All terrorism is done by people..... so by your thinking, we should ban people
First, WHAT people believe is every bit as important as THAT they believe. There are a great many religions (particularly when you count sects/denominations) and of those VERY FEW have any tie to violence.
Second, some violence commonly blamed on religion (like the violence in Ireland) is not religious at all. The troubles in Ireland fall along religious lines BUT these are actually political lines that line-up with religious lines. To massively over-simplify: The Catholics tend to be for separation from the folks in London and the Protestants tend to want better relations with those folks in London (see King Henry VIII and the CoE for some of the context). AFAIK nobody has ever seen a member of the IRA screaming his disagreements over interpretations of the writings of the Apostle Paul as he fired his weapon and I doubt there have been any protestants there who shrieked about their disagreements with a papal decree while shooting at an IRA member....
When the state casts a suspicious eye upon somebody, it has an obligation to narrow the scope as much as possible..... and in the current era nearly all religious violence on the surface of the planet has been committed by members of one particular religion. Nobody should "ban" that religion (and indeed, thoughts and beliefs cannot ever be "banned" anyway) but it means that if any special scrutiny must be applied it should be to followers of that one faith..... and to the extent possible only to the smallest subset of those that is practical.
You are correct on your history of US school violence however.... a bomb not an "assault gun" and although I think you are correct that the perpetrator was Catholic (cannot recall and do not wish to google it) I do not recall that THAT was his motive.
... did not also publish the data from the thousands of documents the Obama administration is hiding (and that Atty Gen Holder is in contempt of congress for withholding from a lawful subpoena) about the thousands of assault weapons they transferred to Mexican drug gangs
"We the people" need AR-15s, big magazines, hollow-point rounds and body armor etc.... to defend ourselves from the criminal gangs that our own federal government has been supplying with crate-loads of "assault weapons". These are the same team-Obama chuckle-heads who are calling for "gun control" to take guns away from our law-abiding citizens. Some of those guns were used to shoot-up a school in Mexico..... Oddly: President Obama did not go on TV to cry over those school kids.... I guess there was no way to use it politically, particularly because HE was the supplier of the so-called "assault weapons"
Try READING what our founders actually WROTE! They wrote a LOT about this stuff... it was VERY important to them.
The founders of the nation wanted the people to have both rifles AND pistols (Washington himself made this point in writing) and they wanted those to be the EXACT military weapons that the government had. They did NOT define a "militia" as an organized uniform-wearing national-guard-type force that was under ANY form of government control (if it's controlled by the government it can hardly be expected to deter the government).... they defined the "militia" as ALL able-bodied competent adult men who were not consciencious objectors (and that's still actually US law... US military regs up until only a few decades ago called this the "inactive reserve" force. it might still be in there.... I have not looked lately).
Nobody on the pro-gun side is "cherry-picking" anything..... we are DEPENDING on the strict construction of the constitution and those original meanings you so clearly dislike. Unfortunately for people who "think" like you do, our founders were rather prolific writers and they were very thoughtful..... they left us with many volumes of writings about exactly what they thought and believed and WHY. There is nothing frivolous in the Constitution and none of the words are just accidental. They very specifically did NOT write the second amendment as: "For the security of the nation, the states shall maintain armed organized militias. The citizens may each have one basic rifle for hunting and one basic pistol for duels". The founders INTENDED that nobody would be able to tell the the so-called "gun nuts" what to do.... they established a clear chain-of-command for the Army and Navy (note: the Marines are part of the Navy, and the Air Force was formed as the "Army Air Corps" (and for benefit of Barack Obama, that's pronounced "core" not "corpse")) but did not establish ANY chain of command for the "militias" ( doing so would have meant ALL adult men were in the Presidential chain-of-command and we would have a police state). The true "Neanderthals" as you put it (and IF they exist), can only be the people like yourself who want to turn the calendar back to pre-Constitution days. It's shocking that we have produced a generation of people so poorly educated, so completely ignorant of history and political theory, and so completely devoid of the intellectual curiosity required to READ what's freely available that they "think" the sort of things you wrote AND believe themselves well-educated!
Sure, the firearms were simpler then, but so were all the other things, like the vehicles (ride a horse, ride or sail a boat, or ride in a horse-pulled cart).
If you actually read all the other stuff our founders wrote, you see that the 2nd amendment had nothing to do with hunting or recreation; they assumed anyfree people could obviously do those things. Their reasons for the 2nd amendment were:
1. To deter any foreign power from invading (because every adult male citizen would have a front-line military weapon and his own ammo supply) Note: the founders approved of women having guns, and although women participated in the revolutionary war, they simply did not presume women would be in any militia.
2. To remove any justification the federal government might have to keep a large "standing army" on US soil "to protect from invasion" (see point #1) where [a] a tyrannical leader might someday turn it against the population (as had happened in the past in "the old world") or [b] it would enable a leader to get us entangled in unnecessary foreign wars. (Bush could not have invaded Iraq if he had had no standing army because every competent, law-abiding adult American had an M-16, body armor, boxes of ammo etc instead of a big permanent army)
3. To deter the civil servants from oppressing the people. Consider: in a country with a king and an unarmed population, a tax collector could abuse a citizen knowing the citizen was powerless to push-back and the full might of the kingdom was behind him. That same tax collector facing an armed population will tend to restrain himself a bit and may even refuse to carry out some particularly tyrannical order because he knows that a cornered citizen might shoot back and that nothing his boss does will protect him from that personal blow-back. This is not to say that our founders wanted us shooting at government employees, but rather to say that they had lived under various royals and they saw value in the idea of self-restraint which the very knowledge of an armed populace would impose upon the minions of the government
All of these reasons for the 2nd amendment are undermined if you allow the government to control who has weapons, how many they have, what type they have, how much ammo they have, where they keep them, etc. (and that's why every tyrant tries to impose some or all of those things). The simple fact is that our founders made it very clear that they intended the citizens to have the front-line weapons (and the guns the Americans had in the revolutionary war were actually superior to the weapons of the British troops.... which meant that our founders wanted "the people" to have guns that were BETTER than the guns of the front-line troops of the best military on Earth.
If you insist that the founders only intended the citizens to have single-round muzzle-loaded flintlock rifles, then for the sake of consistency (and so the 2nd amendment can still fill its role) you must also insist that the government:
1. may have not have guns that are better than single-shot muzzle-loaded flintlocks
2. may not have body armor or modern medical aid
3. may not have radios, computers, satellites, etc
4. may not have any troop transport capability superior to horses or rowboats, etc
For the Constitution to work, the power must be balanced as it was designed to be..... and as the past few decades are demonstrating with ever-increasing clarity, our government is becoming increasingly bloated, expensive, inefficient and bullying as the power balance between the citizens and the politicians in DC gets further out of line. The entire POINT of the "right to bear arms" is that the citizens are SUPERIOR to, and in control of, the federal government and the CITIZENS are the ones with the power; in the U.S. the PEOPLE are sovereign. People who push the "huntin
There are some specific bold rules for kernel devs... and he broke one. And then he tried to blame other innocent parties for it. Finally, (though I do not recall if Linus mentioned it) it was all completely unnecessary! If the guy saw a big problem here (and if you read the entire thread, you might end-up thinking he had a good, or at least reasonable, point) he was about to commit a change that broke one of the big rules...... so the obvious thing to do was to contact others (including Linus perhaps) to float the idea; It was simply inappropriate to boldly move-forward with a code-checkin that broke other people's stuff.
As always (see: "Watergate", or "Bill Clinton") the cover-up attempt only made things worse
One of the things I have always liked about coding apps on Linux is that I've never actually had to code-around any buggy kernel behaviors.
hmmmm.... I guess I've been doing something wrong
Just admit it: AFTER you open a file or device and you are then using it, NOTHING you do to it should result in a returned error code of, in-effect, "file not found"... and if you ever DID see that you'd be mighty annoyed to have somebody claim it was all your fault. You'd probably note that as a "buggy behavior" that you'd have to code-around......... Oh, wait.......
Sorry, but computer users are a subset of the general population, and the ones who care at all about the actions/behaviors/attitudes of any of the developers of the software for those computers is a subset of that subset. Within that set, the vast majority have never even heard of (nor do they care about) any kernel mailing list nor do they care about e-mails that have nothing to do with them. They just want their systems to work and do the things they need them to do. Period.
