So we have illegal migrants complaining that they have their phones searched for evidence of breaking immigration laws. This is not how people take a case to court, even in the court of public opinion.
Here's an example for you, admittedly about a different law. I recall a few years ago reading about people being shot in Chicago a week apart with similar circumstances. The person shot was a known criminal that had broken into a home, the homeowner that shot the criminal had done so with an unregistered firearm. In most places in the USA no one is required to register a firearm because that is considered a violation of the rights as protected by the US Constitution. These two homeowners were not charged with having an unregistered firearm, and in fact were not charged of any crime. Why is that? Because people are not likely to put anyone in prison over defending their own home even if that meant they broke several laws to do so. Every time a person goes to court so does the law.
You want me to be sympathetic on the plight of people having their phones searched? How about finding a person I might have a reason to find sympathy? I don't much care if admitted criminals have their phones searched to find out how they broke the law. We know they came to Germany by overland from somewhere that is not a neighbor. Therefore they are obligated to declare asylum in the first nation in which they are safe. Failing to do so is a violation of the law in most every nation. I agree that searching cell phones to find out which nation that might be is poor form, at best. Searching personal phones for evidence to use against a person is a violation of rights as I understand personal rights. Perhaps I'm merely exposing my US-centered world view but don't like this idea much at all. Here's the thing though, we know they broke the law and all the searching the phone does is expose just how severely they broke the law and/or what to do with the person once the process of proving they broke the law is complete.
Everyone deserves their day in court if accused of a crime. People should feel secure from unlawful search by a government agent, regardless of the nation. What I'm finding real hard to do is feel sympathy for criminals being searched when we know they broke the law.
Someone wiser than I pointed out the best way to stop a bad law is strict enforcement. You want that law on searching phones overturned? Then find a police officer that searched the phone of an old lady that was accused of jaywalking. That's going to get people's sympathy. You want the law on requiring homeowners to register their firearms in Illinois overturned? Then charge a person that just killed a home intruder with having an unregistered firearm. The powers that be know this, and so they often deny the ability for someone to challenge a bad law in court by not enforcing the law against someone that a judge and/or jury might find sympathy.
One more thing... These people are fleeing shithole nations so that they can find a better life elsewhere. I'm fine with that so long as they do so with the intent to "when in Rome do as the Romans do". If they come to Germany, Denmark, or the USA then they need to learn the language of the nation they came to, find a job, and obey the laws. Germany has gained an international reputation for taking refugees, and I believe that this is the compassionate thing to do and a model for all nations to follow. What has happened is that people believe that they can break the law and still get to be a refugee. That's not how this works, and that's not how it should work. Either fix up your shithole nation so you don't have to flee or leave by the legal means as dictated by international law and the laws of the nation you wish to obtain sanctuary.
If you break the law to get into another nation then I'm not going to care much if the nation treats you like a criminal.
If people aren't angry enough about children being separated indefinitely from their refugee parents at borders to revolt, it's not gonna happen for license plates.
Entering the USA unlawfully the first time is a misdemeanor. People accused of breaking the law in the USA are routinely separated from their children because we don't confine children in prison while adults accused of a misdemeanor are routinely confined in prison until their court date. In the case of people accused of crossing the border unlawfully they normally get to see a judge in a matter of hours. So long as they admit guilt before the judge, which is pretty cut and dried in the case of being found crossing the border, and agree to leave the USA then they are reunited with their children in a matter of hours as punishment is routinely given as time served. The parents were separated from their children because the parents CHOSE to try to sneak them past the border.
If the parent chooses to not admit guilt in court but instead wishes to prolong the process by applying for refugee status then that means the parent will be separated from the child longer as this means the parent must remain in prison, because we don't put children in prison but we do put adults accused of a crime in prison. This means the accused must prepare a defense for their actions, find a lawyer, and so forth. Again, the parent can CHOOSE to be reunited with their child but chose not to out of applying for refugee status AFTER they already broken the law. Had they applied for refugee status at a marked point of entry to the USA then they'd be put in a processing center where they could stay with their children instead of being separated from their child by CHOOSING to break the law.
Getting upset about a parent being separated from their children because they were discovered crossing the border illegally is equivalent to being upset about a parent being separated from their children because they were found driving drunk. These parents had demonstrated little regard for the safety of their children by subjecting them to the danger of crossing the border at a point other than a marked border crossing. These people SHOULD be separated from their children because they have proven to be a threat to their child. That's assuming that the person is in fact the parent of the child, as there have been cases of kidnapping for those crossing the border illegally. If the parents want to enter the USA with their children, and not be separated from them, then all they have to do is go to a marked border crossing, proclaim the desire to enter the USA under refugee status and they will the allowed to stay with the child in a processing facility while their status is verified.
Crossing the border illegally more than once is a felony, we routinely separate those accused of felonies from their children. Should the accused claim refugee status after being accused of a felony then they could be separated from their children for a long time because that's a more serious offense and not punished with merely time served.
There are a lot of people not upset about people illegally crossing the border being separated from their children because people that CHOSE to break the law are routinely separated from their children. These parents CHOSE to be separated from their children by their actions.
As for me, I appreciate that every other vehicle on the road has to be registered and regularly inspected. I'm not a fan of having zero means to track down somebody who does a hit-and-run.
People that are willing to commit a hit and run are the kind of people that would not have their vehicle registered and inspected. I guess that a vehicle without a plate might stick out in the crowd but it's not like people don't steal license plates to make the process of tracking people down more difficult. I once tried to find out how many people are driving without a license and I found out that no body know
The government already charges me for the "privilege" of tracking my movements with intersection cameras and license plates. Now they are trying out the means to charge more for greater detail on this tracking?
Here's an idea, let's have everyone take off their plates and toss them in the trash. There, done, no more tracking. At least it makes their tracking more expensive because instead of a unique mark placed prominently on the vehicle they will have to track vehicle shape, size, color, and whatever else they can think of to create a unique profile to track.
This bullshit only lasts so long as the people are willing to put up with it. If they keep pushing on the tracking of people with license plates, driver licenses, and the mission creep they've attached to both, then I suspect at some point they might have a bit of civil disobedience on their hands and not much they can do about it to stop it. They can try to make an example of people by confiscating their cars and locking them up but if there is a jury by peers, and enough people fed up with this bullshit, then they will find this as a problem they cannot resolve with just force and intimidation.
I'm thinking it's about time to do away with license plates, not make them more expensive and with greater ability to track the movement of drivers.
I never quite understood why it is that Sony takes such a grip on the media they've introduced over the years. I can recall a couple examples with mini-disc and memory-stick. Both were introduced by Sony and never released for others to license. My only guess is that they'd gamble on keeping the technology to themselves and make bundles or just allow it to die and eat the cost of development. They had success with this tactic from Trinitron having a near monopoly on CRT displays and TVs for something like 30 or 40 years. Other people produced CRT tubes in this time, and often for much lower prices, but few met the quality of Trinitron. The patents on the technology expired at about the same time the CRT "expired" through competition from other technology. I still use a Sony Trinitron screen nearly every day because it just won't die. So long as it keeps working I see no need to replace it.
For everything other than Trinitron it seems that Sony produced crap products that I bought and got bit by the incompatibilities or I was wise enough to see the compatibility failure early on and avoided it in the first place.
I've developed a reflex of cursing when Sony is mentioned since most everything I got from Sony after Trinitron has been crap.
I remember looking through the selection of CDs at Best Buy and finding on one of them, in small print, a warning that it may not play on some CD players because of it's "special features" or some nonsense. I picked up another and found a similar warning. I picked up a third, and now knowing I might have to look closely this time I didn't see a warning but I also didn't see the "Compact Disc-Digital Audio" emblem I've seen on older music CDs I've bought.
I've lost all confidence that any "CD" I could buy at Best Buy would in fact be disc that met the standards of an audio CD. I haven't bought a CD from Best Buy since that day I saw that warning on the label of one of their discs years ago. I've bought music CDs since, but only after reviewing the store return policy, assuring the media is in fact CDDA, or it's cheap enough that I'd be willing to eat the cost if it won't play on my older gear I keep around.
Had Best Buy not bought crap discs for sale that day I'd probably be still buying CDs from them. I know that this is not solely the fault of Best Buy, they can offer for sale only what the music industry is willing to produce. We've seen stores put pressure on the makers of products before, and Best Buy could have insisted to not sell anything but CDDA. After all if the CD I bought did not play on my gear, and they didn't allow a return by their store policy, then that still reflects on them. I've read their policy and they will replace a "defective" CD with another CD but if the product itself is defective by not meeting the CDDA standard then replacing like with like does not solve my problem. I'd want my money back because I was supposed to get an audio CD but that's not what was in the package.
Oh, I'm sure someone might ask why I don't just download my music. It's simple really, because I'm an audio snob. I'm not a fan of compressed music from downloads, at least not if I'm paying money for it. I listen to streamed music often, for the stuff I really like I want it high quality and on a medium that I can expect to last a long time. That means CDs.
I'm just old enough to remember a time when music was still offered on 1/4 inch tape. I'd see these tape players on TV and movies from that time and I wondered just how much better that was than the fragile LPs and crappy cassettes that I could afford from mail order catalogs. I don't remember how much these hi-fi tapes cost, or how much the players cost, only that it was a lot of money and that I wanted it. The introduction of the CD killed off most any demand for the hi-fi tapes that remained, including my own.
At current consumption, we have 90 years's worth of uranium ore around. We expect to find more, because there's got to be more.
The same has been said of oil many times but we still seem to keep finding more. The supply of any natural resource depends on the cost to mine it. If the price goes up then that makes far more of that resource profitable to mine. Since the cost of the fuel for nuclear power makes up such a small portion of the total cost a 10 times increase in fuel costs means only perhaps a rising of what the ratepayer sees is 10%. I'm not quite sure of how that math works out but it's something close to my estimation. If uranium prices go up by 10 times then that means the supply increases by 10 times, which would mean not 90 years of fuel supply but 900 years. At that point the supply may as well be infinite as no one looks that far into the future for pricing anything.
Imagine ramping up from 20GW to 200GW of electricity production by nuclear in the US, and similarly around the world.
Not only can I imagine that I see this as inevitable. There were a lot of nuclear reactors built in the 1970s and 1980s. Being as the people building them didn't know a lot about how these things worked at the time in the long run they were over engineered with huge safety margins. The planned life for these things were on the scale of 30 or 40 years. Now that we have a better idea on how this stuff works on the long term we've been able to double or triple their expected operational life spans. Even so they will have to be shut down and relatively soon. Replacing them with anything other than another nuclear power plant will be very difficult. Replacing nuclear power with natural gas, wind, solar, or even coal means stressing the know resources available. Just like with diminished availability of uranium raises prices so does increased consumption of coal or whatever. Part of the reason that natural gas is as cheap as it is right now is because we still get 20% of electricity in the USA from nuclear power.
I'm not certain the known uranium resource is enough to power our current electricity consumption for one full year.
We don't have to rely on uranium for nuclear power, thorium works for that too. Thorium is everywhere, and it's cheap to mine if only the governments of the world toss out international treaties that limit access to it. Thorium is expensive only because laws on restricting access to what is considered a weapon grade material make it expensive. We can make thorium real cheap, and therefore make nuclear power real cheap, overnight if we toss out these stupid laws.
