Just because Cringely calls something dead, that doesn't mean it is. Or if something is alive, it doesn't mean he is. Take a look at the list of articles from his Old Hat page. It's like a tour of Wired covers.
Here is Cringely on Excite@Home
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit1999012 1. html
"Excite, like it's bigger, badder competitor Yahoo, is entirely about branding and brand awareness, so the name won't go away. Excite is better known than @Home. Current management at Excite won't change, either. Only the pockets get deeper. So in exactly the same spirit in which a little Mississippi long distance company became MCI-Worldcom, look for more content deals from Excite and more customer-acquiring deals from @Home, sucking-up smaller ISPs.
The one thing that has changed in all this is the identity of the competition. Unable to beat Yahoo at its own game, Excite is using @Home to change the game. The new target is America OnLine. "
While he has been right sometimes, he is just as often wrong, sometimes wildly wrong.
Back in 1998 he proclaimed, loudly that the iMac's intro was going to be flawed by the fact that something like 18% of them didn't work. Well the failure rate was under the industry average when they actually came out of the box. I would provide a link, but his Old Hat list starts the week after this column was out. But I remeber it dangit.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit1999010 6. html
Then in Jan of '99 he said that Apple was screwed because it came out with different colors of iMacs and that was stupid.
Or there was the decleration that broadband was going to make Blockbuster go out of business.
"How long will it be before the time difference between driving to get video on demand or downloading from the Net is a wash? Three years, according to my figures. Add another three years for broad availability and to cover the impact of HDTV, which will make our video files five times larger again. In six years, then, the Blockbuster and Hollywood Videos of this country will probably be have sold their storefronts, too, leaving the strip malls of America to Starbucks and Bennetton. These intellectual property businesses will simply go away, along with what's left of the retail software business. All that will be left is books -- the oldest intellectual property vessels of all. "
It's been three years and video on demand over broadband is only for the peer to peer file sharing crowd.
I'm a registered Democrat in the Great State of South Dakota. (No not the Dakota with your cousins that live in Bismarck.)
I've had great luck with emailing and writing my Senators (Johnson and Daschle), although since Daschle became Senate Majority Leader, his office has gotten worse, so I talk more to Johnson's Office.
I'd really suggest moving to a State with a smaller population, it makes getting listened to easier. (Wyoming, Alaska, one of the Dakotas, Montana, Nevada are good ones).
Form a Technology Board of some sort, start mailing the Senators and Reps, and travel to Washington. My Grandmother is active in Water Rights and Electrification and Education and before her lung cancer, she traveled to D.C. 3-4 times a year and met with the Senators.
I thought the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) was out of the DoJ (Department of Justice) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was out of the DoHaHS (Department of Health and Human Services.
http://www.fda.gov/ - Sure looks like it there, so I have no idea what you are getting at with the comment about drug flow.
PETA used to run around and slash leather coats with razors and throw paint or blood on people with fur.
As for the Pro-Life...go after them as well. In the Reagan and first Bush administration those that blow up abortion clinics and targeted Doctors *were* treated as terrorists. But they havn't done the mass distruction of private property that ELF has.
"Releasing 10,000 minks is "terrorism"? How is it terrorism if no individual is hurt, only corporate interests?"
It's organized distruction of private property, the same way that flying an aircraft into a building is the organized distruction of private property, although without the loss of human life. Don't be so quick to assume that the owners of the released mink was a "corporate interest". It may have been a farmer. The groves of geneticly altered trees destroyed are usually owned by State Universities.
"The definition of "terrorism" is too broad, permitting the special surveillance powers granted in this legislation to be applied far beyond what is commonly thought of by the term. Under the definition proposed by the Administration, even acts of simple civil disobedience could lead organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to become targets of "terrorist" investigations."
Well, I might get flamed for this, but...
While I do not support laws that infringe on any of the Amendments to the Constitution...
Some of the things that groups like the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) do...is terrorism.
"Eco-terrorism, sponsored by loosely knit groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, began in earnest in 1998, with the burning down of a mountaintop ski resort in Vail Colorado, the release of 10,000 minks from an Oregon mink farm, and the burning of a slaughterhouse. Eco-terrorism has proliferated since then, although, until recently, fear of provoking further retaliation has prevented targeted businesses from publicizing the problem. Biotechnology projects are the latest targets, with a fire set to the offices of a global biotech project at Michigan State University in Lansing and various experimental crop sites destroyed."
Events like that, terrorizing people that wear fur or leather, it's not right. In a society based on Common Law, like the US, those things that are not illegal are legal, wearing leather or fur, or raising minks for fur, isn't illegal and it's not right for a private citizen to attack that property. Many of the *LF groups are starting down the same path as Hezbollah and Hamas did in the 60s and 70s. If those domestic groups practice the same kind of distributed terror as Aryan Nation or Hezbollah, the Police and FBI should go after them with the same tools as they go after other "hate" groups.
