I've encountered the use of what I was told was a whey solution being sprayed on roads to keep down the dust in summer. As I recall that did smell a bit.
The first ga,e is a civil war re-enactment. The second link game also does not take place in the modern world.
It doesn't really matter. It is reasonably certain that if somebody wrote such a game it would be protected by the first amendment. The government would have a rather high hurdle to actually ban it.
..... and once the trolls had gone to live with the fairies, and the griefers to live with the pirates, the spell was broken so they could never trouble anyone again. And everyone else lived happily ever after. The end.
If you think the US is a genuine one party state today you don't have a useful understanding of US politics regardless of where you live. There are basic facts that elude you.
Your history is a bit off. Iraq is a clear win, the US was out of Vietnam with a treaty, and the Taliban bolstered by al Qaida no longer rules Afghanistan. If you're bitter about that I suggest buying a beer to catch your tears.
Unless it is addressed the problem will only get worse as local and state governments face funding squeezes due to tax shortfalls and growing pension funding problems.
You are neither a terrorist nor "terrorist" for reading Slashdot, but real terrorists could read Slashdot if they were so inclined, just like they could read the New York Times or watch CNN.
What is the source of the distorted thinking in the thread above? There seems to be an endless supply of it.
And yes, we know that real terrorists use computers, cell phones, and the internet.
What makes you think the real mission of the NSA is to track terrorists?
The real mission of the NSA is signal intelligence. I think it is safe to assume that the primary target for that intelligence collection effort is going to be the nuclear armed nations that directly threaten the US or its allies - often by explicit statements or military actions*, along with various rogue nations (Iran, North Korea) that threaten the US, US allies, free trade routes, or strategic resources. Lower tier threats and concerns are going to be things like diplomatic issues, terrorism, international crime networks, and so on.
You will note that I didn't include domestic political oppression. I'm going to go out on a limb and state that I think that is what you were insinuating as the "real mission" of the NSA. Do you care to confirm or deny that? If you want to confirm it, what is your evidence? I'm unaware of any showing that anybody in the US has been arrested and imprisoned for the act of voting for the wrong party, not even for dog catcher. The closest you could get as far as I know is the admitted abuse by the IRS in the treatment of tax exempt status applications and standing of groups opposing the Obama administration's demonstrated governing philosophy.
Do you want to know the real kicker? Based on the demonstrated level of concern it seems that few people posting here would care if the US government were to actually engage in political oppression, as long as it is by the IRS. We have had story after story after story about the NSA, and so far it amounts to the NSA collects phone bills, and it knows how to crack codes. People are hysterical about that, but not about the IRS engaging in political oppression that may have even tipped the last presidential election by some reckoning. Well, who cares if the US ends up as a one party state in practice, and the door to other abuses opens because of it, just so long as it takes the NSA an extra 2 hours to get some phone bills. There is a lot of distorted thinking going on here. A lot.
* China has recently published multiple articles in state controlled media showing nuclear strike maps against the United States by submarines and now bombers. Russia has decided to assume the mantle of the Soviet Union as an adversary of the West and restart probing Western defenses with bombers, submarines, and surface naval vessels. It has been threatening NATO allies for hosting a limited missile defense system for protection against Iran.
It was "peace with honor," honor that was discarded within a few years by Congress. If the US had continued to back South Vietnam in the face of North Vietnamese aggression as it did in 1973 it might have worked out and stabilized into a situation similar to North & South Korea. Unfortunately the Democrats in Congress threw that away in 1975.
As a practical matter there is a lot to what you state.
In 1973 the US did aid South Vietnam. In 1975 the Democrats in congress sold American allies down the river, banning even medical supplies for them. They almost did it again in Iraq in 2007. The Democratic party earned the mistrust of the American people on national security matters for a reason.
Sort of like how Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tomkin incident?
Not quite. They key part is here: "....it concluded[7] that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2..."
There clearly was a meaningful naval engagement on one day, but they were mistaken about events on the second day. Calk it up to the fog of war, it happens. There are many unknowns, uncertainties, and mistakes that occur in warfare. You don't have perfect knowledge, and the enemy tries to fool you. Electronic equipment is not infallible and is subject to miscalibration, spoofing, and other faults. The interpretation of results is not immune to mistakes of many kinds, including faulty judgment.
On the afternoon of 2 August 1964, while steaming well offshore in international waters, Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats. The destroyer maneuvered to avoid torpedoes and used her guns against her fast-moving opponents, hitting them all. In turn, she was struck in the after gun director by a single 14.5-millimeter machine gun bullet. Maddox called for air support from the carrier Ticonderoga, whose planes strafed the three boats, leaving one dead in the water and burning. Both sides then separated.... more
You can't just wipe that away by claiming the mistakes that followed on another day mean it didn't happen.