I am NOT a Linus fan-boy, but the man was absolutely right here:
Linux suffers far more in the public view when it looks unstable or incomplete than it does from any other peripheral matters. Given that most of the developers of the code that sits on top of Linux are also unpaid volunteers, it's doubly-bad to make changes under their feet that keep breaking their code. Developers of good applications get very frustrated by unstable platforms where the rules keep changing, and the sort of change that Linus attacked here is just plain BAD. The fact that a kernel developer risked making a bunch of apps look bad (and without good justification) is a major problem and actually a symptom of a severe Linux-on-the-desktop problem: too many people making too many poorly-thought-out changes (often where not needed) while neglecting many of the things that are in serious need of fixing. Unfortunately, when everyone is a volunteer and working for free, it's hard to find competent people to do the un-popular grunt-work to fix many long-term usability issues - but there can be a surplus of people who will happily change lots of other stuff on a whim (because it's interesting to them, or because they think they've had a clever idea and they don't feel like "running it by" other people FIRST). Some might want to complain about Linus's tone here (which did no actual harm to anybody, but might have gotten the attention needed to avoid repetitions), but the real offensive act was by the guy who decided to break other peoples' stuff without consulting anybody else first; that's borderline narcissism.
KDE and Gnome are excellent examples of this general phenomenon: neither one became fully stable with all advertized functionality "just working" before both teams made major changes in the look-and-feel of their projects..... and then they repeated this idiocy! Sure, both Gnome and KDE are visually much more shiny baubles, but they are much more obnoxious to adapt to and use. They are still both loaded with confusing and/or redundant garbage, and they still lack some basic functionality that Windows (dating back to Win95 or possibly even Win3.11) had. This is dumb, and much-more deserving of attention than Linus's latest (and this time, at least) barrage.
An average user (not a geek) needs to be able to sit down at a Linux system and easily manage printers (add them, test them,use them, remove them - locally AND on the local network) manage files (find them, use them, edit them, copy them etc on the local machine AND the network) adjust things like the time and date and screensavers and power-management, manage network connectivity (config firewall, ping hosts, get MAC and IP numbers, etc) without a manual and without any hand-holding. This is what enables them to become happy with their primary use of their computers: getting installing and using the applications they need to do e-mail, web browsing, office tasks, etc which in-turn enables them to do the activities they actually care about. As long as any of this is a problem, most developers need to focus on these things before doing other less-necessary things.
If the guy Linus blasted is too "hurt" by this to go-on, then he was not worth having around. If, on the other hand, he was a productive "good guy" who just screwed-up, then this will improve him and he'll be even better in the future. People need to stop wringing their hands over the wrong stuff.... if the guy's an adult, he'll be just fine.
First, "Weapon of Mass Destruction" is a term-of-art, not a slogan. It specifically refers to a class of weapons designed so that a single device can wipe-out a large population - and the definition has always been: Nuclear, Biological or Chemical (NATO and US forces used to refer to this as "NBC warfare"). In the post-9/11 world, however, with new laws on terrorism, Orwellian politicians and activists of various stripes have all been calling anything they dislike "WMD"; the term is being watered-down by mis-use and de-valued just like the words "Holocaust" and "Racist".
Second, Nearly all firearms in the US are semi-automatic (technically even most revolvers are "semi-automatic" though the term is not usually stretched that far --- not yet). The fact is that most non-revolver pistols are every bit as "semi-automatic" as an AR-15 or an AK-47. Most civilians could not manage a completely manual firearm (not even a revolver), and the nation's founders never would have intended them to. The founders of the nation intended that the citizens would all be armed with front-line military weapons (both so that they could deter and repel and foreign invaders and also so they could deter and block any future American tyrant). George Washington specifically wrote that the citizens had a right to keep and bear both pistols and rifles and Jefferson (an inventor) was well-aware of automation, so the idea that guns would become automated would have been no surprise to him. The problem with firearms has NEVER been the inanimate object, just as neither alcohol nor cars are the cause of the annual 20,000+ drunk driving deaths. The problem in all these cases is the human being
All of the mass shootings in recent US history have involved [1] a border-line crazy person who had given previous warnings of extreme dysfunction and [2] a "gun-free zone" where the evil bastard could be confident that his targets were unarmed sheep ready for slaughter.
It's nearly comical to watch all the anti-gun activists go through various contortions to desperately avoid the facts in these arguments. The previous poster (like every pro-2nd-ammendment guy who tries to get a word in edge-wise with Piers Morgan) was correct on the FACTS; When a typical member of the public sees an AR-15 and hears the words "assault weapon" he thinks "machine gun"... this is by design and it's pure propaganda (actual machines guns have been illegal for decades). There has never actually been a gun term "assault weapon"... that's a synthetic propaganda term designed to convey impressions and distort debate, much like the words "hate speech", "homophobia", etc. It's also a fact that an AR-15 is less dangerous than many deer rifles (I have experience with both). The AR-15 might look "cool" (or menacing, depending on your political leanings) but it's real charm is simply that many Americans who have served in the military are comfortable/familiar with the overall design (which is solid and reliable), the rounds are common, and the thing looks intimidating to the sort of stupid thug one might want to deter with it. Nearly all other American weapons can fire rounds just as fast. If you have bought into the whole "assault weapon" thing, you have been manipulated; I prefer the U.S. Constitution including the 2nd amendment... which is what guarantees the other amendments.
BTW: The NRA is wrong: the answer is not to have armed guards everywhere (though they do have an interesting point that we guard all sorts of things we value, like money, with armed guards while refusing such guards for the kids of the non-rich). Our founders never imagined a nation with armed guards in uniforms at every building; they presumed every citizen would be armed as appropriate to protect himself, his family and his business and crime would be low without a ubiquitous display of guns because
I was based in San Diego, and once lived up near the San Onofre plant (had a good friend who worked there). I would have no worries having my family live right nearby in San Onofre (the neighboring community, for those not familiar with the area). First, the plant has a containment facility designed to handle a direct impact by an airliner or a worst-case meltdown, and also designed for SoCal earthquakes. Second, while I have MANY issues with the horrendous civilian oversight of nuclear activity in the US, my main complaint is that they are far too stringent on things that do not matter and not strict enough to make me happy on some things that do. Having said that, however, the record is that the civilian overseers in the US are sufficiently cautious that no American plant has ever killed anybody. Even three Mile Island where the operators completely screwed-up harmed precisely zero people. Unlike Chernobyl, we mandate adequate containment.
You are correct that the US Navy has an amazing track record with nuclear power. I used to have a buddy who was an engineering officer on a boomer, and he and his associates were sterling. I never cease to be amazed that the US Navy can take a bunch of 18 year-old kids from high school and 22 year old college kids and teach them to be competent, disciplined, and exacting..... and then put them in charge of nuclear reactors, jet aircraft, nuclear weapons, etc and have such results.
I have long thought that no nuclear plant in the US should be civilian... working in these plants ought to be a second career we offer to the best members of our nuclear navy when they choose to retire and want a stable family life at a fixed street address. Such people could not only be trusted to be fully-competent and willing to sacrifice to protect their fellow citizens, but also would be competent to defend the facility should that need ever arise.
Dude, stop the heavy drug use; your brain performance will improve slowly and you may even qualify to be a janitor someday
The civilian President of the U.S. (not the military) decided to drop the weapons on Japan (not an arbitrary target... the nation that attacked Pearl Harbor). Even the target cities were carefully selected. Each did have a large population (cities get bombed in "total war", ask the people of London or Dresden) but also had significant military-industrial assets. Tokyo was not targeted in part because although it would have been the city the American civilian population would most want destroyed (after years of fighting, and all the dead American soldiers and sailors) it was the location of the Japanese Emperor and government which were specifically not destroyed (contrary to your bizarre claims). There have been many revisionists who have tried to claim something else ended, or would have ended, the war (as part of an effort by anti-nuclear and/or anti-US agitators to de-legitimize the US actions) but the fact is that the US dropped a bomb on Hiroshima and demanded a surrender, did not get a surrender, dropped a bomb on Nagasaki, and got a surrender within days. It was a terrible choice and not one I'd want to have made, but there is a very real sense in which the Japanese brought it on themselves by almost the same method that Saddam Hussein brought-on his fate: by toying with a WMD program and with bluffs. First, the US intercepted a German U-Boot (the U-234) underway to Japan with nuclear materials from their NAZI German allies (and given that Japan had previously gotten jet and rocket-plane tech from Germany with more and improved upon it and even more of that was aboard, this was seen as a problem (yet another reason to not let the war drag-on - there was simply no way to know how much they were doing or how fast they were working). Second, the Japanese government had made films (which the US had obtained) of their population (including women and children) being trained in combat AND the US had encountered a suicidal fanaticism in both military and civilians at places like Iwo Jima, so the projections were that the US might lose something like a million men in an invasion of the big island (just look at the mess of occupying Iraq with a much more modern US military and a population 99% of which was not willing to do suicide attacks). What president would be able to face the families of a million dead Americans and tell them that he had two bombs that could have prevented all that but decided not to for some abstract/academic reason? The very sad truth is that had the bombs not been dropped, it is quite possible even more Japanese would have died in an invasion and occupation.
