Comment Re: I never understood the principle. (Score 1) 454
Vietnam was not a major war, then? Or the US not an industrialized nation?
Exactly. If you remember, Vietnam was a "police action".
Vietnam was not a major war, then? Or the US not an industrialized nation?
Exactly. If you remember, Vietnam was a "police action".
It's because chemical weapons are only effective against civilian populations. Any well trained military unit will be trained and equipped to deal with them. But it's a horrific way for dictators like assad and hussein to punish unruly subjects.
The US/British invasion of Iraq has, to date, caused well over 1 million civilian deaths - plus many more maimed, bereaved, rendered homeless, and expelled from their homes.
So was that because the Americans and the British used chemical weapons? Or did they accomplish it by other means? If the latter, what's the big deal about chemical weapons?
Biological warfare is just as horrible and indiscriminate as chemical weapons. So if you deliberately bomb the water supply and sewerage systems of a nation like Iraq, as well as its hospitals - after preventing the importation of most modern medical supplies for over a decade - you bring about a wave of infectious diseases that kills tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians, quite indiscriminately. But you cleverly manage to avoid the stigma of "using biological weapons". Clever. But horrible.
I said you cant commit an atrocity then act shocked when that atrocity is normalised. If Germany and Japan didn't want the bombing of cities done to them, then they needed to not do it to others first.
So, by your own standards, if the USA didn't want over a million of its own people killed, it needed to not do it to others first.
Unfortunately, it has. Repeatedly.
Just because somebody is an American and his government (that he may or may not have voted for) sponsors the murder of people in the Middle East it does not mean that this civilian is responsible for the atrocity committed by his government and deserves to die.
Please refer to any competent definition of "democracy". You will find that it means The People are sovereign. And sovereignty entails responsibility. Just as an absolute monarch is absolutely responsible for the actions of his government, the people of a democratic nation are responsible for the actions of their government. It doesn't matter which way you voted, or if you abstained. It doesn't even matter if you demonstrated against a given illegal act. Regardless, you are sovereign, jointly with all the other US citizens. And that means you are responsible.
If you don't think the actions of the present US government reflect the wishes of the US people, which explanation do you choose:
1. The USA is not a democracy.
2. The US people wish to gain the benefits of democracy without accepting its responsibilities.
Incidentally, the USA has been indulging in many acts of war in recent years. President Obama may have said that the USA was not involved in war when it aided the attacks on Libya; but legally speaking it was. Likewise when it killed civilians in Pakistan and Yemen with drones. If it launches a single cruise missile into Syria, then - wherever that missile strikes - the USA will have declared war on Syria. That gives Syria the right to strike back at the USA by any and all military means. As POTUS and his associates are wont to assert, "nothing is off the table". So the only thing standing between the USA and arbitrarily large explosions going off anywhere in its territory is the hope that its current enemy is too weak to fight back.
"Privacy's challenge must be heard by the Investigatory Powers Tribunal, which hears cases in secret and is under no obligation to explain or justify its verdicts."
Otherwise known as "The Court of Star Chamber".
All access is limited to a "Need to Know" basis. All of it. even lower classifications aren't available unless there is a Need to Know.
Two words: Gary McKinnon.
"All access is limited" is so ambiguous as to be almost meaningless. Do you mean "Actually no one, no matter how skilful and unscrupulous, can possibly gain access"? Or "Some bunch of military dimbulbs sitting around a table have decreed that access shall be limited"?
Don't most planes fly above the storms?
Not necessarily. Airliners in which I have flown commonly go no higher than 36,000 feet - occasionally perhaps 40,000 feet. The tops of thunderstorms often reach 55,000 feet and can be even higher. One extreme case reached about 70,000 feet. Moreover, it is necessary to fly well above the tops of the visible clouds, as bad things can happen up to a mile higher. Check out, for instance, http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/tech_ops/read.main/152684/
So pilots almost always opt to fly around storms instead.
If they do not carry dosimeters, why not?
It's an avoidable business expense. As most airlines are either bankrupt or teetering on the edge, they don't spend a red cent more than they absolutely have to.
You're going to need to define "catastrophic" inflation, because we certainly have paper money systems that are more than a century old and still working. The US dollar alone is 228 years old, and the Great British Pound is approaching 300 years old. Have they had inflation over time? Yes, in fact that's considered normal and healthy for a currency. Have they had periods of increased inflation, yes, but never so bad as to wipe out people's savings like with some other currencies (examples include the German Mark after WW1 and the Ruble after the fall of communism in the former Soviet Union).
