The Hindenburg might be a good metaphor for the Bush administration ('rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic' isn't a strong enough metaphor anymore), but in a country where over half the population doesn't even believe in evolution, that 70 year old footage in the hands of the fossil fuel lobby might be enough to stop the H2 economy.
I don't think the volatility of pure H2 is a deal breaker. We run our cars on liquid explosives, and we power the rest of our gadgets with an energy source that moonlights as a form of capital punishment. Concentrated energy is dangerous. The cool thing about H2 is that, unlike electricty, it can be stored and transported without losing any punch. When the Very High Temperature Reactors come online, couldn't we could make huge farms of them in unpopulated areas and move the H2 to the population centers?
One thing the article didn't mention was the role that Platimum group metals will play. Each fuel cell needs a few ounces of these metals, and they are very rare on the Earth. Some estimates claim that the environmental impact of mining and refining the amount needed for a full-blown H2 economy might be worse than sticking with fossil fuels. Of course, they are abundant in space, maybe even on the Moon.
FYI, the Hindenburg's canvas skin was painting with a doping compound that was mostly powdered aluminum and iron oxide, which is basically rocket fuel! Ever notice how amazingly quickly the skin burns off in the footage?
One of my current tasks is moving all the civilization calculations (this is a 4X game similar to GalCiv2 but in realtime) into a third thread instead of piggybacking on every 10th physics frame. If I had enough CPUs to prevent context switching, each AI civilization could have its own thread, but that's only 8 more threads tops. Hmm, 22 processors left;)
Right now my game can only process one Solar System at a time, so each one is more like a new level that you access by moving on the galactic map once you have gathered sufficent tech/resources. If I had 15 or 20 extra CPUs sitting around, I could run a different Solar System on each one, making the game much more open and dynamic.
This nice thing about this is that the speed of light (speed of information) allows me to limit the amount of interaction between systems. If we really are living in some sort of Matrix, god the programmer must have added the speed of light as an optimization for our multiprocessing substrate!;)
I'm not trying to be difficult, guys. I've been writing multi-threaded code 12 hours a day in C# and Visual Studio for the last few years, so its hard for me see what all the fuss is about.
C# has some nice language features like the lock and volatile keywords, and the.Net framework includes classes like the ThreadPool, Monitor and ReaderWriterLock which go a long way towards elminating most of the issues ruffy mentioned.
As far as debugging the code, I haven't seen a debugger that handles multi-threaded code really well. The best way to debug MT code is good logging, along with a GUI that can manage and filter the logs.
The project I'm currently working on is a game built on top of a Solar System simulator. The rendering code and the physics code each run in seperate threads, which allows me to adjust the speed of each independant of the other. This is helpful because adjusting the size of timesteps in the physics code is dicey, and the best way to control the sim rate is to adjust the rate at which the physics thread runs. Maintaining a constant physics rate is more important than a constant render rate, so the render thread checks CPU usage and adjusts its speed accordingly. Yes, this code runs a little slower on single procs, but I track the lock contention and Context Switch rates in perfmon and it isn't bad, the flexibilty is more important.
Here's a link to a demo of the prototype if anyone wants to see it http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-789042178 3974814380&hl=en (I have a high res version on my own server if anyone cares.) Unlike Celestia, all the orbits are calculated in real time, and I still had enough bandwidth leftover to write @ 25 jpgs per second to the hard drive to create the demo. Besides showing off, I just wanted to point out that I'm not delusional or clueless (for the most part)
Dude, have you written any multi-threaded code? It really isn't that hard, regardless of how smart I may or may not be.
The JIT compilers in Java and.Net/Mono take care of many future hardware problems, since the JIT can optimize your code for processors that didn't even exist when you wrote it. Granted, legacy issues always abound, but I've almost always been working in sectors that provide a lot of clean slates, which is probably where my bias comes from.