Depleted Uranium ordnance was created for used on a theoretical European battlefield during WWIII with Soviet tanks pouring into Germany. The Soviets had many more tanks than the US (the US prefers quality over quantity) so the idea was to maximize the ability to penetrate Soviet tank armor. Dust and fragments of rounds was not a major concern because any WWIII scenario was likely to involve a lot more radiation from actual tactical nuclear devices. DU was never really intended to be used in purely conventional war in some third-world dump like Iraq.
"they burn there way through combustible metals by means of controlled-burn nuclear fissions" Really? Where do people get this garbage? Do you hang-out on one of those websites that claims there are ancient ruins of cities on Mars?
DU rounds DO NOT do any form of nuclear reaction when used. If they did, they'd be the world's best, safest, power supply (Nuclear fission in the palm or your hand, without a containment vessel or a chance of meltdown!) Next time, THINK before you post something that crazy The reason Depleted Uranium was used is one of the same reasons bullets used to use lead: with a kinetic-kill weapon, and given two projectiles of the same physical dimensions, you get more punch with a heavier/denser projectile and things get really fun when that density is far higher than the density of the material you are shooting at. It's basic physics.
The US Military gets a smaller portion of the US budget now than at any time in the nation's past. We spend far more on checks to senior citizens. Even a large portion of the pentagon budget goes to retired senior citizens who put-in full careers in uniform rather than to the current personnel or their weapons systems
if we are any sort of something-or-other "complex", we are a banking and wealth re-distributing complex that is dedicated to transferring as much money as possible from young workers to old AARP members on a scale never before seen in human history. The geezers built the government systems to provide for themselves while leaving the bills to future generations, then they maxed-out their investment income by demanding corporations maximize profits by transferring manufacturing out of the US, replacing pensions with 401Ks, and globalizing the banks. Now they are using schemes like "reverse mortgages" to make sure they leave nothing to their kids when they die (no previous generation of Americans has ever done all this to the generations that followed them). In the past, a generation might leave a little debt to their kids, but that generation of kids also inherited the assets of the previous generation. Not this time. This time the multinational banks will get the assets.
Do you have any idea how completely clueless you make yourself look to those of us who have worn a uniform?
In a macro sense, the U.S. military is a security organization. It is an extreme example of a hierarchical structure and it is designed for the security of the nation, so it is ideally-suited to handle security of all things nuclear. The U.S. military is far from perfect (because it it composed of imperfect human beings) but it actually is far more competent than many other human institutions. Each and every member is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution (not some person, or political party) and it is under the control of the elected civilians in the government (the money is provided by congress, the highest leaders are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Congress, and the orders come from the President; most people do not realize it but even the officer promotions notifications go through to the congress, which generally does not intervene but is kept aware and COULD intervene with laws or budgets if it felt the need). The U.S. military is not allowed to unionize, and its legal system (while appearing strange and sometimes more lax than the civilian system) is actually tailored for security and often results in problems being dealt with quietly before they become big enough to require the intervention of the civilians (who have more important things to worry about than discipline matters that were stopped before they became a problem)
You're not in a position to "guarantee" anything from your mother's basement.
Is there anybody on this site who does not know that within the next decade or two we will all be able to design and 3D-print any sort of firearm we can imagine???
So-called "gun control" is a fantasy of two groups: left-wing politicians and activists who are living in the 1960's, and totalitarian governments (how shocking is it that Putin and China have both chimed-in on the subject?) who believe that they will be able to control their populations by controlling access to firearms (a scheme that used to work) while stupidly imagining they will be able to have modern competitive economies without rapid prototyping systems.
We have a very short time to solve the real problem: how do we deal with the small portion of any population who either refuses, or is incapable of, controlling it's own behavior.
As always, it's the simple common-sense reasons and not some crypto-fascist evil corporate gunmaker conspiracy to control the population by putting "murder machines" into the hands of psychopaths. Occam's Razor.
A gun that only fires it if recognizes your grip? um, so when you get injured trying to fight-off a thug before finally resorting to the gun, and your throbbing/bleeding hand makes you hold the thing a little differently - oooops! the thing won't fire!
A gun that indicates whether it's loaded or there's a round in the chamber? dumb. Many Americans have held home invaders, would-be rapists or muggers, etc at bay with unloaded guns (this is safer than keeping the weapon in the nightstand in a fully-loaded and chambered state, and the doubt is often enough to stop a bad guy)
A gun that only fires for the registered owner? Stupid. Somebody breaks into your house, knocks you down, and - oh, wait - your gun won't fire when your wife needs it!
Many of these stupid schemes to make a machine NOT do the very thing it's intended to do just add cost and extra risk, while often being offered by some inventor who hopes lawmakers will mandate his new invention (so he can get rich from the royalties every gun maker will be ordered to pay). Just imagine all the patent litigation and all the royalty checks! Just the added IP activity our society so-desperately needs, right? These things are then also waved before a gullible public by politicians whose real goal (not a conspiracy, many are on-the record for bans/gun-siezures) is tighter gun control (often by either making guns too expensive or so useless that most won't buy them, or by convincing voters that gun makers are evil (since it's obvious that it they were good else they'd already be including the "features"))
These things are not in current guns because most gun buyers are not dumb enough to want to buy a gun that costs more in exchange for crippled functionality - it's just that simple.
The entire thing's a distraction. Your'e supposed to notice the things and not notice your rights shrinking while the rights of crazy/evil people are expanded. Americans used to be able to own fully-automatic machine guns (before congress made them illegal for law-abiding citizens in response to misuse by criminal gangs in the 1930's) and up until much more-recently, many American boys used to carry guns to school (some schools in rural areas had gun clubs, and some boys went hunting before or after school). We NEVER used to have mass-shootings in schools. Before the 1980's we used to keep lunatics in asylums (the ACLU won a legal fight to end that) and it used to be that a thug did not KNOW that a school was an easy place for a massacre... until the morons in government passed a bunch of "gun-free-zone" laws. We did not need armed school employees (the simple doubt about whether they MIGHT be armed was marginally deterrent) but since all those laws passed everybody KNOWS a school is a place where nobody will shoot back. There are many complex reasons for the massacres of the past few years, but stupidly constructed and rapidly passed laws are not the solution. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US and many millions of "violent video games" and DVDs of "action movies", but only a tiny number of massacres; in any politics-free zone, the obvious point would be that none of these physical items make a 99.999% of the population commit murder; these physical objects are not the common thread. Only an evil bastard opportunist who is grinding some other axe would try to penalize all the law-abiding people by depriving them of their rights, while refusing to go after the tiny screwed-up minority who are the actual common denominator in all these crimes - and wrap it all in the shroud of a bunch of dead children.
The USAF has dreamed of a small space plane like this for decades. They tried to build one in the early sixties (X-20 DynaSoar, with a crew of one) and were actually quite close to flying before MacNamera (yeah, Mr. Vietnam, himself) killed it to spend the money some place else. You are free to guess where he needed more money. Neil Armstrong actually flew the launch abort tests for the X-20 in a modified aircraft at Edwards long before he transferred to NASA and the Gemini and Apollo programs. It must have seemed like a miracle to some in the USAF when NASA and a stupidly short-sighted congress abandoned the X-37 program. The Air Force essentially got the program for free from the NASA junk pile (though they have, of course, spent a bunch on it since).
A little unmanned plane like this is a sports car; you don't use it for day-to-day trips, but you use it on special occasions and for special things. A zippy little platform like that can be used to test lots of cool new tech like new sensors. New sensors could generate massive amounts of raw data and be tested looking at most of the earth in all seasons and looking through all weather. You could fill the payload bay with solid state drives or even regular hard drives and save everything in a completely raw, lossless, uncompressed format along with extra data for analysis while downloading only small subsets of the data live. When the vehicle returns, you get back all the raw data, any performance/diagnostic data you chose not to downlink, and the sensors as well (for further analysis, and possible upgrade and re-flight)
It's the ultimate spy satellite development platform
The author could have easily chose to say "protected" rather than "hidden". The word "hidden" carries implications... but in this case the implications are a joke; Even without a payload shroud, the contents of the vehicle would have been blocked from view because they are in a payload bay just like on the shuttles
This would be more accurate: A standard Atlas payload shroud protects the Atlas from the aerodynamics of having an asymmetrical winged vehicle on its nose during the climb to space.
The Atlas was never designed to have a set of wings and tail fins up on its nose generating unbalance lift and drag vectors during ascent (think: arrow with tail feathers relocated to the nose). That's NOT to say that the Atlas could not handle the situation, but rather that the money has not been spent to study the matter sufficiently and to alter the flight software for the guidance system of the Atlas.
