dorbie

Are you sure you're not confusing U-238 with plutonium, the most toxic element out there? Many of your stated claims are pegging my BS detector: 70% of servicemen disabled, and sexually transmitted radiation poisoning in particular. Of course U-238 decays into Plutonium so you get there in the end but it takes a few billion years unless you have a fast breeder reactor in your belly. Edit: oops my bad, looks like it doesn't, there's a long decay chain that looks like a shopping list of the strange and exotic from 238 but no Pu. Dunno where I saw that (ah I was confusing fission products, bad memory, fast breeder ref was right though). Interesting reading about unenriched Uranium and it's decay. Interesting stuff, heres the DU decay isotope ratios(can't be ratios actually, it must be normalized somehow), note the horizontal scale: http://www.antenna.nl/wise/uranium/img/actdu.gif

MAD works unless the other guy is mad.

The poll was overplayed. "values" covers a lot of nebulous and even conflicting issues (the pledge, character, abortion, prayer in school, tits on TV, secularism, etc.), but something like "security" wasn't listed but was broken down into several issues that appeared lower. It was also only top on the list for 20% who also listed other issues if memory serves, not exactly decisive. It's a typical media poll, i.e. close to worthless but good for headlines. Hey you all saw the debates and had the opportunity to give a damn about NK, and the missile shield, it was covered and was actually one of the biggest differences between the candidates. Most other debate issues boiled down to timid posturing about doing a better job.

First a high with the Maginot line and now this low. If 100 jumpers jump with cypresses and don't pull and only 90 of them work was the investment justified? Would you also say we shouldn't armor HMMWVs in Iraq because no armor is 100% effective. I cannot believe that anyone is arguing that a shield that is not 100% effective is useless. I'm risking an aneurism trying to comprehend the though process that would lead to that kind of claim and you actually try to defend it with a flawed analogy. You're actually arguing that if a missile shield can't stop all the missiles then you'd rather have no shield and let them all through. Well good luck with that thinking mate. I have no response adequate for the situation. I'm dumfounded.

So, who has all the missiles that this shield is supposed to defend us from? North Korea, et.al. please pay attention. Get real. You're telling me we're going to implement a missile shield costing hundreds of bilions of dollars to address the minor and unlikely threat of N. Korea launching one of the handful of missiles with conventional warheads at us? NK have several nuclear warheads and are working on more, off and on depending on their mood. This is not disputed by anyone, unless you're volunteering to be the first. You should probably argue the issue with NK since they're pretty adamant about it.

Perhaps you're right. But then again, on a system of this sort, wouldn't the tracking system be the number one priority? I would certainly hope so. That would be my design process... The system can't work. It isn't pessimism, it's science. That's not science, it's opinion. Scientifically it can clearly work. The engineering is extremely challenging. Yes but it takes infrastructure. I said design, but in fact the design was done, it wasn't built. It has since been built and is being built and tested but it's worth testing a kill vehicle to see if you can hit a bullet with a bullet. When you know where the bullet is.

The thing is, and there is really no getting aroung this, if a missile defense system is implemented, it has to work 100% of the time. A 99.9% success rate translates to sudden death for a lot of people if a 1000 missile volley comes our way. That's flawed thinking. If a missile volley comes at us (it's not designed for 1000 missiles) then if it's even partially successful it has been justified. Arguing otherwise is to say we shouldn't build it if it can't be 100% successful, we should just let *all* the ICBMs hit us. To me that makes no sense. Sure 100% success would be nice but it's impossible, but every Nuclear warhead intercepted is one less mushroom cloud over the USA should the worst happen.

So, who has all the missiles that this shield is supposed to defend us from? North Korea, et.al. please pay attention.

What's that? Exit polls showed that the reason Bush was re-elected was based on "Character" not issues. I thought it was "values", make up your mind.

