John Cuthber

I don't think we are facing "an enemy" any more than we always were. There are people who want to get power over others and there have always been those who for whatever reasons do not like what they see in the West. There is nothing new about terrorism; 9/11 just marks the time they got really lucky. It's not the dawn of some new era, if the IRA had thought of it 30 years ago they could have done something similar. The Arab/Israeli conflict could have done it any time since the invention of the plane.

It just happens that the first ones to think of it were anti-American.

Since nothing has really changed (except, perhaps the US people's mindset) it's hard to justify any change in policy.

If you call the fight against these criminals a war then you glorify them.

The talk of whether or not this was a war stemmed from how the people at Gitmo were treated. The question was "Are they soldiers of an enemy with whom we are at war?" If so then treat them as prisoners of war.

OK that means lock them up until the war is over. If the war will never be over then you have a problem there.

My point of view is that some of them are innocent and should be sent home as soon as possible (yet we are discussing this 4 years on).Some of them are criminals (as it happens,they are that particular group of criminals called terrorists) and these people should be punnished.

In order to decide what group they are in they should be tried.

You keep pointing out that there are practical problems with trials. Fair enough, but have you not noticed that there are major problems with not having trials?

You keep making essentially this assertion

"One thing this isn't - a criminal justice exercise. If we approach this with a pre-9/11 mentality, we're going to lose more than 3,000 or so lives, a few towers and a chunk of the pentagon. We're going to lose a city and our liberty along with it sometime in the next 20 years." with no clear evidence in support. The only way to take out a city is with a nuke. You seem muddled- the US govt has lots of these; the terrorists have none. If Al Queada and their ilk had a city the US could possibly nuke it. It doesn't work the other way because AQ don't have the bomb.

OK there's a possibillity they could get it and I have no doubt they would if they could. They are well funded and they haven't got it yet which proves that getting the bomb is difficult.

It's fairly obvious to me that you can make it much harder by reducing the supply of enriched uranium.

The US's gold is still in the federal reserve in Fort Knox. More people are interested in gold than in uranium yet nobody has taken the gold.

It seems clear to me that it is possible to lock up the uranium in the same way.

For what it's worth, the Russian and Chinese governments' gold reserves are still in their vaults too so it looks like they can prevent theft of stuff if they want.

God knows what the so called war on terror has cost in cash terms (never mind human terms). Buying up the world's "loose" enriched uranium and locking it up would be cheaper. ( practically and politically, it might be easier to fund the Russian's uranium storage security than to buy their uranium)

OK there are still a couple of nuclear powers out there who might not want to play along and who can produce their own nukes but I don't see (e.g.) Pakistan or India selling a nuke to AQ because they know who would be held to blame if it were used.

If the US were to chose to do this they would be seen, by me at least, as helping to tidy up the plannet and getting rid of some nasty stuff.

Who knows; that might even get them some positive press across the world.

On the other side we could look at what the USA (with the UK's support) has done in response to 9/11.

Two reports in the news today both indicate that the "war on terror" has done more harm than good. It has provided fuel for the fires of radicalism and it has reduced (at least the UK's) abillity to act as a force for good in the world.

My best guess is that it was a coil of wire, perhaps with a ferrite core, connected to an amplifier.

Any change in the magnetic field would produce a voltage in the coil and if this were amplified and fed to a speaker you could hear it. As you say, there's no way you could hear the IR remote control signal directly, but the IR signal is pulsed in order to carry information to the TV or whatever. Those pulses happen a few times a second so you could hear that.

Also, while the IR would have no direct effect on a coil of wire, the current in the remote control would vary as the IR LEDS went on and off. This would produce a variable magnetic field.

I bet you are glad you didn't buy it now.

"I know that vinegar dissolves in benzene"

I'm pretty sure that something that is over 90% water will not dissolve in benzene.

Acetic acid will mix with benzene and the simple reason is "why not?". I think that it stays largely as dimers joined by H bonds, like the vapour, but I may be mistaken. There are no particularly strong bonds between benzene molecules so there's nothing to stop a pair of acetic acid molecules getting in there.

