Re:Can we please stop with the "denialist" crap?
on
The Limits To Skepticism
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Thank you for taking a more reasonable look at why many people don't really buy into AGW. For me, I don't really have the time to fully evaluate the claims that the earth is getting warmer and that it is mostly due to human release of CO2. IMHO, for things like this, we can never really be 100% sure about it - it's more of a question of how confident we are in the whole chain of events, that the earth is warming, that the warming is caused by human activity, and that the results of this warming will be catastrophically bad. What are you prepared to do about it based on your level of confidence in the theory?
I may not know much about climate theory, but I do know a little about power production technology. The important part to me is that I have no confidence that human society as a whole will be able to achieve a meaningful reduction in CO2 output. Even the current debates, which are mostly for stuff like reducing the rate of increase of CO2 output or holding the output rates to a level of a few years ago, have gone nowhere, and as far as I can tell, if you fully buy into AGW, those levels of reductions will accomplish nothing at all. None of the solutions that the big AGW advocates have been pushing really work - solar power, wind power, electric and hybrid cars have no capability to give us a really meaningful reduction in CO2 output in the context of AWG theory; even if they manage a 10% overall reduction, which I highly doubt, it still won't change anything. The best thing we can do to actually reduce CO2 output is to build lots more nuclear plants - they are a pretty mature technology and they work right now, and each one can fully eliminate a gas or coal plant which produces tremendous amounts of CO2. But even if we went all-out on that, I still don't think we could take enough fossil fuel plants offline fast enough to even slow down AGW.
If you wanted to actually reduce CO2 emissions enough to make a real difference, you'd have to turn off all of the fossil fuel power plants and abandon all of the cars, trucks, trains, buses, and ships, and do it all right now. You'd have to reduce human society to a 18th century subsistence farming level of technology. Trouble is, there are 6 billion people on the planet, and we can't feed them all with subsistence farming. If you really want to do this, then a LOT of people are going to die. Like billions of people. The Holocaust, the Gulags, Mao's mass murders, all of it is just a drop in the bucket compared to what this would cause. Even nuclear war probably wouldn't kill that many people. And you'd also be saying goodbye to the technology what would allow us to save ourselves from all of the other potential threats to human society out there.
It's pretty damn hard for me to believe that even if AGW is real and the results will be catastrophic, that it will be that bad. I say we keep doing pretty much what we're doing right now and rely on our ever-increasing technology to prevent or mitigate anything bad that actually happens.
I'm also affected by the behavior of the big AGW pushers - if these guys really believe that AGW is happening and that the results will be apocalypse-level bad, then why are they always flying private jets to ritzy conferences where they drive around in limos and SUVs, producing more CO2 than some small countries? Why are they pushing things that won't actually reduce CO2 emissions meaningfully, but will make them rich and increase their levels of power and influence? It looks like they're just milking the theory for money and power. If they don't really believe it, then why should I?
It might suck until you found another job, but at least you didn't end up working for some religious tight ass.
Some truth to that, but what if you're broke and the job market sucks and you really need a job? Maybe you'd be willing to tolerate working for a religious tight-ass for a little while until the economy picks up or you find something better. You can argue back and forth about whether it's a good idea in the long run, but I'd rather have the choice be up to me, instead of having the option taken away because every detail of my life can be found in a basic internet search.
I'm well aware that Israel is at least believed to have ballistic missile subs deployed. The trouble is, they don't do you a whole lot of good if your entire country has already been vaporized. All of the "official" nuclear powers are fairly large countries; a dozen nukes being used in any of them would be a horrible tragedy, but their life and culture would go on. Meanwhile, one or two would essentially wipe Israel off the map. Iran has sure been talking crazy (crazy meaning launching a nuclear first strike, regardless of what the consequences are likely to be), so it becomes a question of how much you're willing to bet that they aren't really that crazy.
The most common, and often valid, criticism of the West is that we don't really understand the cultures of the middle east. How many people are willing to bet the fate of their entire nation that when the leaders of Iran talk like they'd launch a nuclear first strike if they had the capability, they don't really mean it? There's no law of nature saying that nuclear weapons will never be used in anger again.
It may be technically true that having nukes means you won't ever be invaded, but I'd say the whole story is that having nukes means that if you piss off enough other countries badly enough, you're more likely to be nuked yourself rather then invaded. If Iran develops nukes, then the US would probably never seriously consider a conventional invasion. But we would be a lot more likely to consider a saturation nuclear strike against them followed by a mopping up invasion in the worst case scenario - worst case scenario meaning something like a smuggled nuke traced back to Iran being detonated in a US city. Actually, I guess the real worst case scenario is a smuggled nuke of indeterminate origin being detonated in a US city. In that case, we'd probably have to launch full-scale strikes against both North Korea and Iran, knowing that one of them is probably innocent. Yes, this stuff is pretty damn nasty, which is why I sure hope we can prevent Iran from getting nukes one way or another.
Interesting, I never had any of those problems. I bought my first Cingular/AT&T contract phone in 2005, before 3G was deployed. I have replaced it twice with unlocked Nokia phones, and each time, I dropped in that same SIM card I got in the 2005 phone, and everything just worked. Phone calls, SMS, MMS, GPRS, 3G, and A-GPS all worked with no configuration. The only exception was that with the first unlocked phone, it didn't seem to pick up the number to call to get my voicemail, but I just called AT&T and they gave it to me. The second one seems to have picked up the voicemail number on its own somehow.