This is typical of the kind of unfortunate view of the test process. They put a homing beacon on the target because they were testing the kill vehicle's capacity to hit the target under guidance. It doesn't mean it was rigged to hit, it means the real tracking system was not designed and they were testing other components and designed systems. Of course politically this get's exploited by opponents of the system as a rigged test of a flawed system which it absolutely wasn't. You need sophisticated infrastructure to get the guidance system working on this system. Testing kill vehicle concepts before building all that crap makes a *lot* of sense. If it had missed you'd have a point. The Patriot Missile system says nothing about this systems capabilities, it's antiquated by comparrison and has been superceded by the vastly superior Arrow 2 systems over Israel anyway. The rationale behind cutting the commanche system was that it's primary role and theatre (killing Soviet tanks invading Europe) was gone, at least that's what I read. The program also had no intention of building any helicopters soon. With all their working prototypes I think the numbers looked like spending another $4 billion the following year for no extra systems built. All to face a threat that had been defeated.

Some proofs of concept take serious cash, numerous exampled exist. There is the early deployment of a limited system that's being pushed through that's slightly unusual but I suspect it's because there's a rapidly developing situation with NK and a limited system while the development is ongoing is one prudent option when you consider the potential consequences. It seems more like a political hot potato than a political football to me. It's high risk IMHO especially with highly publicised tests that could readily fail, they're *tests* afterall. Bush has backed this, he'll get slammed with every negative result or incident (an intentional shutdown is not a big deal) but he'll stick at it until the tests work IMHO. Saying it couldn't be made to work and putting it on the shelf for a later administration would have been the easy option.

I don't have a crystal ball, but I do see the effort NK is putting into building ICBMs that can reach the USA. I have considered the possibility of more primitive forms of delivery but they are slower and have their own flaws especially if we have human intel. The missile systems were mentioned in a presidential debate, Kerry said he'd scrap the program and hold bilateral talks with NK. Anyone who felt sufficiently strongly could have voted accordingly. It is afterall one of the most important issues facing the US. I suspect Bush will implement the agenda he was elected on, you can gripe about single issue referendums till the cows come home.

I don't think this is correct. The GPS uses the same single satellite constellation but can encrypt the transmitions and selectively degrade accuracy. I thing Reagan actually unlocked the full accuracy the military has for civilian use after the Ruskies shot down a wandering airliner. AFAIK DoD can return to degraded accuracy or full encryption and denial of service without denying themselves the use of their system, it was an integral part of the design of the system. I think they can do this selectively over specific theatres should they feel the need. P.S. I'm not familiar with the technical details but I suspect the accuracy is controlled by the selective encryption of clock precision, not by the denial of satellites or the use of separate systems.

Is that armor going to stop the North Korean missile before it reaches San Francisco? ? No, and neither is the so-called "Missile Shield" for reasons that have already been adequately explained. Your crystal ball of pessimism is in fine working order. A development system under test on a launch pad performs an automatic shutdown for reasons not yet known and you say it'll never work. Automatic shutdowns are there to save the vehicle for future tests if something is out of kilter. All that was lost is some time and a test target. The people have spoken, they want the administration to set this as a goal.

When I worked for Marconi I once delivered a missile sensor simulator for another division of Marconi. We did the 3D graphics for the sensor on an SGI and sent it through a "data cube" for convolutions, noise, temporal filtering and HUD symbology. Everything was written in C code with IrisGL. I had to add a Fortran wrapper for the C simulator interface (basically a struct with a bunch of data fields they could just dump values into) because the guy running the customer's lab was a Fortran fanatic. He actually hired a bunch of hot young programmers to write the simulation code and guess what, they were C & C++ experts and had to learn Fortran77 to do the job. This guy was clueless, I had a quick chat with him and he claimed there was nothing you could do in C that you couldn't do in Fortran but the reverse wasn't the case. I've forgotten almost everything I learned about Fortran, but I remember thinking it was awesome when I transitioned to it from Basic and then I discovered C and never looked back.

I can't give blood because I'm British. There's a rule in the US that if you spent > 3 months in the U.K. since 1980 then you're seen as a risk for vCJD (mad cow disease). Other countries have exclusions too. If you've spent 6 monthis in Europe then you're also considered a risk. Even in the UK now if you've *received* a blood donation since 1980 the health services won't accept donations from you. I guess they figure it's a compound risk.