Threads CAN and DO improve performance on single-core machines in today's connected world. If you need to query 10 SQL servers or download 10 files from the Internet, multiple conncurrent threads will always be faster than doing things one at a time in a single thread.
Granted, the performance improvement comes from harnessing the power of remote processors, and you are right that threads would NEVER improve performance on a single core box that isn't connected to a LAN or WAN.
Finally, multi-proc hardware is heading toward ubiquity on the desktop, but every CPU review I've read in the last year or so points out the fact that lots of software needs to catch up.
Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.
I loved my old Tivo more than any audio-video component I've ever owned. That said, I just don't see Tivo turning into the brains at the center of your home theater. I kinda tried for a while, but decided it would be easier and cheaper (in the long run, plus time == money) to just use a PC.
M$ and Sony are trying to replace Tivo from one side (the new XBox and PlayStation are both stealthy attempts to put a CPU in the center of your home theater). On the other side, DVRs are becoming a ubiquitous commodity on set-tops boxes, and it doesn't seem like Tivo can really offer them anything besides the name Tivo, which is probably the most valuable thing Tivo owns (witness the on-again off-again nature of their deal with Comcast).
Imagine if the VCR as we know it had been invented by one company back in the late 70's. Now imagine how long that company would have survived if the only product it ever sold was a VCR with a monthly service fee (while other companies were giving away VCRs, to boot).
My current thinking is that people who care will buy something that better suits their needs, and people who don't will take the free stuff offered by Cable and Satellite providers.
If your sight is 20/40 or better, you can already get enhanced vision as high as 20/10 or 20/15 with Lasik. Some doctors even specialize in vision enhancement for professional athletes. Many golfers and baseball players (most notably Tiger Woods) have had their vision enhanced, with real results.
So why is Lasik ok while Steroids aren't (there's little or no medical evidence supporting the idea that steroids are harmful when used properly).
Here's an article that ran on Slate during the congressional hearings on steroid use - http://www.slate.com/id/2116858/
Buckle up, sports fans, there are all kinds of elective surgeries in the works to improve human performance. I guess as long as you don't inject yourself, anything goes!
If SETI makes contact anytime soon, I could see the Shuttle becoming a pop-culture phenomenon in alien societies. Of course, it would be popular in the same way that the Jamaican Bobsled Team and William Hung are. The shuttle and the ISS might be the least efficient fleet of spacecraft that will ever exist in this universe, which might be good in the long run as the aliens will take pity on us and hand over the Warp Engines so we can stop going in circles.
If we knew the shuttle would end up like this, I don't think we would have bothered. We've spent $145 billion on the shuttle for just over 1,000 days in orbit. This makes the math so depressingly simple even the president can do it in his head.
The lifetime cost of Voyager, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens, and the Hubble Space Telescope combined is about $10 billion, while the ISS alone has cost $35 billion so far. Why throw good money after bad, pull the plug already and rethink the strategy.
There's no point sending humans to the moon (or anywhere else for that matter) unless we plan to stay. There may be large deposits of Platinum-group metals (PGMs) on the moon, and PGMs will be a cornerstone of the hydrogen economy, since each fuel cell needs a few ounces. There isn't much on Earth, and mining/refining the quantity needed to run a full scale H2 economy might cancel out the environmental benefit of fuel cells.
Our only saving grace is the work being done by small entrepreneurs like Burt Rutan. It looks like the X Prize actually did a good job of jump starting the space economy.
I've had a lot of luck with Pandora, but the downside is they want me to use a bare bones web-based player. What's their long term plan, to reinvent the wheel and evolve their own player? Pandora is a nice app for generating recommendations, but I couldn't imagine paying for it as is, since the player is way primitive and you can't get at the recommendation engine without listening to everything.
I'd rather have an interface into Pandora's recommendation engine directly without the pretense of actually listening to everything they recommend. As is, I often let it run muted while I listen to other music, checking what they recommend every so often on Napster.