PETA branding people for a choice of calories is no more right than Aryan Nation branding people for a choice of mate or church.
Many weapons systems in the hands of NATO, US, and Russia are systems that our enemies can't get or don't have.
An example - Soviet fighters.
All the aircraft the Soviets and now Russians export are Export models with toned down sensors and weapons systems.
Same goes for the export versions of American fighters, missiles and sensor equipment.
American M-1 tanks, while in service with Egypt and Kuwait, have not ended up in the hands of the Taliban. Same goes for the F-16s and F-15s, Tornados in the hands of Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman or Indonesia.
Even "client" states like Iraq we unable to get the latest versions of Soviet T-72 or BMPs, instead having to buy knock-off T-84s from Yugoslavia and Chinese APCs. Not because of the price, but because the Soviets would not sell them the best gear. The T-62s and 72s Iraq had were the second or third best models the Soviets had, not the front-line models in East Germany.
Arms races are not new. The idea behind an arms race dates back to the first invention of weapons (other than a rock or stick) by man. The point is to inflict damage upon an enemy or the enemy society to the point that the enemy will no longer oppose your society in whatever venture you are currently at odds over. Where the "race" comes in, is to achive those goals with a lower cost in whatever your society holds dear, in this case it's material loses and life of your citizens.
From 1979-1985, the Soviets using airmobile tactics like the US 1st Air Cav used in Vietnam, ran over the Afghans. From 1985 on, with Stinger and Blowpipe Manpack SAMs, the Afghanis started to win back the war. By late 1987 the Russians started to lower thier helo loses, but by then the costs of the war and worsening economic conditions in the Soviet Union led to a pull-out.
If you look at a time-line of Afghanistan, it has about the same ups and downs as the War in Vietnam from 1965-1973.
PS - One interesting thing about the arming of the Afghanis and Iranians is...most of it takes place after the 1984 Presidental Elections. It's almost as if Reagan didn't really start fouling up until after he won a second term.
Not sure about Postal Plus, but I ran Postal when it first came out on my Mac, and it was a bad game.
It's good to see more games for Linux, but if they are bad games that no one wants, it's not that good of a thing. See when the bad game doesn't sell, then people will say that Linux won't support a game maker and you get into that spiral that Macintosh was in back in '96-'98.
But maybe Postal Plus is better than regular Postal.
On Mac OS 7.6/8.x/9.x there is a Control Panel called File Exchange that has an index of every common file extension and lets you pick the application for it. Under the Internet Control Panel there is a similar feature for picking "helper applications" for Internet related file types and applications.
Or if you like, you can drag the file to the alias or the icon of the application you wish to open the files in. This works for the Desktop, Finder windows, the Dock (OS X) and the Application Switcher (OS 9.x).
Harris and LeMay ordered these attacks, and while some of it was done for terror, alot of industrial work had been outsourced to the houses and smaller businesses.
In Japan, by April of '45 all most all the aircraft part production and AAA munitions were outsourced to people's homes.
Bombing military sites in Afghanistan will have short term military benefits and no effects on a population that is under the thumb of the Taliban
There are a number in the UK, and some in France and Germany.
During the War, the Germans put some of them in to camps.
On the chart of Nazi symbols you can see markings other than the Star of David for Jews and the Pink Triangle.
Christan Scientists, strongly anti-Nazi Catholics and other religous persons were stuck into camps to keep them out of the general public. It wasn't just the Jews that were oppressed.
"And we were no better than Germany when innocent civilians were killed by American bombing."
What about the innocent Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Serbians, Croats, French, Christan Scientists, Danes, Dutch that were overrun, killed, raped, gased and tortured by the Germans when the Allies did none of that?
The bombing of Germany and Japan is a bad comparison for "whos better".
Did the US or Commonwealth forces slaughter 70,000 people when they took Rome or Vienna like the Japanese did at Nanking?
No.
Did the US or Commonwealth gas 6,000,000 Germans at any point?
No.
Did the Germans bomb, burn, rape and murder a vast path across Africa and Europe?
Yes.
Did the Allies carpet bomb German and Japanese cites to slow down German and Japense industrial production, which by 1943 had been dispersed to homes and small businesses?
Yes.
Was that bombing needed?
It can be argued that it was, and that those bombings lead to a quicker end of the war and while it killed many, many Germans and Japanese, it saved many, many other people.
It seems quick enough on OS 10.0.4 on my TiBook, havn't messed with it much on 10.1 yet.
I think the whole Fast/Slow issue on 10.0x was really a YMMV issue.
I had alot of things that people whined about not seem slow, and some things people said screamed by, were slow as hell. 10.1 seems pretty quick all the way around though.