I don't know how realistic that is, but I figure the real reason is to prevent the crew from smuggling weapons past security to hand off to someone else. Maybe you can't find any pilots willing to crash their own plane into something for any reason, but it would probably be much easier to find one who would be willing to carry a weapon past security and hand it off to an actual terrorist for a few hundred k of cash. There's gotta be a few who have families and are deep in debt and would stretch their morals a little if it meant they could provide for their families again, as long as they didn't think anybody they knew would get hurt.
With Iran, it's not that they'll get lost or stolen, it's that it puts the country possessing them in a much stronger diplomatic position. We already know that Iran is the main source of funding and weapons for most of the terrorism and unrest in the middle east (Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, etc). The main check on that is diplomatic (sanctions, etc) and military (threat of invasion) pressure on them. Right now, Iran could potentially be invaded by the US, or by some combination of middle eastern countries, but if they have deployable nukes, invasion by other middle eastern countries becomes essentially suicidal, and invasion by the US becomes exponentially more expensive, so much so that it would take really extraordinary circumstances for it to ever happen. Even small-scale military actions at sea or with their neighbors may have a different tone when backed by a nuclear arsenal.
In addition to that, all of the other middle eastern countries would feel pressure to either put themselves explicitly under the US's protection (not likely to be very popular), or to build their own nuclear weapons (just imagine a half-dozen marginally stable countries with nuclear arsenals).
And there's also the crazy wildcard - they've been threatening to nuke Israel for years now. Are they really crazy enough to actually do it? You wouldn't think so, but if you're Israel and one nuke would wipe your whole country out, are you really willing to bet your live and the fate of your nation that the rulers of Iran aren't that crazy? Hitler told everybody pretty much what he was going to do; nobody believed that he was really that crazy, and look what happened.
If the Japanese had succeeded in wiping out the Pacific fleet in one fell swoop, it would have unlocked the entire Asian continent for them. American was already fighting a war on the European front. A crippled Pacific fleet would have made it impossible to keep up a second front.
No, it wouldn't. The bottom line is that our industrial capacity was just too much for them. It wouldn't matter what they did in the opening stages; we would have out-produced them and defeated them eventually no matter what. And there were more than enough production resources to smother both the Germans and the Japanese. (I know, technically the Soviets did most of the smothering of the Germans, but that's beside the point here).
The fundamental problem with the Axis powers is that they just weren't big enough to take on the whole rest of the world, and that their nationalistic/racist ideologies made it impossible to build true alliances. The only thing that might have actually worked for both Germany and Japan would have been to conquer just enough territory that nobody would complain too much, then consolidate and industrialize that territory, and repeat until they have a bigger war machine than their rivals. But that probably isn't possible if you believe that the citizens in all of the neighboring countries are all sub-human.
AT&T will let you connect any unlocked phone to their network - just drop in your SIM card and go, you don't even have to tell them about it. From what I've heard, T-Mobile will do the same as well. You do have to check the frequencies that the phone supports yourself, though - AT&T uses mostly 800mhz GSM with some 1900mhz and 3G/W-CDMA on the same frequencies. IIRC, T-Mobile uses mostly 1900mhz GSM and 3G on 1700mhz. Right now, not that many phones have the right 3G frequencies for US use. Most unlocked phones have quad-band GSM, but there are still some that are missing one or both of the US frequencies, which will cause you to get lousy reception.
They won't charge you less, though, aside from the benefit of not being in a contract. I suppose you could sign a contract and get the nicest phone they offer for free, and then sell it on craigslist or ebay or something to recoup some of the cost, but I've never bothered.
You need to check out the unlocked phone market; these features are pretty common there. I've had a Nokia N85 for about a year, and it does everything you describe except for being completely open. It connects and charges over Micro-USB; there is proprietary software for Windows that allows syncing, but it will present as a USB storage device to any platform. Since it is unlocked with quad-band GSM and tri-band W-CDMA, it works with any GSM carrier in the US or overseas, just drop in a SIM card. Bluetooth can be used for sending files and tethering in addition to earpieces and headphones. It supports several web browsers, which are all capable of showing full webpages. It does a pretty good job playing videos too, though the stock player is a little picky about h-264 encoding settings. It has since been replaced by the N86, which is the same phone except with a 8MP autofocus camera instead of 5MP. There's no touchscreen, but it is small enough to actually fit in your pocket comfortably.
The only downside is that while there won't be a contract, you will need to shell out a lot more then you would for any phone at the carrier. I've paid around $400+ for all of my unlocked phones.
I assume that the purpose of this was to give a taste of what it would be like to have the Government or maybe a really well connected PI after you, since they would have access to all of your financial information from your real identity.
I read the article in the paper version already. IMHO, he was found mostly because he insisted on "flirting" with the people looking for him and his previous identity.
