Treaties, laws, bans, agreements, contracts, etc. might work if all of the involved parties (whether they be governments, corporations, organizations, or individuals) are honest. Unfortunately, that rarely happens.
A dishonest party will eventually need the threat of force or other punishment to keep it in line. The threat may be monetary and/or physical, but the dishonest party must believe that others are willing to carry it out. Otherwise, they'll be laughing all the way to the bank as they break said construction of words and everyone stands there sputtering "but you said you wouldn't!" or "but it's illegal!"
You are, of course, right. The arguments in this particular case are spurious. Who is making them?
The Brady campaign, for one. I paraphrased the "anti" argument off their "assault weapon" page. There's also that one Congresslady (whose name I forget at the moment) who referred to "the shoulder thing that goes up". I assume she means the stock that every rifle and shotgun has?
On your point about keeping criminals in prison though, isn't that the MOST expensive and distressing thing a government can do?
It depends. Keeping a prisoner is rather expensive, but some of the expense is due to the idea that hardened criminals need ice cream and cable TV. (I shit you not; one inmate filed a lawsuit because he wasn't allowed ice cream, and the court awarded him damages.) As it stands now, many criminals view prison as just a couple months interlude before they can get back on the street. Just a thing they have to go through, in other words.
I would suggest taking some hints from that sheriff in Arizona with the lowest recidivism rate in the country. No cable TV, no high-speed internet. You get three meals a day, but they'd be standardized vegetarian meals (avoiding religious issues over meats). Criminals will be occupied doing hard labor--if nothing else, making big rocks into little rocks. The idea is to keep them from conspiring/plotting/doing business behind bars, and making prison so unpleasant (not cruel torture or anything, but bad enough) that they would rather avoid crime altogether rather than risk going to prison.
I'd also suggest that the violent types (rapists, child molesters, etc.) get life without parole, and actually mean it. Two felonies, same thing. I'm still shocked by the case of the man in Atlanta who was arrested a couple months ago... he had been convicted of 26 felony charges, and had been in and out of prison multiple times... yet he was still walking the streets. He was eventually arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm, and after his rap sheet became public, was finally put away for life.
I'm always dumb-founded on the high recidivism
See above. Prison is just a minor inconvenience to a lot of these guys.
and overall incarceration rates in this country,
Because we throw people in jail with hardened criminals for committing the horrible crime of smoking a joint or selling themselves on a street corner out of desperation. Prisons fill up with these nonviolent offenders, and displace the hardened criminals back out onto the street. Plus, the media glorifies thuggery and street violence. And I'm suspecting that a lot of people turn to gangs and street crime out of desperation; they see no better life ahead of them so they try to find some way to escape. Fixing that will take fixing communities, and I'm not quite sure how to do that.
Easy access to deadly weapons is really peripheral to the fact that so many people want to use them to commit acts of violence.
EXACTLY!
Taking away deadly weapons wouldn't change the fact that there is this element in our society, would it? I don't think so.
Precisely. We'd see a lot more "up close and personal" violence, and crime in general, and the law-abiding people would have one less thing to defend themselves with.
Your "12 times more likely" statistic only holds water when you include suicides. When you consider that over half of all firearm-related deaths in the coutry are suicides, and that people committing suicide with a gun are generally going to use their own, it makes sense.
Second, the number of accidental firearm deaths per year is actually quite low. The number of successful defensive gun uses is much higher.
I'd also suspect that people are more likely to die in a car owned by someone in their household than in anyone else's car.
Ok, so I'm bad at sarcasm. I'm mocking the "logic" of the proposed "assault weapons" ban on the following points:
(Regarding pistol grips) Apparently, changing the angle at which your hands hold the gun makes it "more deadly and able to spray fire from the hip". Tilting my hand twenty degrees more vertical just means my hand is at a different angle, no more. It's like arguing that changing the steering wheel and gearshift on your bone-stock Honda Civic (or holding your hands at 3 and 9 instead of 2 and 10) makes it a racecar that corners better.
(Regarding the "high powered" claim) Apparently, using smaller, less powerful rounds makes a gun "high powered" and "more deadly" than a gun that fires a bigger, more powerful, standard hunting round. Or, the same bullet fired from a "normal"-looking rifle is less deadly than one fired from a scarier-looking AK-47--even though it's the same bullet moving at the same speed. To use a car analogy again, putting a smaller engine with less horsepower and less torque makes the car more powerful and have better acceleration.
(Regarding the "no legitimate use" claim) Apparently, the thousands and thousands of AR-15s, SKSs, M1As, and 10/22s that law-abiding Americans use for hunting, target-shooting competitions, and defense of the home have no legitimate uses like hunting, target-shooting, and defense of the home.
(Regarding the "collapsible stock" claim) Apparently, changing a stock's length by a few inches makes it bad, evil, and easy to conceal. Yet a fixed stock equal in length to the fully collapsed one would still be legal, as would removing the stock entirely (provided the minimum overall length of 26 inches is maintained).
Also ignored is the fact that the previous ban had no effect on criminal violence whatsoever. I'd suggest that a much better approach to crimefighting is to keep violent offenders in prison doing hard time, and help keep people from turning to violence in the first place. Make decisions based on facts rather than "ZOMG it's scary looking!!1!" emotions.
Remember, the government will tell you to rely on it to protect you and defend you from criminals--but then it will turn right around and claim it had no obligation to do so.