You could argue that the electron density of some excited state of a single carbon atom is more like graphite or diamond than the ground state but I think that would be pushing it.

Diamond is different from graphite because the atoms are arranged differently. You can't arrange just one atom.

BTW, DU isn't strong; they use it because it's dense.

Incidentally, the current definition of the metre (since 1983) means that the speed of light (in vacuo) is constant by definition.

http://www.bipm.fr/en/si/history-si/evolution_metre.html

Haezed You posed a question and I will try to answer it.

"Originally Posted by JohnB

Well you could try actually answering the damn question, that way other people don't have to guess. For the record, here they are again.

1.Who are you fighting?

2.How will you identify them?

3.How will you know it's over?

4.Who will sign the Armistice?

4 questions, can you provide 4 answers? "

To which Haezed, you replied

"Four questions can have a single answer. I've given that answer which acknowledges that you have asked difficult questions that help distinguish this from a prototypical "war." However, there are also similarities with a war even though we are not fighting a traditional nation state.

For this reason, I have repeatedly said that the US, as the primary leader in this fight, is struggling to develop new rules that will apply to this fight of the 21st century.

Why is this not an adequate answer? "

OK, I will try to explain.

Imagine this; I'm at the station trying to get a train to London. I don't know when the train is due and the information boards are not working (trust me that's not an unreasonable scenario).

I want to know if I have time to go and get a magazine and a coffee before I catch the train; I know the current time, but lack the information on the departure time of the train.

I ask somebody when the next train to London arrives and they tell me that it's due at 17:00.

Before I asked, I didn't know when the train was due. I asked a question and, because I got an answer, afterwards, I did know when the train was due.

That's what makes it an answer.

If I had asked someone and they had said "I don't know", "that's a very interesting question" or "wibble nuff nuff fishcakes!" this would have been a reply but, since it failed to convey the information I sought, it wouldn't have been an answer.

Do you understand the difference between a reply and an answer now?

I'm still waiting for infromation about what other people would have done in Mr Blair's place. While I'm asking; what would you have done if you had been trapped in an inflatable boat by hostile armed ships?

Unless you can actually come up with a better response than those who were in that situation, might I enquire as to your qualification to make derogatory comments about them or their country?

(And God knows it's pretty rare that I say Blair did a good job.)

There are serious problems with the steady state theory of the universe.

Have fun with the data and your course. BTW, here in the UK most degrees are 3 years long and which income group I fall into depends on the current sterling/ dollar exchange rate.

I think that, while the armed forces take the trouble to explain this to their personnel, they don't tell the BBC about it- perhaps they should.

Well the people are back home now and I have no doubts that they will tell us what happened. It will be interesting to see how the 2 sides are judged after the truth is known. Also, I'm also pretty sure that it is standing policy, if captured like that, to read out any cobblers they ask you to. In this case the "confessions" were in such flaky English it was obvious they were written by someone else. As I said earlier this stunt must have been for the domestic propaganda market.

Fundamentally, I have a simple question to ask. Would those who, like Bettina, disagreed with the way this was handled please tell us what they would have done in Mr Blair's place?

For example, Britain is a nuclear power so we could have nuked Tehran. Would that have been a better ploy?

"I realise this question

"The Taliban protected and supported terrorists - directly the ones responsible for 9/11. That's material support. I have no issues with that. Why do you?"

wasn't aimed at me but.

can I just point out that the Taliban didn't do a very good job of protecting the terrorists who were directly responsible for 9/11. Every one of them died in a plane crash.

Seriously, most of them were Saudis so blaming the Afghans is a bit dumb.

Are you serious? You don't think it would be dumb to automatically blame the Saudis without investigation because the hijackers were of that nationality? And you're judging America about due process??? "

Er, yes and no. I was joking about the idea that the Taliban had looked after the 9/11 bombers. That idea is still ironic.

Just a thought that you don't seem to have noticed.

Why do you think a bunch of Saudi blokes went to Afghanistan to get trained up as fighters for the cause?