Also IMHO, it's entirely possible to really disappear, even from a serious Government search, BUT in order to do so, you must be willing to truly forget about every single aspect of your previous life, forever. You have to be dead to every person you ever knew before the disappearance, and you have to forget about every hobby you ever had and every job skill and qualification you ever had. Hope you don't have any identifying medical conditions, tattoos, or disabilities either. You'll have to build up a completely new version of all of those things. And being able to put together a nice pile of cash (at least $1k, preferably closer to $10k) sure helps. Very few people have the discipline, will, and perhaps sheer insanity to actually carry this out, probably only a handful of Government spies/agents and a few of the most dedicated criminals around... I know I probably couldn't.
And if you're really in that much trouble, it's probably easier to just move to a non-extradition country and live there as yourself.
I upgraded to Karmic on my main home computer pretty much as soon as I could get all of the packages downloaded, which admittedly took a while. I wonder if they could speed up the process by letting you download a file with all of the package updates over Bittorrent? AFAIK, I could download the install disc over Bittorrent, but the only thing I'd be able to do with it is reinstall, which I'd rather avoid if possible.
Anyways, I'm happy so far with how it's running. One big fix for me is that the ATI display drivers are working much better. I'm using integrated Radeon 3200 graphics. When I installed Jaunty on it, the default drivers were fine but un-accelerated, so I let it install the proprietary drivers. They gave me accelerated video, but also a really annoying flicker/line jump problem that nobody was able to help me with. I messed with installing newer versions of ATI's drivers, but they all had the same problem, so I gave up and kept running un-accelerated. This wasn't a huge loss, as I don't play games on it or anything, but still annoying. I did try installing a spare NVidia card that was lying around, and I managed to get good accelerated video on that. When Karmic came around, I was hoping that this bug would be gone. Before I installed it, I removed the NVidia card and rebooted - this did seem to cause some problems, with some garbled graphics and funny dialog boxes from X when I started up again. I was able to get to a desktop and uninstall all of the NVidia-related packages, and it worked fine when I rebooted after that. That's one of the things that can be pretty annoying about Linux/X - it just doesn't handle switching graphics around nearly as smoothly as Windows. But I got back on the integrated Radeon graphics and ran the update, and when it rebooted into Karmic, I let it install the proprietary drivers, and now it works great. So good job there - I guess it was an X update that did it.
I can't really think of any actual problems I've had with it. Sound still works fine everywhere, but since the update, it seems to be turning off the sound system when it's idle so that I get a popping sound on the speakers when some sound starts playing. Mildly annoying, but I don't really mind. The new drive management app seems to do a little better then what they had before, but I haven't messed with it much yet. I do know that in general, Linux could use some polish on this - I'd like better, more clear control over what drives get mounted where, when.
Of course, Windows has it's own share of problems. I have it installed on an extra drive on the same computer, and finding drivers is more of a headache than any of the Linux computers I've tried. And it doesn't come with any significant software or any built-in places to get good, safe software. And it doesn't support any drive formats other than NTFS and FAT32, so my ext3/4 and HFS+ formatted drives are unreadable, and no free utility I can find will let me read them. Meanwhile, Ubuntu, despite coming on CD instead of DVD, has a mail program, an office suite, a graphics editor, photo manager, music manager/player and video player supporting more formats, and a built-in app to download programs to do other things that are known to be free of malware, and it reads and writes every drive format I can throw at it, if not out of the box, then with a free download that is automatically installed. Yep, I guess Windows just isn't ready for the desktop yet:D
Exactly. IMHO, the sooner the myth of objective reporting dies, the better. There never has been and never will be objective news reporting. Any reporter claiming to be objective is either lying to you or is so hopelessly biased that they don't even acknowledge the existence of the other side of the debate. If you want to get a good idea of the truth, or at least get enough information to form your own opinion, you should read articles from openly biased sources on each side of an issue.
I do have mod points, but I'd rather ask to your (virtual) face: WTF are you talking about? On exactly what hardware did you see these issues? I use Ubuntu on my main computer and have tried it on several others for a few days. I've never seen the sound support dying every few hours or the graphics drivers causing kernel panics or anything catastrophic like that. I'll grant that graphics support on Linux does need some work still, especially in the areas of using 2D/3D acceleration properly, but every system that I've used it on so far has been worked fine for applications other than hardcore gaming.
I've used Macs, Windows, and Linux plenty. In my experience, they all have their annoying issues - Windows isn't exactly free of hardware issues either (get ready to hunt down all the drivers you need if you aren't using a factory config), and MacOS is only available on limited hardware with nothing available in the range I'm looking for. Ubuntu did a pretty impressive job of loading good drivers for all of my hardware out of the box. And I like that I can grab a free app to do almost anything common off of the repositories, have it installed automatically, and never worry about viruses, spyware, etc. And there are pretty good free apps to do almost everything I need right out of the box.
I used to use a Power Mac G5 as my main computer, and I just replaced it with a PC running Linux. Why not a Mac Mini? Compared to the price of buying or building a PC, I could get better performance for less money. With the Mini, you're paying extra for a teeny, tiny computer with mostly laptop parts. My computer is going under my desk, and it doesn't make any difference how big it is. So why not get more computer for less money?
There's some truth to that, but if it's absolutely true, then how did they come close to catching up to us in the first place? The same factors of arrogance and risk-aversion that slowed us down will slow them down too in time. Then someone else will take the lead again. Maybe America again, maybe Europe, maybe even Africa will finally get it's stuff together.
