If that's your conclusion when thinking of Africa, might I suggest you get yourself an education? Every major city and town in Kenya is connected to the country's national electricity grid, as are most rural towns. In addition, the Kenyan grid is connected to all other southern African electricity grids via the Southern African Power Pool, allowing them to draw on the additional shared power when needed. Trust me, Google's not going to have to use solar panels to power its Kenyan office.
And yes, part of the reason for this move is to improve the sub-Saharan African localisation of Google's products, especially Google Maps. There is a fairly large Google user base in the region, so the company is keen to improve its service offering and get a foothold in the door early, as all predictions are that internet usage there is going to skyrocket in the next few years even more so than it's doing already.
Xubuntu = Ubuntu with the Xfce window manager, Edubuntu = A version of Ubuntu customised for schools, nUbuntu = Network Ubuntu, an unofficial fork designed for network security testing, Ebuntu = Ubuntu with the Enlightenment window manager and Goobuntu is a rumoured version of Ubuntu developed by Google for internal use.
Granted, this can get slightly confusing at times, but the average user is never going to need to move past Ubuntu itself, as it's the primary distro. Otherwise, I think this naming structure makes sense: A person reading "Edubuntu" is quite likely to make the inference that it's designed for educational use and that it's derived from Ubuntu.
Besides, my original point stands. For the average user, who will only come across the main distro and its release names (such as Dapper Drake), is Ubuntu really that more unserious than such names as "Gentoo", "Slackware" and "Red Hat"? I really don't think so, indeed I think the only reason we no longer consider the above-mentioned names to be odd is that we have become so used to them over the years. In time, Ubuntu will reach the same familiarity.
How so? All these words are legitimate words with legitimate meanings. And how different is it really from other Linux distros (Gentoo and Red Hat come to mind) and even Apple with such names as Panther, Tiger and Leopard?
This is nothing new. BMW has been doing this since 2004, when they were the first to partner with Apple. Since then, Apple has partnered with other manufacturers, including Honda, Audi, Volkswagen, Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Dodge, Jaguar, Jeep, Nissan, Daihatsu, Renault, Suzuki and Volvo. http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipodyourcar/
Well, North Korea's Taep'o-Dong 2 already has a range of approximately 5000km with a 500kg warhead, which can be extended to approx 9000km with a lighter payload. London is approx 4500km from Tehran, and NYC is 9800km away.
As we know that Iran's Shahab-4 and Shahab-5 ICBMs are based on a two-stage and three-stage version of the TD-2 respectively, we can safely assume that they share these ranges. Meaning that Iran probably already has the ability to strike London and all of Western Europe.
In addition to this, Iran has purchased at least 18 BM-25 missiles from North Korea, which are a modernised version of the Russian SS-N-6 submarine launched ballistic missile. Though the original missiles had a range of 2500km, Jane's Defence Weekly has reported that North Korean scientists have managed to boost that to at least 4000km. Furthermore, the BM-25 could in theory be launched from a converted freighter with launch tubes and blast channels, meaning that even with these Iran has the theoretical capability to launch a nuclear missile against the US.
In any case, even if they continue to use purely land-based ICBMs like the Shahab range, it would be naive to believe that they would be unable to increase the range to around 10 000km in the next five to ten years. The expertise to build the required rocket types are out there, mostly in the form of Russian scientists who worked on that country's ICBM program, and a fair number of those would be willing to contribute their knowledge for the right price.
As an example of what can be done, South Africa had a (relatively low-cost) nuclear weapons and ICBM program in the 1980s until both were cancelled in 1991. At the time of cancellation however, SA had completed development of the RSA-4, an ICBM with sufficient range to hit any target on earth with a 700kg warhead. So if South Africa could do it in only 10 years, why can't Iran, considering the help they're getting?
Iran might be working on a nuclear weapons capability. Maybe. They don't have it yet.
At most, they're 10 years away, though it could be something less like 4-5 years. Point is, we don't know. It's pretty certain now, both through the actions of the Iranian government and the accidental release of certain compromising documents, that Iran is actually running a covert nuclear weapons program. The problem we have is that we're not entirely sure of their enrichment capability, especially as the IAEA suspects that Iran has secret uranium enrichment plants in addition to the one discovered at Natanz, so we don't know with any degree of certainty how long it'll take them to enrich the required amount of uranium for a bomb.
If they do build one, it's likely to be something that can just barely be carried by the world's biggest bombers. Like the US and Soviet Union's first efforts were. Going from one of those monsters to something you can launch on a missile is HARD.
Nonsense. You're assuming that the Iranians would need to start from scratch, whereas in reality they're able to piggyback on the experience and expertise from existing nuclear programs. They also have access to far more advanced materials and components, which are naturally far smaller and lighter than the stuff they were using in 1945. So it would actually be very easy for the Iranians to create a nuclear weapon light enough to be carried by an ICBM, provided they had the requisite fissile material.
Going from a missile that can maybe sort of hit near something a thousand kilometres away to something that can reliably (you only get one shot) hit something halfway around the world is HARD. It's also very hard to buy that technology. People tend to wonder when you post your "wanted, ICBM, will pay cash, small denomination Euros" ad on Craig's List.
Once again, you're assuming that Iran would need to re-invent the wheel. Guidance technology for ICBMs is no longer something unobtainable to all except a select few, especially with the advances in computing power and packaging over the past two decades. Besides, it's common knowledge that Iran's Shahab series of missiles are technologically derived from North Korea's Taepo-Dong ICBMs, and it's known that the Taepo-Dongs are accurate enough for a nuclear strike against a city.
