Indeed... every now and then a particularly relevant one will come up, and we'll print it out and label it as appropriate for our office. It then gets posted on the wall.
I've spoken with young engineering students about work in the "real world". I basically told them to watch Office Space and read Dilbert, and imagine working in those places. They laugh until they realize how deadly serious I am.
I think OP meant in terms of things like airfare, hassle, etc. European countries are smaller and much more closely packed together, and so international travel is more commonplace.
For example, going from London to Berlin is like going from Atlanta to Washingon, DC. in terms of distance. An hour and a half flight, or so.
Feinstein goes nowhere without a gun of her own. She carried illegally for several years till she got caught, then got herself a carry permit. Funny how she gets one, but the average person can't.
She also violated every safety rule in the book when she swept a crowd with an "assault weapon", finger on the trigger.
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really? At least as written by Gene Roddenberry it seems to border on communism. Even DS9 continued this trend to a certain point -- mentioning "transporter credits" in one episode. Apparently the government doles out ration coupons to control how often the citizenry can move about. Where's the individual freedom and liberty?
That's one of the bigger things that bugs me about Star Trek. Starfleet guys get all kinds of cool toys and get to go places and blow shit up... but the majority of the population is held down on the planet, and kept fat/dumb/happy by the "ever-good" Federation government. Apparently, resources are unlimited, so there's no money or poverty. So what do those people do all day?
I mean, compare that with Star Wars, where even some teenaged kid who sucks water from the air miles from civilization on an armpit of a planet somewhere between No and Where owns a vehicle capable of suborbital flight and two autonomous self-repairing AIs. I think I'll take the latter scenario, warts and all.
Orbital mechanics work in strange ways. For example, in a circular orbit, you don't thrust up to go up, you thrust forward. Going down, you thrust backward.
In this case, your best bet will be to hit the forward side of the object. If that's not possible, then hitting the bottom of it (depending on where it is in the orbit) will also have an effect. I can't remember offhand what happens from in-plane radial delta-V application, but I think it's a combination of changing the eccentricity of the orbit without affecting the total energy, and changing the longitude of periapsis. Sorry, it's been a couple years since I took orbital mechanics...
Now if you get a space-based laser up, you get more freedom in how your burns are applied.
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season. I'm not really sure how that happened given the fan support, it must have just been Fox superdickery more than anything else.
This. "Hey, let's run the episodes out of order, keep preempting it for other events, and not advertise it!" (later) "I wonder why nobody is watching it?"
Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots
Agree. Modified-human aliens just kill it for me--give me something like Moties, or the bugs from Starship Troopers (the book). Something alien, in other words, if you must have extraterrestrial life. At least go for something non-humanoid.
I like the dark, somewhat gritty stuff (BSG was great at first, good feel to it but got way too emo and supernatural by this last season). It's easy to overdo, though. And bright happy utopia futures are hard to swallow, too.
The first time I saw the new trailer was this weekend. I was actually pretty excited about it--"captain of a starship for twelve minutes" had me thinking "wow, a new decent-sounding SF movie!". Then I found out it was the Trek reboot. It kind of killed my enthusiasm somewhat, but I think I'll actually make an effort to see this one once it's out on DVD. I just hope the Federation is a little less utopia-ish.
You don't have a use for them, so what makes you think someone else will?
There are plenty of people like me around, who will gladly accept free stuff just cause it's free. I have buckets in the garage full of random crap (wires, small gadgets, etc) that I collected and sometimes hack together into things.
The MiG-25 and MiG-29 weren't "ahead of their time". The MiG-25 was developed as a response to the B-70 bomber; when that was canceled, they continued development of it as a general high-speed interceptor. It's a contemporary of the B-70 and SR-71/A-12; the American aircraft flew faster and had better electronics (and didn't slag their own engines to reach Mach 3). The MiG-25 is also believed to have been influenced by the A-5 Vigilante, a carrier-based nuclear strike and recon aircraft. The -25 is notable in that it spurred the development of the F-15 (as the West believed it to be a super-fighter, at least until Bilenko defected) and was the fastest fighter/intereceptor to enter service. It wasn't groundbreaking, though.
