Without saying more than I can, we are far from "ignoring" Iran. If anything we are spending more resources in Iran than Iraq, you just don't hear about it in the useless US media.
Of course we are far from ignoring Iran, but you are making things up and attributing it to a secret war going on in Iran costing more than militarily policing a country in a moderate state of civil war. Or maybe you are saying we are spending impossibly large amounts of money on spying on Iran? With human spies, paid informants, UAV overflights, nabbing of Iranian agents in Iraq, and ELINT/SIGINT performed at sea or just barely across the border, you would be nothing short of crazy to think we are spending anywhere close to the amount of materiel, forces, or money that we are spending in Iraq.
For the record, I don't actually have any personal knowledge of the above occurring, other than mass media articles or very short leaps of imagination.
North Korea cannot be invaded, because Seoul will be devastated by artillery guns located just north of the DMZ, and the death toll will be hundreds of thousands of Seoul citizens in the first single-digit hours of the war. Their major artillery systems near the DMZ are more or less stationary and already known to US forces, but they are mounted on short railroad tracks that can quickly hide them inside mountains while not firing. The only way to win against North Korea is not to play, and wait for it to collapse... but our predictions of "collapse within this decade" are repeatedly pushed back.
I'm sure a similar situation exists with Iran and sea-based oil trade in the region, as well as the nation of Israel. It would be harmful to US and other international interests to invade Iran, since a huge portion of Iran's border is on the Persian Gulf body of water, as well as the narrow chokepoint of the Straight of Hormuz. Unfortunately, Iran is heavily involved in fueling both sides of the insurgency in Iraq, in order to kick US influence out of the region and keep the government from being too pro-US, which in turn means anti-Iran. I don't know about Afghanistan, but I'm sure Iran is involved in the same way with the Taliban as they are with various players in Iraq.
I have very mixed feelings about the invasion of Iraq, intended to be a easy operation over quickly but marred by incompetent civilian leadership. It is extremely unfortunate that we simply can't respond to other problem states in the world due to the smaller-scale MAD circumstances that exist.
It's likely 145 tons of cargo to LEO, which means fuel, spacecraft weight, and maybe even another booster will also count towards the 188,000 kg figure.
This argument always gets modded up, and originally I agreed with it. But the Apollo design first flew in October of 1961. Even in today's cash-strapped space exploration industry, designs have advanced considerably. Must we always live in the 1960s, or will we be allowed to build a new rocket some day?
Replying to myself, and perhaps the GP doesn't realize, but the Ares I is not the same as the Ares V, as I discovered. The Ares V carries 188,000kg to LEO, while the Saturn V "only" carried 118,000kg to LEO. Contrast with the Space Shuttle, which only carries 24,400kg to LEO!
Mod down my original post above (but mod this one up highly:)
They continued spewing out all sort of nonsense about race that mentally confused Bi-racials, and uninformed Caucasians tend to do. So after fifteen minutes of listening to their ignorance...
It's a powerful projector (read: light bulb), not a laser. He only uses a standard green laser to paint the images. Good luck blinding somebody 200 feet away with it by drawing a picture the size of a building. You're just being silly.
Solar fusion works by extreme compression due to the gravitational force... and if you were referring to the orbits themselves, it's ridiculously well-established that you can't gain free energy out of a gravitational system.*
Replying to my own post, I've never actually heard anything suggesting Michelson believed in luminiferous aether, but I figured his name would be well known for the experiment.
"A small subculture of amateur physicists and science-fiction fans -- fewer than 100 worldwide -- are building working perpetual motion devices at home. The designs are based on the work of Albert Michelson, co-proponent of luminiferous aether theory, from the 1890s. Some of these hobbyists hope similar devices can one day power the planet, but so far they consume more energy than they create."
Burning a gallon of has in a similarly sized care would get you around 25mpg city, the Volt will get ~60mpg when burning...
I think that, similar to electric recharge stations, we won't see this sort of technology take off until a large number of gas stations in the US are also offering hasoline.
When my old, featureless cell phone from early 2005 broke late last year, I read more than ten in-depth reviews for whatever new cell phone I'd be buying. I purposefully avoided the iPhone because I thought it'd be all hype and no substance, but a friend recommended it, so I sought out several positive/negative reviews and finally ended up settling on it.
I never truly thought I'd use each and every feature, but I've found it to be helpful in many circumstances that I'd have been lost in (sometimes literally) had I only had my own phone, or an equally featureless phone.
I have one 80gb iPod video, but otherwise own no Apple products and am very, very distant from the Mac OS. There certainly is a non-Apple fan boy market out there for the iPhone, and I'm one person who falls squarely there.