Canada and India have been experimenting with using thorium as a fuel in their current reactors for years now. It's not like we need to design new reactors, current reactors will do fine. I will grant that this is not optimal, we'd be better served with reactors designed for thorium as a fuel from the start. We know thorium is a viable fuel, it's just that we need to still figure out the specifics. Assuming only a year of uranium fuel is available that still gives us enough time to move on to thorium as a fuel.
Why hasn't anyone moved on to thorium as a fuel already? Because there has not been the motivation to do so yet. If the US federal government believes that they could see 20% of electrical production capacity lost in a year for lack of uranium fuel then they will be, IMHO, sufficiently motivated to allow experimentation in thorium as a fuel in current reactors and the construction of new reactors designed for the use of thorium fuel. It takes ten years for the construction of a nuclear reactor in the USA right now only because the government makes it that way. We've built nuclear reactors within 18 months before and I suspect we could do it again, if properly motivated.
We used to be able to bring 5 reactors online every year in the USA back when the USA had half the population it ha
A classical straw man;-) That they didn't go broke doesn't mean it was cheap.
That may be true but, as with most things, it's relative. They don't have to produce electric that is "cheap" only "cheap enough" that it's to their benefit as opposed to things like having to rely on Russian natural gas, wind power, or importing coal, for their electricity. France has limited access to energy except for nuclear. They don't have to produce electricity on their own, I suspect that Germany and UK would be willing to sell it to them but then that's still being reliant on the whims of their neighbors playing nice for a resource vital to the survival of the French, meaning both the individuals that comprise the nation and the national sovereignty.
Also yes, a lot of tax payer money has been used for France nuclear industry. This is well known. In fact, the court of audit in France did the math a couple of years ago to assess the cost of electricity and how much tax payer money ended up in the nuclear industry. Unsurprisingly, it found that nuclear electricity was in fact more expensive than previously thought... No conspiracy though;-)
Whether the money to operate the nuclear reactors comes from electricity rates or through taxation the total cost burden will be born by the totality of the people that live in France. This cost must be paid by the economy and it is to their advantage to keep this cost as low as possible so that they can keep the standard of living high and compete in the global market for whatever it is that France exports. What does France export besides an air of superiority and funny accents? Oh, that's right, they export electricity.
And yes, because they did they math, they decided to reduce their reliance on nuclear in the future.
Then the government had to back pedal on that once they realized that they can't just will coal mines and sunshine into existence. They will have to keep nuclear power plants or become dependent on their neighbors. Being reliant on friendly nations like UK, Spain, and Germany might not be such a bad thing if those nations weren't reliant on Russian natural gas. Russia has been moderately hostile to its neighbors for a long time. I don't see this changing any time soon, especially since Russia can afford to maintain this hostility with ready access to natural gas, coal, uranium, and huge tracts of land for wind and solar.
Finally, you apparently missed how in 2016 they figured out that they used steel of bad quality in many reactors with fake certificates and had to take about a third of their rectors offline at the same time...
That only means that they had a lesson on building better reactors in the future. Again, they can't create coal and sunshine from sheer willpower. If they can't keep their current reactors running then they will have to build new reactors or see their standard of living worsen. They don't have to produce all of their own electricity at the lowest of costs, only just enough electricity at low enough costs that they can't be pushed around by hostile neighbors like Russia.
With current cost of nuclear, it is not worthy an investment regardless how much fuel there is left.
If that were true then China would not bother building another nuclear power plant. China is a communist nation but they know that they must compete with the global market to survive. Even if the nation is communist it still lives under the capitalism that is the competition among nations for resources that we represent with money. If, as an example, they want potatoes from Ireland then they need to provide cell phones cheaper than what Ireland could get from Norway. Or, cheaper than what it would take for Ireland to make cell phones on their own.
I pick Norway because Norway produces a lot of their electricity from hydro. Along with the goal of reducing costs, from things like labor and materials, there is the goal of reducing CO2 output. China does not have near the same kind of access to hydro like Norway but they will have to live with the problems of CO2 output just like Norway would. So, along with prices China competes under the rules of treaties based on CO2 output. Punishment for not reaching the goals can come in losing the market by a total ban, meaning no potatoes for cell phones, or some penalty on price, meaning fewer potatoes for the same cell phones.
China did the math and came up with a different assessment than you did. I'm going out on a limb here and I'm going to assume that China knows more about the costs and treaties that China faces than you do.
Also I start to find the "if we would only invest another couple of hundred billions to develop a new generation of nuclear based on completely unproven designs (but trust us we never overpromised!) then it would be safe, burn the existing waste, and provide electricity to cheap to meter" bullshit the slashdot nuclear fanboys tend to fall for rather ridiculous. I have a bridge to sell you...
I find it ridiculous that people on Slashdot assume they know more about the needs of a government than that government. China is a communist nation that generally doesn't give a shit about the general well being of the public. Even so they've made considerable investment in addressing things like air pollution and keeping their nuclear reactors from blowing up in their faces. They do so, as best I can guess, for two reasons. The first is that a population that is unhappy will be far more likely to rise up against the government. If they keep the air clean and the lights on then people will be satisfied enough to not drag the politicians out in the street and string them up from a lamppost. The second reason is just as self serving, they have to breathe the same air as the rest of the population. If they can't keep the air free from smog and radioactive dust then they suffer as much as the people they abuse with their government.
In short, the Chinese government is not a bunch of idiots, they did the math just like everyone else and they added up that nuclear power is something they need to explore. They are not betting on nuclear power alone, they did that calculation too and realized that they need to invest in wind and solar to find out how to get the most potatoes for their cell phones.
That's not the only nuclear reactor built so quickly. We can build nuclear reactors that are safe, and build them quickly, if properly motivated. I believe the problem is that we have not yet been properly motivated. I'm not sure what proper motivation would look like but it seems that the threat of global warming is not sufficient.
Here's what boggles my mind. We have a threat of global warming from man made CO2 emissions, a threat that is supposed to be an extinction level event. This means that if we don't scale back our CO2 emissions drastically and soon we run the risk of the end of humanity. On the other hand we have nuclear power, an energy source that is low in CO2 and something proven to be inexpensive and safe. Even if it can be shown that nuclear power is not all that safe, or all that inexpensive, we still have the possibility of displacing many coal burning power plants in a very short amount of time if motivated to do so. This means increasing the risk of things like Chernobyl, but worst case estimates are that tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, of people died. Even then that was the because of allowing vodka addled politicians to run the plant instead of properly trained (and sober) engineers and technicians doing the job.
Let's have a show of hands... raise your hand if you believe that we'd ever build a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl again (as in not having a containment dome over the reactor), and allow it to be run by drunken politicians? Now, those of you sitting next to the people with their hands up, punch those people in the face. No one will ever again repeat what was done in Chernobyl. Using Chernobyl as an example of anything people would try today is idiotic. What of Fukushima? Those reactors were older than Chernobyl. While steps were taken to improve the reactors and the processes to run them after Chernobyl we are still talking about 40 year old designs when they melted down. Let's also remember that Japan had it's own politics over running their nuclear reactors. They knew the walls protecting the reactor site from a tsunami were not high enough but the politicians still allowed the reactors to go online and stay operating for decades after this engineering issue was discovered.
We know how to build large power plants in two or three years, we do that all the time. We know how to build nuclear reactors in less than three years, we also do that all the time. It should not take NINE years to build a nuclear power plant even with all the safety inspections and such. If properly motivated we should be able to go from breaking ground to first critical in 24 months.
Raise your hand if you believe that nuclear power is a greater threat to society than global warming. Those of you next to the people with a hand up, punch them in the face.
Assuming a worst case scenario for global warming we have the end of civilization. Assuming the worst case for nuclear power we have what? Of the over 400 nuclear reactors operating today, most of which have NOT melted down over decades of operation. That means if all our electricity came from nuclear power, and we had a million people die from a Chernobyl style event on the same proportion of what we had so far what would that mean? Well, assuming we don't let drunken politicians operate a nuclear power plant that lacks a containment dome then that's zero people dying.
I know that even at a pace of building a new nuclear reactor in even 24 months that could take decades to replace all the coal power in the world. All that means is we should get moving on building nuclear power. To find the blame for why this hasn't happened already go look in the audience for people with two black eyes.
Be prepared for a new renaissance in nuclear power.
At least that is the only reason I can see why this insanely irrational and extremely expensive form of power is used at all.
I took a history course this summer at a local university. The specific topic of the course is not relevant but let's just say it was about modern history, from about WWII to today. In one lecture topic of energy in China came up, that China was investing heavily in wind and solar. I pointed out that China is investing heavily in nuclear power as well. The professor agreed that China was in fact investing in nuclear power but that is a dangerous solution as it carries the threat of a meltdown. I point out that we don't build reactors like we used to. The professor pointed out the recent meltdown at Fukushima as an example of the risk. I pointed out that the reactors at Fukushima were older than Chernobyl. At that point students in class started to ask more questions about nuclear power and the professor said it was time to move on. Shortly after a student sitting next to me says to me quietly the dates on which Fukushima and Chernobyl were built, he verified what I said by looking this up on his laptop.
Why mention this discussion I had in a history class? Because these students will now look at nuclear power in a different way than the previous generation. They didn't grow up in a world where movies like China Syndrome or The Day After on ABC's Sunday Night Movies. Part of it is because people don't watch network TV much any more but also because such scare movies don't hold the weight they used to. "But what about Chernobyl?!?!" No one has built a RBMK reactor like Chernobyl since the early 1980s and no one will because they are inherently unsafe, the few that remain in operation do so only because of modifications to their safety systems and will be shutdown in the next 10 years. "But what about Fukushima?!?!" These are even older designs but with much better safety systems. They failed at Fukushima because the government failed to enforce their own standards on flood walls and the reactors were hit with a once in a 1000 year wave.
I've seen a few of the nuclear meltdown scare movies and TV episodes that come on TV today. They have to explain the serious flaws in the placement of the reactor (such as someone putting a reactor downstream from a huge dam, which of course bursts halfway through the movie), or failures in safety protocols by people operating the plants, because people have experience with this now. We've seen Chernobyl and Fukushima and we know that nuclear power plants don't melt down without a reason.
You want to talk about being "irrational" then tell that to my history professor. He tried to create another generation of people that feared nuclear power and failed because some idiot in the back of class pointed out a couple of facts that can be verified with a few minutes on Google or Wikipedia. France gets 3/4 of their electricity from nuclear power today. The USA gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear. At any given time there are thousands of US Navy sailors riding in relative comfort and safety aboard a nuclear powered submarine or aircraft carrier. This has been the norm for decades.
Nuclear power is safe and people know this. All those sailors that rode on a nuclear powered vessel have families that will listen to their stories of life aboard such a vessel. They might not realize it at the time but they are telling people how safe nuclear power is.
"But what about how expensive nuclear power is?!?!?!" Sure, what about it? We just saw a few more nuclear power plants go online in the USA, China, and a few other places. We've been getting cheap nuclear power for decades now, all over the world. We've proven that nuclear power is at least competitive with wind and solar.
"The waste! What of the radioactive waste?!?!?!" No one seems to be concerned about nuclear waste
While in the summer, it can cover a major amount of the electricity consumed. Still worth it.