Communists have the unique distinction of killing approximately 100,000,000 people in the last century. Revolution, class warfare, and the extermination of class and state enemies are a pattern repeatedly demonstrated in communist rule, often followed by attempts to export the revolution to other places. It is built into the ideology.
When a kinder, gentler communism arises, a "socialism with a human face," the brotherly "socialist," i.e. communist, nations invade to set things straight.
On the plus side - when they've got our asses surrounded, we don't need to worry to much about target acquisition! "Target rich environments" do have their benefits!
Things pretty much worked out that way the last time US and Chinese troops fought each other.
During the Korean War, the Chinese communists had overrun the Yalu River and the Marines battling them were in a running fight to reach the coast. Ten Chinese divisions surrounded Col. Lewis Berwell Puller's 1st Marines. The indomitable "Chesty" Puller saw the situation with his own brand of logic: "Those poor bastards," he said. "They've got us right where we want them. We can fire in any direction now!"
Actually no. The US left as part of a peace agreement which the North Vietnamese violated by invading and conquering South Vietnam with tanks and infantry divisions. Just another case of communist aggression and lying.
Interestingly China invaded Vietnam several years after North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. It wasn't a pleasant experience for them.
... sources said, even if the messages had been translated sooner, it would not have been of much use because the messages were too vague and had no context, with no details of time, location or the nature of the event referred to.
The sources did not consider the information to be a smoking gun, and described it as the sort of chatter that is intercepted constantly, and is seldom of use.
I think the first thing to consider is that many claims are made, but not all hold up under examination. They would prefer to not have to say anything, it is the nature of their job. To understand some of the theater going on you may want to read this.
Yes, I'm aware. But the parent post was commenting on the amount of energy required. Wouldn't the energy of the tsunami be comparable to the event that created it? If seismic energy is manageable despite the magnitude then I would expect that the energy of a tsunami would be manageable, but the form would obviously be different. It may be that the form renders it infeasible, just not the magnitude.
You are talking about redirecting amounts of energy in a wall of water than may be 10-20 feet high or more, yet it comes in as a solid wave and the elevation stays at that height causing water to move inland extremely fast for a long time.
It would be easy to calculate what amount of energy that would be in a width of a town: E =.5 * mass x v^2. You are talking about amounts of energy that would dwarf anything a major multi-unit power plant could produce.
Some scientists working with this sort of approach seem to think there is some potential for handling seismic energy.
"It's very cool stuff," says Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the study. "It's a step toward manipulating seismic waves and done in a genius way."...
The scientists created their jumbo-sized metamaterial in August 2012 by drilling holes in a thick bed of silt and clay near the city of Grenoble in the French Alps. The cylindrical holes stretched down about 5 meters into the earth, but were also skinny, only 32 centimeters wide. They were arranged in a rectangular grid of three rows of 10 holes each. The holes changed the density and stiffness of the earth and, thus, the speed and direction of vibrations rippling through the ground, forming a seismic metamaterial. The scientists then shook the earth on one side of the grid using a vibrating soil-compacting machine that they had placed underground. That machine created 50 seismic surface waves per second with a wavelength of 1.56 meters—about the same as the distance between the holes, though shorter than typical wavelengths from earthquakes.
Sensors placed throughout the site showed that the waves couldn't get past the grid of holes, bouncing off of it instead, the researchers report in a paper posted on the arXiv online preprint server. The waves just barely got by the second row of holes and couldn't even touch the third row, leaving the ground on the other side unshaken.
Slashdot Mirror
I've encountered the use of what I was told was a whey solution being sprayed on roads to keep down the dust in summer. As I recall that did smell a bit.
The first ga,e is a civil war re-enactment. The second link game also does not take place in the modern world.
It doesn't really matter. It is reasonably certain that if somebody wrote such a game it would be protected by the first amendment. The government would have a rather high hurdle to actually ban it.
..... and once the trolls had gone to live with the fairies, and the griefers to live with the pirates, the spell was broken so they could never trouble anyone again. And everyone else lived happily ever after. The end.
If you think the US is a genuine one party state today you don't have a useful understanding of US politics regardless of where you live. There are basic facts that elude you.
Your history is a bit off. Iraq is a clear win, the US was out of Vietnam with a treaty, and the Taliban bolstered by al Qaida no longer rules Afghanistan. If you're bitter about that I suggest buying a beer to catch your tears.
