"Basically corporations have yet another carte blanche legal basis to win a summary judgment against whoever they want for whatever reason."
There - fixed that for the OP.
Yes, anybody can sue anybody for any reason, but not everybody has a 90% chance of winning such suits case after case, often without even warranting a trial. Add this to unfounded RIAA infringment claims, traffic tickets from private companies (camera installers and operators), and medical bills from any random physician that sneaks into a patient's hospital room without their knowlegde, consent, or prior relationship to perform "services" (doctrine of implied consent).
Perhaps I care more about substance and important news than up to the minute reports of some nonsense that happens to be occurring right this minute. It's like when a good report on CNN is interrupted by a live aerial feed of high speed chase in some city hundreds of miles away. Chases happen and crimes are committed constantly in every city every moment - just because I can watch it live doesn't make the information valuable or usefull for me. Now, if it is in my city, then maybe, but I don't see too much point in watching the chase for 30 minutes. Point is, after reading or watching the news I should be just a little smarter after I'm done because of it. This is possible, but as for-profit institutions, the news tabloids cater to their entertainment needy audience, and I swear I lose a few tenths of a point in my IQ everything I watch or read that blather. Compare the reporting of CNN, FOX, ABC/NBC/CBS to NPR or PBS and you can see the difference. This goes for TV, web, or radio. Even better, try BBC International, or any news channel in almost any country outside of the USA, presuming you can understand the language.
"Top Stories" from CNN right now (cc's straight from my RSS feed):
Former CNN news leader dies at 51 - 1 hour ago Meet the Marines killed by that mortar - 2 hours ago Sinkhole swallows family pond - 2 hours ago Rattlesnake handler gets 12th bite - 2 hours ago Pornography pioneer passes - 1 hour ago
As you can see from the list above, Americans don't want NEWS - they want to be entertained.
Or we could hit two birds with one stone. Instead of policy makers in cities deciding upon urban planning methods that are centered around the automobile and escaping the cost of maintaining the inner city in favor of new developments in the suburbs/exurbs (mass produced housing subdivisions with miles to drive to big-box strip malls and parking lots), how about those same officials plan urban areas around pedestrians? Losen zoning restrictions on urban agriculture, such as responsibly raised organic poultry and other small livestock, as well as areas for community gardens. Lower barriers to small businesses and encourage the emergence of low rent open-air markets, or maybe even set up such markets in under-utilized commercial buildings, so people can easily sell their own produce, crafts, and even used goods (like a garage sale, but with much less waste and better economic prospects for both buyers and sellers).
Skyscrapers won't necessarily be more efficient since elevators require a lot of energy, but two- to four-story buildings with stairs and more walkable streets could help against our obesity epidemic. Architecture should be based around passive solar principles instead of massive HVAC systems. Keep windows on the south face for cold climate cities, and on the north for hot climates (in the Northern hemisphere). Choose materials for their properties of reflecting, insulating, or absorbing heat rather than picking the cheapest material per square foot or materials that are more stylish or fashionable. Give tax cuts to builders who build with locally quarried stone rather than encouraging builders to import polished granite and marble from far away places. This is just a start and only one perspective. There are other approaches that can make a real difference to make life more affordable, sustainable, energy efficient without resorting to mud huts, though mud (adobe) has some excellent qualities for sustainable single family dwellings without having to be stuck with primitive living conditions. The building codes (which have a national or global focus) and permitting processes need to be reformed to allow more flexibility for sustainable building techniques that are appropriate for the local area.
Affordable cities are good for a population recovering from a severe recession, while building sustainable structures would provide much needed jobs, as sustainable techniques involves less expense in the manufacture and transport of materials and more expense in the labor required to build and maintain structures.
All I can say is WOW! Does anybody remember the times when the industrial west was importing cheap raw materials from third world countries to support its manufacturing?
Exactly. The world has changed. Wealthy business owners and the wealthy executives who manage those businesses have figured out that they really don't need the American middle class or working class to sustain their wealth creating machine. In America manufacturers had to comply with a mountain of OHSA regulations, environmental regulations, labor laws that affect how many hours you can drive a worker, and how much you can pay them. Then they figured out that if they moved their operations to totalitarian states there were much fewer environmental, safety, and labors regulations to get in the way, and they got a tax break on the profits they keep locked safely away in offshore havens. They are now learning that they can create their new customer base in the same countries where the work is being done. With the manufacturing demand for materials and energy, it is no surprise that our coal resources are being shipped offshore along with the jobs and welfare of the American people.