Let's assume this is true and play it out. So, I own a utility and I need to sell electricity that is cheap and reliable or I go out of business. I figure I can get a majority of my electricity from cheap PV power in summer. The rest is wind and natural gas. Now the sun doesn't shine at night, but demand it lower too, but I'll still need some battery storage to even this out. Not a big deal because solar power is cheap and plentiful in summer.
When winter comes what am I supposed to do? Those solar panels are probably still producing power but less of it and for fewer hours. But I still need to pay for the taxes on the land, the labor to maintain the panels, and so forth. These panels still cost money even if they don't produce power. To make up for that shortage of power I'll need something else. Wind will do only so much, and it's not very reliable. So I'll have to burn natural gas.
Natural gas turbines cost money too, even if they aren't being used. They take up land too, and need maintenance. But if they are running then they make me money. Fuel costs money but so long as the competition is burning natural gas too then I can keep up with them.
I've seen how other utilities manage these seasonal differences in loads and abundance of wind and sun. That's with storage, and lots of it. Batteries are getting better on price and performance but they will never be free. How do these utilities store their energy then? With a dam. The problem with wind and sun for power will always be storage. Unless someone has access to a dam then storage will be expensive, and even then that's not guaranteed because not all dams are equal.
This isn't a matter of storage through the night any more, if someone is relying on solar this much then they need seasonal level storage. They need to be able to store up energy over the summer so that they can access it in the winter. If they can't do that then they can't have solar providing a majority of their electricity.
I've seen the numbers and when solar hits about 20% of generating capacity then "interesting" things start to happen to the daily supply and demand curves. People don't like things getting "interesting" generally.
Creating an air gap is not a "technology". It's a process of separating a computer system from the Internet. Or, rather, not connecting it to the Internet in the first place. I'm guessing most people reading this know that, but the idiots that wrote the article make it sound like Google is refusing to invest a bunch of money and resources into creating some kind of complicated software that doesn't exist yet.
Here's what I think is going on, Google has a business model based on hoovering up personal data in order to sell more advertising. Without the ability to sell adverts on the platform they'd be unable to take advantage of the subsidy to the services they provide to sell at a price below the competition. Instead of simply stating that it would be unprofitable for them to create an air gap system they claim that they are taking some moral high ground.
Congratulations Google, you have been successful in creating clickbait that suckered me in. While I'm sure that got you some more advert money the people that know what an "air gap" actually is aren't going to be fooled. You just advertised that you are not willing to take computer security seriously, and you are willing to give up profitable government contracts to your competitors.
In addition to your desire to hire based on skin color over technical merit I'm guessing that you are on a path to oblivion. One might say that they are paving a path with good intentions.
The problem with making stuff up, like you just did, is that inevitably someone who knows better will call you out. You can provide proof, admit you're a liar, double-down, hotly angry, or just stop posting. Strapping bombs to kids? Just bullshit.
The use of children as suicide bombers by Palestinians is well documented. There's plenty of links to news sources in the Wikipedia article. It took me about 2 minutes to find that article, had you bothered to take 2 minutes yourself to check before you posted then you wouldn't look like an idiot right now.
I love how the standard response of Israel's defenders, when presented with proof of Israelis murdering kids, doctors, nurses and people in wheelchairs, is to blather on...
These deaths by IDF gunfire and tear gas always happen during a protest along the border fence. If these people know that the Israelis are so brutal then why are they bringing children and people in wheelchairs to the protests? Can you explain that? Assuming that the report of a child killed by tear gas was true, what kind of idiot parent brings an infant to a protest? I don't care if the protest was "peaceful". I don't care if they had no reason to expect IDF to gas them. No one wants to bring a child to a protest, out in the desert, so the child can be miserable and cry and therefore make the parents miserable. They brought the kid there knowing that the IDF would be using lethal force, knowing that the child could die, and therefore carry the blame for the death.
I have no sympathy for a culture that uses children as soldiers. I cannot blame the IDF for shooting children that get too close to the border fence when there is a history of children being used as suicide bombers to breach the fence or kill IDF soldiers. If there are wheelchair bound people and children suffocating in gas attacks by the IDF then that's because someone brought them to the border knowing that it's possible they could die in a gas attack.
If the Palestinians want to wage a war with Israel over the land they occupy then they can't claim to be victims of "brutality" when Israel defends their borders.
Sigh. It's not about religion, it's about force, taking land, and wanting to be cruel to people because you've taken their land.
It's not "their land" if they've never set foot on it. These young Palestinians admit that they've never been there before. Maybe instead of expending this effort in fighting for land that they've never seen before they should make the best of what they got.
The whole state would become impoverished and fall apart, even under the best case scenario, if the occupation were to end and an equitable solution found.
I go to the first page of the article you linked to and I find this:
Some U.S. military officials say their current nonnuclear options are too limited or too slow. Unlike intercontinental ballistic missiles, which travel at several times the speed of sound, it can take up to 12 hours for cruise missiles to hit faraway targets. Long-range bombers likewise can take many hours to fly into position for a strike.
That's pretty much what I said in my previous post. With all due respect to General Cartwright his statement was proved to be an exaggeration compared to the previous paragraph in the article. Given that a first strike with missiles that take 12 hours to find their target can mean that verifying the target was hit, and sending a second strike if necessary, will mean the second strike may be the next day. That's a worst case scenario and being "days" in that technically it is more than a single day. Having something go from needing to be blown up to it actually being destroyed in 12 hours in a worst case first attempt, and having that verified and a second strike, or even third, on target looks to be something like 36 hours. That's "hours" by my estimation, not "days".
A B-52 can carry 70 tons of missiles or bombs, cruises at over 500 mph, and with refueling has enough range to reach anywhere on Earth. Worst case scenario is having to travel from a point on Earth to its antipode about 12,500 miles away, that's a 24 hour mission to target (and another 24 hours back but that's already after the target is hit). Perhaps not great on time but also not "days" later from command given to target hit if the USAF is doing its job. That's assuming a worst case scenario. The USA has cruise missiles and B-52 bombers able to launch from multiple locations. The things that we'd like to shatter into tiny bits are unlikely to be at an antipode from any of the two or more bases from which the bombers launch.
Playing around a bit with an online great circle mapping tool, and checking out the current bomber inventory of the USAF, I saw something interesting. The B-2 is based in Missouri and has a range of 6000 miles. Since most of the "interesting" places in the world are within 9000 miles of Whiteman Air Force Base the B-2 can drop bombs on any of these "interesting" places with a single refuel out and another coming back. Being able to fly at over 600 mph it can get to any of these interesting places in 15 hours to make a delivery. Even if it takes 3 hours for the crew to be woken up, showered, dressed, fed, and briefed on the mission, that's 18 hours from start to things going boom. That is indeed "many hours" but not "days".
Agreed, the US has rather significant land, air, and sea based firepower. Against Russia or China there are two problems - it takes days or weeks to deliver that firepower unless we nuclear, and they have rather significant defenses. So there is a niche for prompt global strike, the ability to hit targets anywhere with significant weapons *quickly*, and in a way they can't readily defend against.
The USA has the means to react quickly to any of a number of situations in a matter of hours without using nuclear weapons. There are many bases around the world where the military keeps weapons and people. The Air Force can bring long range bombers on target carrying conventional weapons. The Navy has carriers and submarines with conventional weapons positioned all around the world. If there is a need to get into a war with heavy weapons, like tanks, then that would take days or weeks. Getting boots or ordnance on the ground can take hours. If it's boots on the ground then they'd be armed with rifles and other light weapons. Give them a few more hours and they can move in trucks, dune buggies, and maybe some armored personnel carriers, those they can drop in from cargo planes.
The inability for the US military to hit a target anywhere on the globe in hours would likely only be because an adversary has the ability to outsmart US cruise missiles. I don't know how many missiles the US has, and how they might be defeated, but I'm assuming that mere quantity would overwhelm any adversary in a matter of hours. By that time enough assets would likely be moving to make the next wave much more difficult to stop. This would still be hours, not days, and certainly not weeks.
Oh definitely. Heck you can see the general outline of ISS with binoculars. What you can't do easily is look at it with a telescope that's much more powerful, because the more you magnify things, the smaller your field of view, and LEO objects would pass your field of view in less than a second. I'm curious, then, how detailed their knowledge is of our satellites.
Optical identification of satellites should be relatively trivial after a few passes with fast moving and powerful telescopes mated with a computer that can predict orbits. I'm quite certain that the big players like USA, Russia, and China have this. Even without optics there's a lot that can be determined from radar, just general size and shape can tell a lot. An orbiting mass that is below a certain size is not likely to be a threat, it's just going to be junk or a "cube sat" high school project. The bigger it is the more likely it may carry weapons that can do damage. In between the two extremes something might carry a threat in that it's a spy satellite but it's not a threat in that it carries weapons. Of course every orbiting object is a threat in that it could collide with a valuable satellite. These collisions could be intentional or coincidental. Depending on the specifics of the collision separating the intentional from the coincidental should be fairly trivial to differentiate.
I'm still not convinced of the utility of an orbital weapon. If a nation launched such weapons then they'd be identified as such. It might take some time to verify these as weapons but if these are in orbit as a "just in case" deterrent then they'd have to be placed in high orbit to be safe from existing anti-sat technology. The higher the orbit the more fuel it takes to launch. To be an effective weapon it will be heavy. The higher the orbit the more time the intended target has to identify the threat to respond. This just plain sounds expensive with not much actual value in return.
I don't think the issue is with diversity, but with presentation.
Precisely.
Roddenberry's most amazing statement throughout TOS was paradoxically the most subtle - these things were such non-issues that they weren't worthy of anyone's attention.
There was a bit of cultural differences pointed out in TOS where people made reference to their ancestry in what might be considered stereotypical ways. For example the Russian liked his vodka and spoke kind of funny. It was always played for laughs or a just to round the character out a bit. It wasn't tossed in your face. TNG and DS9 often took things a bit far. Voyager, Enterprise, and the movies seemed to have that subtlety return.
Roddenberry did this sort of thing well. Few today can say the same - characters intended to provide diversity tend to make that diversity a featured part of the story, rather than "the person doing the thing who happens to be a non-SWM".
Now that you mention single white male I noticed something, few or none of the crew in any Trek-verse show or movie were married. People had children but the spouse was often dead or, less often, the child was illegitimate. The few times we saw crew married to someone they were childless. A notable exception is O'Brian and his family. Where there any others?
I can see a need to have a number of crew members that are unmarried for the sake of having romantic tension among the crew and to allow them freedom to date others. Seems odd in a culture with faster than light travel, relative peace, and general abundance of resources, that more people didn't take advantage of that to have a family. Even if that meant leaving the family on some planet and going off on a lengthy tour in space. People in the military do that now, a quick Google search tells me about half of those in the military are married. I'd also expect more of the crew to pair up while serving and get married. We might see crew members share quarters (and a bed) for a while, but they rarely get married before or after this "shacking up".
This notable lack of married couples may in fact be a subtle commentary on diversity and the views of the people behind the shows. They may have simply thought that in the future people just didn't marry, or marriage was defined differently than it is now, as in people weren't considered married until they had children. Perhaps it was a view that married people didn't belong in a militaristic force like Starfleet, that if they married they left/retired or just didn't join. Perhaps those married were never deployed on long missions to space, there were married people in Starfleet but just not on five year missions.