The fourth amendment has been dead since civil forfeiture became common.
Not dead, but badly bruised and put on the cart.
That really needs to be fixed, now.
Federal Case Could Make It Easier For Victims To Defend Themselves Against Civil Forfeiture
Pennsylvania judge calls civil asset forfeiture “state-sanctioned theft”
IJ Scores Major Federal Court Victory In Massachusetts Civil Forfeiture Case
The Rise of Asset Forfeiture Abuse
Bill Would Prohibit Asset Forfeiture In Michigan Without Criminal Conviction - State has been ground zero for money and property seizures
Unless it is addressed the problem will only get worse as local and state governments face funding squeezes due to tax shortfalls and growing pension funding problems.
Exactly! And Pachisi, chess, Settlers of Catan, card games, and ....
Great family interaction, and some are great learning tools.
You are neither a terrorist nor "terrorist" for reading Slashdot, but real terrorists could read Slashdot if they were so inclined, just like they could read the New York Times or watch CNN.
What is the source of the distorted thinking in the thread above? There seems to be an endless supply of it.
And yes, we know that real terrorists use computers, cell phones, and the internet.
Finding treasures in Bin Laden computers*
Inside Al-Qaeda’s Hard Drive
*Where would Bin Laden store and view his pr0n without computers besides everything else he used them for?
Some supplemental reading to the above.
What makes you think the real mission of the NSA is to track terrorists?
The real mission of the NSA is signal intelligence. I think it is safe to assume that the primary target for that intelligence collection effort is going to be the nuclear armed nations that directly threaten the US or its allies - often by explicit statements or military actions*, along with various rogue nations (Iran, North Korea) that threaten the US, US allies, free trade routes, or strategic resources. Lower tier threats and concerns are going to be things like diplomatic issues, terrorism, international crime networks, and so on.
You will note that I didn't include domestic political oppression. I'm going to go out on a limb and state that I think that is what you were insinuating as the "real mission" of the NSA. Do you care to confirm or deny that? If you want to confirm it, what is your evidence? I'm unaware of any showing that anybody in the US has been arrested and imprisoned for the act of voting for the wrong party, not even for dog catcher. The closest you could get as far as I know is the admitted abuse by the IRS in the treatment of tax exempt status applications and standing of groups opposing the Obama administration's demonstrated governing philosophy.
Do you want to know the real kicker? Based on the demonstrated level of concern it seems that few people posting here would care if the US government were to actually engage in political oppression, as long as it is by the IRS. We have had story after story after story about the NSA, and so far it amounts to the NSA collects phone bills, and it knows how to crack codes. People are hysterical about that, but not about the IRS engaging in political oppression that may have even tipped the last presidential election by some reckoning. Well, who cares if the US ends up as a one party state in practice, and the door to other abuses opens because of it, just so long as it takes the NSA an extra 2 hours to get some phone bills. There is a lot of distorted thinking going on here. A lot.
For anyone that cares: The IRS Scandal, Day 232
* China has recently published multiple articles in state controlled media showing nuclear strike maps against the United States by submarines and now bombers. Russia has decided to assume the mantle of the Soviet Union as an adversary of the West and restart probing Western defenses with bombers, submarines, and surface naval vessels. It has been threatening NATO allies for hosting a limited missile defense system for protection against Iran.
It was "peace with honor," honor that was discarded within a few years by Congress. If the US had continued to back South Vietnam in the face of North Vietnamese aggression as it did in 1973 it might have worked out and stabilized into a situation similar to North & South Korea. Unfortunately the Democrats in Congress threw that away in 1975.
As a practical matter there is a lot to what you state.
In 1973 the US did aid South Vietnam. In 1975 the Democrats in congress sold American allies down the river, banning even medical supplies for them. They almost did it again in Iraq in 2007. The Democratic party earned the mistrust of the American people on national security matters for a reason.
Sort of like how Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tomkin incident?
Not quite. They key part is here: "....it concluded[7] that the Maddox had engaged the North Vietnamese Navy on August 2 ..."
There clearly was a meaningful naval engagement on one day, but they were mistaken about events on the second day. Calk it up to the fog of war, it happens. There are many unknowns, uncertainties, and mistakes that occur in warfare. You don't have perfect knowledge, and the enemy tries to fool you. Electronic equipment is not infallible and is subject to miscalibration, spoofing, and other faults. The interpretation of results is not immune to mistakes of many kinds, including faulty judgment.
