Posts by Keith T 617 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Jan 2007
As was noted by an earlier poster, Maggie Thatcher's theory is that having a nuclear bomb on both sides brings 40 years of peace.
So 40 years of peace in the middle east where Israel's nuke becomes a credible usable deterrent because its opposition has a nuke too. So Hamas has to listen. And Israel has to listen too.
As well, just because nuclear submarines cannot be tracked for long under water with currently unclassified technology does not mean that they will be untrackable in the 10 to 40 year period any new nuclear weapons will be deployed during.
We'll wake up one day, hear that China and the USA have gone to the next level of technology, and our nuclear submarines have lost their effectiveness as unstoppable deterrents against superpowers.
Meanwhile, nuclear weapons were never credible deterrents against terrorists.
We'd assume that an Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan had nukes, or was close to getting nukes, and if we could not economically afford to attack them with conventional weapons, use our nukes on them.
Of course by nuking them there would be no evidence that they had no nuclear program, so no national political leaders going down in history as war criminals as per the attack on Iraq.
"an unstoppable, unfindable nuclear hammer capable of shattering a nation in an afternoon," and sadly unusable because they cause so much wide spread devastation.
I do not believe for one minute that the UK would deploy nuclear weapons against the China, Russia, Pakistan, India or Israel that will exist in 10 years from now in retaliation for anything. Even if they attacked an ally, took our PM hostage during a state visit, or did to our children what employees of Vatican City did to our children, we would not see that as worth the price of a nuclear war.
It is even less likely that we'd use nuclear weapons against a non-state terrorist or pirate group.
I know it. You know it. Our enemies know it. Nuclear deterrence only works when the threat of use is credible, and our little island nation can't credibly make that threat.
It would be as if the UK spent huge amounts of money on biological and chemical warfare weapons in the years between WWI and WWII. A total waste because we are not prepared to actually deploy them under any circumstances.
On the other hand, spending money on nukes when "our boys" are fighting in Afghanistan, will not happen because our boys are supposed to be home by 2012.
So our boys will be home well before physical construction of any new nuclear submarines could begin. So taking money from our deployed troops to pay for nuclear subs isn't a choice we are being faced with.
The UK has access to much more international power through credible diplomacy and credible negotiations, through its strong relations with other nations of the world.
The USA, China and Russia can't compete there, because they do not have the recent track record of (relative) honesty and (relative) integrity.
As well, as the USA is finding out, money spent on weapons and fighting is money not available for education, industrial growth and culture (I mean national culture, not just arts).
Why should the UK fund the nuclear protection of Germany and Belgium, if the Germans and Belgians don't see a credible threat that nuclear protection could address?
Plus, the UK's land mass is too small for any foreigner to credibly think the UK would escalate a conflict to nuclear war. Yes, non-nuclear armed forces are far more expensive than nuclear armed forces, but non-nuclear armed forces are the only ones anyone believes we'd use.
Britain's nukes protect the UK by protecting front-line EU states.
Therefore the EU should participate in paying the costs of the UK's nuclear deterrent.
If other EU states, states much closer to Russia, China, Pakistan, India and Israel don't see any value in paying for the EU to have a nuclear deterrent, then there probably isn't any value. In which case we should not pay for a nuclear deterrent either, but instead rely on the USA, Israel and India to protect us.
How can you say with Trident nobody will touch us. We have Trident and they did.
As for there being only 3 wars in 50 years:
Anglo-Egyptian War of 1951-1952; Mau Mau Insurgency, 1952-1956; Cyprus Emergency 1955-1959; Suez/Sinai War 1956, Muscat and Oman Intervention 1957-1959; Jordan Intervention 1958; Indonesia Conflicts, 1960-1966; Ugandan Army Mutiny 1964; Aden Conflict, 1964-1967; The Ulster Troubles, 1969-?; Falklands War, 1982; Gulf War, 1991; Former Yugoslavia Peacemaking Operations; Afghanistan War, 2001-?; Iraq War, 2003-?; Cote d'Ivoire, 2004; Iran 200?-?.
Of course in some of those conflicts was us getting out of situations our upper classes had gotten us into during the profit making days of empire.
In none of those wars did nuclear weapons deter our enemies.
And our nukes don't stop other countries pushing us around diplomatically either. The USA, Russia and China know we'd never nuke them over a trade issue. Vatican City knows we wouldn't nuke them over child abuse. Canada knows we wouldn't nuke them over restrictions on beer imports or continuing seal hunts.
I sometimes loose mouse wheel functionality after browsing for an hour or so. Logitech MX mouse, up-to-date drivers, Windows XP and Windows 7.
But it comes back when I restart Firefox, so I've never submitted a bug report.
Adobe Reader isn't an operating system. It isn't doing anything horrendously complex.
So why does it have so many vulnerabilities?
The "halo effect" makes all Adobe products look bad in the eyes of corporate consumers, because shoddy quality control is not typically something isolated to just one department, but an enterprise wide issue.