But even though our nation's wealth has been stripped and the American workforce has been reduced to servanthood (ie "the service economy"), and we gradually regress to an agrarian economy, we are told that the cause of our problems is the sense of entitlement to things like food stamps to displaced workers and their families (which is often not enough to prevent malnurishment), medicaid for children and their parents (childless adults often do not qualify in some states even if they are critically ill with a curable disease), or the social security that only workers and middle class pay for (earnings over $100k are not subject to any social security taxes). The only solution put forward by the political groups sponsored by wealthy business owners is to lower taxes on the rich - with the presumption that once the rich have more money they will hire American workers and spend money to buy American products. But the world has changed, and only a nation of fools would believe that a change in tax policy is going to magically encourage the wealthy to hire Americans or buy American products. With more money in their pockets the rich will create more jobs in totalitarian countries on the other side of the world and buy more products made in those countries. If the whole planet has to choke in coal ashes from the under-regulated toxic manufacturing processes or greenhouse gases from the diesel fuel used to move the massive amount of goods traveling enormous distances, then that is OK as long as the rich get richer.
I dont know... there seems to be evidence that they're stupider.
Just another of the many symptons of windfarm sickness. Stay away from windfarms before you too become stupid! Oh, no, I think I'm getting sick too now. Yes, I'm also beginning...to...feel...STUPID! AH!!!
I'm showing my nerdiness here, but that reminds me of the time when the crew of the Enterprise discovered an ancient space vessel. Bodies were found aboard, and Piccard observed that they had apparently died in their sleep, and Lt. Worf commented "what a terrible way to die!"
Even still, government does not and should not get involved in "trivial matters". If a private citizen doesn't get a refund he's entitled to, if he calls 911, police will arrive at McDonald's and arrest the citizen for making a nuissance call to 911.
But if an off-duty law enforcment officer makes a mistake, believing he gave a $20 bill to a cashier when he only gave a $10, it is OK for him to threaten the cashier with arrest and assault the cashier with pepper spray if the cashier (a legal minor) asks the officer to wait 10 minutes for her mother to arrive and for her shift to end so they could sort it out.
The key point is that the government will take up those matters that are of interest to the government (and the business contributors to past, present, and future political campaigns - but not ordinary citizens since such citizens rarely have the funds and influence to provide critical support during an election).
Yes, but if he cuts back on the alcohol he could be suspectible to wasp larvae! Consider the risks carefully before you make your decision.
As for all those carcinogens, they are only dangerous when you consume them in California. Much safer to consume them here in Texas. And nothing keeps the bugs away better than asbestos, plutonium and gamma rays.
...that Chinese are just as delicate as Californians. Here in Texas we have oil running through our veins, we breathe ozone recreationally, and we consider lead and mercury "performance enhancing substances". It's just one reason why we can still buy all sorts of products known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, brain injury, and all sorts of ailments that we aren't concerned about much here.
All I said was "due". There is a difference beween stating we are due for a probabilistic event and saying that any one day the odds are greater than the previous (ie observing that after getting three tails in a row we are "due" for a heads in a coin toss, though it is known that the odds for each toss are always 50% and you could have 50 turns and still have tails, though having 50 tails in a row would be an unlikely occurrence). You may be guilty of the reverse gambler's fallacy if you think that we are safe just because it's been thousands of years since the last major event.
The threshold for an impact that causes widespread global mortality and threatens civilization almost certainly lies between about 0.5 and 5 km diameter, perhaps near 2 km. The energy released by an impactor depends on diameter, density, velocity, and angle. Impacts of objects this large occur from one to several times per million years, but the last known climate changing collision was believed to have hit Argentina 3.3 million years ago. So the last known incidence of this magnitude was 3.3 million years ago, but statistically we should have been hit two or three times since then. Either we just haven't uncovered the evidence of these past impacts or they haven't happened yet. If they haven't happened yet, then we are due for a collision - pure and simple. It doesn't mean it will happen this decade, our lifetime, or even in the next 3 million years. But for all of humanity to proceed as though there were no risk from asteroids would be arrogant.