If you have less-than-optimal tower coverage, you will be burning far more battery just carrying it in your pocket all day. I was living with between two and zero bars for the past two weeks, and I was down to 30% battery by the end of the day barely using it. Now that I'm back in the city, I can go a week under similar circumstances without requiring a recharge.
Such a policy wouldn't be secret. In case of a biological epidemic of some kind, the US military will receive the antidote/vaccine before their own families and before the general population of the US. I'm sure the civilian government of the US also receives such privilege. And really, it makes sense in such a wide-scale panic case.
Satellite imagery used to parachute to earth when the film was all used up. This was when reconnaissance satellites were first developed, and before CCDs were invented.
I was completely wrong about James Oberg being an expert. He is an expert on exactly this sort of issue. My intent was only that he doesn't have complete access to all the details of the mission and so can only accurately describe a piece of the puzzle. However, since he is a real expert, the extent to which he is qualified to discuss the shoot-down is vastly increased.
The submitter is debunking an article written in IEEE Spectrum, a civilian magazine. To debunk an article written by a non-expert says very little about whether a shoot-down was actually warranted.
Replying to my own post, it is also important to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_South_Ossetia_(2008) which also tells about the Georgian attack on the capital of South Ossetia. As GP said, we don't have enough facts at this extremely early point to decide.
However, modern military actions of this kind cannot happen overnight. They require extensive operational planning and even more extensive logistical planning. It is possible that Russia was waiting for an escalation or valid pretense to cross the border, engage Georgian armed forces, and occupy Georgian territory.
The past five years have seen Georgia striving to join NATO, and making great progress in that regard. Such a move is decidedly pro-Western and anti-Russian.
Now, Russia has been infringing on Georgian territory for several months to gauge public and international opinion, and several hundred Russian tanks with similarly large concentrations of troops and air power have been amassing in the meantime.
There were over 1,000 US troops helping train Georgian forces in a very large-scale exercise. The bulk of those US forces left on August 2nd and 3rd. It is no surprise that Russia waited until this occurred before launching their invasion under the pretense of Georgian genocide. Since I am not an expert on Georgia, all my information comes from what can be found in recent mass media.
Slashdot Mirror
Without saying more than I can, we are far from "ignoring" Iran. If anything we are spending more resources in Iran than Iraq, you just don't hear about it in the useless US media.
Of course we are far from ignoring Iran, but you are making things up and attributing it to a secret war going on in Iran costing more than militarily policing a country in a moderate state of civil war. Or maybe you are saying we are spending impossibly large amounts of money on spying on Iran? With human spies, paid informants, UAV overflights, nabbing of Iranian agents in Iraq, and ELINT/SIGINT performed at sea or just barely across the border, you would be nothing short of crazy to think we are spending anywhere close to the amount of materiel, forces, or money that we are spending in Iraq.
For the record, I don't actually have any personal knowledge of the above occurring, other than mass media articles or very short leaps of imagination.
North Korea cannot be invaded, because Seoul will be devastated by artillery guns located just north of the DMZ, and the death toll will be hundreds of thousands of Seoul citizens in the first single-digit hours of the war. Their major artillery systems near the DMZ are more or less stationary and already known to US forces, but they are mounted on short railroad tracks that can quickly hide them inside mountains while not firing. The only way to win against North Korea is not to play, and wait for it to collapse... but our predictions of "collapse within this decade" are repeatedly pushed back.
I'm sure a similar situation exists with Iran and sea-based oil trade in the region, as well as the nation of Israel. It would be harmful to US and other international interests to invade Iran, since a huge portion of Iran's border is on the Persian Gulf body of water, as well as the narrow chokepoint of the Straight of Hormuz. Unfortunately, Iran is heavily involved in fueling both sides of the insurgency in Iraq, in order to kick US influence out of the region and keep the government from being too pro-US, which in turn means anti-Iran. I don't know about Afghanistan, but I'm sure Iran is involved in the same way with the Taliban as they are with various players in Iraq.
I have very mixed feelings about the invasion of Iraq, intended to be a easy operation over quickly but marred by incompetent civilian leadership. It is extremely unfortunate that we simply can't respond to other problem states in the world due to the smaller-scale MAD circumstances that exist.
It's likely 145 tons of cargo to LEO, which means fuel, spacecraft weight, and maybe even another booster will also count towards the 188,000 kg figure.
This argument always gets modded up, and originally I agreed with it. But the Apollo design first flew in October of 1961. Even in today's cash-strapped space exploration industry, designs have advanced considerably. Must we always live in the 1960s, or will we be allowed to build a new rocket some day?
Replying to myself, and perhaps the GP doesn't realize, but the Ares I is not the same as the Ares V, as I discovered. The Ares V carries 188,000kg to LEO, while the Saturn V "only" carried 118,000kg to LEO. Contrast with the Space Shuttle, which only carries 24,400kg to LEO!