The MiG-29 was a big leap for Soviet fighters, but it was still somewhat behind contemporary Western aircraft. Its performance is roughly equivalent to an F-16, but the most frequent complaints have centered on its short range. The aircraft seems to have "lost out" to the Su-27 in recent years, due to the greater capabilities and perceived better workmanship of the latter.
The MiG-29 and Su-27 families gained a lot of ground on Western aircraft, but they still have not exceeded them in effectiveness--the biggest differences being in avionics and integration.
The Russians are good at aerodynamics and propulsion, however. It's just that their materials science let them down. When your materials can't take the heat or strain, you end up compromising something--usually weight, strength, reliability, or efficiency. For example, running a given jet engine hotter gives you more thrust and better efficiency, but wears it out a lot faster. It's all a matter of tradeoffs; the Soviet Union was able to make up some performance gaps by sacrificing long-term reliability. Maintenance and overhaul intervals for Soviet equipment were much shorter than for contemporary Western items, though that was accounted for in the logistics structure--entire assemblies were just removed and replaced with another, and the old unit sent back for depot-level maintenance.
a stockpile of nuclear weapons big enough to kill every living thing on the planet is big enough, and any extra are probably unnecessary expense... The British nuclear arsenal is big enough for that. The US has about an order of magnitude more.
You don't give living things enough credit--they're much hardier than you think. There seems to be this myth that just a relative handful of warheads will kill everything on the planet and turn it into a wet, dark version of Mars. Not to downplay the horrors and decided undesirability of such a situation, but even in an all-out "launch everything" scenario, there would still be significant human populations surviving, not to mention animals, plants, etc. You will see drastic changes to some ecosystems, and there will be some areas that are completely uninhabitable by much more than simple plants and cockroaches, but stuff will survive--and will recover faster than you think.
There are plenty of horrible, horrible non-nuclear weapons out there that can be delivered by ICBM that aren't nearly as difficult to develop. A good solid hit on downtown Washington and you've made as much as a political statement as a mushroom cloud. Nukes are only 'The Bomb' because of their emotional impact.
Quite. A virulent, highly fatal, airborne pathogen, or a nasty persistent nerve gas, could be just as horrifying. The world at large just hasn't seen something like that unleashed on a large civilian population*.
That would be about the equivalent of posting a sign in front of your house saying "unarmed pacifists live here" and expecting not to get burglarized (or worse).
The nuclear genie is out of the proverbial lamp, and you can't simply stuff him back in. Worldwide disarmament isn't going to happen until everyone ends up holding hands and singing "kumbaya". The only known unilateral nuclear disarmament was South Africa--and that was only possible because they did it before anyone knew they had nukes in the first place. And you can't just "undiscover" the underlying physics behind them, either.
For reasons too long to go into in a slashdot post, becoming a nuclear power is an irrecovable step. Once you're in, there's no getting out. Reductions are possible, but total elimination is not. Nuclear weapons are horrible things, but we're stuck with them now. We can't just close our eyes and pretend they'll all go away.
Though, I was irritated and amused when all those people who said they'd leave the country if Bush was (re)elected didn't. I'm not a Bush fan either (more of a libertarian, kinda), but if you're going to get up in front of everyone and say that, do what you say and move.
Of course we want all our Congressmen to read every page of every bill in theory, but aren't they unproductive enough as it is?
That's kind of the point... unless you're one of those people to whom more laws = good.
A lawyer will always admonish you to read the fine print before signing a contract. I'm an engineer; I make damn sure I check everything I design (or have submitted to me by those I supervise) before signing off on the drawing. Why, then, is it unreasonable to ask our elected representatives to exercise due diligence in the performance of their jobs? Oh wait, I remember... Pelosi wanted to go to Europe.:-/
Were it up to me, every single one of our "honorable" congressional types who voted for this "stimulus" bill without reading it would be impeached and tried for dereliction of duty.