I know a lot of people have a negative, knee-jerk reaction to nuclear power, but given the world we currently live in, it's looking better all the time.
The latest nuclear power plant designs are much safer than older designs, and can also efficiently generate Hydrogen from water filling a critical role in the Hydrogen Economy (today most Hydrogen is produced from natural gas, which won't scale to a full blown Hyrdo economy).
When you think about all the environmental and political fallout generated by using fossil fuels (especially the now undeniable fact that the Earth is getting warmer), a few tons of nuclear waste buried here and there doesn't seem too bad. Future generations will be able to handle the nuclear waste before it becomes a critical issue. Wouldn't it be better to leave them a world with some nuclear waste than no world at all?
Guilty as charged, I am using the "How the U.S. Government Undermined the Internet" thread on Slashdot as a stump for my own personnel beliefs, isn't that the whole point of this exercise? This isn't a technical matter as much as it is a political matter. There may be a technical solution, but it's about the rest of the world's perception of our actions, which are increasingly being played out in the realm of technology. I posted because I was struck by how much flavor can be lent to something as innocuous sounding as TLD names by political climates, and the fact that we've now been fighting this war on terror longer than we fought the greatest struggle in human history, and I am quite honestly concerned about the caliber of men tasked to lead us through it.
I'm a little ashamed that I came off sounding like a privileged member of the upper class who looks down upon those who serve with such disdain that I can't even bear to mention them. Two million active duty personnel (not sure of the total guard and reserve force) in a country of 300 million is a small subset, nothing else was meant. While I don't have any figures in front of me, I'll be happy to pull one out of my butt and guess that at least half the people in this country are almost completely unaffected by this war.
When you were Christmas shopping this year, did it feel like we were at war? Should 40 year old men be wrestling over $800 game consoles when our nation is waging war? Should the fact that 40 year old men are wresting over toys be a bigger story than the war on the evening news? Our government (Republican, Democrat, it makes no difference) is more concerned with managing the news cycle than managing the war. If the war on terror is important enough to start picking and choosing what parts of the Geneva Convention and Constitution we want to follow, isn't it important enough to raise taxes? How about a $1000 "body armor tax" on every new SUV sold in this country? How about a $20,000 "war widow" or tax on every new house built that costs more than $1 million dollars? How about getting the nation involved in a meaningful way?
The fact that I'm not very impressed by the performance of our president must have led you to the conclusion that I don't support a continued and vigorous war effort. While I thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, I think a half-assed invasion is a full blown tragedy. We were led to war by a group of men who believed their own press releases, who thought war looked kinda fun on TV, and then didn't have the stomach or the competence to do it right. That pisses me off, and I guess my comments may have sounded a little glib without some context.
I don't care about the UN oil-for-food scandal, Weapon Inspectors, Freedom Fries or WMDs anymore, we're past that. Would you be willing to sacrifice your own life or the lives of your children to turn Iraq into an Islamic Theocracy in bed with Iran? That's what we're facing. Compare what this country accomplished in the 4 years of WW II to what we've accomplished in the more than 4 years since 9/11. The 9/11 commission, the one notable act of non-partisan American politics in the 21st century, was fought all the way by our leaders, who would rather rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic than make any meaningful changes to their fiefdoms. Your Grandma gets a cavity search while boarding her flight, but we're not really sure what's in the cargo hold. Some asshole put a bomb in his shoe, so now we have to take our shoes off when going though security, but extremely dangerous chemical plants in every major city are left unprotected because the Chemical Industry lobbied against it.
Do you really think the collective chilling effect of jailing reporters, coupled with the most secretive administration in recent history, makes our country safer? Ever heard of the Glomar Explorer? No one was jailed for running that story, which let the Soviets know we were spending billions of dollars to raise one of their intact, sunken nucle
You make a valid point, but your implied measurement was different than mine. Nothing in my post was factually inaccurate, I just wasn't using the body count as a yardstick, but rather unambiguous results, a clear sense of national purpose and commitment, and competent leadership.