It's also important to note that the X-37 was never designed to be exposed during ascent; the wings and tails might not be up to the loads and parts of the top might not be up to the thermal environment (things get pretty hot on the way up from air friction as you accelerate past mach 2 before you get out of the atmosphere) and the vehicle has a different orientation to the airflow from what it has during reentry). As a NASA project, the X-37 was intended to ride to orbit within the payload bay of the shuttle, where it would be deployed for its test mission and then return home on its own. It was only a test vehicle and was not intended to make many operational flights that way.
First, the shuttle was not a camel designed by committee, nor was it a bloated whale. In actual use, it ended-up being far cheaper to operate than the old Saturns it replaced (NASA has finally run and published the numbers now that the program is over) it just never came close to the goals that were set for it.
NASA spent years studying many different shuttle system designs and took designs and bids from Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, etc and compared many of these designs not just on paper but with an amazing amount of engineering analysis. In the end, they were forced by a bi-partisan political consensus (including President Nixon and the Democrats who ran congress) to choose the system with the lowest up-front development costs but the highest operational costs (they all wanted small numbers while they were in office and did not care what the numbers would be later when they'd be out of office).
It's a common urban myth that the USAF drove the need for a delta wing; it's not true. The USAF needed that for polar launches from VAFB with aborts back to California instead of mid-ocean (need 1K miles of cross-range in that scenario because the Earth keeps turning after you launch... ) but NASA came to the conclusion that they too needed about the same capability. The USAF gets blamed for this feature only because they were smart enough to see their need first. It is true that the USAF needed the big payload bay with specific dimensions for a certain payload but here, again, the requirement was not particularly different from what NASA wanted anyway.
Finally, the USAF did not happily turn its back on the shuttle; At the time the Challenger exploded, there was a shuttle on the pad at VAFB in California (not for launch, but for facility checkout ahead of the first California launch) and they were gearing-up for many military flights to come. The USAF was ordered to transition to other vehicles in the aftermath of the Challenger accident and investigation. Part of the investigation was a re-assessment of the risks of shuttles and that lead to a decision to abandon the use of systems like the Centaur upper stage for shuttle, which were thought to add far too much risk to an already risky vehicle. If the US had had a mush larger fleet (perhaps 10 orbiters) and the ability to remotely operate them on the riskiest missions, the USAF would likely have continued to use shuttles. As it was, there were military missions and payloads even after Challenger during the transition to EELVs.
The shuttle rode on the side of the stack for a reason - so it could use it's three main engines for the entire climb to orbit. These engines were designed to be the best rocket engines ever developed (which meant they'd be very complex and expensive) and, therefore, to be re-usable. They were on the back of the orbiter not as an error, but precisely because that meant they would come home for re-use instead of being thrown-away on each flight. What you seem to think was a mistake, was in fact a design feature and part of the argument for making the scheme both technically and financially workable. As long as going to space requires throwing away most of the vehicle, it will remain the exclusive domain of governments and rich businesses/businessmen. Nobody but the super rich could afford to fly from NY to LA if the entire airliner was discarded during the flight and the passenger parachuted onto the LA runway in a small escape pod.
In actual practice, nothing about the shuttle system turned out to be as cheap as initially intended; that rarely happens on the first-generation of any world-leading technology. Had we built a 2nd generation of shuttles they likely would have performed far better with lower turn-around times and costs.
Any missile with enough altitude and horizontal velocity to place a payload into orbit (something an IRBM or ICBM does not need - see: V-2), can easily do a sub-orbital launch of a heavier payload; that's called a ballistic missile, and it's just a matter of physics and aerodynamics.
First, Clinton and Bush 43 fiddled while the North Koreans built "the bomb". Now Obama has fiddled while the North Koreans built the missile. Now the whacko maniac mini dictator of the north can threaten any population anywhere on Earth. Sure, we'll hear the experts "tut tut" over the notion and they'll explain that we can drag our feet because it will take time to make a nuke small enough for the missile or to make a reentry vehicle for the warhead, but these are the easier tasks and will be hard to monitor. The evidence before us is that western diplomats will similarly entertain themselves with talk while Iran also gets the bomb and a launch vehicle. Dark days are ahead when civilized men stand by while barbarians from the dark ages get their hands on weapons uniquely capable of returning us all to the dark ages.
Unfortunately, most average citizens have no understanding of wireless technology, so when a guy like Steve Jobs came along and offered them a consumer gadget that requires loads of bandwidth they buy it by the millions. Now they, and the politicians they elect, and vendors who seek some of their money are locked in a battle for unlimited quantities of something that is limited... bandwidth within the RF spectrum.
The hard truth is that there is a limit to the available spectrum, and that limited resource should only be allocated to uses that can only be performed wireless. It borders on the criminal to have smartphone companies building video and web browsing into phones... individuals filling their vacant cranial cavities with individual streams of Youtube cat videos, Justin Bieber music, and other individualized streams of pablum should not be competing for use of the nation's RF spectrum with satellite communications, GPS signals, firefighters, police, air traffic controllers, national security, TV and Radio broadcasters (who each serve millions with their broadcast pablum) and so on. Broadcast signals (like GPS, radio, and TV) should have priority since they each serve an unlimited number of people with their bit of the spectrum. Signals that only serve a single civilian user should be the absolute lowest-priority in the system.
Want to make a phone call from your home to your office? Use a land line.
Want to make a call from your car? Cell phone is fine... it's the only way to solve the problem
Want your laptop to talk to a printer? Plug in a cable (network, USB, etc)
Want a security camera? Run a wire
Want you pilot to talk to the control tower? That requires wireless
Want to know where you are while hiking, boating, flying or driving? GPS is great, it uses little bandwidth and serves millions of people, and cannot be done with wires.
With hard-wired networks, there is no limit to the bandwidth... you can just pull more cables when and where needed and your use of bandwidth has no impact upon your neighbor's use of bandwidth (he can pull all the cables he wants on his property). With wireless, on the other hand, each user is consuming a slice of a national asset which he/she does not individually own. There is no way to increase the available RF spectrum... if you want more for something then something else must get by with less. Additionally, most people do not understand that some frequencies of RF energy work better for short-range communication and others for long-range... and some frequencies can be used with small-and-cheap electronics while other frequencies require bigger and more expensive circuits (although this latter limit changes over time of course as technology advances).
Unfortunately, as long as carnival barkers like Steve Jobs keep offering consumers new shiny baubles that need more bandwidth, there will be other jerks like Lightsquared who will try to make a buck by promising consumers more of the RF spectrum (and gambling that public pressure from the uninformed masses for more will force the government to allocate more) for stupid shiny objects at the expense of vital things like navigation, public safety, national security, etc.
2. Frequency adjust hearing aids- these are actually tiny computers that slightly shift the frequency of the waveform for people who have frequency-specific hearing disorders. The cost for them is about $500 base, plus a couple of weeks of software engineering to tune them to the INDIVIDUAL User. It is the second type that the original author's mother needs, and yes, in a way it is a supply and demand problem as *each unit* (even in a pair) has to be tuned to the disability of the individual ear.
Bogus argument
We have these cool things called "algorithms" and "parameters" which we implement in these things called "computers". A generic hearing aid could easily be made and the customer could sit in an automated booth at wallmart, listen to some automated test sounds, give feedback to the booth computer and the booth computer could tweak the parameters for an individual hearing aid, flash the parameters, and provide the "custom" hearing aids for the user to checkout. If you REALLY wanted to get exotic and custom, you could have the booth tell the user to put-in the new aid, re-test, and tweak the values and re-flash the parameters before sending him/her to the checkout. This is the sort of innovation that would have appeared years ago if hearing aids had never been classed as "medical devices". This is like the guys who supply a bunch of uber-expensive "medical equipment" to docs and hospitals trying to explain why they charge so much for a slow two-trace oscilliscope with a different label on the face and some slightly different firmware...
The government in a fit of do-gooder activity declared hearing aids to be "medical devices" which means they are tightly regulated by the government. The existing makers were able to easily hop through the regulatory gates that were initially in place... but anybody who comes along later (after all the bureaucrats have written their thousands of pages of regulations) finds the cost of entering the market prohibitive (you need LOTS of money to hire lawyers to read and understand the regulations, and you need to get your product through all the regulatory hurdles). This creates a government-enforced near monopoly and destroys the ability of normal market forces to drive down prices while driving up performance and features. If anybody tries to remove hearing aids from the medical device category, millions of dollars will flow to the right politicians (establishment Democrats AND establishment Republicans) to defeat the effort. There are big, wealthy companies who depend upon their products being protected from new upstart competitors like this... Look to every industry where the government has stepped in to "protect" us all with regulations: Automobiles, Aviation, Medical devices, etc. In every one of these areas, all significant competitors got into the market BEFORE the government started regulating it, and the regulations were established to "protect the public". This is why BIG companies often side WITH big government in supporting regulations (see big pharma and their deal with Obama on Obamacare, or the big aerospace companies with their hand-in-glove relationship with the FAA) when you would expect them to be opposed to government intervention. Everybody on Slashdot knows full-well how cheap a battery, a mic, a speaker and a microchip would be if they were available from any manufacturer and hanging on a shelf at Frys, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
All terrorism is done by people ..... so by your thinking, we should ban people
First, WHAT people believe is every bit as important as THAT they believe. There are a great many religions (particularly when you count sects/denominations) and of those VERY FEW have any tie to violence.
