Yeah, you're right. Although which party is in power seems to have little to do with it - Clinton bombed the crap out of Iraq, and the present government has allowed the Iraq campaign to continue on it's previous course, and seems determined to not only continue the war in Afghanistan but possibly expand it into Pakistan.
The situation he was referring to has more to do with power games than it does with the democratic process. The US government was willing to stick by Iraq as long as they were useful, and didn't cause any serious problems. The gassing of the Kurds was bad, but it wasn't enough. At the time Iran was seen as a much bigger problem, and Iraq was a useful tool for keeping them in check. The US was willing to turn a blind eye to that particular atrocity. Eventually, though, Iraq got to be more trouble than they were worth. That's the thing about forming alliances with theocrats and tin-pot dictators - it may seem like a good idea at the time, but is almost guaranteed to bite you in the ass in the long run.
So yeah, you're right, my original explanation didn't help at all:) I'll blame it on morning drowsiness.
If you actually believe that, you should spend some time doing research before posting about issues you don't know anything about. Sincerely.
I now award you the "Most Juvenile Commenter of the Month" award. It comes with a lollipop and a free juice-box. Let me know where you would like it mailed.
But the fact is because of the incompetence shown in how the trial is performed and how Saddam's life is ended (like so many of the other "manly" things Bush wanted to do) US is instead shown as weak and the opposite message and result of what was wished for is achieved.
Even though the trial and execution were carried out by Iraqis, and the end result was the death of a mass murderer?
The thing that many people EVERYWHERE "have a problem to understand" is that people will perceive events according to their biases and predispositions. You didn't come to a negative opinion of the US after watching the trial - you already had a negative opinion so you saw the trial as another failing of Americans. Those who are insanely pro-American had the exact opposite reaction.
If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that the debacle is neither a positive or negative commentary on the US, since the US had very little to do with it. Just like Mussolini and his wife getting hanged by Italians after WW2 was neither a positive or negative commentary on the US, since it was carried out by ITALIANS. But I'm sure that some German, somewhere, was probably looking at that incident the same way as you saw Saddam's execution. As I said, most people see what they expect to see, not what's actually there.
Now I realize that you consider the United States the benevolent father/policeman of the World, but for a benevolent father it's sure sending out mixed messages.
That's the problem with being a two-party democracy - your government ends up acting like a multiple-personality sociopath. Monarchies and theocracies tend to act in a much more predictable manner over a long period of time.
"Getting a bullet through the head does NOT mean you die"
Depends on the bullet. One that's big enough will remove most of your head. One that's small enough will repeatedly ricochet off the inside of your skull, turning your brain into mush. In both cases, death is pretty much guaranteed. It's the in-between rounds that cause problems.
Don't kid yourself - murder is acceptable in every country. The only difference is that in your country, you accept the murders which occur when a killer is set free after serving a 10 year sentence, whereas in the countries you've listed they prefer to murder the killer. Don't pretend to be more moral just because your system results in a more indirect form of murder.
Yeah, I don't think you actually understand what your original point was, so I'm not sure how you expect me to parse it. Thanks for wasting my time. Bye.
Actually, I believe the response I gave to be a accurate representation of reality
And you're wrong. The response you gave was, essentially, that society should make laws that favor a minority groups whose populations is P, while ignoring minority groups whose population is P. That's a value judgment - it's an opinion based on personal biases, not "an accurate representation of reality".
Having universal gov't health care doesn't stop the wealthy from buying more health care than anyone else
It does, here in Canada! If I need any serious medical work, I have to get it done in the US. If you guys start socializing too... where the hell am I supposed to go then? Cuba?
distance effects for blast roughly scale as inverse cube of yield
Actually, when dealing with nukes, it's not always that simple. You should look up the Tzar Bomb.
But yes, I took it into account anyway, thank you. Since you seem to think you know what you're talking about, why don't you provide some estimates of the effects of a 25 megatonne nuclear blast? Right now you're just trolling - if you can provide alternate figures, that would actually be informative, or at least interesting.