You conclusion does not follow. Just because Republicans didn't vote for it (in the House, not in the Senate) doesn't mean that no Republican pork was added. They knew it would pass and in committee they DEFINITELY added their own pet projects to the bill under the guise of "improving it so that they could possibly support it".
"The Democrats did everything right and pure, did nothing wrong, only the evil Republicans added bad pork!"
Perhaps it escaped your notice, but the Republicans were completelyshut out of the negotiations for the bill. Pelosi's new rules completely barred Republicans for offering any amendments whatsoever to the stimulus. It was written and negotiated behind closed doors, by Democrats, without Republican input at all. And yet you want to blame them for bad content in a bill that they had no part of? Hell, even Obama was willing to talk with them, but power-drunk "I'm above the law" Pelosi didn't care. She wanted it passed her way, and broke her own promises to allow the bill to be read, because she wanted to go to Europe.
And then, they voted on the bill without even reading it.
There is already a Federal law on the books which says that the anticipated revenue from moving/parking violations can not be included as part of a local government's standard operating budget. And do you think that this law is being followed, hell no! This revenue stream is now an integral part of those budgets, in fact they'll even increase the ticket amounts whenever there is a budget shortfall.
Yep. Many smaller towns down here use traffic fines to make up 30% or more of the budget. The next town over from where I grew up, in fact, was running out of money... they held a town hall meeting where they decided to lower every speed limit to get some revenue back.
Once again, no. People overwhelmingly use their own guns (or a family member's) to commit suicide. You're making the assumption that everyone dies by their own gun, and simply cutting the number in half. It doesn't work that way. I've bothered to do some research, unlike some other people. I admit I am forced to retract my previous statement; the statistic doesn't hold water even if you do include suicides.
The Kellerman study you're referring to has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited. Kellerman himself admitted to cherry-picking his data and ignoring data that didn't suit his preconceived conclusion. He included primarily suicides, with the remainder of the deaths arising from criminal behavior among family members (drug deals gone bad, for example). And his "nationally-representative" study only included 43 cases. It's hard to draw far-reaching conclusions from such a tiny data set.
Estimates of lawful defensive gun uses by private citizens range from 108,000 (NCVS 1993, conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the DoJ) up to 2,000,000 (1993 study by FSU criminologist Gary Kleck) per year. Less than 0.1% of these incidents result in the attacker dying; in most successful defensive gun uses, shots aren't even fired--the criminal flees at the sight of the gun. That counts as a win in my book.
By contrast, accidental firearms deaths number less than 1,000 annually; gun-related suicides number about 18,000. To be quite cold about the numbers, and even using the low end of the numbers, guns prevent over 100 people from being victimized for every accidental death, or at least 5 for every suicide death. If we make the assumptions that all guns are equally likely to cause an accident (or be used defensively) as any other, that means a gun is actually 100 times more likely to be used for defense than be involved in an accidental shooting death (or 5 times more for defense than suicide).
Again, nonproliferation only works to the extend that compliance is verifiable - which, with ASW, is possible at the testing phase. Note that the Iranians had to do dummy launches, which we detected, for a full year before getting a satellite into orbit.
The trick is that you could disguise your payload. The fact that you have launchers is quite public, as you say. Eventually, you will learn to put a spacecraft exactly where you want it, which is also not secret. But if you keep your payload under wraps, nobody can truly verify exactly what's hiding in it.
It all comes together when your next couple satellites also happen to have nuclear warheads hidden on board. Your launch looks just like a normal satellite launch, but you have a wolf in sheep's clothing. A couple nukes in space will play hell with communications and other satellites. Or, you can deorbit them without warning.
And look at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising... where barricaded Jews starting with a handful of rifles and pistols made asses of the Nazis for months.