The US dollar and the pound sterling have experienced what I would consider seriously harmful inflation. In the last 100 years, each of them has lost almost all its value. It's notoriously hard to arrive at a fair comparison, but if you stick to things like loaves of bread, bottles of wine, horses, clothes, houses, etc. one pound today is worth something like a penny in 1913 - a fall in value of about 99.6 percent. I consider that catastrophic for individuals, and over time for institutions too.
To zoom in on more recent time spans, since I got married in 1976 the value of the pound has fallen by at least 90 percent - a great deal more for some items. This is even worse for people on fixed incomes (such as pensioners) because current government policy is to reduce interests almost to zero. It was in fact Lenin who said, "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation"; yet one could suppose that was the policy of present-day democratic governments in the USA, UK, and many other Western nations.
Of course inflation appeals so much to rulers because it lets them borrow money and pay back only a fraction of it. The great majority of citizens have always remained blithely ignorant of inflation, or grossly underestimated its effects. They are aided in this by official government figures that also grossly underestimate inflation, by a variety of clever tricks.
"Neanderthals may not have been able to coordinate such a large social group as modern humans".
It is quite possible that modern humans are not able to coordinate as large social groups as they now have to. No system of government or economic management has yet been proven over a long enough period to engender confidence. For example, no system of paper money has ever lasted more than a century or so without undergoing catastrophic inflation. We are just about getting to the critical point - and it shows.
Neither have we been able to find a system of government that can handle billions of people fairly, safely, and sustainably. A visiting Martian would perhaps be puzzled by the complete absence of any attempt to research, let alone safeguard, the future security of the human race. Instead, everywhere we see businesspeople frantically enriching themselves while politicians plot their strategies to gain or retain power. Very few, if any, think more than five years ahead.
According to an old story, during Nixon's visit to China in 1972 someone asked Zhou Enlai what he thought were the consequences of the French Revolution. "Too early to say," he is supposed to have replied, thus giving a fine example of long-term thinking. It's now thought he was referring to the disturbances going on in France at the time, not in 1789, but it's still a nice story. Just so, it's far too early to tell whether modern man has really done much better than the Neanderthals. Indeed, we may turn out to have done much worse, if we pull much of our ecosystem down with us.
I just realized I never use Caps Lock anymore. I don't even know when was the last time I used it, but it was long ago.
Same here - intentionally anyway. Unfortunately, every now and then I discover that I've been using it unintentionally.
It's the main reason I occasionally consider learning to touch type...
So I guess Ada has its "community" of "dudes with crew cuts, clean shaven, and with pocket protectors working for Defense contractors", does Ada have any "street cred" with the academic "software theorem proof" or "software reliability" communities?
"The more I ponder the principles of language design, and the techniques that put them into practice, the more is my amazement at and admiration of ALGOL 60. Here is a language so far ahead of its time that it was not only an improvement on its predecessors but also on nearly all its successors".
- C.A.R. Hoare, "Hints on Programming Language Design", 1973
MS should not have to give users a choice in software.
If MS did not have a virtual monopoly in PC operating systems, it wouldn't matter very much. Since it does, however, its energetic and long-standing attempts to make the average, non-technical user forget that there are other browsers is culpable.
At one point in United States v. Microsoft, one of MS' highly-paid lawyers told the court with a straight face that IE was an organic part of the Windows operating system, and as such could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.
Simultaneously, I imagine, his colleagues were burning up the lines to Redmond warning the engineering managers to start work on *making* IE an organic part of the Windows operating system that could not be separated from Windows or replaced by another browser without serious damage.
But they made a lot of money in the past through this domination. Basically, you're saying they should more or less get away with it because it no longer matters.
Precisely! When United States v. Microsoft was decided in 2000, instead of breaking up the company or forcing it to publish its source code - as had widely been speculated - the DoJ was satisfied with Microsoft promising not to do it again.
Imagine if the accused in a murder trial were to propose such an outcome. "Don't punish me for this murder, and I promise I shan't do it again in future (at least I won't murder the same guy again)".
Netscape was *already dead*. Promising not to kill it again was a fairly easy commitment to make.
Elliptic paraboloids for sale.