If there is a "word from god" explanation for this somewhere then I'd like to see it.
Sometimes things do need to be pointed out directly, but most of the time, treating it like a non-issue is the best way to illustrate how normal something is in the future. Few directors can do this well.
Besides, I'm pretty sure he's not actually losing his marbles.
I'm not saying he is either. Stewart was merely telling a little tale on how/when he recognized he's not as young as he used to be. It sounds like he's still active in theater and does acting on screens big and small. What he's unlikely to do though is be a main character in another sci-fi adventure show.
I've seen those behind the scenes shows that show what the main actors have to do everyday to produce a typical sci-fi adventure show. They'll work 10, 12, or even 16 hours on set for 4, 5, or 6 days a week for 12 to 20 weeks a year. These actors that are often between 20 and 50 years old find this difficult. When an actor gets to be in their 60s and 70s then they tend to take on roles with limited screen time. They'll be an admiral, school principal, precinct captain, or whatever in an office that shows up on screen for maybe 10 minutes total in a 45 minute episode. They'll stride into a conference room or something, hear what the main characters have to say, make a decision, and then disappear until the end of the episode where they congratulate the main characters for a job well done. That's assuming they show up at all in that week's episode. They might be mentioned in conversation, converse over a telephone, or make an announcement on a PA if they don't appear on screen.
Don't expect to see Captain Picard "star trekking" across the universe. What you'll see is Admiral Picard come out of his office once in a while to bestow his wisdom and intellect upon the rest of the cast and then disappear into his office to review TPS reports or something. Or maybe we'll see a retired Picard on a vineyard in France, tending to his vines, so that a troubled young Starfleet officer can beam in from wherever to seek his advice from time to time.
Enterprise suffered from not having much of a story.
Enterprise suffered for Starfleet not having much of a story. What is Starfleet? It's got a rank structure that we'd recognize as a navy, but then lots of noncombat organizations do. They fly around in ships that are armed, have science teams, do diplomacy, but they make it clear in many ways that they are not a military. They don't fight wars unless absolutely necessary. They don't have "soldiers" as we'd recognize them, only "security officers" or some such are armed with any regularity. It seems that there's more staff in stellar cartography than any other department on the ship. Not that you see these people, we see what the engineers, medics, and command officers are doing.
The Enterprise, in all it's iterations in the Trek-verse, is never described as a warship. It encounters warships and often it perseveres over the warships through some combination of smarts, luck, enemy incompetence or arrogance, or whatever combination of such that moves the plot. They are always on some kind of science mission, making way to some diplomatic function, responding to some call for assistance. What equivalent do we have in our world to this?
Probably the best approximation to Starfleet would be the Coast Guard. One of the biggest function of the Coast Guard is to assist in trade. They perform ship inspections, check paperwork, and so on. This is in addition to things we see Starfleet do like search and rescue, get called up to fight in wars, do science missions, and even in some cases have to be diplomats.
I believe that Enterprise would have been more interesting if it was described as a ship in what we'd recognize as something of a Coast Guard in space. They'd still be doing diplomatic missions, map out stars, respond to calls for assistance, and even fight as a light battleship and/or flying hospital in times of war. In addition they'd have to deal with things like make sure interstellar freighters met safety standards, check for people smuggling illegal aliens, and maybe even hand out citations for speeding. Maybe that sounds boring to many people but there were episodes of Enterprise where they did some of this stuff. Also, there's all kinds of TV shows about police forces. There's shows about ships at sea doing this kind of stuff, transfer that kind of plot to ships in space.
Seems to me that the powers that be tried real hard to not make Starfleet a military, and failed in many ways, and also didn't want Starfleet to look like "cops in space". Well, some organization needs to be the cops in space because people don't always behave. If that's not Starfleet then who is? Make a show about space police and I'd probably watch it.
I picture Picard as being a recurring character. Maybe he'd "bookend" each season, providing continuity with the larger Trek universe by playing a prominent role in these episodes but otherwise be largely absent. Maybe he'd bookend each episode by giving a "captain's log" style opening and/or Mork and Mindy style closing report to some authority on how things played out.
Why do I think Picard would be portrayed in such a way? Because Patrick Stewart is getting old. I saw an interview he had where he'd talk about sitting in a hotel room, watching a Star Trek episode he had been in and not remembering that episode being taped. While watching TV there would be a knock at the door and he'd see room service had brought him food that he didn't remember ordering. He was lighthearted about the experience, merely addressing that his memory isn't like it was.
If he's going to portray Picard then he's going to have to do so in a way that he can disappear for long periods and have the viewers not wonder where he's been. I was surprised to see that Stewart took on a new show, Blunt Talk, given his statements in that interview. I see it's been cancelled. I hadn't seen the show so I don't know how much screen time he had or how well he had performed. Was the show cancelled because Stewart couldn't keep up? Was he forgetting his lines? Or did Stewart's performance have nothing to do with it not continuing?
Even if Stewart felt he'd be up to being a main character on a new Trek-verse show there is still convincing the powers that be that someone that will hit 80 in the second season will be able to keep up.
Imagine how unconvincing it will be when theyâ(TM)re sniping kids in 10 years and claiming that theyâ(TM)re being forced to, because they kids got too close to a fence, and their only defence is the fence, tanks, airplanes and nukes?
Given the history of these "freedom fighters" to strap bombs to children and send them running into crowds, fences, and such I can't blame the Israel border guards. They built a wall, they posted signs, these people know that if they get too close to the wall that they will face lethal force. It's unfortunate, extremely so, if a lost child wanders too close to a fence and gets shot for it out of the fog of war.
So long as we are placing blame here lets not forget that the reason the border guards shoot children and the disabled is because they have seen compassion for these people, quite literally, blow up in their face. In World War 2 the Japanese would fly a white flag indicating surrender but when American soldiers went to accept the surrender they'd get cut down by machine guns. After that the white flag is meaningless, by their own actions they've indicated that they have no intention to surrender. Decades later we still hear idiots talking of American brutality for ignoring Japanese surrender. Well, had the Japanese not redrawn the rules then the Americans in the Pacific Theater would have respected their surrender.
The Palestinians drew up their own rules. They sent children strapped with bombs to the border fence in an attempt to make a hole in it. Well, Israel now knows the rules that people in Gaza are playing under. If they are willing to use children as soldiers in their holy war then they can expect to lose these soldiers in war.
You claim might makes right, but then you object to someone challenging that might.
I'm objecting to them claiming ownership to this land as justification for this use of force. I've read the interviews of people in Gaza. It's some sad story of a young man in Gaza that pines to see "his homeland" on the other side of the fence. He's so determined to set foot on this land that he's willing to die fighting for the "right" for this land. Here's my question, what makes him think that "his land" is on the other side of that fence? He admits that he's never been there. It's likely his parents haven't been there. It's quite possible that his grandparents have never been there.
If this were a political fight as many often claim then that was lost long ago. This is a religious fight now. Perhaps not "religious" in the truest definition as it's not about deities being worshiped. This is a religious war in that they are fighting over this land over many generations out of a belief being passed down over generations that they have a "promised land" on the other side of the fence and that they must kill the people that "stole" the land from them.
In some of the stories I've read the "freedom fighters" in Gaza are being totally honest. They admit to taking people in wheelchairs to the border fence as human shields. They admit that this is about killing Jews. If the Jews are as brutal as you claim then what's keeping Israel from shelling and bombing the entire Gaza strip until the sand glows in the dark? You can claim its because of sanctions they'd get from other nations. Well, Israel is continuously being sanctioned by other nations. How would bombing Gaza change anything? The UN already made statements of Israel violating human rights, but they do nothing about it. So the UN isn't going to stop them. What's stopping Israel from just pushing everyone in Gaza into the sea is that they have compassion.
I believe that Israel has this compassion because they've read their scripture. They may not view Jesus as the son of God but they view him as a prophet. Jesus was a carpenter, he built things. He never lead an army or fought in a war. Mohammad was a warlord, he killed people. If you think using Jesus as an example for Je
The big problem with a "Space Force" is that it's an announcement that you're weaponizing space, which means that Russia, China, and the EU are now challenged to do the same.
No, it doesn't announce a weaponizing of space. What it means is that the space command in the USAF is getting large enough, and with a unique enough mission, that it is worthy of being broken out into an entity that is separate from the USAF.
Seems to me that the USAF space command has enough people and assets that it is roughly on par in size to that of the US Coast Guard. There are other uniformed services that provide direct support to the armed services that do not actively perform combat functions. There's the public health commissioned corps that provides health care for the armed services, but they are largely invisible as they wear uniforms nearly identical to that of the Navy. That's not a DoD agency but it's assets can be called to be under DoD command just like the USCG.
The space force could be merely a non-combat arm of the DoD that manages satellites for GPS, weather, and communications. If the new space force does have a combat function then it is possible they'd take command of the ICBMs. That's not weaponizing space but also something that might fit better in a space force than an air force.
Perhaps the space force won't even be under the DoD. Certainly if broken out there would be a lot of USAF people wearing different uniforms the next day. Where would it go if not DoD? Maybe under Energy, the Department of Energy is already tasked with maintaining nuclear weapons and materials so if the space force is in charge of ICBMs, as well as satellites, then that fits well. (Then again it might make more sense to split the weapon development part of Energy back under the DoD, put the parts that actually deal with energy under Interior with things like oil, wind, and coal, and make Energy disappear. Rick Perry should be happy with that.) Put it under Homeland Security like the USCG. Maybe have it under Commerce with NOAA, they already manage a lot of satellites.
Oh, and another thing, Russia already has a space force. China has something similar, with a cumbersome name that might translate into English as "space force", it manages cyber warfare along with space warfare.
It's not that space is entirely peaceful now, satellite defence is a real issue, but symbolic gestures can have pretty big consequences.
With "Rocket Man" in NK developing ICBMs, and Iran developing rockets under the thin veil of a civilian space agency, it might be time to dispense with symbolism. Or alternately symbolize to these aggressors that we are taking anti-satellite weapons as a serious matter. Maybe NK and Iran are in fact developing the means to launch satellites and not nuclear weapon delivery systems, that doesn't mean these are not also weapons. If they start launching satellites that spy on us, jam communications, destroy our own satellites, or who knows what else, then it might be in our interest to develop a military branch to deal with this threat and announce we are doing so.
I just thought of something that might be something of a historical parallel. In WW1 we saw the first real use of modern chemical weapons. The USA created a "chemical corps" to develop our own chemical weapons. This quickly developed into a group more concerned with countermeasures to enemy chemical weapons. After the effects of chemical weapons horrified everyone the USA dropped the development of chemical weapons but kept this chemical corps to perform countermeasures. We still have this chemical corps in the US military purely as a countermeasure to others using chemical weapons. A space force could be just a group only to protect us from adversaries that weaponized space.
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So we have illegal migrants complaining that they have their phones searched for evidence of breaking immigration laws. This is not how people take a case to court, even in the court of public opinion.