By the time either of these solutions comes to market, you'll be able to just upload existing MP3s to a phone with open firmware, and use the phone's CPU to decode the MP3s for playback. My answer, therefore, is Mu.
What do you mean "by the time"? Phones have been able to do that for years. Every major smartphone OS (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, etc) has a music player and many support hot-swappable microSD cards, and a lot of the lower-end featurephones do too.
Doesn't sound workable to me. Your premise is that you can hide a memory stick of some sort with a lot of data on it. If you can do that reliably, why not just put the hidden data in the clear there instead of messing around with complicated encryption schemes?
I have mod points here, but I didn't see any other posts addressing this point, so I'll say it instead.
The big problem with all of these kinda wacky energy schemes (from the perspective of energy independence and global warming advocates who clamor for these things) is that none of them show any potential of producing enough energy to measurably offset the use of any of our major energy sources like oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. It may be cool and there may be a useful niche for it somewhere, but unless you can get at least gigawatts if not tens of gigawatts or more reliably, then it won't have any effect on our importation of fossil fuels or overall global carbon emissions. And there's also the question of how much other environmental damage and disruption would be caused by deploying something like this on a multi-gigawatt scale.
I still have a working Mac SE, vintage 1986 or so IIRC. It's running some variant of System 7. It works, but I can't think of much to do with it, so it's essentially a decoration in my living room. Originally came with 1mb ram, 20mb hard drive, and low-density 3.5in floppy drive and sports a 8mhz 68000 processor.
FWIW, it has an Ethernet card which I think only supports 10baseT. I've tried to hook it up to my router, but MacTCP doesn't seem to support DHCP and I can't get anywhere giving it a manual address. I installed a floppy drive a while back that supports high-density and windows disks, but the only computer I have with a floppy drive runs Windows, so it's a big pain to get software onto it.
Interesting design there. In TFA, they mentioned being worried that accidentally hitting a plugged in USB drive could break the USB connector off of the drive's board. I guess that won't happen with this one, but what are the odds that hitting this one while it's plugged in will break the USB connector off of your computer's motherboard instead? If something's gotta give, I'd rather it be a $10 USB drive then a $200+ motherboard.
I'd answer yes. Putting conditions like that on our response makes us too vulnerable to manipulation. I can see it now:
Bad Guys: Yeah, we just nuked you and killed 50,000 of your civilians. But don't nuke us back because we only had the one! Good Guys: Okay fine, we'll attack conventionally instead, just give us 6 months or so to build up our conventional forces.
3 months later - kaboom again, another 10,000 or so dead
Bad Guys: Whoops, forgot about that one. But we really don't have any left now! You can trust us! Good Guys: Grumble, grumble, okay fine.
repeat again 3 months later, etc.
There's a reason why a saturation nuclear strike is the official response for a nuclear attack of any size, or even a threat to use a nuke unless we do/don't do some specific thing - deterrence. They best way to make sure that none are ever used, even by crazy megalomaniacal dictators, is to make it clear that any use or threatened use of nuclear weapons will be intolerably horrible for the country that used them, and there will be no chance whatsoever of delaying it or talking your way out of it.
If some tiny country with a couple of nukes gets the idea that they can use a nuke against us and talk their way out of our reply, then there's a much greater chance that they will, and if they do, then we may well have 5 or 6 figures or more of casualties, and then have to contemplate whether we really will vaporize their whole country, killing in numbers to make Hitler, Stalin, and Mao blush. We'd have to, or else the next country will try the same thing with us, but I'd still hate to be the guy who had to give the order.
I don't know if that particular number of citizens is right, but that otherwise sounds good. There are also the issues of delivery systems and security. A nuke isn't worth much if you can't get it to where your enemy is, so you'll need to build and maintain a proven rocket system that can actually carry your warhead to wherever you think your enemy might be, or an air force capable of operating and delivering a highly valuable bomb in contested airspace.
As for security, there are dozens if not more terrorist groups out there who would love to get their hands on a nuke. And if one of them does steal one of yours and attack a nuclear power with it, you will be held responsible, quite possibly to the tune of a saturation strike against your country. So you'd better be able to deploy and maintain enough security to keep it away from them. Especially in less stable countries, these would have to be some of the most loyal and reliable troops you have available, and you're essentially tying them down guarding a weapon that will probably never actually be used.
And of course, it probably isn't worth doing unless you can build at least a dozen or so. One or two seems too vulnerable to sabotage, accidents, failure when used, etc, and if you've already put in the effort to make one, it doesn't cost that much more to make enough to be reasonably well protected against those problems.
So it isn't too hard to see why a lot of countries would think that they aren't worth the trouble. If you don't have an enemy to deter (and you aren't a lunatic dictator in need of constant attention and foreign aid to prop up your economy, which is a total disaster thanks to your own incompetence), then why bother?
I haven't paid too much attention to the mac clone stuff, but I got the impression that most of it was being done by small companies who didn't have any investment in anything else, so that if they lose a lawsuit from Apple, they don't have much else to go after. Now if Dell didn't make it an actual, marketed Mac clone, then it isn't going to go anywhere with anyone but hacker types who won't number enough to be worth designing a computer for. And they wouldn't market it as a mac clone because they have too much to lose in a lawsuit. So, sounds like a no-go.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for taking a more reasonable look at why many people don't really buy into AGW. For me, I don't really have the time to fully evaluate the claims that the earth is getting warmer and that it is mostly due to human release of CO2. IMHO, for things like this, we can never really be 100% sure about it - it's more of a question of how confident we are in the whole chain of events, that the earth is warming, that the warming is caused by human activity, and that the results of this warming will be catastrophically bad. What are you prepared to do about it based on your level of confidence in the theory?