You know, it never fails to amaze me how people can demand that "only the government should have guns".
First, there's plenty of evidence (see Nazi Germany) that governments often do very bad things to their populations, and that having no means to resist them just makes the government's job easier. You may still wind up dead resisting, but at least you will have died standing up for yourself instead of dying like cattle at the slaughter. Peaceful non-resistance against violence only works when those committting the violence have a conscience and a moral code against doing it. Otherwise, you just wind up dead like those cows.
Second, there's usually the implication that personal protection (particularly the use of force for it) is the government's responsibility. Legally speaking, the courts have consistently ruled otherwise--law enforcement has no obligation to protect individuals.
As a whole, I see this denial of responsibility, and the desire to foist it off on someone else, to be a form of cowardice. The same people who will deny any responsibility to protect themselves, or who refuse to do so with force because it's "bad" and they "don't want to hurt anyone" (or some other "moral" objection) seem to have no problem asking--nay, demanding--that somebody else, whom the demander has probably never met, risk his life and put his ass on the line to protect the demander's life and ass, using the same force that the demander refuses to use himself.
If you're going to be a damn pacifist, live what you preach. Don't use force to defend yourself. Back down any time someone confronts you and makes any kind of physical threat. And don't sit there demanding that someone else use force on your behalf and do things that you refuse to do for yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
How long a yellow light needs to be is a matter of simple physics and physiology
I'd add a generous margin to that, to account for inattentiveness, distraction, or delayed processing of the "do I have room to stop" decision.
Logan's Run
Indeed... every now and then a particularly relevant one will come up, and we'll print it out and label it as appropriate for our office. It then gets posted on the wall.
I've spoken with young engineering students about work in the "real world". I basically told them to watch Office Space and read Dilbert, and imagine working in those places. They laugh until they realize how deadly serious I am.
I think OP meant in terms of things like airfare, hassle, etc. European countries are smaller and much more closely packed together, and so international travel is more commonplace.
For example, going from London to Berlin is like going from Atlanta to Washingon, DC. in terms of distance. An hour and a half flight, or so.
Feinstein goes nowhere without a gun of her own. She carried illegally for several years till she got caught, then got herself a carry permit. Funny how she gets one, but the average person can't.
She also violated every safety rule in the book when she swept a crowd with an "assault weapon", finger on the trigger.
It got to me to thinking. What is the Federation really? At least as written by Gene Roddenberry it seems to border on communism. Even DS9 continued this trend to a certain point -- mentioning "transporter credits" in one episode. Apparently the government doles out ration coupons to control how often the citizenry can move about. Where's the individual freedom and liberty?
That's one of the bigger things that bugs me about Star Trek. Starfleet guys get all kinds of cool toys and get to go places and blow shit up... but the majority of the population is held down on the planet, and kept fat/dumb/happy by the "ever-good" Federation government. Apparently, resources are unlimited, so there's no money or poverty. So what do those people do all day?
I mean, compare that with Star Wars, where even some teenaged kid who sucks water from the air miles from civilization on an armpit of a planet somewhere between No and Where owns a vehicle capable of suborbital flight and two autonomous self-repairing AIs. I think I'll take the latter scenario, warts and all.
Orbital mechanics work in strange ways. For example, in a circular orbit, you don't thrust up to go up, you thrust forward. Going down, you thrust backward.
In this case, your best bet will be to hit the forward side of the object. If that's not possible, then hitting the bottom of it (depending on where it is in the orbit) will also have an effect. I can't remember offhand what happens from in-plane radial delta-V application, but I think it's a combination of changing the eccentricity of the orbit without affecting the total energy, and changing the longitude of periapsis. Sorry, it's been a couple years since I took orbital mechanics...
Now if you get a space-based laser up, you get more freedom in how your burns are applied.
I'd say Firefly was a great model on how to do a space show that wasn't Trek but it died after a season. I'm not really sure how that happened given the fan support, it must have just been Fox superdickery more than anything else.