Not going to use an ICBM? If a nuclear weapon were smuggled into Washington and detonated the high governmental officials probably wouldn't get ten minute's warning. More likely their first hint would be a very bright light. The ten minute thing is sort of the worst case for a ballistic missile, which take a decent amount of time to travel half way around the world and are fairly conspicuous while doing it.
Well yes, so what's your point? As I've pointed out, the ICBM threat is actually very real, so it makes sense to conduct these sort of exercises which would be useful in case of an ICBM launch. Besides, at the very least these bunkers will survive such a nuclear strike (even if a set group of leaders do not), and their command and control infrastructure would be valuable to those who take over the roles of the dead.
For the last time, returning to the moon is not just "a sci-fi wet dream", it is a necessary and useful step on the way to our exploration and colonisation of other planets.
Currently, when building spacecraft, everything has to be constructed either completely or mostly on earth. We thus expend a massive amount of energy to get these things past the earth's gravity and into space. It's a waste of energy and severely limiting.
With a moonbase, we would be able to build spacecraft in an environment with far less gravity, meaning that not only would we have much greater freedom in our designs, but it would be cheaper and would require less energy for launch, which would translate into much more available energy for a trip to Mars and a subsequent orbit and return.
I never said it had been directly implicated in terrorist attacks, merely that it was banned in many countries, including Britain and Germany, due to its extremist nature and dissemination of hate speech. Learn to read.
Actually, it has been during times of protectionism (such as the Smoot-Hawley Act), that economic growth has slowed down. While rich countries today did historically have periods of protectionism, they saw their best growth in times with freer trade.
In fact, it's free trade that allows these countries to come off the ladder's bottom rung. With protectionism, foreign companies are far less free to invest in a given country, and so much needed capital is not injected. Also, it raises the cost of living unnecessarily, effectively negating any benefit it might have.
Just take a look at South Korea. In 1960, it was poorer than North Korea, yet today it is many hundreds of times wealthier. That's because it embraced a free-trade development model, which did include sweatshops initially. Their free trade model worked because it forced the country to become competitive in selling products to a foreign market, which is of course far larger than the market in one's own country could ever be.
Finally, globalisation is a fact of life now, and there's no way to stop it. To adopt protectionist measures in the modern era would be economic suicide, and that's aside from the numerous downsides of protectionism. Indeed, I would suggest reading a book called Open World, which goes into the matter in a lot more depth.
I can understand Google News not listing anti-Islamic sites that are full of hate speech, but how then can they explain their decision to keep two blatantly hate-speech Islamist news sources?
Such as al-Manar, the official propaganda wing of Hezbollah, the terrorist group, and Khilafa.com, the site of Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is so radical that is has been banned in many countries, including Britain and Germany).
I'm generally suspicious of claims that Google has some sinister political bias, but there's no denying that it's displaying some fairly disturbing double standards here.
As has been pointed out by others, $2 a day is actually a fairly decent wage for much of the world, and it is certainly enough to live on. Not enough to live a comfortable middle-class life, of course, but enough to get some shelter and avoid starving.
One thing all the anti-sweatshop advocates also seem to forget is that where sweatshops are located, the only other option for employment is usually backbreaking work in the fields all day, a far harsher job with much less pay than a sweatshop job.
In fact, a job at a sweatshop often offers such people their only route out of that grinding poverty. Sweatshops, even while they sound bad, offer the highest wages in the area, certainly more than you'd get in working the fields. This means that workers at sweatshops are finally able to get some extra 'spare' money for use in self-improvement, such as education for themselves and their children.
Sweatshops, far from being the evil many protestors in the West believe them to be, are actually the bottom rung of the ladder. We tend to dislike them, because we're all sitting happily on higher rungs, but for somebody in a dirt-poor part of the world this bottom rung represents a heaven-sent opportunity to advance themselves and drag themselves out of poverty. If you force sweatshops to close, as some evidently want, you kick that bottom rung out and essentially kick all those people in the face. Because without any skills, and being unable to use their comparative advantage (lower wages), they stand no chance whatsoever of getting a formal job if that bottom rung is gone.
Looked at rationally and objectivity, sweatshops are a necessary part of a country's economic evolution. All successful countries, from the US to South Korea to all of Europe, have gone through a sweatshop stage in their development. It would be wrong to tell the poorest countries of the third world that we're not going to allow them to try catch up fairly.
What nonsense. If there is no proof of adverse affect, we should not have to never research or bring these products to market "just in case" there might be an adverse effect in future. It is foolish to attempt to regulate something before it is even known to be dangerous, but this is in effect what is being asked for.
Take DDT, which you evidently believe to be bad. Thanks to people like you, and your insistence on being "cautionary", the use of DDT was banned in many parts of the world, including my own country. The result was a massive increase in malaria cases, and the needless deaths of thousands, if not millions, of people. Nice way to be cautionary, eh?
After banning DDT in 1996, South Africa saw its yearly cases shoot up from around 30 deaths and under 10 000 cases to over 65 000 cases. Nearly 500 people in SA alone died from the disease, and we're speaking here about a country with a better developed healthcare system than most in Africa. After telling the international environmental groups to shove it, SA re-introduced DDT and saw its number of malaria deaths plummet to just 89 people. Swaziland, similarly, saw a 87% drop in its malaria cases.