I may not know much about climate theory, but I do know a little about power production technology. The important part to me is that I have no confidence that human society as a whole will be able to achieve a meaningful reduction in CO2 output. Even the current debates, which are mostly for stuff like reducing the rate of increase of CO2 output or holding the output rates to a level of a few years ago, have gone nowhere, and as far as I can tell, if you fully buy into AGW, those levels of reductions will accomplish nothing at all. None of the solutions that the big AGW advocates have been pushing really work - solar power, wind power, electric and hybrid cars have no capability to give us a really meaningful reduction in CO2 output in the context of AWG theory; even if they manage a 10% overall reduction, which I highly doubt, it still won't change anything. The best thing we can do to actually reduce CO2 output is to build lots more nuclear plants - they are a pretty mature technology and they work right now, and each one can fully eliminate a gas or coal plant which produces tremendous amounts of CO2. But even if we went all-out on that, I still don't think we could take enough fossil fuel plants offline fast enough to even slow down AGW.
If you wanted to actually reduce CO2 emissions enough to make a real difference, you'd have to turn off all of the fossil fuel power plants and abandon all of the cars, trucks, trains, buses, and ships, and do it all right now. You'd have to reduce human society to a 18th century subsistence farming level of technology. Trouble is, there are 6 billion people on the planet, and we can't feed them all with subsistence farming. If you really want to do this, then a LOT of people are going to die. Like billions of people. The Holocaust, the Gulags, Mao's mass murders, all of it is just a drop in the bucket compared to what this would cause. Even nuclear war probably wouldn't kill that many people. And you'd also be saying goodbye to the technology what would allow us to save ourselves from all of the other potential threats to human society out there.
It's pretty damn hard for me to believe that even if AGW is real and the results will be catastrophic, that it will be that bad. I say we keep doing pretty much what we're doing right now and rely on our ever-increasing technology to prevent or mitigate anything bad that actually happens.
I'm also affected by the behavior of the big AGW pushers - if these guys really believe that AGW is happening and that the results will be apocalypse-level bad, then why are they always flying private jets to ritzy conferences where they drive around in limos and SUVs, producing more CO2 than some small countries? Why are they pushing things that won't actually reduce CO2 emissions meaningfully, but will make them rich and increase their levels of power and influence? It looks like they're just milking the theory for money and power. If they don't really believe it, then why should I?
It might suck until you found another job, but at least you didn't end up working for some religious tight ass.
Some truth to that, but what if you're broke and the job market sucks and you really need a job? Maybe you'd be willing to tolerate working for a religious tight-ass for a little while until the economy picks up or you find something better. You can argue back and forth about whether it's a good idea in the long run, but I'd rather have the choice be up to me, instead of having the option taken away because every detail of my life can be found in a basic internet search.
I'm well aware that Israel is at least believed to have ballistic missile subs deployed. The trouble is, they don't do you a whole lot of good if your entire country has already been vaporized. All of the "official" nuclear powers are fairly large countries; a dozen nukes being used in any of them would be a horrible tragedy, but their life and culture would go on. Meanwhile, one or two would essentially wipe Israel off the map. Iran has sure been talking crazy (crazy meaning launching a nuclear first strike, regardless of what the consequences are likely to be), so it becomes a question of how much you're willing to bet that they aren't really that crazy.
The most common, and often valid, criticism of the West is that we don't really understand the cultures of the middle east. How many people are willing to bet the fate of their entire nation that when the leaders of Iran talk like they'd launch a nuclear first strike if they had the capability, they don't really mean it? There's no law of nature saying that nuclear weapons will never be used in anger again.
It may be technically true that having nukes means you won't ever be invaded, but I'd say the whole story is that having nukes means that if you piss off enough other countries badly enough, you're more likely to be nuked yourself rather then invaded. If Iran develops nukes, then the US would probably never seriously consider a conventional invasion. But we would be a lot more likely to consider a saturation nuclear strike against them followed by a mopping up invasion in the worst case scenario - worst case scenario meaning something like a smuggled nuke traced back to Iran being detonated in a US city. Actually, I guess the real worst case scenario is a smuggled nuke of indeterminate origin being detonated in a US city. In that case, we'd probably have to launch full-scale strikes against both North Korea and Iran, knowing that one of them is probably innocent. Yes, this stuff is pretty damn nasty, which is why I sure hope we can prevent Iran from getting nukes one way or another.
Interesting, I never had any of those problems. I bought my first Cingular/AT&T contract phone in 2005, before 3G was deployed. I have replaced it twice with unlocked Nokia phones, and each time, I dropped in that same SIM card I got in the 2005 phone, and everything just worked. Phone calls, SMS, MMS, GPRS, 3G, and A-GPS all worked with no configuration. The only exception was that with the first unlocked phone, it didn't seem to pick up the number to call to get my voicemail, but I just called AT&T and they gave it to me. The second one seems to have picked up the voicemail number on its own somehow.
