US military industrial complex will probably managed to get the dollars somehow regardless of how you vote.
Actually, Winmodems aren't a bad idea per se. They are cheaper to make than full modems, and you don't need to update the hardware much when new modulation standards appear since they are basically a soundcard. Microsoft basically worked out they could make something that hardware manufacturers would like because it was cheap. And rival OS vendors would hate it since the specification wasn't published.
Great! I see you learned your science from comic books and Doctor Who just like me. Finally I have someone to talk to.
When do you think we will get the first superheros from this device? Will they arrive in time to stop the supervillains?
Yeah, it's in my Republican Edition bible. God gave them firearms just after he created them.
And before you start complaining about fair use, sharing stuff with the entire world is not fair use. It's copyright infringement and it is not exactly surprising that the music industry has set up the RIAA to try and stop it.
E.g. from your first link
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/0436215 "In an Arizona case against a defendant who has no legal representation, Atlantic v. Howell, the RIAA is now arguing contrary to its lawyers' statements to the United States Supreme Court in 2005 MGM v. Grokster that the defendant's ripping of personal MP3 copies onto his computer is a copyright infringement. At page 15 of its brief (PDF) it states the following: 'It is undisputed that Defendant possessed unauthorized copies... Virtually all of the sound recordings... are in the ".mp3" format for his and his wife's use... Once Defendant converted Plaintiffs' recordings into the compressed
http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=385319&cid=21664615 I think the issue here is that the article was a troll
No, you've completely missed my point. My point is that if your computer collects a log of you breaking the law and passes it to another machine at Microsoft which analyzes the log to collect data on something other than lawbreaking - in the Microsoft case usage data - then Microsoft Inc doesn't know you've broken the law. The machine could see bittorrent.exe call socket functions and read files, but it doesn't know what these mean because it's just programmed to check performance and collect usage patterns, not catch bittorrent piracy.
But let's suppose that log shows you doing something illegal and a Microsoft employee sees it and recognizes what the log means. He does have that insight - he notices from the filename that you're uploading some song by Metallica which you clearly don't have the right to copy.
Now at this point he goes to ask the legal department whether he should report it to the police. At this point Microsoft Inc does know. My guess is that they would tell him to report it just to cover themselves.
If a quad-amputee employee sat an monitored evidence of a crime, it would count, right? Despite the employee being limited in some way?
This actually made me laugh out loud.