Here's an example for you, admittedly about a different law. I recall a few years ago reading about people being shot in Chicago a week apart with similar circumstances. The person shot was a known criminal that had broken into a home, the homeowner that shot the criminal had done so with an unregistered firearm. In most places in the USA no one is required to register a firearm because that is considered a violation of the rights as protected by the US Constitution. These two homeowners were not charged with having an unregistered firearm, and in fact were not charged of any crime. Why is that? Because people are not likely to put anyone in prison over defending their own home even if that meant they broke several laws to do so. Every time a person goes to court so does the law.
You want me to be sympathetic on the plight of people having their phones searched? How about finding a person I might have a reason to find sympathy? I don't much care if admitted criminals have their phones searched to find out how they broke the law. We know they came to Germany by overland from somewhere that is not a neighbor. Therefore they are obligated to declare asylum in the first nation in which they are safe. Failing to do so is a violation of the law in most every nation. I agree that searching cell phones to find out which nation that might be is poor form, at best. Searching personal phones for evidence to use against a person is a violation of rights as I understand personal rights. Perhaps I'm merely exposing my US-centered world view but don't like this idea much at all. Here's the thing though, we know they broke the law and all the searching the phone does is expose just how severely they broke the law and/or what to do with the person once the process of proving they broke the law is complete.
Everyone deserves their day in court if accused of a crime. People should feel secure from unlawful search by a government agent, regardless of the nation. What I'm finding real hard to do is feel sympathy for criminals being searched when we know they broke the law.
Someone wiser than I pointed out the best way to stop a bad law is strict enforcement. You want that law on searching phones overturned? Then find a police officer that searched the phone of an old lady that was accused of jaywalking. That's going to get people's sympathy. You want the law on requiring homeowners to register their firearms in Illinois overturned? Then charge a person that just killed a home intruder with having an unregistered firearm. The powers that be know this, and so they often deny the ability for someone to challenge a bad law in court by not enforcing the law against someone that a judge and/or jury might find sympathy.
One more thing... These people are fleeing shithole nations so that they can find a better life elsewhere. I'm fine with that so long as they do so with the intent to "when in Rome do as the Romans do". If they come to Germany, Denmark, or the USA then they need to learn the language of the nation they came to, find a job, and obey the laws. Germany has gained an international reputation for taking refugees, and I believe that this is the compassionate thing to do and a model for all nations to follow. What has happened is that people believe that they can break the law and still get to be a refugee. That's not how this works, and that's not how it should work. Either fix up your shithole nation so you don't have to flee or leave by the legal means as dictated by international law and the laws of the nation you wish to obtain sanctuary.
If you break the law to get into another nation then I'm not going to care much if the nation treats you like a criminal.
If people aren't angry enough about children being separated indefinitely from their refugee parents at borders to revolt, it's not gonna happen for license plates.
Entering the USA unlawfully the first time is a misdemeanor. People accused of breaking the law in the USA are routinely separated from their children because we don't confine children in prison while adults accused of a misdemeanor are routinely confined in prison until their court date. In the case of people accused of crossing the border unlawfully they normally get to see a judge in a matter of hours. So long as they admit guilt before the judge, which is pretty cut and dried in the case of being found crossing the border, and agree to leave the USA then they are reunited with their children in a matter of hours as punishment is routinely given as time served. The parents were separated from their children because the parents CHOSE to try to sneak them past the border.
If the parent chooses to not admit guilt in court but instead wishes to prolong the process by applying for refugee status then that means the parent will be separated from the child longer as this means the parent must remain in prison, because we don't put children in prison but we do put adults accused of a crime in prison. This means the accused must prepare a defense for their actions, find a lawyer, and so forth. Again, the parent can CHOOSE to be reunited with their child but chose not to out of applying for refugee status AFTER they already broken the law. Had they applied for refugee status at a marked point of entry to the USA then they'd be put in a processing center where they could stay with their children instead of being separated from their child by CHOOSING to break the law.
Getting upset about a parent being separated from their children because they were discovered crossing the border illegally is equivalent to being upset about a parent being separated from their children because they were found driving drunk. These parents had demonstrated little regard for the safety of their children by subjecting them to the danger of crossing the border at a point other than a marked border crossing. These people SHOULD be separated from their children because they have proven to be a threat to their child. That's assuming that the person is in fact the parent of the child, as there have been cases of kidnapping for those crossing the border illegally. If the parents want to enter the USA with their children, and not be separated from them, then all they have to do is go to a marked border crossing, proclaim the desire to enter the USA under refugee status and they will the allowed to stay with the child in a processing facility while their status is verified.
Crossing the border illegally more than once is a felony, we routinely separate those accused of felonies from their children. Should the accused claim refugee status after being accused of a felony then they could be separated from their children for a long time because that's a more serious offense and not punished with merely time served.
There are a lot of people not upset about people illegally crossing the border being separated from their children because people that CHOSE to break the law are routinely separated from their children. These parents CHOSE to be separated from their children by their actions.
As for me, I appreciate that every other vehicle on the road has to be registered and regularly inspected. I'm not a fan of having zero means to track down somebody who does a hit-and-run.
People that are willing to commit a hit and run are the kind of people that would not have their vehicle registered and inspected. I guess that a vehicle without a plate might stick out in the crowd but it's not like people don't steal license plates to make the process of tracking people down more difficult. I once tried to find out how many people are driving without a license and I found out that no body know
The government already charges me for the "privilege" of tracking my movements with intersection cameras and license plates. Now they are trying out the means to charge more for greater detail on this tracking?
Here's an idea, let's have everyone take off their plates and toss them in the trash. There, done, no more tracking. At least it makes their tracking more expensive because instead of a unique mark placed prominently on the vehicle they will have to track vehicle shape, size, color, and whatever else they can think of to create a unique profile to track.
This bullshit only lasts so long as the people are willing to put up with it. If they keep pushing on the tracking of people with license plates, driver licenses, and the mission creep they've attached to both, then I suspect at some point they might have a bit of civil disobedience on their hands and not much they can do about it to stop it. They can try to make an example of people by confiscating their cars and locking them up but if there is a jury by peers, and enough people fed up with this bullshit, then they will find this as a problem they cannot resolve with just force and intimidation.
I'm thinking it's about time to do away with license plates, not make them more expensive and with greater ability to track the movement of drivers.
Don't be sorry, I had the same reaction.
I never quite understood why it is that Sony takes such a grip on the media they've introduced over the years. I can recall a couple examples with mini-disc and memory-stick. Both were introduced by Sony and never released for others to license. My only guess is that they'd gamble on keeping the technology to themselves and make bundles or just allow it to die and eat the cost of development. They had success with this tactic from Trinitron having a near monopoly on CRT displays and TVs for something like 30 or 40 years. Other people produced CRT tubes in this time, and often for much lower prices, but few met the quality of Trinitron. The patents on the technology expired at about the same time the CRT "expired" through competition from other technology. I still use a Sony Trinitron screen nearly every day because it just won't die. So long as it keeps working I see no need to replace it.
For everything other than Trinitron it seems that Sony produced crap products that I bought and got bit by the incompatibilities or I was wise enough to see the compatibility failure early on and avoided it in the first place.
I've developed a reflex of cursing when Sony is mentioned since most everything I got from Sony after Trinitron has been crap.
I remember looking through the selection of CDs at Best Buy and finding on one of them, in small print, a warning that it may not play on some CD players because of it's "special features" or some nonsense. I picked up another and found a similar warning. I picked up a third, and now knowing I might have to look closely this time I didn't see a warning but I also didn't see the "Compact Disc-Digital Audio" emblem I've seen on older music CDs I've bought.
I've lost all confidence that any "CD" I could buy at Best Buy would in fact be disc that met the standards of an audio CD. I haven't bought a CD from Best Buy since that day I saw that warning on the label of one of their discs years ago. I've bought music CDs since, but only after reviewing the store return policy, assuring the media is in fact CDDA, or it's cheap enough that I'd be willing to eat the cost if it won't play on my older gear I keep around.
Had Best Buy not bought crap discs for sale that day I'd probably be still buying CDs from them. I know that this is not solely the fault of Best Buy, they can offer for sale only what the music industry is willing to produce. We've seen stores put pressure on the makers of products before, and Best Buy could have insisted to not sell anything but CDDA. After all if the CD I bought did not play on my gear, and they didn't allow a return by their store policy, then that still reflects on them. I've read their policy and they will replace a "defective" CD with another CD but if the product itself is defective by not meeting the CDDA standard then replacing like with like does not solve my problem. I'd want my money back because I was supposed to get an audio CD but that's not what was in the package.
Oh, I'm sure someone might ask why I don't just download my music. It's simple really, because I'm an audio snob. I'm not a fan of compressed music from downloads, at least not if I'm paying money for it. I listen to streamed music often, for the stuff I really like I want it high quality and on a medium that I can expect to last a long time. That means CDs.
I'm just old enough to remember a time when music was still offered on 1/4 inch tape. I'd see these tape players on TV and movies from that time and I wondered just how much better that was than the fragile LPs and crappy cassettes that I could afford from mail order catalogs. I don't remember how much these hi-fi tapes cost, or how much the players cost, only that it was a lot of money and that I wanted it. The introduction of the CD killed off most any demand for the hi-fi tapes that remained, including my own.
At current consumption, we have 90 years's worth of uranium ore around. We expect to find more, because there's got to be more.
The same has been said of oil many times but we still seem to keep finding more. The supply of any natural resource depends on the cost to mine it. If the price goes up then that makes far more of that resource profitable to mine. Since the cost of the fuel for nuclear power makes up such a small portion of the total cost a 10 times increase in fuel costs means only perhaps a rising of what the ratepayer sees is 10%. I'm not quite sure of how that math works out but it's something close to my estimation. If uranium prices go up by 10 times then that means the supply increases by 10 times, which would mean not 90 years of fuel supply but 900 years. At that point the supply may as well be infinite as no one looks that far into the future for pricing anything.
Imagine ramping up from 20GW to 200GW of electricity production by nuclear in the US, and similarly around the world.
Not only can I imagine that I see this as inevitable. There were a lot of nuclear reactors built in the 1970s and 1980s. Being as the people building them didn't know a lot about how these things worked at the time in the long run they were over engineered with huge safety margins. The planned life for these things were on the scale of 30 or 40 years. Now that we have a better idea on how this stuff works on the long term we've been able to double or triple their expected operational life spans. Even so they will have to be shut down and relatively soon. Replacing them with anything other than another nuclear power plant will be very difficult. Replacing nuclear power with natural gas, wind, solar, or even coal means stressing the know resources available. Just like with diminished availability of uranium raises prices so does increased consumption of coal or whatever. Part of the reason that natural gas is as cheap as it is right now is because we still get 20% of electricity in the USA from nuclear power.
I'm not certain the known uranium resource is enough to power our current electricity consumption for one full year.
We don't have to rely on uranium for nuclear power, thorium works for that too. Thorium is everywhere, and it's cheap to mine if only the governments of the world toss out international treaties that limit access to it. Thorium is expensive only because laws on restricting access to what is considered a weapon grade material make it expensive. We can make thorium real cheap, and therefore make nuclear power real cheap, overnight if we toss out these stupid laws.
Canada and India have been experimenting with using thorium as a fuel in their current reactors for years now. It's not like we need to design new reactors, current reactors will do fine. I will grant that this is not optimal, we'd be better served with reactors designed for thorium as a fuel from the start. We know thorium is a viable fuel, it's just that we need to still figure out the specifics. Assuming only a year of uranium fuel is available that still gives us enough time to move on to thorium as a fuel.
