yeah, you all know they can't use the startrek transporter
Well, you can, but the first time they tried it the warhead came back inside out, and the second time it came back with a goatee. The third time there were just two identical warheads sitting on the pad, both claiming to be the original. That's about when they gave up and went for trucks.
This is why nukes were named 'peacemakers', it was what they did.
So it turns out Mao was just a good student of American foreign policy: political power does flow from the barrel of a gun^Watomic warhead!
Or perhaps all those gun barrels pointed at the world created a wave of fear and hatred of the US and shunted the problem into the future.
I'd say that because of nuclear weapons, we haven't had another war with astronomical body count.
Up til 2009, you could also have said that complex financial instruments had prevented a worldwide financial crash. The system worked just fine, until it didn't. Up til 1914, you could have said that the intricate web of mutual European treaties prevented a huge war. Until the day it didn't. And then the existence of these systems made the problem worse.
I can't help but think that, fifty years of bizarro deterrence logic aside, we are actually objectively less safe for having these devices. If we'd rather that our cities weren't irradiated and burned to a cinder, perhaps t would be simpler to not build devices designed to irradiate them and burn them to a cinder.
Our mentality was shaped by the threat of nuclear war, so we don't even consider the war between major powers.
On the contrary, those of us who grew up in the 1980s lived with the constant expectation of imminent all-out war between major powers - it's just that we thought we'd get both a major-power war and a nuclear war. Rational evaluation of the probably outcome led to a constant sinking sense of grim fatalism and cynicism. In the 1990s, when the Cold War powers stepped back from the brink a little, and us 80s kids stepped into our fifteen minutes of media spotlight, that fear and cynicism manifested in the darkness of 90s media. The conspiracy paranoia chic of The X-Files. The despair of Nirvana. Pre-millennial angst. The roots of our modern malaise with government are buried in the atomic bunkers. We know that our grandparents set out quite sanely to end the world if they didn't get their fleeting political way. That knowledge, that we're heirs to cheerful automated mass murder, burns at us even as we try our best to ignore it.
And thing is, having a nuclear standoff didn't prevent all the brushfire wars: millions dead in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq/Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq again, Iraq a third time, Afghanistan again, huge chunks of Africa...
It's hard to say that we're better off for having a proud and determined strategy to cold-bloodedly massacre millions of civilians. It's just that we generally choose to ignore the radioactive Godzilla in the living room - especially now that the end of the world du jour is climate change and economic crash and not The Nuclear Button. But the beast is still there.
The US convoys are better protected than suggested by this article.
Um, that's exactly what the article says, if you actually read it.
A driver has the ability to disable the truck so it can't be moved or opened, and the truck is designed to defend itself, OST officials claim. How so remains unclear, though its parent agency, the DOE, contracted in 2005 with an Australian weapons company called Metal Storm to develop a robotic 40-millimeter gun that could "distribute large quantities of ammunition over a large area in an extremely short time frame."
It has happened before, it will happen again.
That's certainly one explanation for the asteroid belt where there ought to be a planet, and why Venus is greenhoused...
But... But... Where do you put the sharks?
Inside cute li'l spacesuits, of course.
So we don't like these things. We don't want them to have to exist, but they do. A
Yes, we really don't like these things. We don't like them so much that by some unexplainable mysterious accident of fate, sixty years worth of research and infrastructure devoted entirely to incinerating cities full of civilians just... somehow happened. It was the darnedest thing. One day, out of the blue, here was Enrico Fermi wondering what the heck this strange alien contraption was that had materialised in his squash court, the next a bunch of German V2 scientists just sort of wandered into Texas in a daze.
Anyhoo, long story, here we are with a couple of hundred silos full of flaming toxic megadeath, which we accidentally ordered instead of noodles! Hoo boy, there were some red faces in the Pentagon when that got found out, I tell you! Goes right against our principles to use 'em, of course. Always has. Um. No, we're not going to turn them off. Why? Weeell.... see now, if we *had* them but didn't *use* them, see, that would make us even better people, wouldn't it, than *not* having them and *wanting* to use them? See? That's logic!
It still takes forever to "Rebuild the Font Cache".
What exactly is VLC doing when it does this?
It's actually reticulating the splines.
"End users shouldn't know what a "codec" is, they should double-click a file and see it play, which is what VLC is all about."
This statement is what's made all the headaches of computers happen.
People using computers, especially online, should be required to pass a competency test and basic knowledge test.
Well, sort of. What's made codecs an especially thorny hassle on both Windows and Mac has been the operating system's staunch absolute refusal to admit that they exist, and to give the user any kind of relevant feedback whatsoever, combined with both companies' equally staunch refusal to allow codecs to be distributed freely.
For example, right-click on a
Codecs could be sensible, if they were treated just like programs, file extensions and fonts: things you could easily tell existed, and if they had a neat control panel somewhere showing what was and wasn't installed. But for inexplicable reasons, all the major OS manufacturers seem to have conspired to make codecs both invisible, and yet sold as commercial extensions that you can't just assume are there. Bizarre.
Prepare for tomorrow -- get ready. -- Edith Keeler, "The City On the Edge of Forever", stardate unknown