Second, some violence commonly blamed on religion (like the violence in Ireland) is not religious at all. The troubles in Ireland fall along religious lines BUT these are actually political lines that line-up with religious lines. To massively over-simplify: The Catholics tend to be for separation from the folks in London and the Protestants tend to want better relations with those folks in London (see King Henry VIII and the CoE for some of the context). AFAIK nobody has ever seen a member of the IRA screaming his disagreements over interpretations of the writings of the Apostle Paul as he fired his weapon and I doubt there have been any protestants there who shrieked about their disagreements with a papal decree while shooting at an IRA member....
When the state casts a suspicious eye upon somebody, it has an obligation to narrow the scope as much as possible ..... and in the current era nearly all religious violence on the surface of the planet has been committed by members of one particular religion. Nobody should "ban" that religion (and indeed, thoughts and beliefs cannot ever be "banned" anyway) but it means that if any special scrutiny must be applied it should be to followers of that one faith ..... and to the extent possible only to the smallest subset of those that is practical.
You are correct on your history of US school violence however .... a bomb not an "assault gun" and although I think you are correct that the perpetrator was Catholic (cannot recall and do not wish to google it) I do not recall that THAT was his motive.
... did not also publish the data from the thousands of documents the Obama administration is hiding (and that Atty Gen Holder is in contempt of congress for withholding from a lawful subpoena) about the thousands of assault weapons they transferred to Mexican drug gangs
"We the people" need AR-15s, big magazines, hollow-point rounds and body armor etc .... to defend ourselves from the criminal gangs that our own federal government has been supplying with crate-loads of "assault weapons". These are the same team-Obama chuckle-heads who are calling for "gun control" to take guns away from our law-abiding citizens. Some of those guns were used to shoot-up a school in Mexico ..... Oddly: President Obama did not go on TV to cry over those school kids .... I guess there was no way to use it politically, particularly because HE was the supplier of the so-called "assault weapons"
Try READING what our founders actually WROTE! They wrote a LOT about this stuff ... it was VERY important to them.
The founders of the nation wanted the people to have both rifles AND pistols (Washington himself made this point in writing) and they wanted those to be the EXACT military weapons that the government had. They did NOT define a "militia" as an organized uniform-wearing national-guard-type force that was under ANY form of government control (if it's controlled by the government it can hardly be expected to deter the government) .... they defined the "militia" as ALL able-bodied competent adult men who were not consciencious objectors (and that's still actually US law ... US military regs up until only a few decades ago called this the "inactive reserve" force. it might still be in there .... I have not looked lately).
Nobody on the pro-gun side is "cherry-picking" anything ..... we are DEPENDING on the strict construction of the constitution and those original meanings you so clearly dislike. Unfortunately for people who "think" like you do, our founders were rather prolific writers and they were very thoughtful ..... they left us with many volumes of writings about exactly what they thought and believed and WHY. There is nothing frivolous in the Constitution and none of the words are just accidental. They very specifically did NOT write the second amendment as: "For the security of the nation, the states shall maintain armed organized militias. The citizens may each have one basic rifle for hunting and one basic pistol for duels". The founders INTENDED that nobody would be able to tell the the so-called "gun nuts" what to do .... they established a clear chain-of-command for the Army and Navy (note: the Marines are part of the Navy, and the Air Force was formed as the "Army Air Corps" (and for benefit of Barack Obama, that's pronounced "core" not "corpse")) but did not establish ANY chain of command for the "militias" ( doing so would have meant ALL adult men were in the Presidential chain-of-command and we would have a police state). The true "Neanderthals" as you put it (and IF they exist), can only be the people like yourself who want to turn the calendar back to pre-Constitution days. It's shocking that we have produced a generation of people so poorly educated, so completely ignorant of history and political theory, and so completely devoid of the intellectual curiosity required to READ what's freely available that they "think" the sort of things you wrote AND believe themselves well-educated!
Sure, the firearms were simpler then, but so were all the other things, like the vehicles (ride a horse, ride or sail a boat, or ride in a horse-pulled cart).
If you actually read all the other stuff our founders wrote, you see that the 2nd amendment had nothing to do with hunting or recreation; they assumed any free people could obviously do those things. Their reasons for the 2nd amendment were:
All of these reasons for the 2nd amendment are undermined if you allow the government to control who has weapons, how many they have, what type they have, how much ammo they have, where they keep them, etc. (and that's why every tyrant tries to impose some or all of those things). The simple fact is that our founders made it very clear that they intended the citizens to have the front-line weapons (and the guns the Americans had in the revolutionary war were actually superior to the weapons of the British troops .... which meant that our founders wanted "the people" to have guns that were BETTER than the guns of the front-line troops of the best military on Earth.
If you insist that the founders only intended the citizens to have single-round muzzle-loaded flintlock rifles, then for the sake of consistency (and so the 2nd amendment can still fill its role) you must also insist that the government:
For the Constitution to work, the power must be balanced as it was designed to be ..... and as the past few decades are demonstrating with ever-increasing clarity, our government is becoming increasingly bloated, expensive, inefficient and bullying as the power balance between the citizens and the politicians in DC gets further out of line. The entire POINT of the "right to bear arms" is that the citizens are SUPERIOR to, and in control of, the federal government and the CITIZENS are the ones with the power; in the U.S. the PEOPLE are sovereign. People who push the "huntin
It was not just an innocent mistake
There are some specific bold rules for kernel devs ... and he broke one. And then he tried to blame other innocent parties for it. Finally, (though I do not recall if Linus mentioned it) it was all completely unnecessary! If the guy saw a big problem here (and if you read the entire thread, you might end-up thinking he had a good, or at least reasonable, point) he was about to commit a change that broke one of the big rules ...... so the obvious thing to do was to contact others (including Linus perhaps) to float the idea; It was simply inappropriate to boldly move-forward with a code-checkin that broke other people's stuff.
As always (see: "Watergate", or "Bill Clinton") the cover-up attempt only made things worse
One of the things I have always liked about coding apps on Linux is that I've never actually had to code-around any buggy kernel behaviors.
hmmmm.... I guess I've been doing something wrong
Just admit it: AFTER you open a file or device and you are then using it, NOTHING you do to it should result in a returned error code of, in-effect, "file not found" ... and if you ever DID see that you'd be mighty annoyed to have somebody claim it was all your fault. You'd probably note that as a "buggy behavior" that you'd have to code-around ......... Oh, wait.......
Sorry, but computer users are a subset of the general population, and the ones who care at all about the actions/behaviors/attitudes of any of the developers of the software for those computers is a subset of that subset. Within that set, the vast majority have never even heard of (nor do they care about) any kernel mailing list nor do they care about e-mails that have nothing to do with them. They just want their systems to work and do the things they need them to do. Period.
I am NOT a Linus fan-boy, but the man was absolutely right here:
Linux suffers far more in the public view when it looks unstable or incomplete than it does from any other peripheral matters. Given that most of the developers of the code that sits on top of Linux are also unpaid volunteers, it's doubly-bad to make changes under their feet that keep breaking their code. Developers of good applications get very frustrated by unstable platforms where the rules keep changing, and the sort of change that Linus attacked here is just plain BAD. The fact that a kernel developer risked making a bunch of apps look bad (and without good justification) is a major problem and actually a symptom of a severe Linux-on-the-desktop problem: too many people making too many poorly-thought-out changes (often where not needed) while neglecting many of the things that are in serious need of fixing. Unfortunately, when everyone is a volunteer and working for free, it's hard to find competent people to do the un-popular grunt-work to fix many long-term usability issues - but there can be a surplus of people who will happily change lots of other stuff on a whim (because it's interesting to them, or because they think they've had a clever idea and they don't feel like "running it by" other people FIRST). Some might want to complain about Linus's tone here (which did no actual harm to anybody, but might have gotten the attention needed to avoid repetitions), but the real offensive act was by the guy who decided to break other peoples' stuff without consulting anybody else first; that's borderline narcissism.