I am sick to death of the F.U.D. surrounding DDT, and the numerous needless deaths that have resulted. I would hate to see another revolutionary technology, like nanotech, which has the potential to improve the lives of millions and cure diseases currently thought to be terminal, end up not being used because too many people were too "cautionary" in their approach.
Um, that's not exactly the best example for the claim that the US is routinely 'not sticking to treaties'. NAFTA is not your ordinary treaty, and it does not stand in isolation, with various other treaties (or treaty organisations like the WTO) and laws co-existing with it. It's weird that Canada chose to negotiate rather than hold its ground though, as given a fairly short amount of time the US would have had no choice but to back off, in the same way it backed off in the steel dispute.
So what we have here is both partners in a deal agreeing to ignore certain provisions of the deal (for now at least). This is not the same as breaking the terms of a treaty.
This treaty, if it passes, does not automatically become law in every member nation of the United States. Instead, the legislative assembly of every participating country has to ratify the treaty (ie, vote it into law). The process of ratifying includes adjusting local laws to come into compliance with the new international treaty, and this may include amending the Constitution (though this is unlikely).
For countries who do not wish to be a part of this absurd treaty, they can just refuse to ratify (or even sign) it. This is the same thing the US has done with Kyoto, where Congress has not ratified the treaty and so it has no legal force over the US.
So if this treaty does somehow become popular, the last resort of Americans would have to be to lobby Congress so as to get it to vote against ratification of the treaty, which would mean the treaty would have no legal authority over the US.
I actually think it's pretty much the same for all countries. International treaties must be ratified by each participating country's legislative assembly, whether that be Congress, Parliament or a similar institution.
Therefore, as participating countries must first ratify treaties, they're also allowed to withdraw from them (by changing national law through the legislature). For example, if Britain wished to withdraw from Kyoto, it would notify the other participating nations of its intent, and then its Parliament would revoke the ratification (entering into law) of the treaty.
It's important to note, however, that without amending the Constitution to make it agree, no legislature is allowed to ratify a treaty that contravenes the Constitution. So if, for example, Congress ratified Treaty A which revoked some or other right contained within the Bill of Rights, then the US Supreme Court has the power to declare that treaty illegal and thus null and void.
Entirely correct. Until a treaty has been ratified by Congress, it has no legal standing and is not considered to be "in effect". This is the case with Kyoto, for example, which was signed but never ratified by Congress (which voted 95-0 to oppose such a treaty anyway). Because of this lack of ratification, the US is not a party to the Kyoto treaty, and it has no legal standing in the US.
This is also why the grandparent's comment about the US "not sticking to treaties" is utter hogwash. Treaties that have been ratified become law in the United States, and unless the law is modified (thereby formally withdrawing from the treaty) the US government is legally required to stick to their provisions.
Ah jeez, the ignorance displaced by TFA is just mindblowing. Only somebody with little knowledge of Bluetooth and how it works will believe that it's possible to infect the entire store with a virus or worm.
Not only are mobile phones incredibly diverse in terms of operating systems and architectures, and most will not have Bluetooth on by default anyway, but Bluetooth is a very secure transmission protocol. People have been trying to hack it ever since it emerged as a standard, and I've yet to see any real example of success. Indeed, the only "Bluetooth" viruses are social engineering viruses that rely on the victim actively accepting a sent file (not too bright, that), and even then work only on one OS.
While it's worth being concerned about network security with smartphones (just as we're concerned with all network security), TFA is just a mindless piece of crap spreading unnecessary F.U.D. in a hyperbolic manner.
On the face of it, it sounds like a decent idea, but I see too many problems with it. The main advantage of having a university-wide email system is that it standardizes on everything, including the interface. Not only does this make uni tech support that much easier (and most students will complain to the university first anyway), but it also means that the university is absolutely certain what the capabilities of each student's email account is. They know which file-types it is capable of receiving (does it allow HTML, for example), and they know what the file size limit is.
Another thing to take into consideration is the huge popularity of sites like Facebook, which rely upon students having @***.edu or similar email accounts for authentication, in order to ensure that only students use the service. Under the system you're proposing, Facebook would no longer be able to do that, and it would lose much of its advantages.
Thing is, it's not really that impossibly difficult or expensive to run a decent email service onsite, especially when using a package like Horde with IMP. For the size of the student body of most institutions, a massive server is not required, and a capable enough machine is not that expensive. The problem is that, as has been mentioned above ad infinitum, decisions like this are usually made not by the CS professionals but by middle level managers with little real understanding of the options and possibilities, and who gets starry-eyed at the thought of an offer from Microsoft. Pity.
First of all, let's stop the stereotyping. The "developing world" is huge and extremely diverse, containing countries as comparatively wealthy and advanced as South Africa as well as underdeveloped and poor countries like Mozambique. To suggest, as some have here, that "nobody in the developing world has free time", or "few people have access to electricity" or my personal favourite of "people in the developing world have more pressing needs, such as food and water", is of course ludicrous. To those making such arguments, please do us all a favour and educate yourselves.
Programming is essentially a product of enthusiasm, as many of those reading Slashdot will probably know. In this, it is similar to becoming a pilot. Every single programmer I know began programming purely out of interest, and a desire to do more with their computers and explore the boundaries of what was possible. Not all programmers go on to make it their careers though, just as not all of those who dream of flying as kids end up as pilots. However, when the demand is there, people become encouraged to turn their hobby or interest into a career, and do so. The thing to remember here is that programmers are not created, and you cannot shove out some govt program that will result in a couple hundred programmers emerging by the end of the year. Instead, it's about giving youths access to computers (say at school) and teaching them the healthy curiousity and ambition that results in them trying to do more than the usual.