Sometimes you'll get arrested for that in Georgia, too, but it almost always gets thrown out in court (assuming you were licensed and legal to carry in that location). Now, if you're in a private establishment, and the manager/proprietor decides he doesn't like it, that's a different matter; he has full legal right to ask you to cover up or leave.
in general, though, firearms laws in Georgia are so convoluted and ambiguous that even the judges, lawyers, and police don't really know it well. Go up and ask five officers what the laws are, you'll get six different answers. We're trying to fix that, because regardless of the subject, the people deserve laws that are clear and easy to understand. Otherwise, how can they follow them?
It certainly depends on the location, but (at least in the US) there's a big difference between owning a weapon, carrying it around in a holster/scabbard/whatever, and brandishing/threatening with it.
The first is generally legal, with a few exceptions or restrictions.
The second is commonly legal too, with certain conditions. In Georgia, for example, one may carry any weapon (except a handgun) as described above, so long as it is done openly and in plain sight. To carry a handgun (openly or concealed) or to conceal a firearm in general, one must obtain a firearms license.
The third will generally 9and rightly) get you arrested on felony charges everywhere; the name of the charge will vary, but they're generally equivalent. In Georgia, pointing a gun at someone or threatening them with a deadly weapon in general will get you charged with aggrevated assault. Other states may classify it as "brandishing a weapon" or "attempted murder", for example.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that owning and carrying a Klingon sword is legal in Colorado. Threatening someone with it is not, obviously.
Yes, we must ban replica weapons that are only made for killing large numbers of people! Protect the children!
These "assault swords" have features like extra cutting edges, and allow the evil person using one to swing it in both directions, thereby killing more people. The user's hands are placed a little differently than on traditional swords, meaning the user can swing with more power and hit more people at once. They're made of cheap metal, which is more dangerous than regular steel because it's more powerful and stronger than a real sword! And they have engravings in an unknown foreign terrorist language, which tells the user how to be deadly assassin. And there's obviously no need for engraving on a sword.
And obviously, if we ban them, they'll all magically go away, because we know that criminals who like to commit acts of violence will be scared of the law that bans their swords. Nobody will ever make one themselves, or sneak one in through the black market, and there are no legitimate uses (such as movie props and reenactments) for these weapons.
Renting an airplane and loading a nuclear bomb in it requires human sacrifice and an aviating licence. Building something that can lift the warhead to a suitable altitude sounds easier.
I think it's already been demonstrated that finding humans willing to sacrifice themselves to perform such an attack is trivial. Finding one with pilot training adds little difficulty. Obtaining a suitable airplane isn't too hard either.
Building a rocket suitable for launching something the size of a crude nuclear device, even if it's not going very high? Theoretically simple, but harder to do in practice. You'll either need to make lots of test articles (which can attract attention), or hope it works on the first shot (unlikely). It also requires a larger manpower and engineering investment than the first method. There's more that can go wrong, it's harder to do, and there's no additional benefit.
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer with a pilot's license and a little experience with rocketry.
As to the tracing of fissionable materials... that might help figuring out where it was mined, but that doesn't actually relate to who build and fired the bomb.
It does give you a good place to start, at least. "Misplacing" fissionables is a big no-no in most of the world; the party responsible will either fall over itself trying to help, or risk getting turned into Trinitite in short order.
Uhh, if you can smuggle in a warhead, why bother building that simple missile? You get an airburst, which means your thermal and blast (overpressure) effects have a wider footprint than a ground initiation, but creating less "dirty" fallout. Just rent an airplane and load said bomb in the back, if you have to have the airburst. But a U-haul running around creates less suspicion.
A smuggled warhead might not leave an easy ballistic track to identify where it was launched, but analysis of the fallout radiation effects can (relatively) easily identify where the fissionable material came from.
ICBMs do no target a ground area per se, they target a specific spot of space and let gravity do the rest.
So, in reality it's not hard and if you can get a satellite in orbit, you could probably hit any large country. Sure they may not be able to hit withing meters of the target, but being able to do that is just icing.
All the information you need to put something an a particular X is available and easy to compute.
The computation is fairly easy. The trick is that you need to hit not only a "specific spot of space", but you need to hit that spot at exactly the right time and going exactly the right speed, and with your reentry vehicle (RV) facing the right direction. A tiny deviation will add up tremendously, as will any atmospheric variation. That's why ballistic missiles fly such arcing paths instead of low orbital profiles--less effect from the atmosphere.
Basically, you need really, really accurate inertial navigation systems (possibly with star trackers to supplement orientation data), you need a guidance "bus" with very precise thrusters to match the velocity and orientation requirements, and you need a way to release the warhead without disturbing any of the above.
It's not as hard if you're just trying to land in the general vicinity of a soft target (like a city), or you just want to smash random things up and burn them... but if you're trying to take out a target designed to resist a nuclear attack (like missile silos and their control facilities, for example), you need a near-direct hit.
Not quite. Kinetic energy is indeed pretty useful, if you can aim it well enough and have enough of it. Any kinetic penetrator you launch on a ballistic missile might be useful for, say, hitting a hardened bunker or sinking a ship. It may even take out a building or three. But the widespread destruction associated with a nuke (square miles of it) isn't going to be matched by a missile-launched kinetic impactor. You have to move to the realm of asteroids for those kinds of effects. Otherwise, why wouldn't these missiles already carry kinetic warheads?