I'm a veteran of the USAF, and I don't know more than a handful of people who have even been to Iraq. I haven't been asked to make a single sacrifice to help win the war, yet a small subset of the population is being unfairly burdened. In fact, I'll be given a nice break on my taxes this April since I exercised some stock options this year.
You're probably right about an attack on the Soviets before '49, but once we got the kinks worked out of the whole Cold War thing, the world was much more stable than it is now. Remember the good old days, when the bad guys were polite enough to wear uniforms while they marched around where we could see them, on their own side of the fence, of course.
If the United States government had taken similar steps five years ago, it would likely have been perceived quite differently. Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the world's perception of the United States and it's government hasn't changed this drastically since World War II. Even our strongest allies no longer trust our good intentions.
How do you think World War II and the post-war period would have played out if Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur had been in charge instead of FDR, Marshall and Eisenhower? Most historians agree that the Cuban Missile Crisis would have resulted in the Global Thermonuclear War if Kennedy has listened to LeMay and invaded Cuba. Damn Massachusetts liberals.
Of course, if Truman had listened to MacArthur during the Korean War, we wouldn't have made it to 1962.
I'm looking around, and I don't see a new FDR, JFK, or Eisenhower waiting in the wings. Or maybe they are there, and the polarization of American politics is silencing the moderate voices of reason.
We've now been fighting the War on Terrorism longer than we fought WWII, how do you think the results stack up? If George Bush had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, do you think he would have listened to LeMay and invaded Cuba?
Slashdot Mirror
The Hindenburg might be a good metaphor for the Bush administration ('rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic' isn't a strong enough metaphor anymore), but in a country where over half the population doesn't even believe in evolution, that 70 year old footage in the hands of the fossil fuel lobby might be enough to stop the H2 economy.
I don't think the volatility of pure H2 is a deal breaker. We run our cars on liquid explosives, and we power the rest of our gadgets with an energy source that moonlights as a form of capital punishment. Concentrated energy is dangerous. The cool thing about H2 is that, unlike electricty, it can be stored and transported without losing any punch. When the Very High Temperature Reactors come online, couldn't we could make huge farms of them in unpopulated areas and move the H2 to the population centers?
One thing the article didn't mention was the role that Platimum group metals will play. Each fuel cell needs a few ounces of these metals, and they are very rare on the Earth. Some estimates claim that the environmental impact of mining and refining the amount needed for a full-blown H2 economy might be worse than sticking with fossil fuels. Of course, they are abundant in space, maybe even on the Moon.
FYI, the Hindenburg's canvas skin was painting with a doping compound that was mostly powdered aluminum and iron oxide, which is basically rocket fuel! Ever notice how amazingly quickly the skin burns off in the footage?
Good point.
One of my current tasks is moving all the civilization calculations (this is a 4X game similar to GalCiv2 but in realtime) into a third thread instead of piggybacking on every 10th physics frame. If I had enough CPUs to prevent context switching, each AI civilization could have its own thread, but that's only 8 more threads tops. Hmm, 22 processors left ;)
Right now my game can only process one Solar System at a time, so each one is more like a new level that you access by moving on the galactic map once you have gathered sufficent tech/resources. If I had 15 or 20 extra CPUs sitting around, I could run a different Solar System on each one, making the game much more open and dynamic.
This nice thing about this is that the speed of light (speed of information) allows me to limit the amount of interaction between systems. If we really are living in some sort of Matrix, god the programmer must have added the speed of light as an optimization for our multiprocessing substrate! ;)
I'm not trying to be difficult, guys. I've been writing multi-threaded code 12 hours a day in C# and Visual Studio for the last few years, so its hard for me see what all the fuss is about.
C# has some nice language features like the lock and volatile keywords, and the .Net framework includes classes like the ThreadPool, Monitor and ReaderWriterLock which go a long way towards elminating most of the issues ruffy mentioned.