That's why almost all nukes have small yield, most of the energy is wasted in the big ones.
The reason most nukes are relatively small is because money and resources are limited, and it makes much more sense to have 60,000 relatively small weapons than 600 really huge ones. It gives you more versatility - you can hit more targets. It gives you better accuracy - you can eliminate a city while producing minimal damage to the surrounding area. It gives you more redundancy - if you have a high failure rate or if your enemies develop an ABM system, large numbers help mitigate the effect.
The decisions are made based on efficiency, yes, but not the efficiency of the explosion.
We almost all know a little of English in Quebec, but hey, IT'S NOT OUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. You just cannot think as good in an other language than your own.
Yeah, and? English isn't my original language either, but Canada doesn't provide any protection for my native tongue. Why should you bastards be any different? Why not protect Italian, German, Spanish, and Dari, while we're at it? Make sure that every federal employee speaks all 6 languages!
If ANY language is going to be our "second language", it should be some Native American dialect. There's absolutely no reason for French to be an official language in Canada.
Here, I'll help you out with the cliffs-notes version:
At 0900[1] the weapon was dropped from the B-29 Superfortress Dave's Dream (formerly Big Stink of the 509th Composite Group) and detonated 520 ft above the target fleet, with a yield of 23 kilotons. Five ships were sunk. Two attack transports sank immediately, two destroyers within hours, and one Japanese cruiser the following day. It was the first time more than one ship had been sunk by a single bomb..... the main cause of less-than-expected ship carnage was that the bomb missed its aim point by 710 yards."...
In Baker, the weapon was suspended beneath landing craft LSM-60 anchored in the midst of the target fleet. Baker was detonated 90 feet (27 m) underwater, halfway to the bottom in water 180 feet (54 m) deep. How/Mike Hour was at 0835.[1] No identifiable part of LSM-60 was ever found. Ten ships were sunk, including a German heavy cruiser which sank in December, five months after the test, because radioactivity prevented repairs to a leak in the hull....
The most famous picture shows the 27,000 ton battleship Arkansas, 562 ft (171 m) long, upended to near vertical, with two-thirds of its length in the air, silhouetted against the north face of the water column.[27]
As with Able, any ships that remained afloat within 1,000 yards of the detonation were seriously damaged, but this time the damage came from below, from water pressure rather than air pressure. The greatest difference between the two shots, however, was the radioactive contamination of all the target ships by Baker.
And these were 23 KILOtonne explosions. That's three orders of magnitude less than the hypothetical explosion I was discussing.
Oh, I agree completely. If terrorists got their hand on a nuke, they'd be looking to blow up a city, not a power plant. I was just pointing out that the original guy has no idea what he was talking about:)
Of course, in wartime the situation changes, but then you'll have bigger problems anyway. In a long enough war you'd simply institute energy rationing. I think the biggest problem for these floating turbines is weather extremes rather than any man-made disasters.
Nuclear is (or should be), without a doubt, the biggest part of the picture. In it's current form it's relatively clean and safe. And if we finally get fusion to work within the next few decades, it should be fairly easy to convert existing nuke plants, making them even safer. We should be breaking ground on dozens of new reactors, not looking to stick windmills in the middle of the atlantic.
Solar and wind have their place, but they're simply not a viable alternative if your goal is to stop burning fossil fuels. They're a good way to supplement our existing infrastructure, but that's about it.
Oil rigs are a weeee bit more durable than windmills.
And they cost a lot more than a million dollars.
Now, sure, you could reinforce your windmills to withstand weather extremes. But at what cost? The advantage of building them at sea is that they're more efficient, but if you have to spend 5 times more energy and materials just to make them, then is the efficiency boost really worth it?
Slashdot Mirror
You sure are a persistent little troll. It's pretty rare to see such simple-minded devotion on slashdot.