Currently, the emergence of programmers in the developing world is hampered by a lack of widespread access to quick and cheap internet, and a lack of access to computers. Yet this is slowly changing, and it really can only get better as both internet access and computing become irrevocably cheaper every year. Indeed, if there are already enough skilled software programmers in India to throw half of Slashdot's contributors into a protectionist rage every so often, then you know things are looking up in the developing world.
This article, and others like it, is interesting but ultimately misguided. The choice here is not an absolutist one between open source and proprietary software, as both have their place, and nor is there any way to magically create programmers. Instead, the attention that is being focused on the supposed lack of programmers such instead be focused on pressuring the governments of the developing world to liberalise their markets, drop tariffs, and generally increases the level of freedom available to their people, so that those with the curiousity to try new things will be able to do so without hindrance.
Yeah, it's merely the latest development of an idea that's been punted around for quite a few years now. I would hesitate to call Trophy "nothing more than the US version of the Russian Arena system", since by all accounts Trophy is decidedly more effective and less harmful to dismounted infantry, and besides it's Israeli, not American.
Incidentally, the US, Israel and Russia are not the only ones working on this tech. South Africa's Avitronics (now owned by SAAB) has been working on a similar system for a few years, which is also reputed to be very effective.
Called the LEDS, or Land Electronic Defence System, it consists of laser and radar missile approach warning sensors linked in to a number of countermeasures aboard the vehicle turret. Options include multi-spectral smoke, active signature decoys, or a hard-kill option similar to that seen in the Israeli system.
The hard-kill countermeasure involves the relatively small Mongoose 1 projective, which destroys the incoming warhead purely through kinetic energy. The mathematics behind this are predictably phenomenally complex, but evidently doable by reasonably-priced processing power small enough to fit into a combat vehicle.
As for response time, it certainly is incredibly fast. I was able to view a non-armed working demonstrator once, and was encouraged to take a photo of the system's sensors with my camera's flash on. By the time I had released the button, the system control panel had already identified the direction of the 'threat', swivelled the Mongoose launcher to face me, and subsequently dismissed it as a false alarm. Very quick indeed.
Of course, there will always be a danger to dismounted infantry from this system. However, this system in particular is specifically designed to be as safe to dismounted infantry as possible (hence the use of pure kinetic energy for destruction rather than a proximity detonation), and it could be argued that dismounted infantry are already vulnerable to RPGs and ATGMs that impact on the side of armoured vehicles anyway.
It's technology like this that will ensure the tank remains an integral part of the world's militaries for decades to come. Rumours of its demise are always greatly exaggerated.
Let's get back on topic here, the Orwellian overtones in this thread are becoming slightly overdone.
What's being proposed here is hardly a new thing. South Africa was one of the pioneers in this, and the SA Air Force has been operating the Seeker UAV in civilian areas for over a decade now. In fact, the Seeker was the first UAV to be cleared for operations in controlled airspace, with the creation of a set of rules and requirements that are only beginning to be explored by most countries now. So long as the requirements are met, it is just as safe to fly a UAV in controlled and civilian airspace as it is to fly ordinary manned aircraft. Don't believe the "but they'll crash into passenger planes" balderdash.
Secondly, this is hardly an Orwellian undertaking. It's no more sinister than police helicopters, or the border patrol aircraft that fly along the border. In fact, these UAVs will fulfill essentially the same role, it'll just be cheaper. So this is NOT the same as wiretapping, searching library records and whatnot, at least not unless you're one of those who regard even police helicopters as sinister...
I'd even go so far as to say the deployment of UAVs in a police capacity can reduce the often stifling police presence at some public gatherings. For example, during S.Africa's inaugural democratic elections in 1994 the Seeker system was deployed around the country to keep an eye on polling stations, and to spot violence breaking out (as it did back then). Police could then be directed in to the specific area they were needed, instead of just having thousands of cops inefficiently trying to blanket the area.
So I really don't see anything wrong with this at all, considering I've seen for myself how such a system has been implemented and operated. All these UAVs will do is replicate an existing capability while making it cheaper to do so. Surely that's a good thing, considering it means the government actually saves money for once?
Yeah, exactly. Way too many people here just assumed that he was being charged for "propaganda", without bothering to RTFA. Hey, if you could be arrested for propaganda in support of the enemy, I can think of quite a few people who'd also be eligible for prosecution. Except the Feds haven't touched them...
The internet spooks are hunting these guys, more than most of us will know. Except most of that evidence will likely never see the inside of a courtroom. It's used instead to build up a picture of the terrorist organisations, identifying its leaders and attempting to track its plans. After all, the guys who generally send the messages via the net tend to be the low-level sort, not worth arresting immediately unless there's a very good reason. Intel agencies much prefer to leave them be, while watching their every move in order to be led further up the ladder to their leaders and commanders. Then they try either send a capture team or a Predator with Hellfires to deal with the latter, depending on whatever's practical.
You can never defeat a terrorist group by killing its footsoldiers, there'll almost always be more where they come from. But a terrorist group without its leaders is just another mass movement, with no organization and leadership to make it a dangerous one.