As far as debugging the code, I haven't seen a debugger that handles multi-threaded code really well. The best way to debug MT code is good logging, along with a GUI that can manage and filter the logs.
The project I'm currently working on is a game built on top of a Solar System simulator. The rendering code and the physics code each run in seperate threads, which allows me to adjust the speed of each independant of the other. This is helpful because adjusting the size of timesteps in the physics code is dicey, and the best way to control the sim rate is to adjust the rate at which the physics thread runs. Maintaining a constant physics rate is more important than a constant render rate, so the render thread checks CPU usage and adjusts its speed accordingly. Yes, this code runs a little slower on single procs, but I track the lock contention and Context Switch rates in perfmon and it isn't bad, the flexibilty is more important.
Here's a link to a demo of the prototype if anyone wants to see it http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-789042178 3974814380&hl=en (I have a high res version on my own server if anyone cares.) Unlike Celestia, all the orbits are calculated in real time, and I still had enough bandwidth leftover to write @ 25 jpgs per second to the hard drive to create the demo. Besides showing off, I just wanted to point out that I'm not delusional or clueless (for the most part)
Dude, have you written any multi-threaded code? It really isn't that hard, regardless of how smart I may or may not be.
The JIT compilers in Java and .Net/Mono take care of many future hardware problems, since the JIT can optimize your code for processors that didn't even exist when you wrote it. Granted, legacy issues always abound, but I've almost always been working in sectors that provide a lot of clean slates, which is probably where my bias comes from.
Threads CAN and DO improve performance on single-core machines in today's connected world. If you need to query 10 SQL servers or download 10 files from the Internet, multiple conncurrent threads will always be faster than doing things one at a time in a single thread.
Granted, the performance improvement comes from harnessing the power of remote processors, and you are right that threads would NEVER improve performance on a single core box that isn't connected to a LAN or WAN.
I'm in the middle of Kurzweil's latest book. ;)
Finally, multi-proc hardware is heading toward ubiquity on the desktop, but every CPU review I've read in the last year or so points out the fact that lots of software needs to catch up.
Why is it so hard to get developers to write decent multi-threaded code? It's not that hard, and using threads properly can almost always improve performance and/or responsiveness on single proc/core machines to boot.
A browser I can use on my laptop when Jesus is carrying me across the beach.
I loved my old Tivo more than any audio-video component I've ever owned. That said, I just don't see Tivo turning into the brains at the center of your home theater. I kinda tried for a while, but decided it would be easier and cheaper (in the long run, plus time == money) to just use a PC.
M$ and Sony are trying to replace Tivo from one side (the new XBox and PlayStation are both stealthy attempts to put a CPU in the center of your home theater). On the other side, DVRs are becoming a ubiquitous commodity on set-tops boxes, and it doesn't seem like Tivo can really offer them anything besides the name Tivo, which is probably the most valuable thing Tivo owns (witness the on-again off-again nature of their deal with Comcast).
Imagine if the VCR as we know it had been invented by one company back in the late 70's. Now imagine how long that company would have survived if the only product it ever sold was a VCR with a monthly service fee (while other companies were giving away VCRs, to boot).
My current thinking is that people who care will buy something that better suits their needs, and people who don't will take the free stuff offered by Cable and Satellite providers.
Other things I'm addicted to: reading, indoor plumbing, electricity, automobiles, telephones...
This story is only a step above the crap on local TV news, "Is your computer trying to kill you? Tune in Tuesday at 11 to find out."
If your sight is 20/40 or better, you can already get enhanced vision as high as 20/10 or 20/15 with Lasik. Some doctors even specialize in vision enhancement for professional athletes. Many golfers and baseball players (most notably Tiger Woods) have had their vision enhanced, with real results.
So why is Lasik ok while Steroids aren't (there's little or no medical evidence supporting the idea that steroids are harmful when used properly).