KDE and Gnome are excellent examples of this general phenomenon: neither one became fully stable with all advertized functionality "just working" before both teams made major changes in the look-and-feel of their projects ..... and then they repeated this idiocy! Sure, both Gnome and KDE are visually much more shiny baubles, but they are much more obnoxious to adapt to and use. They are still both loaded with confusing and/or redundant garbage, and they still lack some basic functionality that Windows (dating back to Win95 or possibly even Win3.11) had. This is dumb, and much-more deserving of attention than Linus's latest (and this time, at least) barrage.
An average user (not a geek) needs to be able to sit down at a Linux system and easily manage printers (add them, test them ,use them, remove them - locally AND on the local network) manage files (find them, use them, edit them, copy them etc on the local machine AND the network) adjust things like the time and date and screensavers and power-management, manage network connectivity (config firewall, ping hosts, get MAC and IP numbers, etc) without a manual and without any hand-holding. This is what enables them to become happy with their primary use of their computers: getting installing and using the applications they need to do e-mail, web browsing, office tasks, etc which in-turn enables them to do the activities they actually care about. As long as any of this is a problem, most developers need to focus on these things before doing other less-necessary things.
If the guy Linus blasted is too "hurt" by this to go-on, then he was not worth having around. If, on the other hand, he was a productive "good guy" who just screwed-up, then this will improve him and he'll be even better in the future. People need to stop wringing their hands over the wrong stuff.... if the guy's an adult, he'll be just fine.
First, "Weapon of Mass Destruction" is a term-of-art, not a slogan. It specifically refers to a class of weapons designed so that a single device can wipe-out a large population - and the definition has always been: Nuclear, Biological or Chemical (NATO and US forces used to refer to this as "NBC warfare"). In the post-9/11 world, however, with new laws on terrorism, Orwellian politicians and activists of various stripes have all been calling anything they dislike "WMD"; the term is being watered-down by mis-use and de-valued just like the words "Holocaust" and "Racist".
Second, Nearly all firearms in the US are semi-automatic (technically even most revolvers are "semi-automatic" though the term is not usually stretched that far --- not yet). The fact is that most non-revolver pistols are every bit as "semi-automatic" as an AR-15 or an AK-47. Most civilians could not manage a completely manual firearm (not even a revolver), and the nation's founders never would have intended them to. The founders of the nation intended that the citizens would all be armed with front-line military weapons (both so that they could deter and repel and foreign invaders and also so they could deter and block any future American tyrant). George Washington specifically wrote that the citizens had a right to keep and bear both pistols and rifles and Jefferson (an inventor) was well-aware of automation, so the idea that guns would become automated would have been no surprise to him. The problem with firearms has NEVER been the inanimate object, just as neither alcohol nor cars are the cause of the annual 20,000+ drunk driving deaths. The problem in all these cases is the human being
All of the mass shootings in recent US history have involved [1] a border-line crazy person who had given previous warnings of extreme dysfunction and [2] a "gun-free zone" where the evil bastard could be confident that his targets were unarmed sheep ready for slaughter.
It's nearly comical to watch all the anti-gun activists go through various contortions to desperately avoid the facts in these arguments. The previous poster (like every pro-2nd-ammendment guy who tries to get a word in edge-wise with Piers Morgan) was correct on the FACTS; When a typical member of the public sees an AR-15 and hears the words "assault weapon" he thinks "machine gun" ... this is by design and it's pure propaganda (actual machines guns have been illegal for decades). There has never actually been a gun term "assault weapon" ... that's a synthetic propaganda term designed to convey impressions and distort debate, much like the words "hate speech", "homophobia", etc. It's also a fact that an AR-15 is less dangerous than many deer rifles (I have experience with both). The AR-15 might look "cool" (or menacing, depending on your political leanings) but it's real charm is simply that many Americans who have served in the military are comfortable/familiar with the overall design (which is solid and reliable), the rounds are common, and the thing looks intimidating to the sort of stupid thug one might want to deter with it. Nearly all other American weapons can fire rounds just as fast. If you have bought into the whole "assault weapon" thing, you have been manipulated; I prefer the U.S. Constitution including the 2nd amendment ... which is what guarantees the other amendments.
BTW: The NRA is wrong: the answer is not to have armed guards everywhere (though they do have an interesting point that we guard all sorts of things we value, like money, with armed guards while refusing such guards for the kids of the non-rich). Our founders never imagined a nation with armed guards in uniforms at every building; they presumed every citizen would be armed as appropriate to protect himself, his family and his business and crime would be low without a ubiquitous display of guns because
I was based in San Diego, and once lived up near the San Onofre plant (had a good friend who worked there). I would have no worries having my family live right nearby in San Onofre (the neighboring community, for those not familiar with the area). First, the plant has a containment facility designed to handle a direct impact by an airliner or a worst-case meltdown, and also designed for SoCal earthquakes. Second, while I have MANY issues with the horrendous civilian oversight of nuclear activity in the US, my main complaint is that they are far too stringent on things that do not matter and not strict enough to make me happy on some things that do. Having said that, however, the record is that the civilian overseers in the US are sufficiently cautious that no American plant has ever killed anybody. Even three Mile Island where the operators completely screwed-up harmed precisely zero people. Unlike Chernobyl, we mandate adequate containment.
You are correct that the US Navy has an amazing track record with nuclear power. I used to have a buddy who was an engineering officer on a boomer, and he and his associates were sterling. I never cease to be amazed that the US Navy can take a bunch of 18 year-old kids from high school and 22 year old college kids and teach them to be competent, disciplined, and exacting ..... and then put them in charge of nuclear reactors, jet aircraft, nuclear weapons, etc and have such results.
I have long thought that no nuclear plant in the US should be civilian ... working in these plants ought to be a second career we offer to the best members of our nuclear navy when they choose to retire and want a stable family life at a fixed street address. Such people could not only be trusted to be fully-competent and willing to sacrifice to protect their fellow citizens, but also would be competent to defend the facility should that need ever arise.
arbitrarily dropped on Japan
Dude, stop the heavy drug use; your brain performance will improve slowly and you may even qualify to be a janitor someday
The civilian President of the U.S. (not the military) decided to drop the weapons on Japan (not an arbitrary target ... the nation that attacked Pearl Harbor). Even the target cities were carefully selected. Each did have a large population (cities get bombed in "total war", ask the people of London or Dresden) but also had significant military-industrial assets. Tokyo was not targeted in part because although it would have been the city the American civilian population would most want destroyed (after years of fighting, and all the dead American soldiers and sailors) it was the location of the Japanese Emperor and government which were specifically not destroyed (contrary to your bizarre claims). There have been many revisionists who have tried to claim something else ended, or would have ended, the war (as part of an effort by anti-nuclear and/or anti-US agitators to de-legitimize the US actions) but the fact is that the US dropped a bomb on Hiroshima and demanded a surrender, did not get a surrender, dropped a bomb on Nagasaki, and got a surrender within days. It was a terrible choice and not one I'd want to have made, but there is a very real sense in which the Japanese brought it on themselves by almost the same method that Saddam Hussein brought-on his fate: by toying with a WMD program and with bluffs. First, the US intercepted a German U-Boot (the U-234) underway to Japan with nuclear materials from their NAZI German allies (and given that Japan had previously gotten jet and rocket-plane tech from Germany with more and improved upon it and even more of that was aboard, this was seen as a problem (yet another reason to not let the war drag-on - there was simply no way to know how much they were doing or how fast they were working). Second, the Japanese government had made films (which the US had obtained) of their population (including women and children) being trained in combat AND the US had encountered a suicidal fanaticism in both military and civilians at places like Iwo Jima, so the projections were that the US might lose something like a million men in an invasion of the big island (just look at the mess of occupying Iraq with a much more modern US military and a population 99% of which was not willing to do suicide attacks). What president would be able to face the families of a million dead Americans and tell them that he had two bombs that could have prevented all that but decided not to for some abstract/academic reason? The very sad truth is that had the bombs not been dropped, it is quite possible even more Japanese would have died in an invasion and occupation.
Depleted Uranium ordnance was created for used on a theoretical European battlefield during WWIII with Soviet tanks pouring into Germany. The Soviets had many more tanks than the US (the US prefers quality over quantity) so the idea was to maximize the ability to penetrate Soviet tank armor. Dust and fragments of rounds was not a major concern because any WWIII scenario was likely to involve a lot more radiation from actual tactical nuclear devices. DU was never really intended to be used in purely conventional war in some third-world dump like Iraq.
"they burn there way through combustible metals by means of controlled-burn nuclear fissions" Really? Where do people get this garbage? Do you hang-out on one of those websites that claims there are ancient ruins of cities on Mars?