This. "Hey, let's run the episodes out of order, keep preempting it for other events, and not advertise it!" (later) "I wonder why nobody is watching it?"
Reset button at the end of the episode, lame. Space anomalies, lame. Gritty scifi future with lots of angst, made lame by overexposure on Galactica. Aliens who look exactly like us save for bumpy foreheads? I could buy it when I was younger but it's just ridiculous these days. (I'll probably be in the minority on this one.) Time-travel plots, squishy techno-babble science plots, holodeck plots
Agree. Modified-human aliens just kill it for me--give me something like Moties, or the bugs from Starship Troopers (the book). Something alien, in other words, if you must have extraterrestrial life. At least go for something non-humanoid.
I like the dark, somewhat gritty stuff (BSG was great at first, good feel to it but got way too emo and supernatural by this last season). It's easy to overdo, though. And bright happy utopia futures are hard to swallow, too.
The first time I saw the new trailer was this weekend. I was actually pretty excited about it--"captain of a starship for twelve minutes" had me thinking "wow, a new decent-sounding SF movie!". Then I found out it was the Trek reboot. It kind of killed my enthusiasm somewhat, but I think I'll actually make an effort to see this one once it's out on DVD. I just hope the Federation is a little less utopia-ish.
The local range won't allow anything but paper targets :(
A friend and I might be buying some land, though, and setting up our own range there.
You don't have a use for them, so what makes you think someone else will?
There are plenty of people like me around, who will gladly accept free stuff just cause it's free. I have buckets in the garage full of random crap (wires, small gadgets, etc) that I collected and sometimes hack together into things.
The MiG-25 and MiG-29 weren't "ahead of their time". The MiG-25 was developed as a response to the B-70 bomber; when that was canceled, they continued development of it as a general high-speed interceptor. It's a contemporary of the B-70 and SR-71/A-12; the American aircraft flew faster and had better electronics (and didn't slag their own engines to reach Mach 3). The MiG-25 is also believed to have been influenced by the A-5 Vigilante, a carrier-based nuclear strike and recon aircraft. The -25 is notable in that it spurred the development of the F-15 (as the West believed it to be a super-fighter, at least until Bilenko defected) and was the fastest fighter/intereceptor to enter service. It wasn't groundbreaking, though.
The MiG-29 was a big leap for Soviet fighters, but it was still somewhat behind contemporary Western aircraft. Its performance is roughly equivalent to an F-16, but the most frequent complaints have centered on its short range. The aircraft seems to have "lost out" to the Su-27 in recent years, due to the greater capabilities and perceived better workmanship of the latter.
The MiG-29 and Su-27 families gained a lot of ground on Western aircraft, but they still have not exceeded them in effectiveness--the biggest differences being in avionics and integration.
The Russians are good at aerodynamics and propulsion, however. It's just that their materials science let them down. When your materials can't take the heat or strain, you end up compromising something--usually weight, strength, reliability, or efficiency. For example, running a given jet engine hotter gives you more thrust and better efficiency, but wears it out a lot faster. It's all a matter of tradeoffs; the Soviet Union was able to make up some performance gaps by sacrificing long-term reliability. Maintenance and overhaul intervals for Soviet equipment were much shorter than for contemporary Western items, though that was accounted for in the logistics structure--entire assemblies were just removed and replaced with another, and the old unit sent back for depot-level maintenance.
a stockpile of nuclear weapons big enough to kill every living thing on the planet is big enough, and any extra are probably unnecessary expense... The British nuclear arsenal is big enough for that. The US has about an order of magnitude more.
You don't give living things enough credit--they're much hardier than you think. There seems to be this myth that just a relative handful of warheads will kill everything on the planet and turn it into a wet, dark version of Mars. Not to downplay the horrors and decided undesirability of such a situation, but even in an all-out "launch everything" scenario, there would still be significant human populations surviving, not to mention animals, plants, etc. You will see drastic changes to some ecosystems, and there will be some areas that are completely uninhabitable by much more than simple plants and cockroaches, but stuff will survive--and will recover faster than you think.