Here's an article that ran on Slate during the congressional hearings on steroid use - http://www.slate.com/id/2116858/ Buckle up, sports fans, there are all kinds of elective surgeries in the works to improve human performance. I guess as long as you don't inject yourself, anything goes!
If SETI makes contact anytime soon, I could see the Shuttle becoming a pop-culture phenomenon in alien societies. Of course, it would be popular in the same way that the Jamaican Bobsled Team and William Hung are. The shuttle and the ISS might be the least efficient fleet of spacecraft that will ever exist in this universe, which might be good in the long run as the aliens will take pity on us and hand over the Warp Engines so we can stop going in circles.
8 70913-1427800?v=glance&n=283155
If we knew the shuttle would end up like this, I don't think we would have bothered. We've spent $145 billion on the shuttle for just over 1,000 days in orbit. This makes the math so depressingly simple even the president can do it in his head.
The lifetime cost of Voyager, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens, and the Hubble Space Telescope combined is about $10 billion, while the ISS alone has cost $35 billion so far. Why throw good money after bad, pull the plug already and rethink the strategy.
There's no point sending humans to the moon (or anywhere else for that matter) unless we plan to stay. There may be large deposits of Platinum-group metals (PGMs) on the moon, and PGMs will be a cornerstone of the hydrogen economy, since each fuel cell needs a few ounces. There isn't much on Earth, and mining/refining the quantity needed to run a full scale H2 economy might cancel out the environmental benefit of fuel cells.
Moonrush by Dennis Wingo is a great read on the subject - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1894959108/103-9
Our only saving grace is the work being done by small entrepreneurs like Burt Rutan. It looks like the X Prize actually did a good job of jump starting the space economy.
I've had a lot of luck with Pandora, but the downside is they want me to use a bare bones web-based player. What's their long term plan, to reinvent the wheel and evolve their own player? Pandora is a nice app for generating recommendations, but I couldn't imagine paying for it as is, since the player is way primitive and you can't get at the recommendation engine without listening to everything.
I'd rather have an interface into Pandora's recommendation engine directly without the pretense of actually listening to everything they recommend. As is, I often let it run muted while I listen to other music, checking what they recommend every so often on Napster.
I know a lot of people have a negative, knee-jerk reaction to nuclear power, but given the world we currently live in, it's looking better all the time.
The latest nuclear power plant designs are much safer than older designs, and can also efficiently generate Hydrogen from water filling a critical role in the Hydrogen Economy (today most Hydrogen is produced from natural gas, which won't scale to a full blown Hyrdo economy).
Here's a nice view from 10,000 feet - http://zfacts.com/p/285.html
When you think about all the environmental and political fallout generated by using fossil fuels (especially the now undeniable fact that the Earth is getting warmer), a few tons of nuclear waste buried here and there doesn't seem too bad. Future generations will be able to handle the nuclear waste before it becomes a critical issue. Wouldn't it be better to leave them a world with some nuclear waste than no world at all?
Guilty as charged, I am using the "How the U.S. Government Undermined the Internet" thread on Slashdot as a stump for my own personnel beliefs, isn't that the whole point of this exercise? This isn't a technical matter as much as it is a political matter. There may be a technical solution, but it's about the rest of the world's perception of our actions, which are increasingly being played out in the realm of technology. I posted because I was struck by how much flavor can be lent to something as innocuous sounding as TLD names by political climates, and the fact that we've now been fighting this war on terror longer than we fought the greatest struggle in human history, and I am quite honestly concerned about the caliber of men tasked to lead us through it.
I'm a little ashamed that I came off sounding like a privileged member of the upper class who looks down upon those who serve with such disdain that I can't even bear to mention them. Two million active duty personnel (not sure of the total guard and reserve force) in a country of 300 million is a small subset, nothing else was meant. While I don't have any figures in front of me, I'll be happy to pull one out of my butt and guess that at least half the people in this country are almost completely unaffected by this war.