It is interesting to note, though, that the US has considered and investigated conventional and inert warheads for ICBMs. The intention is to provide a rapid response in cases where we can't get an aircaft or cruise missile there in time, or to hit very deeply buried or hardened targets.
Unfortunately, there are three big problems. First is technical. An unguided ballistic warhead isn't going to give the kind of accuracy you get with today's aircraft-launched "smart" munitions. You would need to develop a guidance package for the warhead itself, and figure out how to control said warhead during a high-speed reentry. We can do this already when the goal is to land softly, but an application like this demands a somewhat faster impact. Said warhead and guidance system also need to be able to take the much hotter thermal loads from said entry.
Second, ballistic missiles and their associated systems are expensive. If you thought that $500k cruise missile was bad, buy a Minuteman III. I think they run $50 million a pop.
Third (the biggest obstacle) is political. A conventional ICBM looks and flies just like a nuclear one. And even if you give assurances to other nuclear parties before launch that it's conventional, they might not trust you, especially if the target is also one of those nuclear countries. The chance that the missile will be taken for a nuke is just too high.
It explains why the US didn't invade North Vietnam, or bomb China in the 50s, or make a real attempt at invading Cuba. It's why neither side pushed too far in 1973.
To quote Mr. Slade again:
When a country first acquires nuclear weapons it does so out of a very accurate perception that possession of nukes fundamentally changes it relationships with other powers. What nuclear weapons buy for a New Nuclear Power (NNP) is the fact that once the country in question has nuclear weapons, it cannot be beaten. It can be defeated, that is it can be prevented from achieving certain goals or stopped from following certain courses of action, but it cannot be beaten. It will never have enemy tanks moving down the streets of its capital, it will never have its national treasures looted and its citizens forced into servitude. The enemy will be destroyed by nuclear attack first. A potential enemy knows that so will not push the situation to the point where our NNP is on the verge of being beaten. In effect, the effect of acquiring nuclear weapons is that the owning country has set limits on any conflict in which it is involved. This is such an immensely attractive option that states find it irresistible.
Only later do they realize the problem. Nuclear weapons are so immensely destructive that they mean a country can be totally destroyed by their use. Although our NNP cannot be beaten by an enemy it can be destroyed by that enemy. Although a beaten country can pick itself up and recover, the chances of a country devastated by nuclear strikes doing the same are virtually non-existant. [This needs some elaboration. Given the likely scale and effects of a nuclear attack, its most unlikely that the everybody will be killed. There will be survivors and they will rebuild a society but it will have nothing in common with what was there before. So, to all intents and purposes, once a society initiates a nuclear exchange its gone forever]. Once this basic factor has been absorbed, the NNP makes a fundamental realization that will influence every move it makes from this point onwards. If it does nothing, its effectively invincible. If, however, it does something, there is a serious risk that it will initiate a chain of events that will eventually lead to a nuclear holocaust. The result of that terrifying realization is strategic paralysis.
With that appreciation of strategic paralysis comes an even worse problem. A non-nuclear country has a wide range of options for its forces. Although its actions may incur a risk of being beaten they do not court destruction. Thus, a non-nuclear nation can afford to take risks of a calculated nature. However, a nuclear-equipped nation has to consider the risk that actions by its conventional forces will lead to a situation where it may have to use its nuclear forces with the resulting holocaust. Therefore, not only are its strategic nuclear options restricted by its possession of nuclear weapons, so are its tactical and operational options. So we add tactical and operational paralysis to the strategic variety. This is why we see such a tremendous emphasis on the mechanics of decision making in nuclear powers. Every decision has to be thought through, not for one step or the step after but for six, seven or eight steps down the line.
We can see this in the events of the 1960s and 1970s, especially surrounding the Vietnam War. Every so often, the question gets asked "How could the US have won in Vietnam?" with a series of replies that include invading the North, extending the bombing to China and other dramatic escalations of the conflict. Now, it should be obvious why such suggestions could not, in the real world, be contemplated. The risk of ending up in a nuclear war was too great. For another example, note how the presence of nuclear weapons restricted and limited the tactical and operational options available to both sides in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In effect neither side could push the war to a final conclusion because to do so would bring down nuclear
Other attack vectors (smuggling in warheads by sea/land) may be technically easier and more likely, but (being cold about it) the end damage potential is much less. If terrorists set off a bomb or two, there's lots of damage, but the rest of the country is still intact. But if a missile launches, the end result is basically that all the missiles fly. And that ruins everyone's day.
To quote Stuart Slade, defense analyst (emphasis mine):
The problem with missiles is this; once they are fired, they are on their way. Nothing can stop them (in the sense that the launch decision is final; contrary to many people's opinion, ICBMs do not have a destruct system - ones fired on range testing do, but operational ones do not) and nothing can prevent them striking their targets. The other problem is that they are very fast-moving and give the forces on the other side very little chance to decide what is happening and why. If a launch is detected now, the President has less time to make his decision over future action than most people to chose their meal at a restaurant.
Thrown into that is the inevitability of the whole thing; a missile fired means a target hit. Unless the wretched thing malfunctions, of course, but nuclear weapons are not a good place to start relying on luck. So the simple fact that a missile is on its way means that a country is about to have some fairly catastrophic damage inflicted on it. But is that all? Is that first missile the start of a salvo? Is it aimed at the deterrent forces on the ground - so that any response will be ragged? Without going too deeply into the dynamics of the decision (that would take a book rather than an answer to a question on an essay), the odds stack so that if a missile is inbound, it requires immense faith and courage not to return fire. That's step one.