I don't know how realistic that is, but I figure the real reason is to prevent the crew from smuggling weapons past security to hand off to someone else. Maybe you can't find any pilots willing to crash their own plane into something for any reason, but it would probably be much easier to find one who would be willing to carry a weapon past security and hand it off to an actual terrorist for a few hundred k of cash. There's gotta be a few who have families and are deep in debt and would stretch their morals a little if it meant they could provide for their families again, as long as they didn't think anybody they knew would get hurt.
With Iran, it's not that they'll get lost or stolen, it's that it puts the country possessing them in a much stronger diplomatic position. We already know that Iran is the main source of funding and weapons for most of the terrorism and unrest in the middle east (Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, etc). The main check on that is diplomatic (sanctions, etc) and military (threat of invasion) pressure on them. Right now, Iran could potentially be invaded by the US, or by some combination of middle eastern countries, but if they have deployable nukes, invasion by other middle eastern countries becomes essentially suicidal, and invasion by the US becomes exponentially more expensive, so much so that it would take really extraordinary circumstances for it to ever happen. Even small-scale military actions at sea or with their neighbors may have a different tone when backed by a nuclear arsenal.
In addition to that, all of the other middle eastern countries would feel pressure to either put themselves explicitly under the US's protection (not likely to be very popular), or to build their own nuclear weapons (just imagine a half-dozen marginally stable countries with nuclear arsenals).
And there's also the crazy wildcard - they've been threatening to nuke Israel for years now. Are they really crazy enough to actually do it? You wouldn't think so, but if you're Israel and one nuke would wipe your whole country out, are you really willing to bet your live and the fate of your nation that the rulers of Iran aren't that crazy? Hitler told everybody pretty much what he was going to do; nobody believed that he was really that crazy, and look what happened.
If the Japanese had succeeded in wiping out the Pacific fleet in one fell swoop, it would have unlocked the entire Asian continent for them. American was already fighting a war on the European front. A crippled Pacific fleet would have made it impossible to keep up a second front.
No, it wouldn't. The bottom line is that our industrial capacity was just too much for them. It wouldn't matter what they did in the opening stages; we would have out-produced them and defeated them eventually no matter what. And there were more than enough production resources to smother both the Germans and the Japanese. (I know, technically the Soviets did most of the smothering of the Germans, but that's beside the point here).
The fundamental problem with the Axis powers is that they just weren't big enough to take on the whole rest of the world, and that their nationalistic/racist ideologies made it impossible to build true alliances. The only thing that might have actually worked for both Germany and Japan would have been to conquer just enough territory that nobody would complain too much, then consolidate and industrialize that territory, and repeat until they have a bigger war machine than their rivals. But that probably isn't possible if you believe that the citizens in all of the neighboring countries are all sub-human.
AT&T will let you connect any unlocked phone to their network - just drop in your SIM card and go, you don't even have to tell them about it. From what I've heard, T-Mobile will do the same as well. You do have to check the frequencies that the phone supports yourself, though - AT&T uses mostly 800mhz GSM with some 1900mhz and 3G/W-CDMA on the same frequencies. IIRC, T-Mobile uses mostly 1900mhz GSM and 3G on 1700mhz. Right now, not that many phones have the right 3G frequencies for US use. Most unlocked phones have quad-band GSM, but there are still some that are missing one or both of the US frequencies, which will cause you to get lousy reception.
They won't charge you less, though, aside from the benefit of not being in a contract. I suppose you could sign a contract and get the nicest phone they offer for free, and then sell it on craigslist or ebay or something to recoup some of the cost, but I've never bothered.
You need to check out the unlocked phone market; these features are pretty common there. I've had a Nokia N85 for about a year, and it does everything you describe except for being completely open. It connects and charges over Micro-USB; there is proprietary software for Windows that allows syncing, but it will present as a USB storage device to any platform. Since it is unlocked with quad-band GSM and tri-band W-CDMA, it works with any GSM carrier in the US or overseas, just drop in a SIM card. Bluetooth can be used for sending files and tethering in addition to earpieces and headphones. It supports several web browsers, which are all capable of showing full webpages. It does a pretty good job playing videos too, though the stock player is a little picky about h-264 encoding settings. It has since been replaced by the N86, which is the same phone except with a 8MP autofocus camera instead of 5MP. There's no touchscreen, but it is small enough to actually fit in your pocket comfortably.
The only downside is that while there won't be a contract, you will need to shell out a lot more then you would for any phone at the carrier. I've paid around $400+ for all of my unlocked phones.
I assume that the purpose of this was to give a taste of what it would be like to have the Government or maybe a really well connected PI after you, since they would have access to all of your financial information from your real identity.
I read the article in the paper version already. IMHO, he was found mostly because he insisted on "flirting" with the people looking for him and his previous identity.
Also IMHO, it's entirely possible to really disappear, even from a serious Government search, BUT in order to do so, you must be willing to truly forget about every single aspect of your previous life, forever. You have to be dead to every person you ever knew before the disappearance, and you have to forget about every hobby you ever had and every job skill and qualification you ever had. Hope you don't have any identifying medical conditions, tattoos, or disabilities either. You'll have to build up a completely new version of all of those things. And being able to put together a nice pile of cash (at least $1k, preferably closer to $10k) sure helps. Very few people have the discipline, will, and perhaps sheer insanity to actually carry this out, probably only a handful of Government spies/agents and a few of the most dedicated criminals around... I know I probably couldn't.