When you were Christmas shopping this year, did it feel like we were at war? Should 40 year old men be wrestling over $800 game consoles when our nation is waging war? Should the fact that 40 year old men are wresting over toys be a bigger story than the war on the evening news? Our government (Republican, Democrat, it makes no difference) is more concerned with managing the news cycle than managing the war. If the war on terror is important enough to start picking and choosing what parts of the Geneva Convention and Constitution we want to follow, isn't it important enough to raise taxes? How about a $1000 "body armor tax" on every new SUV sold in this country? How about a $20,000 "war widow" or tax on every new house built that costs more than $1 million dollars? How about getting the nation involved in a meaningful way?
The fact that I'm not very impressed by the performance of our president must have led you to the conclusion that I don't support a continued and vigorous war effort. While I thought the invasion of Iraq was a bad idea, I think a half-assed invasion is a full blown tragedy. We were led to war by a group of men who believed their own press releases, who thought war looked kinda fun on TV, and then didn't have the stomach or the competence to do it right. That pisses me off, and I guess my comments may have sounded a little glib without some context.
I don't care about the UN oil-for-food scandal, Weapon Inspectors, Freedom Fries or WMDs anymore, we're past that. Would you be willing to sacrifice your own life or the lives of your children to turn Iraq into an Islamic Theocracy in bed with Iran? That's what we're facing. Compare what this country accomplished in the 4 years of WW II to what we've accomplished in the more than 4 years since 9/11. The 9/11 commission, the one notable act of non-partisan American politics in the 21st century, was fought all the way by our leaders, who would rather rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic than make any meaningful changes to their fiefdoms. Your Grandma gets a cavity search while boarding her flight, but we're not really sure what's in the cargo hold. Some asshole put a bomb in his shoe, so now we have to take our shoes off when going though security, but extremely dangerous chemical plants in every major city are left unprotected because the Chemical Industry lobbied against it.
Do you really think the collective chilling effect of jailing reporters, coupled with the most secretive administration in recent history, makes our country safer? Ever heard of the Glomar Explorer? No one was jailed for running that story, which let the Soviets know we were spending billions of dollars to raise one of their intact, sunken nucle
You make a valid point, but your implied measurement was different than mine. Nothing in my post was factually inaccurate, I just wasn't using the body count as a yardstick, but rather unambiguous results, a clear sense of national purpose and commitment, and competent leadership.
I'm a veteran of the USAF, and I don't know more than a handful of people who have even been to Iraq. I haven't been asked to make a single sacrifice to help win the war, yet a small subset of the population is being unfairly burdened. In fact, I'll be given a nice break on my taxes this April since I exercised some stock options this year.
You're probably right about an attack on the Soviets before '49, but once we got the kinks worked out of the whole Cold War thing, the world was much more stable than it is now. Remember the good old days, when the bad guys were polite enough to wear uniforms while they marched around where we could see them, on their own side of the fence, of course.
If the United States government had taken similar steps five years ago, it would likely have been perceived quite differently. Whatever your politics, you have to admit that the world's perception of the United States and it's government hasn't changed this drastically since World War II. Even our strongest allies no longer trust our good intentions.
How do you think World War II and the post-war period would have played out if Curtis LeMay and Douglas MacArthur had been in charge instead of FDR, Marshall and Eisenhower? Most historians agree that the Cuban Missile Crisis would have resulted in the Global Thermonuclear War if Kennedy has listened to LeMay and invaded Cuba. Damn Massachusetts liberals.
Of course, if Truman had listened to MacArthur during the Korean War, we wouldn't have made it to 1962.
I'm looking around, and I don't see a new FDR, JFK, or Eisenhower waiting in the wings. Or maybe they are there, and the polarization of American politics is silencing the moderate voices of reason.
We've now been fighting the War on Terrorism longer than we fought WWII, how do you think the results stack up? If George Bush had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis, do you think he would have listened to LeMay and invaded Cuba?