Now we go to step two. The nation that has let one fly either by accident or design. Its government knows that the "other side" has immense pressure on it to return fire, that the odds in the decision-making process stack in favor of opening fire. If they hang around and wait to see what will happen, the rest of their forces get caught on the ground - and destroyed. So they require immense faith and courage not to continue firing.
Step three - the nation that is being fired on knows that the other guys are working on the basis that the odds stack in favor of continuing firing. That ends it; they know the other guys will open fire, so even if they had decided not to, they will reverse that decision. The guys who fired first know that so, even if they had decided not to fire, they reverse that decision.
Everybody fires, everybody dies. More or less. Both sides know it so they don't bother with the question. One flies, they all fly. The only question is the timing.
How does BMD figure into this? It buys time. A single missile inbound can be shot down reasonably easily. So if a single inbound is detected, it can be shot down - stopped from reaching its target. That takes the dreadful time squeeze out - both sides can afford to wait to see what happens. The side that is being shot at can see what develops and also contact the other side and ask. Not a joke - that may be the most important single step. The side that let one fly by accident knows that the other side is going to wait so they can also afford to do so. And the whole situation is a lot cooler.
That's not to say we shouldn't secure ports and borders and all that. We certainly should. But we can't ignore the less-likely but potentially more catastrophic threat, either. The "we can't stop everything, so let's do nothing" approach is stupid, too.
It should also be noted that the US had a working missile defense system in the 70s.
I think this move by Iran actually may ease tensions.
One defense analyst pointed out that nations generally become a little more careful and less brash once they get nuclear capability. You're much less likely to stick your neck out and get involved in something that might force you into using your new capability if you know that the same force will likely be unleashed upon you.
An analyst was once asked what Saddam would have done differently in 1990 if he had nukes; the answer was "well, he wouldn't have invaded Kuwait".
Orbit != escape velocity. It's quite a different ballgame, actually; escape velocity is what you need to never come back to earth, as if you're going to Mars or something.
Demonstrating orbital capability is sufficient to show that Iran has the physical "oomph" to send warheads anywhere. Landing anywhere close to the target, and getting a working warhead (much less a decently-reliable one that will work on a missile), are going to be much harder.
The thing is, when socialists talk about the concept of "social justice" they are talking about benefiting from the same starting point without being hindered by some poverty-induced limitations.
Problem is, "equal opportunity" so often gets perverted into an "equal outcome". There are quite a number of people out there who firmly believe that all students should only be educated to the lowest common denominator. No advanced or accelerated classes, no opportunity to excel beyond the norm. They will quite happily hold everyone else back on accout of the one kid who cannot (or will not) learn.
Yes, give everyone an equal start. Push everyone to learn as best they can. Don't throw up arbitrary financial barriers. But don't start handicapping and holding back the smart or hard-working kids on account of the other kids who can't or won't learn.
Why wouldn't you just lower taxes if you meant for citizens to have more money?
Because just cutting taxes doesn't make it seem like you're punishing "the rich" enough; therefore, fewer votes for you.
Given a disparity among a population (say, income distribution), most people would rather try to close the gap by dragging the upper end down (even if by doing so they hurt themselves monetarily) than by doing something to improve their own situation.
Hard work doesn't necessarily equate to brute physical labor. It might very well mean sitting down and learning the material, even though it's hard, so you can get a job doing what you want to do.
I have a whole bunch of old Asimov's and Analogs from the late 60s through the 80s that we picked up at a used bookstore... but no recent ones. I'm hesitant to subscribe to one without knowing what they're like now.
Speaking as someone who is using Charter internet to type this comment right now, their service is awful. It costs too much, the tech support and service people are crap
A couple years ago, Charter tried to charge my wife (fiancee then) $100 for installing a wall jack. Trouble is, they didn't do that. The just ran a cable from the main outlet into the other room and tucked it along the baseboard. We spent an hour and a half on the phone with them, to be told "well, we thought we were going to have to install one, so you're getting charged". So we spoke to the supervisor, who said they'd have to charge us to have someone come out and verify that there wasn't one installed. We told them to fuck off; since they screwed up, they'd have to cover the charge. We finally resolved it after a month.
I will get dialup before I deal with Charter again.
Let's do Starship Trooperscorrectly, with the powered armor, drops, and (most importantly) keeping the same thought-provoking message as the book. I actually did storyboards of the opening sequence once; I can see it perfectly in my head...
Let's do The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, too. And Mote would be great, as would Scalzi's Old Man's War (though this one more just for fun).
Stuff learned by sending probes not containing humans to Mars: lots. Stuff learned by sending probes containing humans to Mars: zilch.
False dichotomy. "This thing is worthless because we haven't learned anything from it" is hardly a valid statement when you haven't even done that thing.
Let's try a different comparison, replacing Mars with the moon. We learned a metric assload of stuff from the six Apollo landings and their EVAs. A manned crew has higher support costs, but can cover a lot more ground in a given timeframe, does not have to deal with latency on the order of minutes for every command, and is far more capable of independent decision-making than any robot will ever be.
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Remember that people aren't honest.
Fixed that for you.
Treaties, laws, bans, agreements, contracts, etc. might work if all of the involved parties (whether they be governments, corporations, organizations, or individuals) are honest. Unfortunately, that rarely happens.