DU rounds DO NOT do any form of nuclear reaction when used. If they did, they'd be the world's best, safest, power supply (Nuclear fission in the palm or your hand, without a containment vessel or a chance of meltdown!) Next time, THINK before you post something that crazy The reason Depleted Uranium was used is one of the same reasons bullets used to use lead: with a kinetic-kill weapon, and given two projectiles of the same physical dimensions, you get more punch with a heavier/denser projectile and things get really fun when that density is far higher than the density of the material you are shooting at. It's basic physics.
The US Military gets a smaller portion of the US budget now than at any time in the nation's past. We spend far more on checks to senior citizens. Even a large portion of the pentagon budget goes to retired senior citizens who put-in full careers in uniform rather than to the current personnel or their weapons systems
if we are any sort of something-or-other "complex", we are a banking and wealth re-distributing complex that is dedicated to transferring as much money as possible from young workers to old AARP members on a scale never before seen in human history. The geezers built the government systems to provide for themselves while leaving the bills to future generations, then they maxed-out their investment income by demanding corporations maximize profits by transferring manufacturing out of the US, replacing pensions with 401Ks, and globalizing the banks. Now they are using schemes like "reverse mortgages" to make sure they leave nothing to their kids when they die (no previous generation of Americans has ever done all this to the generations that followed them). In the past, a generation might leave a little debt to their kids, but that generation of kids also inherited the assets of the previous generation. Not this time. This time the multinational banks will get the assets.
Or maybe you think we should make decisions about NASA based on the film "Mars Attacks".....
Oh, I get it, you think Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert, and The Onion are actually news. (eyes rolling)
Do you have any idea how completely clueless you make yourself look to those of us who have worn a uniform?
In a macro sense, the U.S. military is a security organization. It is an extreme example of a hierarchical structure and it is designed for the security of the nation, so it is ideally-suited to handle security of all things nuclear. The U.S. military is far from perfect (because it it composed of imperfect human beings) but it actually is far more competent than many other human institutions. Each and every member is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution (not some person, or political party) and it is under the control of the elected civilians in the government (the money is provided by congress, the highest leaders are appointed by the President and confirmed by the Congress, and the orders come from the President; most people do not realize it but even the officer promotions notifications go through to the congress, which generally does not intervene but is kept aware and COULD intervene with laws or budgets if it felt the need). The U.S. military is not allowed to unionize, and its legal system (while appearing strange and sometimes more lax than the civilian system) is actually tailored for security and often results in problems being dealt with quietly before they become big enough to require the intervention of the civilians (who have more important things to worry about than discipline matters that were stopped before they became a problem)
You're not in a position to "guarantee" anything from your mother's basement.
Is there anybody on this site who does not know that within the next decade or two we will all be able to design and 3D-print any sort of firearm we can imagine???
So-called "gun control" is a fantasy of two groups: left-wing politicians and activists who are living in the 1960's, and totalitarian governments (how shocking is it that Putin and China have both chimed-in on the subject?) who believe that they will be able to control their populations by controlling access to firearms (a scheme that used to work) while stupidly imagining they will be able to have modern competitive economies without rapid prototyping systems.
We have a very short time to solve the real problem: how do we deal with the small portion of any population who either refuses, or is incapable of, controlling it's own behavior.
As always, it's the simple common-sense reasons and not some crypto-fascist evil corporate gunmaker conspiracy to control the population by putting "murder machines" into the hands of psychopaths. Occam's Razor.
A gun that only fires it if recognizes your grip? um, so when you get injured trying to fight-off a thug before finally resorting to the gun, and your throbbing/bleeding hand makes you hold the thing a little differently - oooops! the thing won't fire!
A gun that indicates whether it's loaded or there's a round in the chamber? dumb. Many Americans have held home invaders, would-be rapists or muggers, etc at bay with unloaded guns (this is safer than keeping the weapon in the nightstand in a fully-loaded and chambered state, and the doubt is often enough to stop a bad guy)
A gun that only fires for the registered owner? Stupid. Somebody breaks into your house, knocks you down, and - oh, wait - your gun won't fire when your wife needs it!
Many of these stupid schemes to make a machine NOT do the very thing it's intended to do just add cost and extra risk, while often being offered by some inventor who hopes lawmakers will mandate his new invention (so he can get rich from the royalties every gun maker will be ordered to pay). Just imagine all the patent litigation and all the royalty checks! Just the added IP activity our society so-desperately needs, right? These things are then also waved before a gullible public by politicians whose real goal (not a conspiracy, many are on-the record for bans/gun-siezures) is tighter gun control (often by either making guns too expensive or so useless that most won't buy them, or by convincing voters that gun makers are evil (since it's obvious that it they were good else they'd already be including the "features"))
These things are not in current guns because most gun buyers are not dumb enough to want to buy a gun that costs more in exchange for crippled functionality - it's just that simple.
The entire thing's a distraction. Your'e supposed to notice the things and not notice your rights shrinking while the rights of crazy/evil people are expanded. Americans used to be able to own fully-automatic machine guns (before congress made them illegal for law-abiding citizens in response to misuse by criminal gangs in the 1930's) and up until much more-recently, many American boys used to carry guns to school (some schools in rural areas had gun clubs, and some boys went hunting before or after school). We NEVER used to have mass-shootings in schools. Before the 1980's we used to keep lunatics in asylums (the ACLU won a legal fight to end that) and it used to be that a thug did not KNOW that a school was an easy place for a massacre ... until the morons in government passed a bunch of "gun-free-zone" laws. We did not need armed school employees (the simple doubt about whether they MIGHT be armed was marginally deterrent) but since all those laws passed everybody KNOWS a school is a place where nobody will shoot back. There are many complex reasons for the massacres of the past few years, but stupidly constructed and rapidly passed laws are not the solution. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US and many millions of "violent video games" and DVDs of "action movies", but only a tiny number of massacres; in any politics-free zone, the obvious point would be that none of these physical items make a 99.999% of the population commit murder; these physical objects are not the common thread. Only an evil bastard opportunist who is grinding some other axe would try to penalize all the law-abiding people by depriving them of their rights, while refusing to go after the tiny screwed-up minority who are the actual common denominator in all these crimes - and wrap it all in the shroud of a bunch of dead children.
The USAF has dreamed of a small space plane like this for decades. They tried to build one in the early sixties (X-20 DynaSoar, with a crew of one) and were actually quite close to flying before MacNamera (yeah, Mr. Vietnam, himself) killed it to spend the money some place else. You are free to guess where he needed more money. Neil Armstrong actually flew the launch abort tests for the X-20 in a modified aircraft at Edwards long before he transferred to NASA and the Gemini and Apollo programs. It must have seemed like a miracle to some in the USAF when NASA and a stupidly short-sighted congress abandoned the X-37 program. The Air Force essentially got the program for free from the NASA junk pile (though they have, of course, spent a bunch on it since).
A little unmanned plane like this is a sports car; you don't use it for day-to-day trips, but you use it on special occasions and for special things. A zippy little platform like that can be used to test lots of cool new tech like new sensors. New sensors could generate massive amounts of raw data and be tested looking at most of the earth in all seasons and looking through all weather. You could fill the payload bay with solid state drives or even regular hard drives and save everything in a completely raw, lossless, uncompressed format along with extra data for analysis while downloading only small subsets of the data live. When the vehicle returns, you get back all the raw data, any performance/diagnostic data you chose not to downlink, and the sensors as well (for further analysis, and possible upgrade and re-flight)
It's the ultimate spy satellite development platform
The author could have easily chose to say "protected" rather than "hidden". The word "hidden" carries implications ... but in this case the implications are a joke; Even without a payload shroud, the contents of the vehicle would have been blocked from view because they are in a payload bay just like on the shuttles
This would be more accurate: A standard Atlas payload shroud protects the Atlas from the aerodynamics of having an asymmetrical winged vehicle on its nose during the climb to space.
The Atlas was never designed to have a set of wings and tail fins up on its nose generating unbalance lift and drag vectors during ascent (think: arrow with tail feathers relocated to the nose). That's NOT to say that the Atlas could not handle the situation, but rather that the money has not been spent to study the matter sufficiently and to alter the flight software for the guidance system of the Atlas.
It's also important to note that the X-37 was never designed to be exposed during ascent; the wings and tails might not be up to the loads and parts of the top might not be up to the thermal environment (things get pretty hot on the way up from air friction as you accelerate past mach 2 before you get out of the atmosphere) and the vehicle has a different orientation to the airflow from what it has during reentry). As a NASA project, the X-37 was intended to ride to orbit within the payload bay of the shuttle, where it would be deployed for its test mission and then return home on its own. It was only a test vehicle and was not intended to make many operational flights that way.