No, the nearest galaxy to the Earth is the Milky Way, it's approximately 0 light years away. Here's an image looking towards the center of the Milky Way that make it recognizable as a big old dusty Galaxy with stars & dark matter etc. http://www.gco.org.au/astrophotographs/Milky%20Way.jpg The nearest Star (excluding our Sun) is Proxima Centauri at 4.22 light years away, and it's right next to Alpha Centauri A a star very similar to our Sun and considered a promising candidate for life.

I didn't say he did, I said others he runs with do, for example Hoagland and his attacks on NASA whe he publishes unfounded conjecture on Mars cities, in my opinion.

Reminds me of some sick photos I saw on the web once. A couple of geniuses had handed them in for development at the local Costco. The photos were of woman and her new boyfriend posing with various body parts of the woman's ex-boyfriend. They were quite cheerful about it in the photos smiling and joking with family fun gags like sticking the guy's severed foot in the mouth of the severed head that was sitting on the coffee table while mugging for the camera. They were arrested and sent away for a Loooong time. Yep peterson is a sicko but I've seen sicker. There are some frikin animals on two legs out there.

Is that armor going to stop the North Korean missile before it reaches San Francisco? Maybe we could all climb inside a HMMWV when the shockwave hits. Better yet we could fill a passenger jet with air marshalls, fly them up there and they could take pot shots at any warheads as it zipped past them. It's a contingency, think of it as a $multi-billion cypress for nuclear war. They can't make it work right now but one day it might and the USA has voted for a President who's said he'll try to. You wouldn't want him to break a promise would you?

The reason I mentioned the long half life is because once its in the water, that water is contaminated, forever. One millionth of a gram is not very damn much, and that is all it takes to be fatal, if inhaled or swallowed, or otherwise enters the body. So when you said "Arsenic isn't radioactive" you actually meant to imply that Arsenic stays around longer and is more dangerous? Trace amounts of a lot of stuff can kill you, but it does depend on the details. I'd need to see the toxicology info before I believed it. There's a lot of junk science on the anti-DU side of things, IMHO.

Well I haven't seen that paper but it sure ain't the radiation that kills you, but the radiation boogeyman is used to scare people.

People are omnivores, ... I thought that until I tried to eat raw hamburger like dogs and cats can. I think it's safe to believe, based upon our digestive systems from our teeth to our intestines that we are primary herbivoires. Maybe eat fish raw, but red meat and pork... naw....we die. I've eaten raw meat in the form of rare steak and lived to tell of it, infact it's very tasty, and I'm still alive. I'd never have tried raw fish and would have thought similar things as you do about meat until I tried sushi (sushi wasn't on the menu where I grew up in Scotland). It's also not unreasonable to thing that we may have adapted to all this cooked meat we eat. Evolution doesn't stop just because we're 'civilized'.

I did mine at Perris with Jim Wallace. He can usually do it same day, but it would probably help to give him some advanced warning. He charges $50 for the training with pool session or $20 each if you can get a friend or two to join you in the training. He has a spare harness and canopy at the ready and Perris has a pool. I liked the training with Jim, he's been on a lot of water jumps and had a lot of stories to tell first hand not just about procedures but general non obvious stuff that has gotten people killed on water jumps. His advice on the practicalities of various buoyancy devices & jump conditions was great and his approach is refreshingly pragmatic, born form hard earned experience.

Dunno about that particular stat, but I do know that Nuclear Munitions handlers and AWACS aircrew do have a irregularly high number of female babies than male babies... Odd... Nuclear munitions have all sorts of weird shit in them, including fast decaying isotopes like Tritium but even weirder secret sauce isotopes we're not supposed to know about. AWACS well you know what they do. None of that has real bearing on DU. It should be noted that the decay products of isotopes are important too or would be it the half life wasn't multiple billions of years. We should allso reflect that US weapons use of Uranium doesn't make DU, it separates uranium isotopes. The DU was always there just not depleted, it was always decaying emitting radiation and would still have been even it it was left alone.