Actions in the Gulf of Tonkin, August 1964
On the afternoon of 2 August 1964, while steaming well offshore in international waters, Maddox was attacked by three North Vietnamese motor torpedo boats. The destroyer maneuvered to avoid torpedoes and used her guns against her fast-moving opponents, hitting them all. In turn, she was struck in the after gun director by a single 14.5-millimeter machine gun bullet. Maddox called for air support from the carrier Ticonderoga, whose planes strafed the three boats, leaving one dead in the water and burning. Both sides then separated. ... more
You can't just wipe that away by claiming the mistakes that followed on another day mean it didn't happen.
Communists have the unique distinction of killing approximately 100,000,000 people in the last century. Revolution, class warfare, and the extermination of class and state enemies are a pattern repeatedly demonstrated in communist rule, often followed by attempts to export the revolution to other places. It is built into the ideology.
The Soviet Story is informative. - Excerpts
When a kinder, gentler communism arises, a "socialism with a human face," the brotherly "socialist," i.e. communist, nations invade to set things straight.
On the plus side - when they've got our asses surrounded, we don't need to worry to much about target acquisition! "Target rich environments" do have their benefits!
Things pretty much worked out that way the last time US and Chinese troops fought each other.
Lt. Gen. Lewis Berwell Puller
During the Korean War, the Chinese communists had overrun the Yalu River and the Marines battling them were in a running fight to reach the coast. Ten Chinese divisions surrounded Col. Lewis Berwell Puller's 1st Marines. The indomitable "Chesty" Puller saw the situation with his own brand of logic: "Those poor bastards," he said. "They've got us right where we want them. We can fire in any direction now!"
Americans surrendered in Vietnam
Actually no. The US left as part of a peace agreement which the North Vietnamese violated by invading and conquering South Vietnam with tanks and infantry divisions. Just another case of communist aggression and lying.
Interestingly China invaded Vietnam several years after North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam. It wasn't a pleasant experience for them.
Possibly, but note this section from the article:
... sources said, even if the messages had been translated sooner, it would not have been of much use because the messages were too vague and had no context, with no details of time, location or the nature of the event referred to.
The sources did not consider the information to be a smoking gun, and described it as the sort of chatter that is intercepted constantly, and is seldom of use.
I think the first thing to consider is that many claims are made, but not all hold up under examination. They would prefer to not have to say anything, it is the nature of their job. To understand some of the theater going on you may want to read this.
Did a Computer Bug Help Deep Blue Beat Kasparov?
Deep Blue
Yes, I'm aware. But the parent post was commenting on the amount of energy required. Wouldn't the energy of the tsunami be comparable to the event that created it? If seismic energy is manageable despite the magnitude then I would expect that the energy of a tsunami would be manageable, but the form would obviously be different. It may be that the form renders it infeasible, just not the magnitude.
A new way of seeing: Metamaterial lens has ten times more power
You are talking about redirecting amounts of energy in a wall of water than may be 10-20 feet high or more, yet it comes in as a solid wave and the elevation stays at that height causing water to move inland extremely fast for a long time.
It would be easy to calculate what amount of energy that would be in a width of a town: E = .5 * mass x v^2. You are talking about amounts of energy that would dwarf anything a major multi-unit power plant could produce.
Some scientists working with this sort of approach seem to think there is some potential for handling seismic energy.
How to Repel an Earthquake
"It's very cool stuff," says Ulf Leonhardt, a theoretical physicist at the University of St. Andrews in the United Kingdom who was not involved with the study. "It's a step toward manipulating seismic waves and done in a genius way." ...
The scientists created their jumbo-sized metamaterial in August 2012 by drilling holes in a thick bed of silt and clay near the city of Grenoble in the French Alps. The cylindrical holes stretched down about 5 meters into the earth, but were also skinny, only 32 centimeters wide. They were arranged in a rectangular grid of three rows of 10 holes each. The holes changed the density and stiffness of the earth and, thus, the speed and direction of vibrations rippling through the ground, forming a seismic metamaterial. The scientists then shook the earth on one side of the grid using a vibrating soil-compacting machine that they had placed underground. That machine created 50 seismic surface waves per second with a wavelength of 1.56 meters—about the same as the distance between the holes, though shorter than typical wavelengths from earthquakes.
Sensors placed throughout the site showed that the waves couldn't get past the grid of holes, bouncing off of it instead, the researchers report in a paper posted on the arXiv online preprint server. The waves just barely got by the second row of holes and couldn't even touch the third row, leaving the ground on the other side unshaken.
I suppose it's pointless asking you to grow up?
I saw these items that you might find interesting.
How to Repel an Earthquake
How to prevent earthquake damage: make buildings invisible
Seismic Metamaterials Could Cloak Dams and Power Stations