RTFA, not only did this guy hijack servers for his own use (which is most surely a criminal act), but he did so in order to disseminate weapons manuals and the like not only propaganda material. It is a common and long-standing principle in Western countries that providing aid and comfort to the enemy, most especially in terms of technical assistance, is a crime.
It would be wrong to view the arrest of this man as "one more erosion of our rights", because the right to support the enemy has never existed. Save your energy to defend real victims, not this guy.
Or indeed anything to do with Arabs. The Persians are, well, Persian. They're about as genetically different to Arabs as Europeans are. For that matter, I think chess was also a pre-Islamic practice in Persia, Islam again had nothing to do with it.
You know, when you think about it, it's awfully humiliating when not only are the collaters of this data forced to adopt non-Islamic era inventions as "Islamic", but that it cannot find anything more recent than 1300CE worthy of being called a notable invention.
If anything, this exhibition should not be about Islamic pride. It should be a wake-up call to the Muslim world that the innate creativity and resourcefulness of the Arab and Persian peoples has been stifled by modern Islam.
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If that's your conclusion when thinking of Africa, might I suggest you get yourself an education? Every major city and town in Kenya is connected to the country's national electricity grid, as are most rural towns. In addition, the Kenyan grid is connected to all other southern African electricity grids via the Southern African Power Pool, allowing them to draw on the additional shared power when needed. Trust me, Google's not going to have to use solar panels to power its Kenyan office.
And yes, part of the reason for this move is to improve the sub-Saharan African localisation of Google's products, especially Google Maps. There is a fairly large Google user base in the region, so the company is keen to improve its service offering and get a foothold in the door early, as all predictions are that internet usage there is going to skyrocket in the next few years even more so than it's doing already.
Xubuntu = Ubuntu with the Xfce window manager, Edubuntu = A version of Ubuntu customised for schools, nUbuntu = Network Ubuntu, an unofficial fork designed for network security testing, Ebuntu = Ubuntu with the Enlightenment window manager and Goobuntu is a rumoured version of Ubuntu developed by Google for internal use.
Granted, this can get slightly confusing at times, but the average user is never going to need to move past Ubuntu itself, as it's the primary distro. Otherwise, I think this naming structure makes sense: A person reading "Edubuntu" is quite likely to make the inference that it's designed for educational use and that it's derived from Ubuntu.
Besides, my original point stands. For the average user, who will only come across the main distro and its release names (such as Dapper Drake), is Ubuntu really that more unserious than such names as "Gentoo", "Slackware" and "Red Hat"? I really don't think so, indeed I think the only reason we no longer consider the above-mentioned names to be odd is that we have become so used to them over the years. In time, Ubuntu will reach the same familiarity.
Is it because the distro's name isn't in English?
This is nothing new. BMW has been doing this since 2004, when they were the first to partner with Apple. Since then, Apple has partnered with other manufacturers, including Honda, Audi, Volkswagen, Chrysler, Mercedes-Benz, Dodge, Jaguar, Jeep, Nissan, Daihatsu, Renault, Suzuki and Volvo. http://www.apple.com/ipod/ipodyourcar/
As we know that Iran's Shahab-4 and Shahab-5 ICBMs are based on a two-stage and three-stage version of the TD-2 respectively, we can safely assume that they share these ranges. Meaning that Iran probably already has the ability to strike London and all of Western Europe.
In addition to this, Iran has purchased at least 18 BM-25 missiles from North Korea, which are a modernised version of the Russian SS-N-6 submarine launched ballistic missile. Though the original missiles had a range of 2500km, Jane's Defence Weekly has reported that North Korean scientists have managed to boost that to at least 4000km. Furthermore, the BM-25 could in theory be launched from a converted freighter with launch tubes and blast channels, meaning that even with these Iran has the theoretical capability to launch a nuclear missile against the US.
In any case, even if they continue to use purely land-based ICBMs like the Shahab range, it would be naive to believe that they would be unable to increase the range to around 10 000km in the next five to ten years. The expertise to build the required rocket types are out there, mostly in the form of Russian scientists who worked on that country's ICBM program, and a fair number of those would be willing to contribute their knowledge for the right price.
As an example of what can be done, South Africa had a (relatively low-cost) nuclear weapons and ICBM program in the 1980s until both were cancelled in 1991. At the time of cancellation however, SA had completed development of the RSA-4, an ICBM with sufficient range to hit any target on earth with a 700kg warhead. So if South Africa could do it in only 10 years, why can't Iran, considering the help they're getting?
Iran might be working on a nuclear weapons capability. Maybe. They don't have it yet.
At most, they're 10 years away, though it could be something less like 4-5 years. Point is, we don't know. It's pretty certain now, both through the actions of the Iranian government and the accidental release of certain compromising documents, that Iran is actually running a covert nuclear weapons program. The problem we have is that we're not entirely sure of their enrichment capability, especially as the IAEA suspects that Iran has secret uranium enrichment plants in addition to the one discovered at Natanz, so we don't know with any degree of certainty how long it'll take them to enrich the required amount of uranium for a bomb.
If they do build one, it's likely to be something that can just barely be carried by the world's biggest bombers. Like the US and Soviet Union's first efforts were. Going from one of those monsters to something you can launch on a missile is HARD.
Nonsense. You're assuming that the Iranians would need to start from scratch, whereas in reality they're able to piggyback on the experience and expertise from existing nuclear programs. They also have access to far more advanced materials and components, which are naturally far smaller and lighter than the stuff they were using in 1945. So it would actually be very easy for the Iranians to create a nuclear weapon light enough to be carried by an ICBM, provided they had the requisite fissile material.