:)
Mod down my original post above (but mod this one up highly
The Saturn V is a much bigger rocket than Aries I.
Payload to LEO for Saturn V is 118,000kg, but payload to orbit for Aries I is 25,000kg. That sickens me.
They continued spewing out all sort of nonsense about race that mentally confused Bi-racials, and uninformed Caucasians tend to do. So after fifteen minutes of listening to their ignorance ...
Alright, man. You're not the racist. Don't worry.
It's a powerful projector (read: light bulb), not a laser. He only uses a standard green laser to paint the images. Good luck blinding somebody 200 feet away with it by drawing a picture the size of a building. You're just being silly.
Solar fusion works by extreme compression due to the gravitational force... and if you were referring to the orbits themselves, it's ridiculously well-established that you can't gain free energy out of a gravitational system.*
*Arapidlyspinningblackholesayswhat?
Replying to my own post, I've never actually heard anything suggesting Michelson believed in luminiferous aether, but I figured his name would be well known for the experiment.
"A small subculture of amateur physicists and science-fiction fans -- fewer than 100 worldwide -- are building working perpetual motion devices at home. The designs are based on the work of Albert Michelson, co-proponent of luminiferous aether theory, from the 1890s. Some of these hobbyists hope similar devices can one day power the planet, but so far they consume more energy than they create."
Good article.
Just be happy you don't live in Fort Bragg. The mayor there makes me wake up at 6:00am every morning! :(
You mean the extremely complex deterministic chemical reactions in your brain will ignore his future posts, not your free will.
Burning a gallon of has in a similarly sized care would get you around 25mpg city, the Volt will get ~60mpg when burning ...
I think that, similar to electric recharge stations, we won't see this sort of technology take off until a large number of gas stations in the US are also offering hasoline.
When my old, featureless cell phone from early 2005 broke late last year, I read more than ten in-depth reviews for whatever new cell phone I'd be buying. I purposefully avoided the iPhone because I thought it'd be all hype and no substance, but a friend recommended it, so I sought out several positive/negative reviews and finally ended up settling on it.
I never truly thought I'd use each and every feature, but I've found it to be helpful in many circumstances that I'd have been lost in (sometimes literally) had I only had my own phone, or an equally featureless phone.
I have one 80gb iPod video, but otherwise own no Apple products and am very, very distant from the Mac OS. There certainly is a non-Apple fan boy market out there for the iPhone, and I'm one person who falls squarely there.
If you have less-than-optimal tower coverage, you will be burning far more battery just carrying it in your pocket all day. I was living with between two and zero bars for the past two weeks, and I was down to 30% battery by the end of the day barely using it. Now that I'm back in the city, I can go a week under similar circumstances without requiring a recharge.
Mod parent insightful.
You're not the boss of me! I am an individual!
Such a policy wouldn't be secret. In case of a biological epidemic of some kind, the US military will receive the antidote/vaccine before their own families and before the general population of the US. I'm sure the civilian government of the US also receives such privilege. And really, it makes sense in such a wide-scale panic case.
It's just an interesting fact that I wasn't sure if you knew already. :)
Satellite imagery used to parachute to earth when the film was all used up. This was when reconnaissance satellites were first developed, and before CCDs were invented.
I was completely wrong about James Oberg being an expert. He is an expert on exactly this sort of issue. My intent was only that he doesn't have complete access to all the details of the mission and so can only accurately describe a piece of the puzzle. However, since he is a real expert, the extent to which he is qualified to discuss the shoot-down is vastly increased.
:)
You can consider myself corrected.
The submitter is debunking an article written in IEEE Spectrum, a civilian magazine. To debunk an article written by a non-expert says very little about whether a shoot-down was actually warranted.
There have already been legal suits between states in the US over alteration of river flows.
Replying to my own post, it is also important to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_in_South_Ossetia_(2008) which also tells about the Georgian attack on the capital of South Ossetia. As GP said, we don't have enough facts at this extremely early point to decide.
However, modern military actions of this kind cannot happen overnight. They require extensive operational planning and even more extensive logistical planning. It is possible that Russia was waiting for an escalation or valid pretense to cross the border, engage Georgian armed forces, and occupy Georgian territory.
The past five years have seen Georgia striving to join NATO, and making great progress in that regard. Such a move is decidedly pro-Western and anti-Russian.
Now, Russia has been infringing on Georgian territory for several months to gauge public and international opinion, and several hundred Russian tanks with similarly large concentrations of troops and air power have been amassing in the meantime.
There were over 1,000 US troops helping train Georgian forces in a very large-scale exercise. The bulk of those US forces left on August 2nd and 3rd. It is no surprise that Russia waited until this occurred before launching their invasion under the pretense of Georgian genocide. Since I am not an expert on Georgia, all my information comes from what can be found in recent mass media.