A dishonest party will eventually need the threat of force or other punishment to keep it in line. The threat may be monetary and/or physical, but the dishonest party must believe that others are willing to carry it out. Otherwise, they'll be laughing all the way to the bank as they break said construction of words and everyone stands there sputtering "but you said you wouldn't!" or "but it's illegal!"
You are, of course, right. The arguments in this particular case are spurious. Who is making them?
The Brady campaign, for one. I paraphrased the "anti" argument off their "assault weapon" page. There's also that one Congresslady (whose name I forget at the moment) who referred to "the shoulder thing that goes up". I assume she means the stock that every rifle and shotgun has?
On your point about keeping criminals in prison though, isn't that the MOST expensive and distressing thing a government can do?
It depends. Keeping a prisoner is rather expensive, but some of the expense is due to the idea that hardened criminals need ice cream and cable TV. (I shit you not; one inmate filed a lawsuit because he wasn't allowed ice cream, and the court awarded him damages.) As it stands now, many criminals view prison as just a couple months interlude before they can get back on the street. Just a thing they have to go through, in other words.
I would suggest taking some hints from that sheriff in Arizona with the lowest recidivism rate in the country. No cable TV, no high-speed internet. You get three meals a day, but they'd be standardized vegetarian meals (avoiding religious issues over meats). Criminals will be occupied doing hard labor--if nothing else, making big rocks into little rocks. The idea is to keep them from conspiring/plotting/doing business behind bars, and making prison so unpleasant (not cruel torture or anything, but bad enough) that they would rather avoid crime altogether rather than risk going to prison.
I'd also suggest that the violent types (rapists, child molesters, etc.) get life without parole, and actually mean it. Two felonies, same thing. I'm still shocked by the case of the man in Atlanta who was arrested a couple months ago... he had been convicted of 26 felony charges, and had been in and out of prison multiple times... yet he was still walking the streets. He was eventually arrested for being a felon in possession of a firearm, and after his rap sheet became public, was finally put away for life.
I'm always dumb-founded on the high recidivism
See above. Prison is just a minor inconvenience to a lot of these guys.
and overall incarceration rates in this country,
Because we throw people in jail with hardened criminals for committing the horrible crime of smoking a joint or selling themselves on a street corner out of desperation. Prisons fill up with these nonviolent offenders, and displace the hardened criminals back out onto the street. Plus, the media glorifies thuggery and street violence. And I'm suspecting that a lot of people turn to gangs and street crime out of desperation; they see no better life ahead of them so they try to find some way to escape. Fixing that will take fixing communities, and I'm not quite sure how to do that.
Easy access to deadly weapons is really peripheral to the fact that so many people want to use them to commit acts of violence.
EXACTLY!
Taking away deadly weapons wouldn't change the fact that there is this element in our society, would it? I don't think so.
Precisely. We'd see a lot more "up close and personal" violence, and crime in general, and the law-abiding people would have one less thing to defend themselves with.
Your "12 times more likely" statistic only holds water when you include suicides. When you consider that over half of all firearm-related deaths in the coutry are suicides, and that people committing suicide with a gun are generally going to use their own, it makes sense.
Second, the number of accidental firearm deaths per year is actually quite low. The number of successful defensive gun uses is much higher.
I'd also suspect that people are more likely to die in a car owned by someone in their household than in anyone else's car.
Ok, so I'm bad at sarcasm. I'm mocking the "logic" of the proposed "assault weapons" ban on the following points:
(Regarding pistol grips) Apparently, changing the angle at which your hands hold the gun makes it "more deadly and able to spray fire from the hip". Tilting my hand twenty degrees more vertical just means my hand is at a different angle, no more. It's like arguing that changing the steering wheel and gearshift on your bone-stock Honda Civic (or holding your hands at 3 and 9 instead of 2 and 10) makes it a racecar that corners better.
(Regarding the "high powered" claim) Apparently, using smaller, less powerful rounds makes a gun "high powered" and "more deadly" than a gun that fires a bigger, more powerful, standard hunting round. Or, the same bullet fired from a "normal"-looking rifle is less deadly than one fired from a scarier-looking AK-47--even though it's the same bullet moving at the same speed. To use a car analogy again, putting a smaller engine with less horsepower and less torque makes the car more powerful and have better acceleration.
(Regarding the "no legitimate use" claim) Apparently, the thousands and thousands of AR-15s, SKSs, M1As, and 10/22s that law-abiding Americans use for hunting, target-shooting competitions, and defense of the home have no legitimate uses like hunting, target-shooting, and defense of the home.
(Regarding the "collapsible stock" claim) Apparently, changing a stock's length by a few inches makes it bad, evil, and easy to conceal. Yet a fixed stock equal in length to the fully collapsed one would still be legal, as would removing the stock entirely (provided the minimum overall length of 26 inches is maintained).
Also ignored is the fact that the previous ban had no effect on criminal violence whatsoever. I'd suggest that a much better approach to crimefighting is to keep violent offenders in prison doing hard time, and help keep people from turning to violence in the first place. Make decisions based on facts rather than "ZOMG it's scary looking!!1!" emotions.
Remember, the government will tell you to rely on it to protect you and defend you from criminals--but then it will turn right around and claim it had no obligation to do so.
"Actually in most states with a license you can walk around waving a pistol around."
Huh? Tell me, which states are those?