And if you're really in that much trouble, it's probably easier to just move to a non-extradition country and live there as yourself.
I upgraded to Karmic on my main home computer pretty much as soon as I could get all of the packages downloaded, which admittedly took a while. I wonder if they could speed up the process by letting you download a file with all of the package updates over Bittorrent? AFAIK, I could download the install disc over Bittorrent, but the only thing I'd be able to do with it is reinstall, which I'd rather avoid if possible.
Anyways, I'm happy so far with how it's running. One big fix for me is that the ATI display drivers are working much better. I'm using integrated Radeon 3200 graphics. When I installed Jaunty on it, the default drivers were fine but un-accelerated, so I let it install the proprietary drivers. They gave me accelerated video, but also a really annoying flicker/line jump problem that nobody was able to help me with. I messed with installing newer versions of ATI's drivers, but they all had the same problem, so I gave up and kept running un-accelerated. This wasn't a huge loss, as I don't play games on it or anything, but still annoying. I did try installing a spare NVidia card that was lying around, and I managed to get good accelerated video on that. When Karmic came around, I was hoping that this bug would be gone. Before I installed it, I removed the NVidia card and rebooted - this did seem to cause some problems, with some garbled graphics and funny dialog boxes from X when I started up again. I was able to get to a desktop and uninstall all of the NVidia-related packages, and it worked fine when I rebooted after that. That's one of the things that can be pretty annoying about Linux/X - it just doesn't handle switching graphics around nearly as smoothly as Windows. But I got back on the integrated Radeon graphics and ran the update, and when it rebooted into Karmic, I let it install the proprietary drivers, and now it works great. So good job there - I guess it was an X update that did it.
I can't really think of any actual problems I've had with it. Sound still works fine everywhere, but since the update, it seems to be turning off the sound system when it's idle so that I get a popping sound on the speakers when some sound starts playing. Mildly annoying, but I don't really mind. The new drive management app seems to do a little better then what they had before, but I haven't messed with it much yet. I do know that in general, Linux could use some polish on this - I'd like better, more clear control over what drives get mounted where, when.
Of course, Windows has it's own share of problems. I have it installed on an extra drive on the same computer, and finding drivers is more of a headache than any of the Linux computers I've tried. And it doesn't come with any significant software or any built-in places to get good, safe software. And it doesn't support any drive formats other than NTFS and FAT32, so my ext3/4 and HFS+ formatted drives are unreadable, and no free utility I can find will let me read them. Meanwhile, Ubuntu, despite coming on CD instead of DVD, has a mail program, an office suite, a graphics editor, photo manager, music manager/player and video player supporting more formats, and a built-in app to download programs to do other things that are known to be free of malware, and it reads and writes every drive format I can throw at it, if not out of the box, then with a free download that is automatically installed. Yep, I guess Windows just isn't ready for the desktop yet :D
Exactly. IMHO, the sooner the myth of objective reporting dies, the better. There never has been and never will be objective news reporting. Any reporter claiming to be objective is either lying to you or is so hopelessly biased that they don't even acknowledge the existence of the other side of the debate. If you want to get a good idea of the truth, or at least get enough information to form your own opinion, you should read articles from openly biased sources on each side of an issue.
I do have mod points, but I'd rather ask to your (virtual) face: WTF are you talking about? On exactly what hardware did you see these issues? I use Ubuntu on my main computer and have tried it on several others for a few days. I've never seen the sound support dying every few hours or the graphics drivers causing kernel panics or anything catastrophic like that. I'll grant that graphics support on Linux does need some work still, especially in the areas of using 2D/3D acceleration properly, but every system that I've used it on so far has been worked fine for applications other than hardcore gaming.
I've used Macs, Windows, and Linux plenty. In my experience, they all have their annoying issues - Windows isn't exactly free of hardware issues either (get ready to hunt down all the drivers you need if you aren't using a factory config), and MacOS is only available on limited hardware with nothing available in the range I'm looking for. Ubuntu did a pretty impressive job of loading good drivers for all of my hardware out of the box. And I like that I can grab a free app to do almost anything common off of the repositories, have it installed automatically, and never worry about viruses, spyware, etc. And there are pretty good free apps to do almost everything I need right out of the box.
I used to use a Power Mac G5 as my main computer, and I just replaced it with a PC running Linux. Why not a Mac Mini? Compared to the price of buying or building a PC, I could get better performance for less money. With the Mini, you're paying extra for a teeny, tiny computer with mostly laptop parts. My computer is going under my desk, and it doesn't make any difference how big it is. So why not get more computer for less money?
There's some truth to that, but if it's absolutely true, then how did they come close to catching up to us in the first place? The same factors of arrogance and risk-aversion that slowed us down will slow them down too in time. Then someone else will take the lead again. Maybe America again, maybe Europe, maybe even Africa will finally get it's stuff together.
By the time either of these solutions comes to market, you'll be able to just upload existing MP3s to a phone with open firmware, and use the phone's CPU to decode the MP3s for playback. My answer, therefore, is Mu.