Objects with a diameter of roughly 50 m (164 ft) strike Earth approximately once every thousand years, producing explosions comparable to the one known to have detonated roughly 8.5 kilometers (28,000 ft) above Tunguska in 1908. Even when we predict that a near earth asteroid will pass close but not hit us we are not out of danger. In 1490 about 10,000 people died from meteors in the Chinese city of Ch'ing-yang when an asteroid broke overhead.
But consider this: In 2000 a computer analysis of asteroid impacts showed an annual risk of a fatal impact at one in 90, and concluded that an average of 120,000 people died per event. A small section of my property lies on a 100 year flood plain. Even though there is only 1% chance in any year that the area will flood, and theoretical the area could flood several times within 100 years or not at all in 200 years, insurance companies and mortgage companies won't talk to me about financing and insuring a structure on that area, even though the structure itself will have been paid off in less than 10 years and will likely depreciate to scrap value over the course of several decades. If the odds of flooding on my property are great enough of a concern to scare off finance companies that can diversify their portfolio, then why aren't we more concerned about asteroids that can obliterate the only asset humans can call home? If you lose all your property in a flood but survive, you can declare bankruptcy and start over. Not so easy if you lose a whole metropolitan region and their populations from a single meteor.
And while we may hate to base our decisions on a computer projection -- especially one done by a newcomer to the field of impact studies -- when it comes to asteroidal impact, there's little else to go on. Only about 3 percent of impacts leave a crater, and even when a crater does form, it is eventually buried by sediment, as happened to the Yucatan crater, or by the shifting of tectonic plates. On Earth, crater-counting can cause a false sense of security.
Actually, some 100 bodies have already been discovered on orbits which take them so close to the Earth's orbit, that they could hit in the far distant future. This is because the orbits of these bodies change slowly with time. Although their orbits do not intersect Earth's orbit at present, they could hit in a few thousand years or more. I would like to think that it is possible that the level of development our civilization has achieved will continue wi
You can also wait until temperatures are hovering at around 98F to venture out to do things that would normally put you on the target list. Still need conventional camo and stealthy maneuvers.
So, is the solution is to grin and bear it? Drones mean we don't have to invade Pakistan, which we certainly don't want to do given that they are a nuclear power - unlike Iraq they actually DO have weapons of mass destruction. Drones also mean that US pilots won't get shot down or crash to be captured by Al Qaeda or create an embarrassing situation if Pakistani politicians debate whether to return the pilot to the Americans or try him under a number of laws, from illegal immigration to espionage to murder.
Ideally, the US would be raising a group of locals to do the fighting for us, but this would undermine Pakistani authority and turn them hostile toward us - we are already pushing the limits as far as keeping them cooperating with us as it is.
We could go with the grin-and-bear-it approach like we did under Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, but that only empowered terrorists to launch the 911 attacks when we did barely anything to provoke it compared to our global occupation and targeted killing of today. Certainly there are no easy solutions, though we could just go back to arrogant racist profiling policies of our past and just bar anyone coming into our country from those parts of the world where terrorists are known to be recruited, harbored, trained, equipped, and planning their attacks.
I thought that would be a two-for-one deal for a terrorist. The main strategy for Al Qaeda in Iraq was to bomb Sunni and Shiite Mosques to drive them into a civil war, or to just set off a car bomb anywhere where people gathered, such as a crowded street market with the goal to kill as many random civilians as possible to show that the US invaders could not build a safe and happy democracy in Iraq.
Being able to lure drone strikes into the same crowds gives the terrorists the opportunity to kill and maime hundreds while pinning the USA as the direct aggressor, rather than just being powerless to stop it. Of course, the war has dragged on long enough that now nobody cares anymore when a single terrorist is killed and 20 innocent children along with him.
As far as probabilities are concerned, meteor and asteroid impacts are actually quite common. A large asteroid or commet hit Siberia just 100 years ago and caused devastation for hundreds of square miles. Such an impact in a densely populated region would wipe out thousands or millions of people. As far as odds are concerned we are due for another large collision. As a society we have already committed ourselves to exploring space and making use of satellites for practical needs, why not this as well? We have Tsunami advanced detection and warning systems, so why not have the same for asteroids? Back when the first Tsunami warning systems were installed your argument could have been just as valid then, since Tsunamis don't happen every day, and warning systems can't always guarantee people can get to safe heights in time (ie the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami). And of all the known Tsunamis that have wiped out entire cities and coastlines and tens of thousands of people throughout human history, how many of these might have been caused by a large meteor hitting the ocean?