Yeah, you're right. Although which party is in power seems to have little to do with it - Clinton bombed the crap out of Iraq, and the present government has allowed the Iraq campaign to continue on it's previous course, and seems determined to not only continue the war in Afghanistan but possibly expand it into Pakistan.
The situation he was referring to has more to do with power games than it does with the democratic process. The US government was willing to stick by Iraq as long as they were useful, and didn't cause any serious problems. The gassing of the Kurds was bad, but it wasn't enough. At the time Iran was seen as a much bigger problem, and Iraq was a useful tool for keeping them in check. The US was willing to turn a blind eye to that particular atrocity. Eventually, though, Iraq got to be more trouble than they were worth. That's the thing about forming alliances with theocrats and tin-pot dictators - it may seem like a good idea at the time, but is almost guaranteed to bite you in the ass in the long run.
So yeah, you're right, my original explanation didn't help at all :) I'll blame it on morning drowsiness.
I now award you the "Most Juvenile Commenter of the Month" award. It comes with a lollipop and a free juice-box. Let me know where you would like it mailed.
Even though the trial and execution were carried out by Iraqis, and the end result was the death of a mass murderer?
The thing that many people EVERYWHERE "have a problem to understand" is that people will perceive events according to their biases and predispositions. You didn't come to a negative opinion of the US after watching the trial - you already had a negative opinion so you saw the trial as another failing of Americans. Those who are insanely pro-American had the exact opposite reaction.
If you had any sense at all, you'd realize that the debacle is neither a positive or negative commentary on the US, since the US had very little to do with it. Just like Mussolini and his wife getting hanged by Italians after WW2 was neither a positive or negative commentary on the US, since it was carried out by ITALIANS. But I'm sure that some German, somewhere, was probably looking at that incident the same way as you saw Saddam's execution. As I said, most people see what they expect to see, not what's actually there.
That's the problem with being a two-party democracy - your government ends up acting like a multiple-personality sociopath. Monarchies and theocracies tend to act in a much more predictable manner over a long period of time.
Ah, yes, it's the Jews again.
I didn't realize that there was enough neo-Nazis on here for such a comment to get modded +5.
Funny, you quote him perfectly, and then respond to a completely different statement.
He said they won't use their KNOWLEDGE and TRAINING to kill someone.
Go ahead, read that again.
Now, tell me: how does yelling over a phone and throwing things at nurses count as using knowledge and training?
"Getting a bullet through the head does NOT mean you die"
Depends on the bullet. One that's big enough will remove most of your head. One that's small enough will repeatedly ricochet off the inside of your skull, turning your brain into mush. In both cases, death is pretty much guaranteed. It's the in-between rounds that cause problems.
Don't kid yourself - murder is acceptable in every country. The only difference is that in your country, you accept the murders which occur when a killer is set free after serving a 10 year sentence, whereas in the countries you've listed they prefer to murder the killer. Don't pretend to be more moral just because your system results in a more indirect form of murder.
Heh. Until I looked at the title of your comment, I thought you were talking about sex. Should have known better, I guess ...
lol. That's the first time I've seen French called a race :) Congratulations, you win the "stupides person on slashdot" award!
Yeah, I don't think you actually understand what your original point was, so I'm not sure how you expect me to parse it. Thanks for wasting my time. Bye.
And you're wrong. The response you gave was, essentially, that society should make laws that favor a minority groups whose populations is P, while ignoring minority groups whose population is P. That's a value judgment - it's an opinion based on personal biases, not "an accurate representation of reality".
WTF?
I'm not an indian, you moron.
It does, here in Canada! If I need any serious medical work, I have to get it done in the US. If you guys start socializing too ... where the hell am I supposed to go then? Cuba?
Actually, when dealing with nukes, it's not always that simple. You should look up the Tzar Bomb.
But yes, I took it into account anyway, thank you. Since you seem to think you know what you're talking about, why don't you provide some estimates of the effects of a 25 megatonne nuclear blast? Right now you're just trolling - if you can provide alternate figures, that would actually be informative, or at least interesting.
