Posts by Matthew Poole
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to BenWilson,
Fuel Air bombs work in a way that is a mix of blast and chemical anti-personnel effects
Got a citation for that? The whole point of an FAB is that it combusts its entire payload resulting in a massive negative-pressure effect which results in barometric damage to structures and people. If they work properly there's nothing left behind from the weapon.
As for the rest, yes conventional weapons can be somewhat indiscriminate, but not over the same kind of uncontrollably large area as chemical weapons. Even cluster bombs have a discrete blast radius and dispersal area.
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It's disturbing that Syria is reported to have VX. If that's used it'll make the sarin attacks look like a family trip to Disneyland.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to BenWilson,
Chemical weapons are also utterly indiscriminate. Even aerial bombing has a clear destination and a limited blast radius. Chemical weapons, though, are play-things of the wind and environmental conditions, and they linger for hours, if not weeks. Toss in the slow death for people minimally exposed and they're describable only as pure evil.
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I’m in no doubt that the Syrian government has been using chemical weapons in populated areas
Or, at the least, the Syrian military has been, if what's reported about communications intercepts is accurate.
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Does NZ have Double Jeopardy laws?
We do:
No one who has been finally acquitted or convicted of, or pardoned for, an offence shall be tried or punished for it again. -
OnPoint: BTW, the NZ Police can use…, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
Chokers!
No sense of ambition, obviously!Oh, I have no doubt they're that ambitious, there are just minor physical laws which come into play.
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OnPoint: BTW, the NZ Police can use…, in reply to Colin Fleming,
I think that it’s likely that the NSA has a much higher data density than private organisations – Google, for example, has much more efficient data centres than most private organisations because they design everything themselves, and it’s reasonable to assume that the NSA does the same, but you’re right, you wouldn’t get four to six orders of magnitude there. Reading around a bit it seems like the yottabyte figure which was bandied around at the beginning was probably total signal data to be processed, not stored.
The NSA is still bound by basic laws of physics around heat production and cooling capability, no matter what they do, so reasonable deductions can be made by looking at how much cooling capacity they're providing. They're not known for producing breakthroughs in storage tech, either, so civilian knowledge remains applicable to their environment.
A yottabyte is 1,000 zettabytes, so a ludicrously large volume. The entirety of internet history is only estimated to be a zettabyte, and the annual internet data flow is still easily measured in exabytes. There's no way the Utah DC is being constructed to process something like six orders of magnitude more electronic data than is currently produced by the online world. -
Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to BenWilson,
the superpowers use their vetoes frequently in the UN
The average over the last decade is about two per year (from here), which isn't overly crazy. Mostly it's the US protecting Israel from the consequences of its criminal behaviour, though Russia and China have been knocking back resolutions on Syria a bit of late.
What they do do is threaten to use them, so things just don't come up for a vote, which also skews the numbers.
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Legal Beagle: The Police Investigation…, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
You know that the (acting) Head of the GCSB at the time of the interception lost his job, right?
There's no blood in that. No satisfaction of the commentariat's visceral desire for vengeance.
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Hard News: This time it's Syria, in reply to Chris Waugh,
The permanent members don’t seem to use their vetos terribly often. They seem to be more often held up as a threat, a kind of nuclear option to encourage negotiations to head in a more preferable direction. Even so, abstentions seem to happen far more often than vetos.
If they restricted their vetoes entirely to matters within their own borders it wouldn't be quite so objectionable; but they don't. Instead we're left with the Russians protecting Syria (currently) and the US protecting Israel (the majority of vetoes ever cast are the US protecting Israel). It's not stopping them going to war with each other, it's stopping everyone else from punishing their favourite client states.