Now, suppose this satellite is just the beginning of a permanent program that monitors near earth space for signs of approaching objects. Say it continues for 200 years from now with no potential collisions detected, but then it catches one, gives enough warning to either take action on the object or evacuate the area that will be affected by the collision. Suppose hundreds of thousands of lives are saved? Is it then worth the cost? And I would point out that if the money isn't going into this program it would go to some other program, like the effect of low gravity on milk production in goats, or some other nonsense. Even with a meteor warning system scientists would still use the satellite to study and learn, which may become very useful down the road. It's certainly no worse than the money being thrown at the CERN program.
Most of the ones I see these days are for hunting deer. So teenagers can hunt real deer with real rifles, but doing the same thing simulated on a video screen is going to turn them into mass murderers?
The NRA's new policy of blaming video games is only going to backfire on firearm manufacturers. Part of the alure of top selling firearms like the AR-15 is how cool you think you are as soon as you have one. Take away movies like Rambo and Scareface or video games like Call of Duty (which pays gun manufacturers royalties to depict the various makes and models), and the demand for AR-15s and AK-47s is sure to decline over time.
Hunting as a past time has been on the decline for several decades now, and without movies and video games only sporting enthusiasts from law enforcement and military backgrounds will have much serious interest in these sorts of weapons. The arms industry is going to have to go back into the business of stoking violence between nation states in order to keep their revenues and their stock values growing at a competitive pace.
Slashdot Mirror
"Basically corporations have yet another carte blanche legal basis to win a summary judgment against whoever they want for whatever reason."
There - fixed that for the OP.
Yes, anybody can sue anybody for any reason, but not everybody has a 90% chance of winning such suits case after case, often without even warranting a trial. Add this to unfounded RIAA infringment claims, traffic tickets from private companies (camera installers and operators), and medical bills from any random physician that sneaks into a patient's hospital room without their knowlegde, consent, or prior relationship to perform "services" (doctrine of implied consent).
Perhaps I care more about substance and important news than up to the minute reports of some nonsense that happens to be occurring right this minute. It's like when a good report on CNN is interrupted by a live aerial feed of high speed chase in some city hundreds of miles away. Chases happen and crimes are committed constantly in every city every moment - just because I can watch it live doesn't make the information valuable or usefull for me. Now, if it is in my city, then maybe, but I don't see too much point in watching the chase for 30 minutes. Point is, after reading or watching the news I should be just a little smarter after I'm done because of it. This is possible, but as for-profit institutions, the news tabloids cater to their entertainment needy audience, and I swear I lose a few tenths of a point in my IQ everything I watch or read that blather. Compare the reporting of CNN, FOX, ABC/NBC/CBS to NPR or PBS and you can see the difference. This goes for TV, web, or radio. Even better, try BBC International, or any news channel in almost any country outside of the USA, presuming you can understand the language.
Talk about hitting the nail on the head.
"Top Stories" from CNN right now (cc's straight from my RSS feed):
Former CNN news leader dies at 51 - 1 hour ago
Meet the Marines killed by that mortar - 2 hours ago
Sinkhole swallows family pond - 2 hours ago
Rattlesnake handler gets 12th bite - 2 hours ago
Pornography pioneer passes - 1 hour ago
As you can see from the list above, Americans don't want NEWS - they want to be entertained.
Or we could hit two birds with one stone. Instead of policy makers in cities deciding upon urban planning methods that are centered around the automobile and escaping the cost of maintaining the inner city in favor of new developments in the suburbs/exurbs (mass produced housing subdivisions with miles to drive to big-box strip malls and parking lots), how about those same officials plan urban areas around pedestrians? Losen zoning restrictions on urban agriculture, such as responsibly raised organic poultry and other small livestock, as well as areas for community gardens. Lower barriers to small businesses and encourage the emergence of low rent open-air markets, or maybe even set up such markets in under-utilized commercial buildings, so people can easily sell their own produce, crafts, and even used goods (like a garage sale, but with much less waste and better economic prospects for both buyers and sellers).