Going from a missile that can maybe sort of hit near something a thousand kilometres away to something that can reliably (you only get one shot) hit something halfway around the world is HARD. It's also very hard to buy that technology. People tend to wonder when you post your "wanted, ICBM, will pay cash, small denomination Euros" ad on Craig's List.
Once again, you're assuming that Iran would need to re-invent the wheel. Guidance technology for ICBMs is no longer something unobtainable to all except a select few, especially with the advances in computing power and packaging over the past two decades. Besides, it's common knowledge that Iran's Shahab series of missiles are technologically derived from North Korea's Taepo-Dong ICBMs, and it's known that the Taepo-Dongs are accurate enough for a nuclear strike against a city.
Not going to use an ICBM? If a nuclear weapon were smuggled into Washington and detonated the high governmental officials probably wouldn't get ten minute's warning. More likely their first hint would be a very bright light. The ten minute thing is sort of the worst case for a ballistic missile, which take a decent amount of time to travel half way around the world and are fairly conspicuous while doing it.
Well yes, so what's your point? As I've pointed out, the ICBM threat is actually very real, so it makes sense to conduct these sort of exercises which would be useful in case of an ICBM launch. Besides, at the very least these bunkers will survive such a nuclear strike (even if a set group of leaders do not), and their command and control infrastructure would be valuable to those who take over the roles of the dead.
Or cocaine.
Currently, when building spacecraft, everything has to be constructed either completely or mostly on earth. We thus expend a massive amount of energy to get these things past the earth's gravity and into space. It's a waste of energy and severely limiting.
With a moonbase, we would be able to build spacecraft in an environment with far less gravity, meaning that not only would we have much greater freedom in our designs, but it would be cheaper and would require less energy for launch, which would translate into much more available energy for a trip to Mars and a subsequent orbit and return.
I never said it had been directly implicated in terrorist attacks, merely that it was banned in many countries, including Britain and Germany, due to its extremist nature and dissemination of hate speech. Learn to read.
In fact, it's free trade that allows these countries to come off the ladder's bottom rung. With protectionism, foreign companies are far less free to invest in a given country, and so much needed capital is not injected. Also, it raises the cost of living unnecessarily, effectively negating any benefit it might have.
Just take a look at South Korea. In 1960, it was poorer than North Korea, yet today it is many hundreds of times wealthier. That's because it embraced a free-trade development model, which did include sweatshops initially. Their free trade model worked because it forced the country to become competitive in selling products to a foreign market, which is of course far larger than the market in one's own country could ever be.
Finally, globalisation is a fact of life now, and there's no way to stop it. To adopt protectionist measures in the modern era would be economic suicide, and that's aside from the numerous downsides of protectionism. Indeed, I would suggest reading a book called Open World, which goes into the matter in a lot more depth.
Such as al-Manar, the official propaganda wing of Hezbollah, the terrorist group, and Khilafa.com, the site of Hizb ut-Tahrir (which is so radical that is has been banned in many countries, including Britain and Germany).
I'm generally suspicious of claims that Google has some sinister political bias, but there's no denying that it's displaying some fairly disturbing double standards here.
One thing all the anti-sweatshop advocates also seem to forget is that where sweatshops are located, the only other option for employment is usually backbreaking work in the fields all day, a far harsher job with much less pay than a sweatshop job.
In fact, a job at a sweatshop often offers such people their only route out of that grinding poverty. Sweatshops, even while they sound bad, offer the highest wages in the area, certainly more than you'd get in working the fields. This means that workers at sweatshops are finally able to get some extra 'spare' money for use in self-improvement, such as education for themselves and their children.
Sweatshops, far from being the evil many protestors in the West believe them to be, are actually the bottom rung of the ladder. We tend to dislike them, because we're all sitting happily on higher rungs, but for somebody in a dirt-poor part of the world this bottom rung represents a heaven-sent opportunity to advance themselves and drag themselves out of poverty. If you force sweatshops to close, as some evidently want, you kick that bottom rung out and essentially kick all those people in the face. Because without any skills, and being unable to use their comparative advantage (lower wages), they stand no chance whatsoever of getting a formal job if that bottom rung is gone.
Looked at rationally and objectivity, sweatshops are a necessary part of a country's economic evolution. All successful countries, from the US to South Korea to all of Europe, have gone through a sweatshop stage in their development. It would be wrong to tell the poorest countries of the third world that we're not going to allow them to try catch up fairly.
Take DDT, which you evidently believe to be bad. Thanks to people like you, and your insistence on being "cautionary", the use of DDT was banned in many parts of the world, including my own country. The result was a massive increase in malaria cases, and the needless deaths of thousands, if not millions, of people. Nice way to be cautionary, eh?
After banning DDT in 1996, South Africa saw its yearly cases shoot up from around 30 deaths and under 10 000 cases to over 65 000 cases. Nearly 500 people in SA alone died from the disease, and we're speaking here about a country with a better developed healthcare system than most in Africa. After telling the international environmental groups to shove it, SA re-introduced DDT and saw its number of malaria deaths plummet to just 89 people. Swaziland, similarly, saw a 87% drop in its malaria cases.