What do you mean "by the time"? Phones have been able to do that for years. Every major smartphone OS (Windows Mobile, Symbian, Blackberry, Android, iPhone, etc) has a music player and many support hot-swappable microSD cards, and a lot of the lower-end featurephones do too.
Doesn't sound workable to me. Your premise is that you can hide a memory stick of some sort with a lot of data on it. If you can do that reliably, why not just put the hidden data in the clear there instead of messing around with complicated encryption schemes?
I have mod points here, but I didn't see any other posts addressing this point, so I'll say it instead.
The big problem with all of these kinda wacky energy schemes (from the perspective of energy independence and global warming advocates who clamor for these things) is that none of them show any potential of producing enough energy to measurably offset the use of any of our major energy sources like oil, gas, coal, and nuclear. It may be cool and there may be a useful niche for it somewhere, but unless you can get at least gigawatts if not tens of gigawatts or more reliably, then it won't have any effect on our importation of fossil fuels or overall global carbon emissions. And there's also the question of how much other environmental damage and disruption would be caused by deploying something like this on a multi-gigawatt scale.
I still have a working Mac SE, vintage 1986 or so IIRC. It's running some variant of System 7. It works, but I can't think of much to do with it, so it's essentially a decoration in my living room. Originally came with 1mb ram, 20mb hard drive, and low-density 3.5in floppy drive and sports a 8mhz 68000 processor.
FWIW, it has an Ethernet card which I think only supports 10baseT. I've tried to hook it up to my router, but MacTCP doesn't seem to support DHCP and I can't get anywhere giving it a manual address. I installed a floppy drive a while back that supports high-density and windows disks, but the only computer I have with a floppy drive runs Windows, so it's a big pain to get software onto it.
Interesting design there. In TFA, they mentioned being worried that accidentally hitting a plugged in USB drive could break the USB connector off of the drive's board. I guess that won't happen with this one, but what are the odds that hitting this one while it's plugged in will break the USB connector off of your computer's motherboard instead? If something's gotta give, I'd rather it be a $10 USB drive then a $200+ motherboard.
I'd answer yes. Putting conditions like that on our response makes us too vulnerable to manipulation. I can see it now:
Bad Guys: Yeah, we just nuked you and killed 50,000 of your civilians. But don't nuke us back because we only had the one!
Good Guys: Okay fine, we'll attack conventionally instead, just give us 6 months or so to build up our conventional forces.
3 months later - kaboom again, another 10,000 or so dead
Bad Guys: Whoops, forgot about that one. But we really don't have any left now! You can trust us!
Good Guys: Grumble, grumble, okay fine.
repeat again 3 months later, etc.
There's a reason why a saturation nuclear strike is the official response for a nuclear attack of any size, or even a threat to use a nuke unless we do/don't do some specific thing - deterrence. They best way to make sure that none are ever used, even by crazy megalomaniacal dictators, is to make it clear that any use or threatened use of nuclear weapons will be intolerably horrible for the country that used them, and there will be no chance whatsoever of delaying it or talking your way out of it.
If some tiny country with a couple of nukes gets the idea that they can use a nuke against us and talk their way out of our reply, then there's a much greater chance that they will, and if they do, then we may well have 5 or 6 figures or more of casualties, and then have to contemplate whether we really will vaporize their whole country, killing in numbers to make Hitler, Stalin, and Mao blush. We'd have to, or else the next country will try the same thing with us, but I'd still hate to be the guy who had to give the order.
I don't know if that particular number of citizens is right, but that otherwise sounds good. There are also the issues of delivery systems and security. A nuke isn't worth much if you can't get it to where your enemy is, so you'll need to build and maintain a proven rocket system that can actually carry your warhead to wherever you think your enemy might be, or an air force capable of operating and delivering a highly valuable bomb in contested airspace.
As for security, there are dozens if not more terrorist groups out there who would love to get their hands on a nuke. And if one of them does steal one of yours and attack a nuclear power with it, you will be held responsible, quite possibly to the tune of a saturation strike against your country. So you'd better be able to deploy and maintain enough security to keep it away from them. Especially in less stable countries, these would have to be some of the most loyal and reliable troops you have available, and you're essentially tying them down guarding a weapon that will probably never actually be used.
And of course, it probably isn't worth doing unless you can build at least a dozen or so. One or two seems too vulnerable to sabotage, accidents, failure when used, etc, and if you've already put in the effort to make one, it doesn't cost that much more to make enough to be reasonably well protected against those problems.
So it isn't too hard to see why a lot of countries would think that they aren't worth the trouble. If you don't have an enemy to deter (and you aren't a lunatic dictator in need of constant attention and foreign aid to prop up your economy, which is a total disaster thanks to your own incompetence), then why bother?
I haven't paid too much attention to the mac clone stuff, but I got the impression that most of it was being done by small companies who didn't have any investment in anything else, so that if they lose a lawsuit from Apple, they don't have much else to go after. Now if Dell didn't make it an actual, marketed Mac clone, then it isn't going to go anywhere with anyone but hacker types who won't number enough to be worth designing a computer for. And they wouldn't market it as a mac clone because they have too much to lose in a lawsuit. So, sounds like a no-go.
Yes, then they might not be so uptight all the time.