Why hasn't anyone moved on to thorium as a fuel already? Because there has not been the motivation to do so yet. If the US federal government believes that they could see 20% of electrical production capacity lost in a year for lack of uranium fuel then they will be, IMHO, sufficiently motivated to allow experimentation in thorium as a fuel in current reactors and the construction of new reactors designed for the use of thorium fuel. It takes ten years for the construction of a nuclear reactor in the USA right now only because the government makes it that way. We've built nuclear reactors within 18 months before and I suspect we could do it again, if properly motivated.
We used to be able to bring 5 reactors online every year in the USA back when the USA had half the population it ha
A classical straw man ;-) That they didn't go broke doesn't mean it was cheap.
That may be true but, as with most things, it's relative. They don't have to produce electric that is "cheap" only "cheap enough" that it's to their benefit as opposed to things like having to rely on Russian natural gas, wind power, or importing coal, for their electricity. France has limited access to energy except for nuclear. They don't have to produce electricity on their own, I suspect that Germany and UK would be willing to sell it to them but then that's still being reliant on the whims of their neighbors playing nice for a resource vital to the survival of the French, meaning both the individuals that comprise the nation and the national sovereignty.
Also yes, a lot of tax payer money has been used for France nuclear industry. This is well known. In fact, the court of audit in France did the math a couple of years ago to assess the cost of electricity and how much tax payer money ended up in the nuclear industry. Unsurprisingly, it found that nuclear electricity was in fact more expensive than previously thought... No conspiracy though ;-)
Whether the money to operate the nuclear reactors comes from electricity rates or through taxation the total cost burden will be born by the totality of the people that live in France. This cost must be paid by the economy and it is to their advantage to keep this cost as low as possible so that they can keep the standard of living high and compete in the global market for whatever it is that France exports. What does France export besides an air of superiority and funny accents? Oh, that's right, they export electricity.
And yes, because they did they math, they decided to reduce their reliance on nuclear in the future.
Then the government had to back pedal on that once they realized that they can't just will coal mines and sunshine into existence. They will have to keep nuclear power plants or become dependent on their neighbors. Being reliant on friendly nations like UK, Spain, and Germany might not be such a bad thing if those nations weren't reliant on Russian natural gas. Russia has been moderately hostile to its neighbors for a long time. I don't see this changing any time soon, especially since Russia can afford to maintain this hostility with ready access to natural gas, coal, uranium, and huge tracts of land for wind and solar.
Finally, you apparently missed how in 2016 they figured out that they used steel of bad quality in many reactors with fake certificates and had to take about a third of their rectors offline at the same time...
That only means that they had a lesson on building better reactors in the future. Again, they can't create coal and sunshine from sheer willpower. If they can't keep their current reactors running then they will have to build new reactors or see their standard of living worsen. They don't have to produce all of their own electricity at the lowest of costs, only just enough electricity at low enough costs that they can't be pushed around by hostile neighbors like Russia.
With current cost of nuclear, it is not worthy an investment regardless how much fuel there is left.
If that were true then China would not bother building another nuclear power plant. China is a communist nation but they know that they must compete with the global market to survive. Even if the nation is communist it still lives under the capitalism that is the competition among nations for resources that we represent with money. If, as an example, they want potatoes from Ireland then they need to provide cell phones cheaper than what Ireland could get from Norway. Or, cheaper than what it would take for Ireland to make cell phones on their own.
I pick Norway because Norway produces a lot of their electricity from hydro. Along with the goal of reducing costs, from things like labor and materials, there is the goal of reducing CO2 output. China does not have near the same kind of access to hydro like Norway but they will have to live with the problems of CO2 output just like Norway would. So, along with prices China competes under the rules of treaties based on CO2 output. Punishment for not reaching the goals can come in losing the market by a total ban, meaning no potatoes for cell phones, or some penalty on price, meaning fewer potatoes for the same cell phones.
China did the math and came up with a different assessment than you did. I'm going out on a limb here and I'm going to assume that China knows more about the costs and treaties that China faces than you do.
Also I start to find the "if we would only invest another couple of hundred billions to develop a new generation of nuclear based on completely unproven designs (but trust us we never overpromised!) then it would be safe, burn the existing waste, and provide electricity to cheap to meter" bullshit the slashdot nuclear fanboys tend to fall for rather ridiculous. I have a bridge to sell you...
I find it ridiculous that people on Slashdot assume they know more about the needs of a government than that government. China is a communist nation that generally doesn't give a shit about the general well being of the public. Even so they've made considerable investment in addressing things like air pollution and keeping their nuclear reactors from blowing up in their faces. They do so, as best I can guess, for two reasons. The first is that a population that is unhappy will be far more likely to rise up against the government. If they keep the air clean and the lights on then people will be satisfied enough to not drag the politicians out in the street and string them up from a lamppost. The second reason is just as self serving, they have to breathe the same air as the rest of the population. If they can't keep the air free from smog and radioactive dust then they suffer as much as the people they abuse with their government.
In short, the Chinese government is not a bunch of idiots, they did the math just like everyone else and they added up that nuclear power is something they need to explore. They are not betting on nuclear power alone, they did that calculation too and realized that they need to invest in wind and solar to find out how to get the most potatoes for their cell phones.
Is it worth saving the world from climate change if we take the profit out of it?
No.
I think a nuclear power plant is a little bit more complicated to design and build than the Hoover Dam.
Then you are mistaken.
It took 18 months (give or take) for the USS Nautilus to be built.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
That's not the only nuclear reactor built so quickly. We can build nuclear reactors that are safe, and build them quickly, if properly motivated. I believe the problem is that we have not yet been properly motivated. I'm not sure what proper motivation would look like but it seems that the threat of global warming is not sufficient.
Here's what boggles my mind. We have a threat of global warming from man made CO2 emissions, a threat that is supposed to be an extinction level event. This means that if we don't scale back our CO2 emissions drastically and soon we run the risk of the end of humanity. On the other hand we have nuclear power, an energy source that is low in CO2 and something proven to be inexpensive and safe. Even if it can be shown that nuclear power is not all that safe, or all that inexpensive, we still have the possibility of displacing many coal burning power plants in a very short amount of time if motivated to do so. This means increasing the risk of things like Chernobyl, but worst case estimates are that tens of thousands, or maybe hundreds of thousands, of people died. Even then that was the because of allowing vodka addled politicians to run the plant instead of properly trained (and sober) engineers and technicians doing the job.
Let's have a show of hands... raise your hand if you believe that we'd ever build a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl again (as in not having a containment dome over the reactor), and allow it to be run by drunken politicians? Now, those of you sitting next to the people with their hands up, punch those people in the face. No one will ever again repeat what was done in Chernobyl. Using Chernobyl as an example of anything people would try today is idiotic. What of Fukushima? Those reactors were older than Chernobyl. While steps were taken to improve the reactors and the processes to run them after Chernobyl we are still talking about 40 year old designs when they melted down. Let's also remember that Japan had it's own politics over running their nuclear reactors. They knew the walls protecting the reactor site from a tsunami were not high enough but the politicians still allowed the reactors to go online and stay operating for decades after this engineering issue was discovered.
We know how to build large power plants in two or three years, we do that all the time. We know how to build nuclear reactors in less than three years, we also do that all the time. It should not take NINE years to build a nuclear power plant even with all the safety inspections and such. If properly motivated we should be able to go from breaking ground to first critical in 24 months.
Raise your hand if you believe that nuclear power is a greater threat to society than global warming. Those of you next to the people with a hand up, punch them in the face.
Assuming a worst case scenario for global warming we have the end of civilization. Assuming the worst case for nuclear power we have what? Of the over 400 nuclear reactors operating today, most of which have NOT melted down over decades of operation. That means if all our electricity came from nuclear power, and we had a million people die from a Chernobyl style event on the same proportion of what we had so far what would that mean? Well, assuming we don't let drunken politicians operate a nuclear power plant that lacks a containment dome then that's zero people dying.
I know that even at a pace of building a new nuclear reactor in even 24 months that could take decades to replace all the coal power in the world. All that means is we should get moving on building nuclear power. To find the blame for why this hasn't happened already go look in the audience for people with two black eyes.
Be prepared for a new renaissance in nuclear power.
At least that is the only reason I can see why this insanely irrational and extremely expensive form of power is used at all.
I took a history course this summer at a local university. The specific topic of the course is not relevant but let's just say it was about modern history, from about WWII to today. In one lecture topic of energy in China came up, that China was investing heavily in wind and solar. I pointed out that China is investing heavily in nuclear power as well. The professor agreed that China was in fact investing in nuclear power but that is a dangerous solution as it carries the threat of a meltdown. I point out that we don't build reactors like we used to. The professor pointed out the recent meltdown at Fukushima as an example of the risk. I pointed out that the reactors at Fukushima were older than Chernobyl. At that point students in class started to ask more questions about nuclear power and the professor said it was time to move on. Shortly after a student sitting next to me says to me quietly the dates on which Fukushima and Chernobyl were built, he verified what I said by looking this up on his laptop.
Why mention this discussion I had in a history class? Because these students will now look at nuclear power in a different way than the previous generation. They didn't grow up in a world where movies like China Syndrome or The Day After on ABC's Sunday Night Movies. Part of it is because people don't watch network TV much any more but also because such scare movies don't hold the weight they used to. "But what about Chernobyl?!?!" No one has built a RBMK reactor like Chernobyl since the early 1980s and no one will because they are inherently unsafe, the few that remain in operation do so only because of modifications to their safety systems and will be shutdown in the next 10 years. "But what about Fukushima?!?!" These are even older designs but with much better safety systems. They failed at Fukushima because the government failed to enforce their own standards on flood walls and the reactors were hit with a once in a 1000 year wave.
I've seen a few of the nuclear meltdown scare movies and TV episodes that come on TV today. They have to explain the serious flaws in the placement of the reactor (such as someone putting a reactor downstream from a huge dam, which of course bursts halfway through the movie), or failures in safety protocols by people operating the plants, because people have experience with this now. We've seen Chernobyl and Fukushima and we know that nuclear power plants don't melt down without a reason.
You want to talk about being "irrational" then tell that to my history professor. He tried to create another generation of people that feared nuclear power and failed because some idiot in the back of class pointed out a couple of facts that can be verified with a few minutes on Google or Wikipedia. France gets 3/4 of their electricity from nuclear power today. The USA gets 20% of its electricity from nuclear. At any given time there are thousands of US Navy sailors riding in relative comfort and safety aboard a nuclear powered submarine or aircraft carrier. This has been the norm for decades.
Nuclear power is safe and people know this. All those sailors that rode on a nuclear powered vessel have families that will listen to their stories of life aboard such a vessel. They might not realize it at the time but they are telling people how safe nuclear power is.
"But what about how expensive nuclear power is?!?!?!" Sure, what about it? We just saw a few more nuclear power plants go online in the USA, China, and a few other places. We've been getting cheap nuclear power for decades now, all over the world. We've proven that nuclear power is at least competitive with wind and solar.
"The waste! What of the radioactive waste?!?!?!" No one seems to be concerned about nuclear waste
While in the summer, it can cover a major amount of the electricity consumed. Still worth it.