Yes, the Russians have boat loads of Ti laying around. Actually, thats one of the reasons they built those Fast Attack subs out of Ti instead of steel was because of cost, not strength or MAD avoidance. Ti as I understand it, is a bear to work with for a structural metal in aviation or naval engineering.
It conducts heat pretty well and it looks good on my Powerbook though.
The Myth of Soviet Fighters having vaccum tubes vs. the West's solid state technology making the Soviet's able to fight in a nuclear environment is just that a myth.
By the late 1970s and early 80s, the United States, Europe and Soviet next generation fighters had all progressed from a vaccum tube level of technology to solid states.
The Third Generation Jets
US - F-4, F-111, A-6, A-7, F-8
USSR - MiG-21, MiG-25, Su-17/19
Europe - Jaguar, Mirage III, Buccanner
Were being replaced by the Next Generation aircraft, and at the time (1976) Soviet CPU technology was just as good, if not better than that of the United States (The KGB Archives book talks about this). It was only in the mid 1980s that the economy of scale and massive money put into AMD, Intel, Samsung and Motorola designs began to outstrip Soviet clock-speeds and designs.
The older Soviet designs tended to be cheap and disposable aircraft, but by the late 70s, they were building smaller numbers of world class aircraft like the West, and they used advanced avionics and computer systems.
The Fourth Generation Jets
US - F-14, F-15, F-16, F/A-18
USSR - MiG-29, Su-27
Europe - Tornado, Mirage IIIE
(Note the F-14 is something of a bastard that crosses Generations with features of both. And the MiG-31 is just an upgraded MiG-25)
It's true that EMP and TREE has a serious effect on solid state electronics, and it's also true that the West spent billions of dollars hardening thier equipment against EMP.
The myth of Soviet gear being more survivable because of vaccum tubes, for the most part is a myth. The Soviets hung tight with the West until about 1985 in technology, and with each advance the West made, the Soivets matched it or passed it.
Since people know how big the shroud on the Titans are, we know how big the max diameter of the optics are. And if they aren't launched on Titans, we know how big the cargo bay of the Shutte is.
As for who says - The Federation of American Scientists, Aviation Week and Janes says. If the big three say it...it's probably true.
According to the FAS website, the KH-12 "IMPROVED CRYSTAL", which is the best the US has in orbit, can..."readily identify and distinguish differing types of vehicles and equipment with resolutions better than 10 centimeters."
So unless you are playing with big cards, I doubt the Man can read your hand.
The optical sensors like KH-11/KH-12 can't see through clouds, so they also have the Lacrosse series, which use Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to image thier targets.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because Cringely calls something dead, that doesn't mean it is. Or if something is alive, it doesn't mean he is. Take a look at the list of articles from his Old Hat page. It's like a tour of Wired covers.
2 1. html
0 6. html
Here is Cringely on Excite@Home
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit199901
"Excite, like it's bigger, badder competitor Yahoo, is entirely about branding and brand awareness, so the name won't go away. Excite is better known than @Home. Current management at Excite won't change, either. Only the pockets get deeper. So in exactly the same spirit in which a little Mississippi long distance company became MCI-Worldcom, look for more content deals from Excite and more customer-acquiring deals from @Home, sucking-up smaller ISPs.
The one thing that has changed in all this is the identity of the competition. Unable to beat Yahoo at its own game, Excite is using @Home to change the game. The new target is America OnLine. "
While he has been right sometimes, he is just as often wrong, sometimes wildly wrong.
Back in 1998 he proclaimed, loudly that the iMac's intro was going to be flawed by the fact that something like 18% of them didn't work. Well the failure rate was under the industry average when they actually came out of the box. I would provide a link, but his Old Hat list starts the week after this column was out. But I remeber it dangit.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit199901
Then in Jan of '99 he said that Apple was screwed because it came out with different colors of iMacs and that was stupid.
Or there was the decleration that broadband was going to make Blockbuster go out of business.
"How long will it be before the time difference between driving to get video on demand or downloading from the Net is a wash? Three years, according to my figures. Add another three years for broad availability and to cover the impact of HDTV, which will make our video files five times larger again. In six years, then, the Blockbuster and Hollywood Videos of this country will probably be have sold their storefronts, too, leaving the strip malls of America to Starbucks and Bennetton. These intellectual property businesses will simply go away, along with what's left of the retail software business. All that will be left is books -- the oldest intellectual property vessels of all. "
It's been three years and video on demand over broadband is only for the peer to peer file sharing crowd.
I'm a registered Democrat in the Great State of South Dakota. (No not the Dakota with your cousins that live in Bismarck.)
I've had great luck with emailing and writing my Senators (Johnson and Daschle), although since Daschle became Senate Majority Leader, his office has gotten worse, so I talk more to Johnson's Office.