First, the shuttle was not a camel designed by committee, nor was it a bloated whale. In actual use, it ended-up being far cheaper to operate than the old Saturns it replaced (NASA has finally run and published the numbers now that the program is over) it just never came close to the goals that were set for it.
NASA spent years studying many different shuttle system designs and took designs and bids from Grumman, Lockheed, Boeing, Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, etc and compared many of these designs not just on paper but with an amazing amount of engineering analysis. In the end, they were forced by a bi-partisan political consensus (including President Nixon and the Democrats who ran congress) to choose the system with the lowest up-front development costs but the highest operational costs (they all wanted small numbers while they were in office and did not care what the numbers would be later when they'd be out of office).
It's a common urban myth that the USAF drove the need for a delta wing; it's not true. The USAF needed that for polar launches from VAFB with aborts back to California instead of mid-ocean (need 1K miles of cross-range in that scenario because the Earth keeps turning after you launch... ) but NASA came to the conclusion that they too needed about the same capability. The USAF gets blamed for this feature only because they were smart enough to see their need first. It is true that the USAF needed the big payload bay with specific dimensions for a certain payload but here, again, the requirement was not particularly different from what NASA wanted anyway.
Finally, the USAF did not happily turn its back on the shuttle; At the time the Challenger exploded, there was a shuttle on the pad at VAFB in California (not for launch, but for facility checkout ahead of the first California launch) and they were gearing-up for many military flights to come. The USAF was ordered to transition to other vehicles in the aftermath of the Challenger accident and investigation. Part of the investigation was a re-assessment of the risks of shuttles and that lead to a decision to abandon the use of systems like the Centaur upper stage for shuttle, which were thought to add far too much risk to an already risky vehicle. If the US had had a mush larger fleet (perhaps 10 orbiters) and the ability to remotely operate them on the riskiest missions, the USAF would likely have continued to use shuttles. As it was, there were military missions and payloads even after Challenger during the transition to EELVs.
The shuttle rode on the side of the stack for a reason - so it could use it's three main engines for the entire climb to orbit. These engines were designed to be the best rocket engines ever developed (which meant they'd be very complex and expensive) and, therefore, to be re-usable. They were on the back of the orbiter not as an error, but precisely because that meant they would come home for re-use instead of being thrown-away on each flight. What you seem to think was a mistake, was in fact a design feature and part of the argument for making the scheme both technically and financially workable. As long as going to space requires throwing away most of the vehicle, it will remain the exclusive domain of governments and rich businesses/businessmen. Nobody but the super rich could afford to fly from NY to LA if the entire airliner was discarded during the flight and the passenger parachuted onto the LA runway in a small escape pod.
In actual practice, nothing about the shuttle system turned out to be as cheap as initially intended; that rarely happens on the first-generation of any world-leading technology. Had we built a 2nd generation of shuttles they likely would have performed far better with lower turn-around times and costs.
Any missile with enough altitude and horizontal velocity to place a payload into orbit (something an IRBM or ICBM does not need - see: V-2), can easily do a sub-orbital launch of a heavier payload; that's called a ballistic missile, and it's just a matter of physics and aerodynamics.
First, Clinton and Bush 43 fiddled while the North Koreans built "the bomb". Now Obama has fiddled while the North Koreans built the missile. Now the whacko maniac mini dictator of the north can threaten any population anywhere on Earth. Sure, we'll hear the experts "tut tut" over the notion and they'll explain that we can drag our feet because it will take time to make a nuke small enough for the missile or to make a reentry vehicle for the warhead, but these are the easier tasks and will be hard to monitor. The evidence before us is that western diplomats will similarly entertain themselves with talk while Iran also gets the bomb and a launch vehicle. Dark days are ahead when civilized men stand by while barbarians from the dark ages get their hands on weapons uniquely capable of returning us all to the dark ages.
Unfortunately, most average citizens have no understanding of wireless technology, so when a guy like Steve Jobs came along and offered them a consumer gadget that requires loads of bandwidth they buy it by the millions. Now they, and the politicians they elect, and vendors who seek some of their money are locked in a battle for unlimited quantities of something that is limited... bandwidth within the RF spectrum.
The hard truth is that there is a limit to the available spectrum, and that limited resource should only be allocated to uses that can only be performed wireless. It borders on the criminal to have smartphone companies building video and web browsing into phones... individuals filling their vacant cranial cavities with individual streams of Youtube cat videos, Justin Bieber music, and other individualized streams of pablum should not be competing for use of the nation's RF spectrum with satellite communications, GPS signals, firefighters, police, air traffic controllers, national security, TV and Radio broadcasters (who each serve millions with their broadcast pablum) and so on. Broadcast signals (like GPS, radio, and TV) should have priority since they each serve an unlimited number of people with their bit of the spectrum. Signals that only serve a single civilian user should be the absolute lowest-priority in the system.
Want to make a phone call from your home to your office? Use a land line.
Want to make a call from your car? Cell phone is fine... it's the only way to solve the problem
Want your laptop to talk to a printer? Plug in a cable (network, USB, etc)
Want a security camera? Run a wire
Want you pilot to talk to the control tower? That requires wireless
Want to know where you are while hiking, boating, flying or driving? GPS is great, it uses little bandwidth and serves millions of people, and cannot be done with wires.
With hard-wired networks, there is no limit to the bandwidth... you can just pull more cables when and where needed and your use of bandwidth has no impact upon your neighbor's use of bandwidth (he can pull all the cables he wants on his property). With wireless, on the other hand, each user is consuming a slice of a national asset which he/she does not individually own. There is no way to increase the available RF spectrum... if you want more for something then something else must get by with less. Additionally, most people do not understand that some frequencies of RF energy work better for short-range communication and others for long-range... and some frequencies can be used with small-and-cheap electronics while other frequencies require bigger and more expensive circuits (although this latter limit changes over time of course as technology advances).
Unfortunately, as long as carnival barkers like Steve Jobs keep offering consumers new shiny baubles that need more bandwidth, there will be other jerks like Lightsquared who will try to make a buck by promising consumers more of the RF spectrum (and gambling that public pressure from the uninformed masses for more will force the government to allocate more) for stupid shiny objects at the expense of vital things like navigation, public safety, national security, etc.
2. Frequency adjust hearing aids- these are actually tiny computers that slightly shift the frequency of the waveform for people who have frequency-specific hearing disorders. The cost for them is about $500 base, plus a couple of weeks of software engineering to tune them to the INDIVIDUAL User. It is the second type that the original author's mother needs, and yes, in a way it is a supply and demand problem as *each unit* (even in a pair) has to be tuned to the disability of the individual ear.
Bogus argument
We have these cool things called "algorithms" and "parameters" which we implement in these things called "computers". A generic hearing aid could easily be made and the customer could sit in an automated booth at wallmart, listen to some automated test sounds, give feedback to the booth computer and the booth computer could tweak the parameters for an individual hearing aid, flash the parameters, and provide the "custom" hearing aids for the user to checkout. If you REALLY wanted to get exotic and custom, you could have the booth tell the user to put-in the new aid, re-test, and tweak the values and re-flash the parameters before sending him/her to the checkout. This is the sort of innovation that would have appeared years ago if hearing aids had never been classed as "medical devices". This is like the guys who supply a bunch of uber-expensive "medical equipment" to docs and hospitals trying to explain why they charge so much for a slow two-trace oscilliscope with a different label on the face and some slightly different firmware...
The government in a fit of do-gooder activity declared hearing aids to be "medical devices" which means they are tightly regulated by the government. The existing makers were able to easily hop through the regulatory gates that were initially in place... but anybody who comes along later (after all the bureaucrats have written their thousands of pages of regulations) finds the cost of entering the market prohibitive (you need LOTS of money to hire lawyers to read and understand the regulations, and you need to get your product through all the regulatory hurdles). This creates a government-enforced near monopoly and destroys the ability of normal market forces to drive down prices while driving up performance and features. If anybody tries to remove hearing aids from the medical device category, millions of dollars will flow to the right politicians (establishment Democrats AND establishment Republicans) to defeat the effort. There are big, wealthy companies who depend upon their products being protected from new upstart competitors like this... Look to every industry where the government has stepped in to "protect" us all with regulations: Automobiles, Aviation, Medical devices, etc. In every one of these areas, all significant competitors got into the market BEFORE the government started regulating it, and the regulations were established to "protect the public". This is why BIG companies often side WITH big government in supporting regulations (see big pharma and their deal with Obama on Obamacare, or the big aerospace companies with their hand-in-glove relationship with the FAA) when you would expect them to be opposed to government intervention. Everybody on Slashdot knows full-well how cheap a battery, a mic, a speaker and a microchip would be if they were available from any manufacturer and hanging on a shelf at Frys, etc.