Sometimes you'll get arrested for that in Georgia, too, but it almost always gets thrown out in court (assuming you were licensed and legal to carry in that location). Now, if you're in a private establishment, and the manager/proprietor decides he doesn't like it, that's a different matter; he has full legal right to ask you to cover up or leave.
in general, though, firearms laws in Georgia are so convoluted and ambiguous that even the judges, lawyers, and police don't really know it well. Go up and ask five officers what the laws are, you'll get six different answers. We're trying to fix that, because regardless of the subject, the people deserve laws that are clear and easy to understand. Otherwise, how can they follow them?
It certainly depends on the location, but (at least in the US) there's a big difference between owning a weapon, carrying it around in a holster/scabbard/whatever, and brandishing/threatening with it.
The first is generally legal, with a few exceptions or restrictions.
The second is commonly legal too, with certain conditions. In Georgia, for example, one may carry any weapon (except a handgun) as described above, so long as it is done openly and in plain sight. To carry a handgun (openly or concealed) or to conceal a firearm in general, one must obtain a firearms license.
The third will generally 9and rightly) get you arrested on felony charges everywhere; the name of the charge will vary, but they're generally equivalent. In Georgia, pointing a gun at someone or threatening them with a deadly weapon in general will get you charged with aggrevated assault. Other states may classify it as "brandishing a weapon" or "attempted murder", for example.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that owning and carrying a Klingon sword is legal in Colorado. Threatening someone with it is not, obviously.
Yes, we must ban replica weapons that are only made for killing large numbers of people! Protect the children!
These "assault swords" have features like extra cutting edges, and allow the evil person using one to swing it in both directions, thereby killing more people.
The user's hands are placed a little differently than on traditional swords, meaning the user can swing with more power and hit more people at once.
They're made of cheap metal, which is more dangerous than regular steel because it's more powerful and stronger than a real sword!
And they have engravings in an unknown foreign terrorist language, which tells the user how to be deadly assassin. And there's obviously no need for engraving on a sword.
And obviously, if we ban them, they'll all magically go away, because we know that criminals who like to commit acts of violence will be scared of the law that bans their swords. Nobody will ever make one themselves, or sneak one in through the black market, and there are no legitimate uses (such as movie props and reenactments) for these weapons.
Renting an airplane and loading a nuclear bomb in it requires human sacrifice and an aviating licence. Building something that can lift the warhead to a suitable altitude sounds easier.
I think it's already been demonstrated that finding humans willing to sacrifice themselves to perform such an attack is trivial. Finding one with pilot training adds little difficulty. Obtaining a suitable airplane isn't too hard either.
Building a rocket suitable for launching something the size of a crude nuclear device, even if it's not going very high? Theoretically simple, but harder to do in practice. You'll either need to make lots of test articles (which can attract attention), or hope it works on the first shot (unlikely). It also requires a larger manpower and engineering investment than the first method. There's more that can go wrong, it's harder to do, and there's no additional benefit.
Disclaimer: I'm an engineer with a pilot's license and a little experience with rocketry.
As to the tracing of fissionable materials... that might help figuring out where it was mined, but that doesn't actually relate to who build and fired the bomb.
It does give you a good place to start, at least. "Misplacing" fissionables is a big no-no in most of the world; the party responsible will either fall over itself trying to help, or risk getting turned into Trinitite in short order.
Uhh, if you can smuggle in a warhead, why bother building that simple missile? You get an airburst, which means your thermal and blast (overpressure) effects have a wider footprint than a ground initiation, but creating less "dirty" fallout. Just rent an airplane and load said bomb in the back, if you have to have the airburst. But a U-haul running around creates less suspicion.
A smuggled warhead might not leave an easy ballistic track to identify where it was launched, but analysis of the fallout radiation effects can (relatively) easily identify where the fissionable material came from.
ICBMs do no target a ground area per se, they target a specific spot of space and let gravity do the rest.
So, in reality it's not hard and if you can get a satellite in orbit, you could probably hit any large country. Sure they may not be able to hit withing meters of the target, but being able to do that is just icing.
All the information you need to put something an a particular X is available and easy to compute.
The computation is fairly easy. The trick is that you need to hit not only a "specific spot of space", but you need to hit that spot at exactly the right time and going exactly the right speed, and with your reentry vehicle (RV) facing the right direction. A tiny deviation will add up tremendously, as will any atmospheric variation. That's why ballistic missiles fly such arcing paths instead of low orbital profiles--less effect from the atmosphere.
Basically, you need really, really accurate inertial navigation systems (possibly with star trackers to supplement orientation data), you need a guidance "bus" with very precise thrusters to match the velocity and orientation requirements, and you need a way to release the warhead without disturbing any of the above.
It's not as hard if you're just trying to land in the general vicinity of a soft target (like a city), or you just want to smash random things up and burn them... but if you're trying to take out a target designed to resist a nuclear attack (like missile silos and their control facilities, for example), you need a near-direct hit.
Not quite. Kinetic energy is indeed pretty useful, if you can aim it well enough and have enough of it. Any kinetic penetrator you launch on a ballistic missile might be useful for, say, hitting a hardened bunker or sinking a ship. It may even take out a building or three. But the widespread destruction associated with a nuke (square miles of it) isn't going to be matched by a missile-launched kinetic impactor. You have to move to the realm of asteroids for those kinds of effects. Otherwise, why wouldn't these missiles already carry kinetic warheads?
It is interesting to note, though, that the US has considered and investigated conventional and inert warheads for ICBMs. The intention is to provide a rapid response in cases where we can't get an aircaft or cruise missile there in time, or to hit very deeply buried or hardened targets.