Let's assume this is true and play it out. So, I own a utility and I need to sell electricity that is cheap and reliable or I go out of business. I figure I can get a majority of my electricity from cheap PV power in summer. The rest is wind and natural gas. Now the sun doesn't shine at night, but demand it lower too, but I'll still need some battery storage to even this out. Not a big deal because solar power is cheap and plentiful in summer.
When winter comes what am I supposed to do? Those solar panels are probably still producing power but less of it and for fewer hours. But I still need to pay for the taxes on the land, the labor to maintain the panels, and so forth. These panels still cost money even if they don't produce power. To make up for that shortage of power I'll need something else. Wind will do only so much, and it's not very reliable. So I'll have to burn natural gas.
Natural gas turbines cost money too, even if they aren't being used. They take up land too, and need maintenance. But if they are running then they make me money. Fuel costs money but so long as the competition is burning natural gas too then I can keep up with them.
I've seen how other utilities manage these seasonal differences in loads and abundance of wind and sun. That's with storage, and lots of it. Batteries are getting better on price and performance but they will never be free. How do these utilities store their energy then? With a dam. The problem with wind and sun for power will always be storage. Unless someone has access to a dam then storage will be expensive, and even then that's not guaranteed because not all dams are equal.
This isn't a matter of storage through the night any more, if someone is relying on solar this much then they need seasonal level storage. They need to be able to store up energy over the summer so that they can access it in the winter. If they can't do that then they can't have solar providing a majority of their electricity.
I've seen the numbers and when solar hits about 20% of generating capacity then "interesting" things start to happen to the daily supply and demand curves. People don't like things getting "interesting" generally.
Creating an air gap is not a "technology". It's a process of separating a computer system from the Internet. Or, rather, not connecting it to the Internet in the first place. I'm guessing most people reading this know that, but the idiots that wrote the article make it sound like Google is refusing to invest a bunch of money and resources into creating some kind of complicated software that doesn't exist yet.
Here's what I think is going on, Google has a business model based on hoovering up personal data in order to sell more advertising. Without the ability to sell adverts on the platform they'd be unable to take advantage of the subsidy to the services they provide to sell at a price below the competition. Instead of simply stating that it would be unprofitable for them to create an air gap system they claim that they are taking some moral high ground.
Congratulations Google, you have been successful in creating clickbait that suckered me in. While I'm sure that got you some more advert money the people that know what an "air gap" actually is aren't going to be fooled. You just advertised that you are not willing to take computer security seriously, and you are willing to give up profitable government contracts to your competitors.
In addition to your desire to hire based on skin color over technical merit I'm guessing that you are on a path to oblivion. One might say that they are paving a path with good intentions.
The problem with making stuff up, like you just did, is that inevitably someone who knows better will call you out. You can provide proof, admit you're a liar, double-down, hotly angry, or just stop posting. Strapping bombs to kids? Just bullshit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...â"Palestinian_conflict
The use of children as suicide bombers by Palestinians is well documented. There's plenty of links to news sources in the Wikipedia article. It took me about 2 minutes to find that article, had you bothered to take 2 minutes yourself to check before you posted then you wouldn't look like an idiot right now.
I love how the standard response of Israel's defenders, when presented with proof of Israelis murdering kids, doctors, nurses and people in wheelchairs, is to blather on...
The Palestinians have been caught lying many times about the Israel forces killing Palestinians.
https://www.christianpost.com/...
https://www.jpost.com/Arab-Isr...
These deaths by IDF gunfire and tear gas always happen during a protest along the border fence. If these people know that the Israelis are so brutal then why are they bringing children and people in wheelchairs to the protests? Can you explain that? Assuming that the report of a child killed by tear gas was true, what kind of idiot parent brings an infant to a protest? I don't care if the protest was "peaceful". I don't care if they had no reason to expect IDF to gas them. No one wants to bring a child to a protest, out in the desert, so the child can be miserable and cry and therefore make the parents miserable. They brought the kid there knowing that the IDF would be using lethal force, knowing that the child could die, and therefore carry the blame for the death.
I have no sympathy for a culture that uses children as soldiers. I cannot blame the IDF for shooting children that get too close to the border fence when there is a history of children being used as suicide bombers to breach the fence or kill IDF soldiers. If there are wheelchair bound people and children suffocating in gas attacks by the IDF then that's because someone brought them to the border knowing that it's possible they could die in a gas attack.
If the Palestinians want to wage a war with Israel over the land they occupy then they can't claim to be victims of "brutality" when Israel defends their borders.
Sigh. It's not about religion, it's about force, taking land, and wanting to be cruel to people because you've taken their land.
It's not "their land" if they've never set foot on it. These young Palestinians admit that they've never been there before. Maybe instead of expending this effort in fighting for land that they've never seen before they should make the best of what they got.
The whole state would become impoverished and fall apart, even under the best case scenario, if the occupation were to end and an equitable solution found.
I don't even know what that means.
I go to the first page of the article you linked to and I find this:
Some U.S. military officials say their current nonnuclear options are too limited or too slow. Unlike intercontinental ballistic missiles, which travel at several times the speed of sound, it can take up to 12 hours for cruise missiles to hit faraway targets. Long-range bombers likewise can take many hours to fly into position for a strike.
That's pretty much what I said in my previous post. With all due respect to General Cartwright his statement was proved to be an exaggeration compared to the previous paragraph in the article. Given that a first strike with missiles that take 12 hours to find their target can mean that verifying the target was hit, and sending a second strike if necessary, will mean the second strike may be the next day. That's a worst case scenario and being "days" in that technically it is more than a single day. Having something go from needing to be blown up to it actually being destroyed in 12 hours in a worst case first attempt, and having that verified and a second strike, or even third, on target looks to be something like 36 hours. That's "hours" by my estimation, not "days".
A B-52 can carry 70 tons of missiles or bombs, cruises at over 500 mph, and with refueling has enough range to reach anywhere on Earth. Worst case scenario is having to travel from a point on Earth to its antipode about 12,500 miles away, that's a 24 hour mission to target (and another 24 hours back but that's already after the target is hit). Perhaps not great on time but also not "days" later from command given to target hit if the USAF is doing its job. That's assuming a worst case scenario. The USA has cruise missiles and B-52 bombers able to launch from multiple locations. The things that we'd like to shatter into tiny bits are unlikely to be at an antipode from any of the two or more bases from which the bombers launch.
Playing around a bit with an online great circle mapping tool, and checking out the current bomber inventory of the USAF, I saw something interesting. The B-2 is based in Missouri and has a range of 6000 miles. Since most of the "interesting" places in the world are within 9000 miles of Whiteman Air Force Base the B-2 can drop bombs on any of these "interesting" places with a single refuel out and another coming back. Being able to fly at over 600 mph it can get to any of these interesting places in 15 hours to make a delivery. Even if it takes 3 hours for the crew to be woken up, showered, dressed, fed, and briefed on the mission, that's 18 hours from start to things going boom. That is indeed "many hours" but not "days".
Agreed, the US has rather significant land, air, and sea based firepower. Against Russia or China there are two problems - it takes days or weeks to deliver that firepower unless we nuclear, and they have rather significant defenses. So there is a niche for prompt global strike, the ability to hit targets anywhere with significant weapons *quickly*, and in a way they can't readily defend against.
The USA has the means to react quickly to any of a number of situations in a matter of hours without using nuclear weapons. There are many bases around the world where the military keeps weapons and people. The Air Force can bring long range bombers on target carrying conventional weapons. The Navy has carriers and submarines with conventional weapons positioned all around the world. If there is a need to get into a war with heavy weapons, like tanks, then that would take days or weeks. Getting boots or ordnance on the ground can take hours. If it's boots on the ground then they'd be armed with rifles and other light weapons. Give them a few more hours and they can move in trucks, dune buggies, and maybe some armored personnel carriers, those they can drop in from cargo planes.
The inability for the US military to hit a target anywhere on the globe in hours would likely only be because an adversary has the ability to outsmart US cruise missiles. I don't know how many missiles the US has, and how they might be defeated, but I'm assuming that mere quantity would overwhelm any adversary in a matter of hours. By that time enough assets would likely be moving to make the next wave much more difficult to stop. This would still be hours, not days, and certainly not weeks.
Oh definitely. Heck you can see the general outline of ISS with binoculars. What you can't do easily is look at it with a telescope that's much more powerful, because the more you magnify things, the smaller your field of view, and LEO objects would pass your field of view in less than a second. I'm curious, then, how detailed their knowledge is of our satellites.
Optical identification of satellites should be relatively trivial after a few passes with fast moving and powerful telescopes mated with a computer that can predict orbits. I'm quite certain that the big players like USA, Russia, and China have this. Even without optics there's a lot that can be determined from radar, just general size and shape can tell a lot. An orbiting mass that is below a certain size is not likely to be a threat, it's just going to be junk or a "cube sat" high school project. The bigger it is the more likely it may carry weapons that can do damage. In between the two extremes something might carry a threat in that it's a spy satellite but it's not a threat in that it carries weapons. Of course every orbiting object is a threat in that it could collide with a valuable satellite. These collisions could be intentional or coincidental. Depending on the specifics of the collision separating the intentional from the coincidental should be fairly trivial to differentiate.
I'm still not convinced of the utility of an orbital weapon. If a nation launched such weapons then they'd be identified as such. It might take some time to verify these as weapons but if these are in orbit as a "just in case" deterrent then they'd have to be placed in high orbit to be safe from existing anti-sat technology. The higher the orbit the more fuel it takes to launch. To be an effective weapon it will be heavy. The higher the orbit the more time the intended target has to identify the threat to respond. This just plain sounds expensive with not much actual value in return.
I don't think the issue is with diversity, but with presentation.
Precisely.
Roddenberry's most amazing statement throughout TOS was paradoxically the most subtle - these things were such non-issues that they weren't worthy of anyone's attention.
There was a bit of cultural differences pointed out in TOS where people made reference to their ancestry in what might be considered stereotypical ways. For example the Russian liked his vodka and spoke kind of funny. It was always played for laughs or a just to round the character out a bit. It wasn't tossed in your face. TNG and DS9 often took things a bit far. Voyager, Enterprise, and the movies seemed to have that subtlety return.
Roddenberry did this sort of thing well. Few today can say the same - characters intended to provide diversity tend to make that diversity a featured part of the story, rather than "the person doing the thing who happens to be a non-SWM".
Now that you mention single white male I noticed something, few or none of the crew in any Trek-verse show or movie were married. People had children but the spouse was often dead or, less often, the child was illegitimate. The few times we saw crew married to someone they were childless. A notable exception is O'Brian and his family. Where there any others?
I can see a need to have a number of crew members that are unmarried for the sake of having romantic tension among the crew and to allow them freedom to date others. Seems odd in a culture with faster than light travel, relative peace, and general abundance of resources, that more people didn't take advantage of that to have a family. Even if that meant leaving the family on some planet and going off on a lengthy tour in space. People in the military do that now, a quick Google search tells me about half of those in the military are married. I'd also expect more of the crew to pair up while serving and get married. We might see crew members share quarters (and a bed) for a while, but they rarely get married before or after this "shacking up".