Skyscrapers won't necessarily be more efficient since elevators require a lot of energy, but two- to four-story buildings with stairs and more walkable streets could help against our obesity epidemic. Architecture should be based around passive solar principles instead of massive HVAC systems. Keep windows on the south face for cold climate cities, and on the north for hot climates (in the Northern hemisphere). Choose materials for their properties of reflecting, insulating, or absorbing heat rather than picking the cheapest material per square foot or materials that are more stylish or fashionable. Give tax cuts to builders who build with locally quarried stone rather than encouraging builders to import polished granite and marble from far away places. This is just a start and only one perspective. There are other approaches that can make a real difference to make life more affordable, sustainable, energy efficient without resorting to mud huts, though mud (adobe) has some excellent qualities for sustainable single family dwellings without having to be stuck with primitive living conditions. The building codes (which have a national or global focus) and permitting processes need to be reformed to allow more flexibility for sustainable building techniques that are appropriate for the local area.
Affordable cities are good for a population recovering from a severe recession, while building sustainable structures would provide much needed jobs, as sustainable techniques involves less expense in the manufacture and transport of materials and more expense in the labor required to build and maintain structures.
Except that the "gains" are not real gains, but rather slowing down the expected increase in carbon emissions as our population and economy grows.
All I can say is WOW! Does anybody remember the times when the industrial west was importing cheap raw materials from third world countries to support its manufacturing?
Exactly. The world has changed. Wealthy business owners and the wealthy executives who manage those businesses have figured out that they really don't need the American middle class or working class to sustain their wealth creating machine. In America manufacturers had to comply with a mountain of OHSA regulations, environmental regulations, labor laws that affect how many hours you can drive a worker, and how much you can pay them. Then they figured out that if they moved their operations to totalitarian states there were much fewer environmental, safety, and labors regulations to get in the way, and they got a tax break on the profits they keep locked safely away in offshore havens. They are now learning that they can create their new customer base in the same countries where the work is being done. With the manufacturing demand for materials and energy, it is no surprise that our coal resources are being shipped offshore along with the jobs and welfare of the American people.
But even though our nation's wealth has been stripped and the American workforce has been reduced to servanthood (ie "the service economy"), and we gradually regress to an agrarian economy, we are told that the cause of our problems is the sense of entitlement to things like food stamps to displaced workers and their families (which is often not enough to prevent malnurishment), medicaid for children and their parents (childless adults often do not qualify in some states even if they are critically ill with a curable disease), or the social security that only workers and middle class pay for (earnings over $100k are not subject to any social security taxes). The only solution put forward by the political groups sponsored by wealthy business owners is to lower taxes on the rich - with the presumption that once the rich have more money they will hire American workers and spend money to buy American products. But the world has changed, and only a nation of fools would believe that a change in tax policy is going to magically encourage the wealthy to hire Americans or buy American products. With more money in their pockets the rich will create more jobs in totalitarian countries on the other side of the world and buy more products made in those countries. If the whole planet has to choke in coal ashes from the under-regulated toxic manufacturing processes or greenhouse gases from the diesel fuel used to move the massive amount of goods traveling enormous distances, then that is OK as long as the rich get richer.
I dont know... there seems to be evidence that they're stupider.
Just another of the many symptons of windfarm sickness. Stay away from windfarms before you too become stupid! Oh, no, I think I'm getting sick too now. Yes, I'm also beginning...to...feel...STUPID! AH!!!
But then fewer people would be running the red lights, which would reduce the revenue to the city and the camera operators.
I'm showing my nerdiness here, but that reminds me of the time when the crew of the Enterprise discovered an ancient space vessel. Bodies were found aboard, and Piccard observed that they had apparently died in their sleep, and Lt. Worf commented "what a terrible way to die!"
Even still, government does not and should not get involved in "trivial matters". If a private citizen doesn't get a refund he's entitled to, if he calls 911, police will arrive at McDonald's and arrest the citizen for making a nuissance call to 911.