Unfortunately, there are three big problems. First is technical. An unguided ballistic warhead isn't going to give the kind of accuracy you get with today's aircraft-launched "smart" munitions. You would need to develop a guidance package for the warhead itself, and figure out how to control said warhead during a high-speed reentry. We can do this already when the goal is to land softly, but an application like this demands a somewhat faster impact. Said warhead and guidance system also need to be able to take the much hotter thermal loads from said entry.
Second, ballistic missiles and their associated systems are expensive. If you thought that $500k cruise missile was bad, buy a Minuteman III. I think they run $50 million a pop.
Third (the biggest obstacle) is political. A conventional ICBM looks and flies just like a nuclear one. And even if you give assurances to other nuclear parties before launch that it's conventional, they might not trust you, especially if the target is also one of those nuclear countries. The chance that the missile will be taken for a nuke is just too high.
It explains why the US didn't invade North Vietnam, or bomb China in the 50s, or make a real attempt at invading Cuba. It's why neither side pushed too far in 1973.
To quote Mr. Slade again:
When a country first acquires nuclear weapons it does so out of a very accurate perception that possession of nukes fundamentally changes it relationships with other powers. What nuclear weapons buy for a New Nuclear Power (NNP) is the fact that once the country in question has nuclear weapons, it cannot be beaten. It can be defeated, that is it can be prevented from achieving certain goals or stopped from following certain courses of action, but it cannot be beaten. It will never have enemy tanks moving down the streets of its capital, it will never have its national treasures looted and its citizens forced into servitude. The enemy will be destroyed by nuclear attack first. A potential enemy knows that so will not push the situation to the point where our NNP is on the verge of being beaten. In effect, the effect of acquiring nuclear weapons is that the owning country has set limits on any conflict in which it is involved. This is such an immensely attractive option that states find it irresistible.
Only later do they realize the problem. Nuclear weapons are so immensely destructive that they mean a country can be totally destroyed by their use. Although our NNP cannot be beaten by an enemy it can be destroyed by that enemy. Although a beaten country can pick itself up and recover, the chances of a country devastated by nuclear strikes doing the same are virtually non-existant. [This needs some elaboration. Given the likely scale and effects of a nuclear attack, its most unlikely that the everybody will be killed. There will be survivors and they will rebuild a society but it will have nothing in common with what was there before. So, to all intents and purposes, once a society initiates a nuclear exchange its gone forever]. Once this basic factor has been absorbed, the NNP makes a fundamental realization that will influence every move it makes from this point onwards. If it does nothing, its effectively invincible. If, however, it does something, there is a serious risk that it will initiate a chain of events that will eventually lead to a nuclear holocaust. The result of that terrifying realization is strategic paralysis.
With that appreciation of strategic paralysis comes an even worse problem. A non-nuclear country has a wide range of options for its forces. Although its actions may incur a risk of being beaten they do not court destruction. Thus, a non-nuclear nation can afford to take risks of a calculated nature. However, a nuclear-equipped nation has to consider the risk that actions by its conventional forces will lead to a situation where it may have to use its nuclear forces with the resulting holocaust. Therefore, not only are its strategic nuclear options restricted by its possession of nuclear weapons, so are its tactical and operational options. So we add tactical and operational paralysis to the strategic variety. This is why we see such a tremendous emphasis on the mechanics of decision making in nuclear powers. Every decision has to be thought through, not for one step or the step after but for six, seven or eight steps down the line.
We can see this in the events of the 1960s and 1970s, especially surrounding the Vietnam War. Every so often, the question gets asked "How could the US have won in Vietnam?" with a series of replies that include invading the North, extending the bombing to China and other dramatic escalations of the conflict. Now, it should be obvious why such suggestions could not, in the real world, be contemplated. The risk of ending up in a nuclear war was too great. For another example, note how the presence of nuclear weapons restricted and limited the tactical and operational options available to both sides in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In effect neither side could push the war to a final conclusion because to do so would bring down nuclear
Other attack vectors (smuggling in warheads by sea/land) may be technically easier and more likely, but (being cold about it) the end damage potential is much less. If terrorists set off a bomb or two, there's lots of damage, but the rest of the country is still intact. But if a missile launches, the end result is basically that all the missiles fly. And that ruins everyone's day.
To quote Stuart Slade, defense analyst (emphasis mine):
The problem with missiles is this; once they are fired, they are on their way. Nothing can stop them (in the sense that the launch decision is final; contrary to many people's opinion, ICBMs do not have a destruct system - ones fired on range testing do, but operational ones do not) and nothing can prevent them striking their targets. The other problem is that they are very fast-moving and give the forces on the other side very little chance to decide what is happening and why. If a launch is detected now, the President has less time to make his decision over future action than most people to chose their meal at a restaurant.
Thrown into that is the inevitability of the whole thing; a missile fired means a target hit. Unless the wretched thing malfunctions, of course, but nuclear weapons are not a good place to start relying on luck. So the simple fact that a missile is on its way means that a country is about to have some fairly catastrophic damage inflicted on it. But is that all? Is that first missile the start of a salvo? Is it aimed at the deterrent forces on the ground - so that any response will be ragged? Without going too deeply into the dynamics of the decision (that would take a book rather than an answer to a question on an essay), the odds stack so that if a missile is inbound, it requires immense faith and courage not to return fire. That's step one.