This notable lack of married couples may in fact be a subtle commentary on diversity and the views of the people behind the shows. They may have simply thought that in the future people just didn't marry, or marriage was defined differently than it is now, as in people weren't considered married until they had children. Perhaps it was a view that married people didn't belong in a militaristic force like Starfleet, that if they married they left/retired or just didn't join. Perhaps those married were never deployed on long missions to space, there were married people in Starfleet but just not on five year missions.
If there is a "word from god" explanation for this somewhere then I'd like to see it.
Sometimes things do need to be pointed out directly, but most of the time, treating it like a non-issue is the best way to illustrate how normal something is in the future. Few directors can do this well.
Yep.
Besides, I'm pretty sure he's not actually losing his marbles.
I'm not saying he is either. Stewart was merely telling a little tale on how/when he recognized he's not as young as he used to be. It sounds like he's still active in theater and does acting on screens big and small. What he's unlikely to do though is be a main character in another sci-fi adventure show.
I've seen those behind the scenes shows that show what the main actors have to do everyday to produce a typical sci-fi adventure show. They'll work 10, 12, or even 16 hours on set for 4, 5, or 6 days a week for 12 to 20 weeks a year. These actors that are often between 20 and 50 years old find this difficult. When an actor gets to be in their 60s and 70s then they tend to take on roles with limited screen time. They'll be an admiral, school principal, precinct captain, or whatever in an office that shows up on screen for maybe 10 minutes total in a 45 minute episode. They'll stride into a conference room or something, hear what the main characters have to say, make a decision, and then disappear until the end of the episode where they congratulate the main characters for a job well done. That's assuming they show up at all in that week's episode. They might be mentioned in conversation, converse over a telephone, or make an announcement on a PA if they don't appear on screen.
Don't expect to see Captain Picard "star trekking" across the universe. What you'll see is Admiral Picard come out of his office once in a while to bestow his wisdom and intellect upon the rest of the cast and then disappear into his office to review TPS reports or something. Or maybe we'll see a retired Picard on a vineyard in France, tending to his vines, so that a troubled young Starfleet officer can beam in from wherever to seek his advice from time to time.
Enterprise suffered from not having much of a story.
Enterprise suffered for Starfleet not having much of a story. What is Starfleet? It's got a rank structure that we'd recognize as a navy, but then lots of noncombat organizations do. They fly around in ships that are armed, have science teams, do diplomacy, but they make it clear in many ways that they are not a military. They don't fight wars unless absolutely necessary. They don't have "soldiers" as we'd recognize them, only "security officers" or some such are armed with any regularity. It seems that there's more staff in stellar cartography than any other department on the ship. Not that you see these people, we see what the engineers, medics, and command officers are doing.
The Enterprise, in all it's iterations in the Trek-verse, is never described as a warship. It encounters warships and often it perseveres over the warships through some combination of smarts, luck, enemy incompetence or arrogance, or whatever combination of such that moves the plot. They are always on some kind of science mission, making way to some diplomatic function, responding to some call for assistance. What equivalent do we have in our world to this?
Probably the best approximation to Starfleet would be the Coast Guard. One of the biggest function of the Coast Guard is to assist in trade. They perform ship inspections, check paperwork, and so on. This is in addition to things we see Starfleet do like search and rescue, get called up to fight in wars, do science missions, and even in some cases have to be diplomats.
I believe that Enterprise would have been more interesting if it was described as a ship in what we'd recognize as something of a Coast Guard in space. They'd still be doing diplomatic missions, map out stars, respond to calls for assistance, and even fight as a light battleship and/or flying hospital in times of war. In addition they'd have to deal with things like make sure interstellar freighters met safety standards, check for people smuggling illegal aliens, and maybe even hand out citations for speeding. Maybe that sounds boring to many people but there were episodes of Enterprise where they did some of this stuff. Also, there's all kinds of TV shows about police forces. There's shows about ships at sea doing this kind of stuff, transfer that kind of plot to ships in space.
Seems to me that the powers that be tried real hard to not make Starfleet a military, and failed in many ways, and also didn't want Starfleet to look like "cops in space". Well, some organization needs to be the cops in space because people don't always behave. If that's not Starfleet then who is? Make a show about space police and I'd probably watch it.
Will there be a Star Trek flamethrower?
I picture Picard as being a recurring character. Maybe he'd "bookend" each season, providing continuity with the larger Trek universe by playing a prominent role in these episodes but otherwise be largely absent. Maybe he'd bookend each episode by giving a "captain's log" style opening and/or Mork and Mindy style closing report to some authority on how things played out.
Why do I think Picard would be portrayed in such a way? Because Patrick Stewart is getting old. I saw an interview he had where he'd talk about sitting in a hotel room, watching a Star Trek episode he had been in and not remembering that episode being taped. While watching TV there would be a knock at the door and he'd see room service had brought him food that he didn't remember ordering. He was lighthearted about the experience, merely addressing that his memory isn't like it was.
If he's going to portray Picard then he's going to have to do so in a way that he can disappear for long periods and have the viewers not wonder where he's been. I was surprised to see that Stewart took on a new show, Blunt Talk, given his statements in that interview. I see it's been cancelled. I hadn't seen the show so I don't know how much screen time he had or how well he had performed. Was the show cancelled because Stewart couldn't keep up? Was he forgetting his lines? Or did Stewart's performance have nothing to do with it not continuing?
Even if Stewart felt he'd be up to being a main character on a new Trek-verse show there is still convincing the powers that be that someone that will hit 80 in the second season will be able to keep up.
There weren't any pansexuals in that video!
Here's a video with a pansexual wookie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
And just for fun here's Darth Vader on the accordion...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
For some reason I have a compelling desire to start cello lessons.
Imagine how unconvincing it will be when theyâ(TM)re sniping kids in 10 years and claiming that theyâ(TM)re being forced to, because they kids got too close to a fence, and their only defence is the fence, tanks, airplanes and nukes?
Given the history of these "freedom fighters" to strap bombs to children and send them running into crowds, fences, and such I can't blame the Israel border guards. They built a wall, they posted signs, these people know that if they get too close to the wall that they will face lethal force. It's unfortunate, extremely so, if a lost child wanders too close to a fence and gets shot for it out of the fog of war.
So long as we are placing blame here lets not forget that the reason the border guards shoot children and the disabled is because they have seen compassion for these people, quite literally, blow up in their face. In World War 2 the Japanese would fly a white flag indicating surrender but when American soldiers went to accept the surrender they'd get cut down by machine guns. After that the white flag is meaningless, by their own actions they've indicated that they have no intention to surrender. Decades later we still hear idiots talking of American brutality for ignoring Japanese surrender. Well, had the Japanese not redrawn the rules then the Americans in the Pacific Theater would have respected their surrender.
The Palestinians drew up their own rules. They sent children strapped with bombs to the border fence in an attempt to make a hole in it. Well, Israel now knows the rules that people in Gaza are playing under. If they are willing to use children as soldiers in their holy war then they can expect to lose these soldiers in war.
You claim might makes right, but then you object to someone challenging that might.
I'm objecting to them claiming ownership to this land as justification for this use of force. I've read the interviews of people in Gaza. It's some sad story of a young man in Gaza that pines to see "his homeland" on the other side of the fence. He's so determined to set foot on this land that he's willing to die fighting for the "right" for this land. Here's my question, what makes him think that "his land" is on the other side of that fence? He admits that he's never been there. It's likely his parents haven't been there. It's quite possible that his grandparents have never been there.
If this were a political fight as many often claim then that was lost long ago. This is a religious fight now. Perhaps not "religious" in the truest definition as it's not about deities being worshiped. This is a religious war in that they are fighting over this land over many generations out of a belief being passed down over generations that they have a "promised land" on the other side of the fence and that they must kill the people that "stole" the land from them.
In some of the stories I've read the "freedom fighters" in Gaza are being totally honest. They admit to taking people in wheelchairs to the border fence as human shields. They admit that this is about killing Jews. If the Jews are as brutal as you claim then what's keeping Israel from shelling and bombing the entire Gaza strip until the sand glows in the dark? You can claim its because of sanctions they'd get from other nations. Well, Israel is continuously being sanctioned by other nations. How would bombing Gaza change anything? The UN already made statements of Israel violating human rights, but they do nothing about it. So the UN isn't going to stop them. What's stopping Israel from just pushing everyone in Gaza into the sea is that they have compassion.
I believe that Israel has this compassion because they've read their scripture. They may not view Jesus as the son of God but they view him as a prophet. Jesus was a carpenter, he built things. He never lead an army or fought in a war. Mohammad was a warlord, he killed people. If you think using Jesus as an example for Je
The big problem with a "Space Force" is that it's an announcement that you're weaponizing space, which means that Russia, China, and the EU are now challenged to do the same.
No, it doesn't announce a weaponizing of space. What it means is that the space command in the USAF is getting large enough, and with a unique enough mission, that it is worthy of being broken out into an entity that is separate from the USAF.
Seems to me that the USAF space command has enough people and assets that it is roughly on par in size to that of the US Coast Guard. There are other uniformed services that provide direct support to the armed services that do not actively perform combat functions. There's the public health commissioned corps that provides health care for the armed services, but they are largely invisible as they wear uniforms nearly identical to that of the Navy. That's not a DoD agency but it's assets can be called to be under DoD command just like the USCG.
The space force could be merely a non-combat arm of the DoD that manages satellites for GPS, weather, and communications. If the new space force does have a combat function then it is possible they'd take command of the ICBMs. That's not weaponizing space but also something that might fit better in a space force than an air force.
Perhaps the space force won't even be under the DoD. Certainly if broken out there would be a lot of USAF people wearing different uniforms the next day. Where would it go if not DoD? Maybe under Energy, the Department of Energy is already tasked with maintaining nuclear weapons and materials so if the space force is in charge of ICBMs, as well as satellites, then that fits well. (Then again it might make more sense to split the weapon development part of Energy back under the DoD, put the parts that actually deal with energy under Interior with things like oil, wind, and coal, and make Energy disappear. Rick Perry should be happy with that.) Put it under Homeland Security like the USCG. Maybe have it under Commerce with NOAA, they already manage a lot of satellites.
Oh, and another thing, Russia already has a space force. China has something similar, with a cumbersome name that might translate into English as "space force", it manages cyber warfare along with space warfare.
It's not that space is entirely peaceful now, satellite defence is a real issue, but symbolic gestures can have pretty big consequences.
With "Rocket Man" in NK developing ICBMs, and Iran developing rockets under the thin veil of a civilian space agency, it might be time to dispense with symbolism. Or alternately symbolize to these aggressors that we are taking anti-satellite weapons as a serious matter. Maybe NK and Iran are in fact developing the means to launch satellites and not nuclear weapon delivery systems, that doesn't mean these are not also weapons. If they start launching satellites that spy on us, jam communications, destroy our own satellites, or who knows what else, then it might be in our interest to develop a military branch to deal with this threat and announce we are doing so.
I just thought of something that might be something of a historical parallel. In WW1 we saw the first real use of modern chemical weapons. The USA created a "chemical corps" to develop our own chemical weapons. This quickly developed into a group more concerned with countermeasures to enemy chemical weapons. After the effects of chemical weapons horrified everyone the USA dropped the development of chemical weapons but kept this chemical corps to perform countermeasures. We still have this chemical corps in the US military purely as a countermeasure to others using chemical weapons. A space force could be just a group only to protect us from adversaries that weaponized space.