In future, I predict there are going to be more and more of these narrowly distributed exploits used to penetrate companies and joint working groups for social, corporate and international espionage.
Keeping them narrowly distributed means they can be used for weeks, months or even years before they are discovered and forwarded to anti-virus companies.
In the future, I expect such exploits to be even more discrete and to affect a wider range of poorly tested (unchallenged) software.
So basically these electric cars will charge in a 3 minutes if plugged into a standard North American electric clothes dryer socket (30A 220V)?
Is that right?
That means refuelling installations will cost a few hundred dollars to build, versus a few hundred thousand dollars for gas/petrol stations.
Gas stations will become obsolete as convenience stores, motels, office buildings, etc. put in coin-operated refuelling points. Even with just a few customers a day, they'd recoup their investment in a year.
The current F18 is the Super Hornet, a half generation ahead of the original F18. It only entered service with the USN in 1999, and finally replaced the Tomcat in 2006.
I assume that is what LP was referring to.
The Royal Australian Airforce ordered some F/A 18E/F in 2007 and are only beginning to receive them now.
So they are not an obsolete by any means.
Yes, the shoe dragging the aircraft would be in a channel under the deck.
It is that channel under the deck where the linear drive electric catapult motor would be.
I imagine it has to be well shielded from the aircraft's avionics. That should be no problem.
Would Ellison see something wrong with firing an employee for knowingly making payments for work that was never done, or knowingly paying an employee or contractor for work that the employee or contractor never did? Not unless that employee is a CEO.
During his interviews with David Frost, Richard Nixon said, "Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal."
Would Ellison paraphrase it, "Well, when a CEO does it, that means that it is not illegal."
Being in Canada and knowing Canadian business ethics, a good chunk of Canadian "business people" would regard a $10,000 fine as a license to do business. There would be no feeling of shame. No feeling of guilt. A fine is nothing more than what you get for a parking offence. A regulatory issue, not a criminal one.
A month in jail would provide that feeling of shame and guilt, that greater society sees what they did as a crime.
Steven E. Dale, Isaac Benlolo, Kirk Mulveney, and Pearl Keslassy are likely thinking up new schemes to pursue through a new numbered company as we speak. They'll probably continue to seek their fortunes in the grey areas of the law and the black areas of morality.
In my experience, accidental deletions are the biggest cause of needing to do a restore.
Often the accidental deletions are not discovered for several months or even a year.
That Mosley and McAfee backups both replicate the accidental deletion, by automatically deleting the backup 30 days after the original file is deleted, is the biggest drawback of those products.
In North America we have extensive pre-hiring screening of candidates for police work for mental problems, precisely because psychopaths and some other mentally ill people seek out positions of power. Especially on the major forces it is truly extensive.
The problem is that some police become psychologically corrupted after hiring, they become sociopaths, people who display psychopathic behaviour due to their surroundings.
And the problem is a problem because they are not ejected from police forces once their co-workers discover their psychological corruption.
Once they start abusing power, police officers should be out-placed to non-police work. This should be done before it gets to the stage of criminal acts.
These people could live productive law abiding lives, in jobs that do NOT give them power over others.
you've got to remember that they have to deal with the lowest scum holes the country has to offer on a daily basis, at staff meetings.
Remember, when a police officer shelters a criminal colleague he is sheltering someone who has the power to show up at your doorstep at 3 AM and demand you hand your children over to him.
Also a problem here in Canada. The police here are well trained, but they just don't care that they are breaking the law.
And if they break the law because they lost their temper (a common cause for criminals of all kinds to break the law) their co-workers who are present cover up for them, become accomplices or accessories, and co-workers assigned to any investigation botch it, committing obstruction of justice.
And our judges and politicians do nothing, because they depend on police to protect them.
It seems to me freedom and democracy are doomed.
"these officers are quite prepared to take their chances, on the basis that the number of times they will be caught out by being recorded is likely to be few and far between"
Which is the typical thought process of non-police criminals as well.
Criminals should be treated as criminals, whether they are in or out of uniform.
If it means making arrests at the next staff meetings, so be it.
The real blasphemy is ignoring or advising against using God's gift of intelligence to us all individually.
The real blasphemy is believing in some words written by some person or persons, instead of believing in what "God" wrote in the world around us, instead of believing in direct observation.
Why make us read the whole thing when a quote will do for most of us:
"In my opinion, Apple's claim is not just marketing, it is actually quite accurate based on a 20/20 visual acuity.
"However it is also important to note that the maximum acuity of a healthy human eye is approximately 20/16 to 20/12, so it would be inaccurate to refer to 20/20 visual acuity as "perfect" vision (despite the popular belief). The significance of the 20/20 standard can be best thought of as the lower limit of the normal visual acuity."
And from there he goes on to waffle about how if Jobs had made a different claim, that different claim would be correct.
Not exactly impressive logic.
Young people just don't understand how reading glasses work. They blur your vision at distances, so you don't wear them all the time. You only wear them when planning to read.
Ask just about any person over age 50, cell phones are next to useless to us for anything but taking voice calls.
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