If I wanted to set up a terrorist training camp I might think about Afghanistan as a venue. The rule of law there is more than a little suspect. I reckon that, provided I had cash, I could persuade one of the local warlords to use some of there space.

I certainly wouldn't want to do that in Saudia where a very repressive regime rules the place (that's not to say the Taliban are not repressive- just that they aren't as good at it. They have only been practicing since the Russians left. That Saudis have been at it for ages).

OK that's some sort of explanation for the training camps in Afghanistan.

Why are they full of Saudi people like the 9/11 bombers and OBL himself?

Could it possibly be that Saudia isn't a very nice place?

I gather it's just fine if, like Mr Bush, you are a rich oilman. They seem to have something in common with the Saudi royal family. Perhaps it's a shared sense of moral values when it comes to locking up troublemakers.

Unfortunately, if you happen to disagree with the system. you are in trouble.

Oh, BTW WRT this exchange;

"The International Community is pretty unanimous in their opinion, America disagrees (And probably at least half of the US citizens agree with the International Community) but it's the rest of the world who isn't "rational"? It's the rest of the planet FCS that's "making idiotic comments" and needs to grow up? I don't care who you are, that's funny right there.

Unless you are a lemming, there is no reason to believe that the majority is right about our system of justice, particularly if they do not show any evidence of understanding our system."

Er, no. The idea of valuing the opinion of the majority is called democracy.

Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like an answer to the 4 questions John B has put and also for any gainsayment of the 4 points he made about the practices and existence of Gitmo.

For the record, I accept that you have made a reply to those 4 questions; it was this

"This is the complex issue of our day. We have an ill defined enemy who does consider himself to be at war with the US and others. The President has determined that applying full civilian rights to such individuals will not be effective and I tend to agree. The US Supreme Court has weighed in and afforded the rights as evidenced by Hamden and I also tend to agree with that decision primarily because of your last three questions. This is not a typical war but I also tend to think it is more war than a criminal justice exericse."

Unfortunately, it doesn't actually answer the questions- Would you like another go? Also it's not the complex issue of our day; it's a very old problem. Here in the UK we had to deal with the IRA whose position was not that different from Al Q or any other terrorist group.

We tried internment (bloody fools that we were). It didn't work.

It won't work any better now and the reasons are essentially the points JohnB made.

I understand that racing greyhounds are trained to urinate in bowls so the urine can be tested for performance enhancing drugs.

Perhaps training the dog would be easier than sorting out the chemistry.

BTW, urea is a white crystaline odourless solid. The smell comes from products of bacterial degradation of urea and other things that are present.

"There is only one identity in the universe.

-I- what you are born with, an identity"

If there's only one identity then it doesn't make sense to talk of "an identity" because it implies another identity.

Also, I don't see how you can say there's only one identity; mine is different from my neighbour's.

Five pages of thread and I still haven't seen a good argument against simply treating these people as suspected criminals. Finding out if there's real evidence, punishing the guilty and releasing the innocent.

While the West keeps prisoners in this way it demeans us and lends support to the terrorists and those seking to recruit more young people to die for the cause.

As John B says, everyone else tries terrorists as criminals; it seems to work.

What's different about these people?

Insane Alien,

I have a photographic plate and some aluminium; would you like to swap it for a gamma camera? I can't seem to afford one.

I think you might do better to avoid double posting and to start a new thread for a new topic. Since you are new, I'll answer anyway but please don't do it again.

As it happens the first equation is ballanced.

There might be lots of uses for that reaction.

Heating copper in air leaves it covered with a layer of oxide. That layer can be removed by washing with dilute H2SO4 to give CuSO4 which dissolves.

I'm not sure, but I think CuO might exist naturally as a copper ore. If it does then you might want to extract the ore with dilute acid to recover the copper for processing.

Recently one of those so called enemy combatants was released without charge because there was no real evidence against him so I guess it's nice that nobody shot him; btw he was picked up on a business trip in Gambia so shooting him might have been a bit embarrassing.