I am sick to death of the F.U.D. surrounding DDT, and the numerous needless deaths that have resulted. I would hate to see another revolutionary technology, like nanotech, which has the potential to improve the lives of millions and cure diseases currently thought to be terminal, end up not being used because too many people were too "cautionary" in their approach.
So what we have here is both partners in a deal agreeing to ignore certain provisions of the deal (for now at least). This is not the same as breaking the terms of a treaty.
This treaty, if it passes, does not automatically become law in every member nation of the United States. Instead, the legislative assembly of every participating country has to ratify the treaty (ie, vote it into law). The process of ratifying includes adjusting local laws to come into compliance with the new international treaty, and this may include amending the Constitution (though this is unlikely).
For countries who do not wish to be a part of this absurd treaty, they can just refuse to ratify (or even sign) it. This is the same thing the US has done with Kyoto, where Congress has not ratified the treaty and so it has no legal force over the US.
So if this treaty does somehow become popular, the last resort of Americans would have to be to lobby Congress so as to get it to vote against ratification of the treaty, which would mean the treaty would have no legal authority over the US.
Therefore, as participating countries must first ratify treaties, they're also allowed to withdraw from them (by changing national law through the legislature). For example, if Britain wished to withdraw from Kyoto, it would notify the other participating nations of its intent, and then its Parliament would revoke the ratification (entering into law) of the treaty.
It's important to note, however, that without amending the Constitution to make it agree, no legislature is allowed to ratify a treaty that contravenes the Constitution. So if, for example, Congress ratified Treaty A which revoked some or other right contained within the Bill of Rights, then the US Supreme Court has the power to declare that treaty illegal and thus null and void.
This is also why the grandparent's comment about the US "not sticking to treaties" is utter hogwash. Treaties that have been ratified become law in the United States, and unless the law is modified (thereby formally withdrawing from the treaty) the US government is legally required to stick to their provisions.
Ah jeez, the ignorance displaced by TFA is just mindblowing. Only somebody with little knowledge of Bluetooth and how it works will believe that it's possible to infect the entire store with a virus or worm.
Not only are mobile phones incredibly diverse in terms of operating systems and architectures, and most will not have Bluetooth on by default anyway, but Bluetooth is a very secure transmission protocol. People have been trying to hack it ever since it emerged as a standard, and I've yet to see any real example of success. Indeed, the only "Bluetooth" viruses are social engineering viruses that rely on the victim actively accepting a sent file (not too bright, that), and even then work only on one OS.
While it's worth being concerned about network security with smartphones (just as we're concerned with all network security), TFA is just a mindless piece of crap spreading unnecessary F.U.D. in a hyperbolic manner.
On the face of it, it sounds like a decent idea, but I see too many problems with it. The main advantage of having a university-wide email system is that it standardizes on everything, including the interface. Not only does this make uni tech support that much easier (and most students will complain to the university first anyway), but it also means that the university is absolutely certain what the capabilities of each student's email account is. They know which file-types it is capable of receiving (does it allow HTML, for example), and they know what the file size limit is.
Another thing to take into consideration is the huge popularity of sites like Facebook, which rely upon students having @***.edu or similar email accounts for authentication, in order to ensure that only students use the service. Under the system you're proposing, Facebook would no longer be able to do that, and it would lose much of its advantages.
Thing is, it's not really that impossibly difficult or expensive to run a decent email service onsite, especially when using a package like Horde with IMP. For the size of the student body of most institutions, a massive server is not required, and a capable enough machine is not that expensive. The problem is that, as has been mentioned above ad infinitum, decisions like this are usually made not by the CS professionals but by middle level managers with little real understanding of the options and possibilities, and who gets starry-eyed at the thought of an offer from Microsoft. Pity.
First of all, let's stop the stereotyping. The "developing world" is huge and extremely diverse, containing countries as comparatively wealthy and advanced as South Africa as well as underdeveloped and poor countries like Mozambique. To suggest, as some have here, that "nobody in the developing world has free time", or "few people have access to electricity" or my personal favourite of "people in the developing world have more pressing needs, such as food and water", is of course ludicrous. To those making such arguments, please do us all a favour and educate yourselves.
Programming is essentially a product of enthusiasm, as many of those reading Slashdot will probably know. In this, it is similar to becoming a pilot. Every single programmer I know began programming purely out of interest, and a desire to do more with their computers and explore the boundaries of what was possible. Not all programmers go on to make it their careers though, just as not all of those who dream of flying as kids end up as pilots. However, when the demand is there, people become encouraged to turn their hobby or interest into a career, and do so. The thing to remember here is that programmers are not created, and you cannot shove out some govt program that will result in a couple hundred programmers emerging by the end of the year. Instead, it's about giving youths access to computers (say at school) and teaching them the healthy curiousity and ambition that results in them trying to do more than the usual.
Currently, the emergence of programmers in the developing world is hampered by a lack of widespread access to quick and cheap internet, and a lack of access to computers. Yet this is slowly changing, and it really can only get better as both internet access and computing become irrevocably cheaper every year. Indeed, if there are already enough skilled software programmers in India to throw half of Slashdot's contributors into a protectionist rage every so often, then you know things are looking up in the developing world.
This article, and others like it, is interesting but ultimately misguided. The choice here is not an absolutist one between open source and proprietary software, as both have their place, and nor is there any way to magically create programmers. Instead, the attention that is being focused on the supposed lack of programmers such instead be focused on pressuring the governments of the developing world to liberalise their markets, drop tariffs, and generally increases the level of freedom available to their people, so that those with the curiousity to try new things will be able to do so without hindrance.