Now we go to step two. The nation that has let one fly either by accident or design. Its government knows that the "other side" has immense pressure on it to return fire, that the odds in the decision-making process stack in favor of opening fire. If they hang around and wait to see what will happen, the rest of their forces get caught on the ground - and destroyed. So they require immense faith and courage not to continue firing.
Step three - the nation that is being fired on knows that the other guys are working on the basis that the odds stack in favor of continuing firing. That ends it; they know the other guys will open fire, so even if they had decided not to, they will reverse that decision. The guys who fired first know that so, even if they had decided not to fire, they reverse that decision.
Everybody fires, everybody dies. More or less. Both sides know it so they don't bother with the question. One flies, they all fly. The only question is the timing.
How does BMD figure into this? It buys time. A single missile inbound can be shot down reasonably easily. So if a single inbound is detected, it can be shot down - stopped from reaching its target. That takes the dreadful time squeeze out - both sides can afford to wait to see what happens. The side that is being shot at can see what develops and also contact the other side and ask. Not a joke - that may be the most important single step. The side that let one fly by accident knows that the other side is going to wait so they can also afford to do so. And the whole situation is a lot cooler.
That's not to say we shouldn't secure ports and borders and all that. We certainly should. But we can't ignore the less-likely but potentially more catastrophic threat, either. The "we can't stop everything, so let's do nothing" approach is stupid, too.
It should also be noted that the US had a working missile defense system in the 70s.
I think this move by Iran actually may ease tensions.
One defense analyst pointed out that nations generally become a little more careful and less brash once they get nuclear capability. You're much less likely to stick your neck out and get involved in something that might force you into using your new capability if you know that the same force will likely be unleashed upon you.
An analyst was once asked what Saddam would have done differently in 1990 if he had nukes; the answer was "well, he wouldn't have invaded Kuwait".
Orbit != escape velocity. It's quite a different ballgame, actually; escape velocity is what you need to never come back to earth, as if you're going to Mars or something.
Demonstrating orbital capability is sufficient to show that Iran has the physical "oomph" to send warheads anywhere. Landing anywhere close to the target, and getting a working warhead (much less a decently-reliable one that will work on a missile), are going to be much harder.
Heh... my employer's server conventions seem to run as follows:
Legacy CAD data: Aircraft carriers (Enterprise, Forrestall, Bunker Hill, Langley, etc)
Legacy CAD workstations: Helicopters, engineering terms, tools
Current CAD servers: Mafia bosses
Mail servers: Strategic weapons
I also distinctly remember one printer in a Georgia Tech research lab being named "Sexual Chocolate"
The thing is, when socialists talk about the concept of "social justice" they are talking about benefiting from the same starting point without being hindered by some poverty-induced limitations.
Problem is, "equal opportunity" so often gets perverted into an "equal outcome". There are quite a number of people out there who firmly believe that all students should only be educated to the lowest common denominator. No advanced or accelerated classes, no opportunity to excel beyond the norm. They will quite happily hold everyone else back on accout of the one kid who cannot (or will not) learn.
Yes, give everyone an equal start. Push everyone to learn as best they can. Don't throw up arbitrary financial barriers. But don't start handicapping and holding back the smart or hard-working kids on account of the other kids who can't or won't learn.
Why wouldn't you just lower taxes if you meant for citizens to have more money?
Because just cutting taxes doesn't make it seem like you're punishing "the rich" enough; therefore, fewer votes for you.
Given a disparity among a population (say, income distribution), most people would rather try to close the gap by dragging the upper end down (even if by doing so they hurt themselves monetarily) than by doing something to improve their own situation.
Hard work doesn't necessarily equate to brute physical labor. It might very well mean sitting down and learning the material, even though it's hard, so you can get a job doing what you want to do.
"Give me six lines written by the most honest of men, and I will find something in them which will hang him."
Cardinal Richelieu
I have a whole bunch of old Asimov's and Analogs from the late 60s through the 80s that we picked up at a used bookstore... but no recent ones. I'm hesitant to subscribe to one without knowing what they're like now.
Speaking as someone who is using Charter internet to type this comment right now, their service is awful. It costs too much, the tech support and service people are crap
A couple years ago, Charter tried to charge my wife (fiancee then) $100 for installing a wall jack. Trouble is, they didn't do that. The just ran a cable from the main outlet into the other room and tucked it along the baseboard. We spent an hour and a half on the phone with them, to be told "well, we thought we were going to have to install one, so you're getting charged". So we spoke to the supervisor, who said they'd have to charge us to have someone come out and verify that there wasn't one installed. We told them to fuck off; since they screwed up, they'd have to cover the charge. We finally resolved it after a month.
I will get dialup before I deal with Charter again.
YES!!!
Let's do Starship Troopers correctly, with the powered armor, drops, and (most importantly) keeping the same thought-provoking message as the book. I actually did storyboards of the opening sequence once; I can see it perfectly in my head...
Let's do The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, too. And Mote would be great, as would Scalzi's Old Man's War (though this one more just for fun).
Stuff learned by sending probes not containing humans to Mars: lots.
Stuff learned by sending probes containing humans to Mars: zilch.
False dichotomy. "This thing is worthless because we haven't learned anything from it" is hardly a valid statement when you haven't even done that thing.
Let's try a different comparison, replacing Mars with the moon. We learned a metric assload of stuff from the six Apollo landings and their EVAs. A manned crew has higher support costs, but can cover a lot more ground in a given timeframe, does not have to deal with latency on the order of minutes for every command, and is far more capable of independent decision-making than any robot will ever be.