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29498350/
But if an off-duty law enforcment officer makes a mistake, believing he gave a $20 bill to a cashier when he only gave a $10, it is OK for him to threaten the cashier with arrest and assault the cashier with pepper spray if the cashier (a legal minor) asks the officer to wait 10 minutes for her mother to arrive and for her shift to end so they could sort it out.
http://www.enquirer.com/editions/2000/03/12/loc_court_orders_fired.html
(The entire incident was recorded on CCTV, and can be viewed here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY9wbP_zZkI )
The key point is that the government will take up those matters that are of interest to the government (and the business contributors to past, present, and future political campaigns - but not ordinary citizens since such citizens rarely have the funds and influence to provide critical support during an election).
Yes, but if he cuts back on the alcohol he could be suspectible to wasp larvae! Consider the risks carefully before you make your decision.
As for all those carcinogens, they are only dangerous when you consume them in California. Much safer to consume them here in Texas. And nothing keeps the bugs away better than asbestos, plutonium and gamma rays.
So that's why mosquitos don't bite you. I thought it was out of respect.
...that Chinese are just as delicate as Californians. Here in Texas we have oil running through our veins, we breathe ozone recreationally, and we consider lead and mercury "performance enhancing substances". It's just one reason why we can still buy all sorts of products known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects, brain injury, and all sorts of ailments that we aren't concerned about much here.
All I said was "due". There is a difference beween stating we are due for a probabilistic event and saying that any one day the odds are greater than the previous (ie observing that after getting three tails in a row we are "due" for a heads in a coin toss, though it is known that the odds for each toss are always 50% and you could have 50 turns and still have tails, though having 50 tails in a row would be an unlikely occurrence). You may be guilty of the reverse gambler's fallacy if you think that we are safe just because it's been thousands of years since the last major event.
The threshold for an impact that causes widespread global mortality and threatens civilization almost certainly lies between about 0.5 and 5 km diameter, perhaps near 2 km. The energy released by an impactor depends on diameter, density, velocity, and angle. Impacts of objects this large occur from one to several times per million years, but the last known climate changing collision was believed to have hit Argentina 3.3 million years ago. So the last known incidence of this magnitude was 3.3 million years ago, but statistically we should have been hit two or three times since then. Either we just haven't uncovered the evidence of these past impacts or they haven't happened yet. If they haven't happened yet, then we are due for a collision - pure and simple. It doesn't mean it will happen this decade, our lifetime, or even in the next 3 million years. But for all of humanity to proceed as though there were no risk from asteroids would be arrogant.
Objects with a diameter of roughly 50 m (164 ft) strike Earth approximately once every thousand years, producing explosions comparable to the one known to have detonated roughly 8.5 kilometers (28,000 ft) above Tunguska in 1908. Even when we predict that a near earth asteroid will pass close but not hit us we are not out of danger. In 1490 about 10,000 people died from meteors in the Chinese city of Ch'ing-yang when an asteroid broke overhead.
But consider this: In 2000 a computer analysis of asteroid impacts showed an annual risk of a fatal impact at one in 90, and concluded that an average of 120,000 people died per event. A small section of my property lies on a 100 year flood plain. Even though there is only 1% chance in any year that the area will flood, and theoretical the area could flood several times within 100 years or not at all in 200 years, insurance companies and mortgage companies won't talk to me about financing and insuring a structure on that area, even though the structure itself will have been paid off in less than 10 years and will likely depreciate to scrap value over the course of several decades. If the odds of flooding on my property are great enough of a concern to scare off finance companies that can diversify their portfolio, then why aren't we more concerned about asteroids that can obliterate the only asset humans can call home? If you lose all your property in a flood but survive, you can declare bankruptcy and start over. Not so easy if you lose a whole metropolitan region and their populations from a single meteor.
And while we may hate to base our decisions on a computer projection -- especially one done by a newcomer to the field of impact studies -- when it comes to asteroidal impact, there's little else to go on. Only about 3 percent of impacts leave a crater, and even when a crater does form, it is eventually buried by sediment, as happened to the Yucatan crater, or by the shifting of tectonic plates. On Earth, crater-counting can cause a false sense of security.
Actually, some 100 bodies have already been discovered on orbits which take them so close to the Earth's orbit, that they could hit in the far distant future. This is because the orbits of these bodies change slowly with time. Although their orbits do not intersect Earth's orbit at present, they could hit in a few thousand years or more. I would like to think that it is possible that the level of development our civilization has achieved will continue wi
You can also wait until temperatures are hovering at around 98F to venture out to do things that would normally put you on the target list. Still need conventional camo and stealthy maneuvers.