Nobody paraded the inmates of Guantanamo bay which is why none of us has any recollection of the kneeling prisoners in bright orange jump suits.

I think the rest of the quote was something like this.

Suddenly, things like the homeland security act come into force and are accepted by the public as a "wartime necessity" (IIRC income tax was one of those too).

You milk it a little more by getting the West to show the pics of OBL making threatening remarks.

you play clips of leaders saying things out of context, and suddenly you have a whole lot more support. People tend to forget whether their enemy actually did anything wrong."

I didn't need to change much.

It's not that I condone terrorism; I've been too close to being a victim to do that. It's just that I also don't condone governments telling lies to their people about Saddam's WMD being 40 minutes from launching an attack. I don't condone restricting the freedoms of ordinary citizens of the US or UK in the name of a fake "war" on terror. I'm not saying that Iran's government is more ethical than mine, yours or anyone else's.

I don't see the point in ignoring the fact that the other guys have a point of view. They didn't get out of bed one day and start screaming "death to the West" because they are stupid. They do that because they see the West as an oppressor. OK, they have been galvanised into action by political leaders who are after power. Locking a few up without a trial didn't help the West there, but it's great propaganda for recruiting terrorists. Invading a country to get rid of a tyrant (who we put there in the first place) didn't help either. I can't help thinking it would have been better to get a broader international consensus there. As it stands it looks, at best, rather like trying to grab the oil; at worst it looks like cultural suppression.

You can hardly blame their political leaders for doing something with rather strong parallels with the behaviour of Messrs Bush and Blair, like taking random individuals as prisoners in order to bolster local support. After all- it worked.

I'm not trying to slam the West; just trying to see both sides. You might want to try that too.

That's a very good question.

I think the answer is that the ions in solution are hydrated and these hydrated ions are too big to go through the membrane pores.

I realise this question

"The taliban protected and supported terrorists - directly the ones responsible for 9/11. That's material support. I have no issues with that. Why do you?"

wasn't aimed at me but.

can I just point out that the Taliban didn't do a very good job of protecting the terrorists who were directly responsible for 9/11. Every one of them died in a plane crash.

Seriously, most of them were Saudis so blaming the Afghans is a bit dumb.

BTW, have you all forgotten about the other bloke who was recently freed- the one who also had no evidence against him and who was only freed as a result of the UK govt's pressure.

Whatever Hicks did or didn't do seems to be a bit lost in the world of propaganda.

What about

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bisher_Amin_Khalil_Al-Rawi#Release_negotiation

released, eventually because there really wasn't a case against him?

OK, I admit I know little about clay and nearly nothing about building. Also, I realise this may be a really dumb question but, is any clay a good thing to build houses on? It seems to me that , when it rains, it would go soggy.

Er?

"So why is it that a weak acid like HCLO4 can be made by its conjugate pairs H+ and CLO4- "

??

HClO4 is an exceptionally strong acid.

Good luck getting any animal experiments past an ethics committee.

Come to that, good luck getting hold of any radioisotopes.

You don't need a gamma camera; autoradiography will work quite nicely.

Betina I can agree with half of this "I don't see it that way. I see Iran as a bully and the UK caving in by apologizing for being in international waters under a U.N. mandate." There's no question they are being bullies but I don't think the UK has apologised at all for this (and, of course, nor should we).

Wherever they ship was, Iraq lost any plausibility when it first complained about the Brits being in Iran's waters. The location they gave was in Iraq's territory; our presence there may be questionable but it's not Iran's business to try to do anything about it. Since the Iranian forces didn't seem to know where they were...

BTW, does this

"You capture some British soilders, regardless if they actually did anything wrong. PArade them around and present them as an enemy threat. Suddenly, Iranians don't feel as safe. Moderates are pushed towards supporting the radicals out of fear. You milk it a little more by getting the West to make threatening remarks... you play clips of Western leaders saying things out of context, and suddenly you have a whole lot more support. People tend to forget whether their enemy actually did anything wrong."

remind anyone of gitmo?

I am not, nor have I ever been, someone who knew that man.