There are plenty of horrible, horrible non-nuclear weapons out there that can be delivered by ICBM that aren't nearly as difficult to develop. A good solid hit on downtown Washington and you've made as much as a political statement as a mushroom cloud. Nukes are only 'The Bomb' because of their emotional impact.
Quite. A virulent, highly fatal, airborne pathogen, or a nasty persistent nerve gas, could be just as horrifying. The world at large just hasn't seen something like that unleashed on a large civilian population*.
*It's been done, but not widely publicized.
That would be about the equivalent of posting a sign in front of your house saying "unarmed pacifists live here" and expecting not to get burglarized (or worse).
The nuclear genie is out of the proverbial lamp, and you can't simply stuff him back in. Worldwide disarmament isn't going to happen until everyone ends up holding hands and singing "kumbaya". The only known unilateral nuclear disarmament was South Africa--and that was only possible because they did it before anyone knew they had nukes in the first place. And you can't just "undiscover" the underlying physics behind them, either.
For reasons too long to go into in a slashdot post, becoming a nuclear power is an irrecovable step. Once you're in, there's no getting out. Reductions are possible, but total elimination is not. Nuclear weapons are horrible things, but we're stuck with them now. We can't just close our eyes and pretend they'll all go away.
Whoosh.
Though, I was irritated and amused when all those people who said they'd leave the country if Bush was (re)elected didn't. I'm not a Bush fan either (more of a libertarian, kinda), but if you're going to get up in front of everyone and say that, do what you say and move.
Of course we want all our Congressmen to read every page of every bill in theory, but aren't they unproductive enough as it is?
That's kind of the point... unless you're one of those people to whom more laws = good.
A lawyer will always admonish you to read the fine print before signing a contract. I'm an engineer; I make damn sure I check everything I design (or have submitted to me by those I supervise) before signing off on the drawing. Why, then, is it unreasonable to ask our elected representatives to exercise due diligence in the performance of their jobs? Oh wait, I remember... Pelosi wanted to go to Europe. :-/
Were it up to me, every single one of our "honorable" congressional types who voted for this "stimulus" bill without reading it would be impeached and tried for dereliction of duty.
You conclusion does not follow. Just because Republicans didn't vote for it (in the House, not in the Senate) doesn't mean that no Republican pork was added. They knew it would pass and in committee they DEFINITELY added their own pet projects to the bill under the guise of "improving it so that they could possibly support it".
"The Democrats did everything right and pure, did nothing wrong, only the evil Republicans added bad pork!"
Perhaps it escaped your notice, but the Republicans were completely shut out of the negotiations for the bill. Pelosi's new rules completely barred Republicans for offering any amendments whatsoever to the stimulus. It was written and negotiated behind closed doors, by Democrats, without Republican input at all. And yet you want to blame them for bad content in a bill that they had no part of? Hell, even Obama was willing to talk with them, but power-drunk "I'm above the law" Pelosi didn't care. She wanted it passed her way, and broke her own promises to allow the bill to be read, because she wanted to go to Europe.
And then, they voted on the bill without even reading it.
Transparency and bipartisanship my hairy ass.
Your ideas intrigue me, sir; I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
How would an interested person go about setting up and installing such a system?
You don't need that much. Just give me a good rifle and some varmint ammo, and put me in a stand.
Erm...
whooosh...
in every possible sense.
There is already a Federal law on the books which says that the anticipated revenue from moving/parking violations can not be included as part of a local government's standard operating budget. And do you think that this law is being followed, hell no! This revenue stream is now an integral part of those budgets, in fact they'll even increase the ticket amounts whenever there is a budget shortfall.
Yep. Many smaller towns down here use traffic fines to make up 30% or more of the budget. The next town over from where I grew up, in fact, was running out of money... they held a town hall meeting where they decided to lower every speed limit to get some revenue back.