The reason most nukes are relatively small is because money and resources are limited, and it makes much more sense to have 60,000 relatively small weapons than 600 really huge ones.
It gives you more versatility - you can hit more targets.
It gives you better accuracy - you can eliminate a city while producing minimal damage to the surrounding area.
It gives you more redundancy - if you have a high failure rate or if your enemies develop an ABM system, large numbers help mitigate the effect.
The decisions are made based on efficiency, yes, but not the efficiency of the explosion.
Then why the hell did you respond? Your entire argument is a philosophical one.
There you go, fixed that for ya.
So you're advocating mob-rule? Get enough people together, and you can force through whatever laws you like?
Sorry, but that's not how western democracy is supposed to work. Otherwise, the US should be a Christian state, ruled by the Pope.
That was the most complicated history-salad that I've ever seen. You're really something special!
Yeah, and? English isn't my original language either, but Canada doesn't provide any protection for my native tongue. Why should you bastards be any different? Why not protect Italian, German, Spanish, and Dari, while we're at it? Make sure that every federal employee speaks all 6 languages!
If ANY language is going to be our "second language", it should be some Native American dialect. There's absolutely no reason for French to be an official language in Canada.
Please do a bit of reading before sounding off:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads#Test_Baker_-_July_25
It will help you sound less ignorant.
Here, I'll help you out with the cliffs-notes version:
At 0900[1] the weapon was dropped from the B-29 Superfortress Dave's Dream (formerly Big Stink of the 509th Composite Group) and detonated 520 ft above the target fleet, with a yield of 23 kilotons. Five ships were sunk. Two attack transports sank immediately, two destroyers within hours, and one Japanese cruiser the following day. It was the first time more than one ship had been sunk by a single bomb. .... the main cause of less-than-expected ship carnage was that the bomb missed its aim point by 710 yards." ...
In Baker, the weapon was suspended beneath landing craft LSM-60 anchored in the midst of the target fleet. Baker was detonated 90 feet (27 m) underwater, halfway to the bottom in water 180 feet (54 m) deep. How/Mike Hour was at 0835.[1] No identifiable part of LSM-60 was ever found. Ten ships were sunk, including a German heavy cruiser which sank in December, five months after the test, because radioactivity prevented repairs to a leak in the hull. ...
The most famous picture shows the 27,000 ton battleship Arkansas, 562 ft (171 m) long, upended to near vertical, with two-thirds of its length in the air, silhouetted against the north face of the water column.[27]
As with Able, any ships that remained afloat within 1,000 yards of the detonation were seriously damaged, but this time the damage came from below, from water pressure rather than air pressure. The greatest difference between the two shots, however, was the radioactive contamination of all the target ships by Baker.
And these were 23 KILOtonne explosions. That's three orders of magnitude less than the hypothetical explosion I was discussing.
Oh, I agree completely. If terrorists got their hand on a nuke, they'd be looking to blow up a city, not a power plant. I was just pointing out that the original guy has no idea what he was talking about :)
Of course, in wartime the situation changes, but then you'll have bigger problems anyway. In a long enough war you'd simply institute energy rationing. I think the biggest problem for these floating turbines is weather extremes rather than any man-made disasters.
Nuclear is (or should be), without a doubt, the biggest part of the picture. In it's current form it's relatively clean and safe. And if we finally get fusion to work within the next few decades, it should be fairly easy to convert existing nuke plants, making them even safer. We should be breaking ground on dozens of new reactors, not looking to stick windmills in the middle of the atlantic.
Solar and wind have their place, but they're simply not a viable alternative if your goal is to stop burning fossil fuels. They're a good way to supplement our existing infrastructure, but that's about it.
Oil rigs are a weeee bit more durable than windmills.
And they cost a lot more than a million dollars.
Now, sure, you could reinforce your windmills to withstand weather extremes. But at what cost? The advantage of building them at sea is that they're more efficient, but if you have to spend 5 times more energy and materials just to make them, then is the efficiency boost really worth it?