Or you can leave. Not always easy, but half the Muslim world seems to be migrating away from war zones to live in Europe, Canada, and even the USA.
Except the presence of such a shelter will be considered defacto proof that you too are in fact a terrorist as well.
So, is the solution is to grin and bear it? Drones mean we don't have to invade Pakistan, which we certainly don't want to do given that they are a nuclear power - unlike Iraq they actually DO have weapons of mass destruction. Drones also mean that US pilots won't get shot down or crash to be captured by Al Qaeda or create an embarrassing situation if Pakistani politicians debate whether to return the pilot to the Americans or try him under a number of laws, from illegal immigration to espionage to murder.
Ideally, the US would be raising a group of locals to do the fighting for us, but this would undermine Pakistani authority and turn them hostile toward us - we are already pushing the limits as far as keeping them cooperating with us as it is.
We could go with the grin-and-bear-it approach like we did under Reagan, Bush Sr., Clinton, but that only empowered terrorists to launch the 911 attacks when we did barely anything to provoke it compared to our global occupation and targeted killing of today. Certainly there are no easy solutions, though we could just go back to arrogant racist profiling policies of our past and just bar anyone coming into our country from those parts of the world where terrorists are known to be recruited, harbored, trained, equipped, and planning their attacks.
I thought that would be a two-for-one deal for a terrorist. The main strategy for Al Qaeda in Iraq was to bomb Sunni and Shiite Mosques to drive them into a civil war, or to just set off a car bomb anywhere where people gathered, such as a crowded street market with the goal to kill as many random civilians as possible to show that the US invaders could not build a safe and happy democracy in Iraq.
Being able to lure drone strikes into the same crowds gives the terrorists the opportunity to kill and maime hundreds while pinning the USA as the direct aggressor, rather than just being powerless to stop it. Of course, the war has dragged on long enough that now nobody cares anymore when a single terrorist is killed and 20 innocent children along with him.
As far as probabilities are concerned, meteor and asteroid impacts are actually quite common. A large asteroid or commet hit Siberia just 100 years ago and caused devastation for hundreds of square miles. Such an impact in a densely populated region would wipe out thousands or millions of people. As far as odds are concerned we are due for another large collision. As a society we have already committed ourselves to exploring space and making use of satellites for practical needs, why not this as well? We have Tsunami advanced detection and warning systems, so why not have the same for asteroids? Back when the first Tsunami warning systems were installed your argument could have been just as valid then, since Tsunamis don't happen every day, and warning systems can't always guarantee people can get to safe heights in time (ie the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami). And of all the known Tsunamis that have wiped out entire cities and coastlines and tens of thousands of people throughout human history, how many of these might have been caused by a large meteor hitting the ocean?
Now, suppose this satellite is just the beginning of a permanent program that monitors near earth space for signs of approaching objects. Say it continues for 200 years from now with no potential collisions detected, but then it catches one, gives enough warning to either take action on the object or evacuate the area that will be affected by the collision. Suppose hundreds of thousands of lives are saved? Is it then worth the cost? And I would point out that if the money isn't going into this program it would go to some other program, like the effect of low gravity on milk production in goats, or some other nonsense. Even with a meteor warning system scientists would still use the satellite to study and learn, which may become very useful down the road. It's certainly no worse than the money being thrown at the CERN program.
Most of the ones I see these days are for hunting deer. So teenagers can hunt real deer with real rifles, but doing the same thing simulated on a video screen is going to turn them into mass murderers?
The NRA's new policy of blaming video games is only going to backfire on firearm manufacturers. Part of the alure of top selling firearms like the AR-15 is how cool you think you are as soon as you have one. Take away movies like Rambo and Scareface or video games like Call of Duty (which pays gun manufacturers royalties to depict the various makes and models), and the demand for AR-15s and AK-47s is sure to decline over time.
Hunting as a past time has been on the decline for several decades now, and without movies and video games only sporting enthusiasts from law enforcement and military backgrounds will have much serious interest in these sorts of weapons. The arms industry is going to have to go back into the business of stoking violence between nation states in order to keep their revenues and their stock values growing at a competitive pace.
I'd say these politicians are jumping the gun, but they've probably introduced a bill to ban doing that as well.
Love it!