Once again, no. People overwhelmingly use their own guns (or a family member's) to commit suicide. You're making the assumption that everyone dies by their own gun, and simply cutting the number in half. It doesn't work that way. I've bothered to do some research, unlike some other people. I admit I am forced to retract my previous statement; the statistic doesn't hold water even if you do include suicides.
The Kellerman study you're referring to has been thoroughly and repeatedly discredited. Kellerman himself admitted to cherry-picking his data and ignoring data that didn't suit his preconceived conclusion. He included primarily suicides, with the remainder of the deaths arising from criminal behavior among family members (drug deals gone bad, for example). And his "nationally-representative" study only included 43 cases. It's hard to draw far-reaching conclusions from such a tiny data set.
Estimates of lawful defensive gun uses by private citizens range from 108,000 (NCVS 1993, conducted by the Census Bureau on behalf of the DoJ) up to 2,000,000 (1993 study by FSU criminologist Gary Kleck) per year. Less than 0.1% of these incidents result in the attacker dying; in most successful defensive gun uses, shots aren't even fired--the criminal flees at the sight of the gun. That counts as a win in my book.
By contrast, accidental firearms deaths number less than 1,000 annually; gun-related suicides number about 18,000. To be quite cold about the numbers, and even using the low end of the numbers, guns prevent over 100 people from being victimized for every accidental death, or at least 5 for every suicide death. If we make the assumptions that all guns are equally likely to cause an accident (or be used defensively) as any other, that means a gun is actually 100 times more likely to be used for defense than be involved in an accidental shooting death (or 5 times more for defense than suicide).
Again, nonproliferation only works to the extend that compliance is verifiable - which, with ASW, is possible at the testing phase. Note that the Iranians had to do dummy launches, which we detected, for a full year before getting a satellite into orbit.
The trick is that you could disguise your payload. The fact that you have launchers is quite public, as you say. Eventually, you will learn to put a spacecraft exactly where you want it, which is also not secret. But if you keep your payload under wraps, nobody can truly verify exactly what's hiding in it.
It all comes together when your next couple satellites also happen to have nuclear warheads hidden on board. Your launch looks just like a normal satellite launch, but you have a wolf in sheep's clothing. A couple nukes in space will play hell with communications and other satellites. Or, you can deorbit them without warning.
So for the US, a space weapons ban is a no-brainer if everyone else adheres to it, too.
Fixed that for you.
And look at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising... where barricaded Jews starting with a handful of rifles and pistols made asses of the Nazis for months.
You know, it never fails to amaze me how people can demand that "only the government should have guns".
First, there's plenty of evidence (see Nazi Germany) that governments often do very bad things to their populations, and that having no means to resist them just makes the government's job easier. You may still wind up dead resisting, but at least you will have died standing up for yourself instead of dying like cattle at the slaughter. Peaceful non-resistance against violence only works when those committting the violence have a conscience and a moral code against doing it. Otherwise, you just wind up dead like those cows.
Second, there's usually the implication that personal protection (particularly the use of force for it) is the government's responsibility. Legally speaking, the courts have consistently ruled otherwise--law enforcement has no obligation to protect individuals.
As a whole, I see this denial of responsibility, and the desire to foist it off on someone else, to be a form of cowardice. The same people who will deny any responsibility to protect themselves, or who refuse to do so with force because it's "bad" and they "don't want to hurt anyone" (or some other "moral" objection) seem to have no problem asking--nay, demanding--that somebody else, whom the demander has probably never met, risk his life and put his ass on the line to protect the demander's life and ass, using the same force that the demander refuses to use himself.
If you're going to be a damn pacifist, live what you preach. Don't use force to defend yourself. Back down any time someone confronts you and makes any kind of physical threat. And don't sit there demanding that someone else use force on your behalf and do things that you refuse to do for yourself.