Yeah, it's merely the latest development of an idea that's been punted around for quite a few years now. I would hesitate to call Trophy "nothing more than the US version of the Russian Arena system", since by all accounts Trophy is decidedly more effective and less harmful to dismounted infantry, and besides it's Israeli, not American.
Incidentally, the US, Israel and Russia are not the only ones working on this tech. South Africa's Avitronics (now owned by SAAB) has been working on a similar system for a few years, which is also reputed to be very effective.
Called the LEDS, or Land Electronic Defence System, it consists of laser and radar missile approach warning sensors linked in to a number of countermeasures aboard the vehicle turret. Options include multi-spectral smoke, active signature decoys, or a hard-kill option similar to that seen in the Israeli system.
The hard-kill countermeasure involves the relatively small Mongoose 1 projective, which destroys the incoming warhead purely through kinetic energy. The mathematics behind this are predictably phenomenally complex, but evidently doable by reasonably-priced processing power small enough to fit into a combat vehicle.
As for response time, it certainly is incredibly fast. I was able to view a non-armed working demonstrator once, and was encouraged to take a photo of the system's sensors with my camera's flash on. By the time I had released the button, the system control panel had already identified the direction of the 'threat', swivelled the Mongoose launcher to face me, and subsequently dismissed it as a false alarm. Very quick indeed.
Of course, there will always be a danger to dismounted infantry from this system. However, this system in particular is specifically designed to be as safe to dismounted infantry as possible (hence the use of pure kinetic energy for destruction rather than a proximity detonation), and it could be argued that dismounted infantry are already vulnerable to RPGs and ATGMs that impact on the side of armoured vehicles anyway.
It's technology like this that will ensure the tank remains an integral part of the world's militaries for decades to come. Rumours of its demise are always greatly exaggerated.
Let's get back on topic here, the Orwellian overtones in this thread are becoming slightly overdone.
What's being proposed here is hardly a new thing. South Africa was one of the pioneers in this, and the SA Air Force has been operating the Seeker UAV in civilian areas for over a decade now. In fact, the Seeker was the first UAV to be cleared for operations in controlled airspace, with the creation of a set of rules and requirements that are only beginning to be explored by most countries now. So long as the requirements are met, it is just as safe to fly a UAV in controlled and civilian airspace as it is to fly ordinary manned aircraft. Don't believe the "but they'll crash into passenger planes" balderdash.
Secondly, this is hardly an Orwellian undertaking. It's no more sinister than police helicopters, or the border patrol aircraft that fly along the border. In fact, these UAVs will fulfill essentially the same role, it'll just be cheaper. So this is NOT the same as wiretapping, searching library records and whatnot, at least not unless you're one of those who regard even police helicopters as sinister...
I'd even go so far as to say the deployment of UAVs in a police capacity can reduce the often stifling police presence at some public gatherings. For example, during S.Africa's inaugural democratic elections in 1994 the Seeker system was deployed around the country to keep an eye on polling stations, and to spot violence breaking out (as it did back then). Police could then be directed in to the specific area they were needed, instead of just having thousands of cops inefficiently trying to blanket the area.
So I really don't see anything wrong with this at all, considering I've seen for myself how such a system has been implemented and operated. All these UAVs will do is replicate an existing capability while making it cheaper to do so. Surely that's a good thing, considering it means the government actually saves money for once?
Yeah, exactly. Way too many people here just assumed that he was being charged for "propaganda", without bothering to RTFA. Hey, if you could be arrested for propaganda in support of the enemy, I can think of quite a few people who'd also be eligible for prosecution. Except the Feds haven't touched them...
The internet spooks are hunting these guys, more than most of us will know. Except most of that evidence will likely never see the inside of a courtroom. It's used instead to build up a picture of the terrorist organisations, identifying its leaders and attempting to track its plans. After all, the guys who generally send the messages via the net tend to be the low-level sort, not worth arresting immediately unless there's a very good reason. Intel agencies much prefer to leave them be, while watching their every move in order to be led further up the ladder to their leaders and commanders. Then they try either send a capture team or a Predator with Hellfires to deal with the latter, depending on whatever's practical.
You can never defeat a terrorist group by killing its footsoldiers, there'll almost always be more where they come from. But a terrorist group without its leaders is just another mass movement, with no organization and leadership to make it a dangerous one.
RTFA, not only did this guy hijack servers for his own use (which is most surely a criminal act), but he did so in order to disseminate weapons manuals and the like not only propaganda material. It is a common and long-standing principle in Western countries that providing aid and comfort to the enemy, most especially in terms of technical assistance, is a crime. It would be wrong to view the arrest of this man as "one more erosion of our rights", because the right to support the enemy has never existed. Save your energy to defend real victims, not this guy.
Or indeed anything to do with Arabs. The Persians are, well, Persian. They're about as genetically different to Arabs as Europeans are. For that matter, I think chess was also a pre-Islamic practice in Persia, Islam again had nothing to do with it.
You know, when you think about it, it's awfully humiliating when not only are the collaters of this data forced to adopt non-Islamic era inventions as "Islamic", but that it cannot find anything more recent than 1300CE worthy of being called a notable invention.
If anything, this exhibition should not be about Islamic pride. It should be a wake-up call to the Muslim world that the innate creativity and resourcefulness of the Arab and Persian peoples has been stifled by modern Islam.