I'd really suggest moving to a State with a smaller population, it makes getting listened to easier. (Wyoming, Alaska, one of the Dakotas, Montana, Nevada are good ones).
Form a Technology Board of some sort, start mailing the Senators and Reps, and travel to Washington. My Grandmother is active in Water Rights and Electrification and Education and before her lung cancer, she traveled to D.C. 3-4 times a year and met with the Senators.
Ahh.
How can you say, that "no one" was terrorized by it.
You don't know that, you don't know what went through the minds of the victims of the various attacks by the eco-terror groups.
Drugs and the USDA...
I thought the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency) was out of the DoJ (Department of Justice) and the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) was out of the DoHaHS (Department of Health and Human Services.
http://www.fda.gov/ - Sure looks like it there, so I have no idea what you are getting at with the comment about drug flow.
PETA used to run around and slash leather coats with razors and throw paint or blood on people with fur.
As for the Pro-Life...go after them as well. In the Reagan and first Bush administration those that blow up abortion clinics and targeted Doctors *were* treated as terrorists. But they havn't done the mass distruction of private property that ELF has.
"Releasing 10,000 minks is "terrorism"? How is it terrorism if no individual is hurt, only corporate interests?"
It's organized distruction of private property, the same way that flying an aircraft into a building is the organized distruction of private property, although without the loss of human life. Don't be so quick to assume that the owners of the released mink was a "corporate interest". It may have been a farmer. The groves of geneticly altered trees destroyed are usually owned by State Universities.
"The definition of "terrorism" is too broad, permitting the special surveillance powers granted in this legislation to be applied far beyond what is commonly thought of by the term. Under the definition proposed by the Administration, even acts of simple civil disobedience could lead organizations such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) to become targets of "terrorist" investigations."
n tr ibutors/kurtz071701.shtml
Well, I might get flamed for this, but...
While I do not support laws that infringe on any of the Amendments to the Constitution...
Some of the things that groups like the ELF (Earth Liberation Front) do...is terrorism.
http://www.nationalreview.com/search-results/co
"Eco-terrorism, sponsored by loosely knit groups like the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front, began in earnest in 1998, with the burning down of a mountaintop ski resort in Vail Colorado, the release of 10,000 minks from an Oregon mink farm, and the burning of a slaughterhouse. Eco-terrorism has proliferated since then, although, until recently, fear of provoking further retaliation has prevented targeted businesses from publicizing the problem. Biotechnology projects are the latest targets, with a fire set to the offices of a global biotech project at Michigan State University in Lansing and various experimental crop sites destroyed."
Events like that, terrorizing people that wear fur or leather, it's not right. In a society based on Common Law, like the US, those things that are not illegal are legal, wearing leather or fur, or raising minks for fur, isn't illegal and it's not right for a private citizen to attack that property. Many of the *LF groups are starting down the same path as Hezbollah and Hamas did in the 60s and 70s. If those domestic groups practice the same kind of distributed terror as Aryan Nation or Hezbollah, the Police and FBI should go after them with the same tools as they go after other "hate" groups.
PETA branding people for a choice of calories is no more right than Aryan Nation branding people for a choice of mate or church.
While yes, $200 will get you about 80GB of 5400 RPM Hard Disk, a quick look at thechipmerchant.com shows...
PC 2100 DDR 32X64 [256MB]
$50.00
PC 2100 DDR 32X72 [256MB] ECC
$57.00
KINGMAX PC150 32X64 [256MB]
$44.00
PC133 64X72 [512MB] ECC Reg.
$86.00
Rambus is a bit more, but still cheap compared to a year ago
PC800 Rambus 256MB ECC
$132.00
Wouldn't it be Sir Darth?
I know...off topic...
Not really accurate.
Many weapons systems in the hands of NATO, US, and Russia are systems that our enemies can't get or don't have.
An example - Soviet fighters.
All the aircraft the Soviets and now Russians export are Export models with toned down sensors and weapons systems.
Same goes for the export versions of American fighters, missiles and sensor equipment.
American M-1 tanks, while in service with Egypt and Kuwait, have not ended up in the hands of the Taliban. Same goes for the F-16s and F-15s, Tornados in the hands of Pakistan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman or Indonesia.
Even "client" states like Iraq we unable to get the latest versions of Soviet T-72 or BMPs, instead having to buy knock-off T-84s from Yugoslavia and Chinese APCs. Not because of the price, but because the Soviets would not sell them the best gear. The T-62s and 72s Iraq had were the second or third best models the Soviets had, not the front-line models in East Germany.
Arms races are not new. The idea behind an arms race dates back to the first invention of weapons (other than a rock or stick) by man. The point is to inflict damage upon an enemy or the enemy society to the point that the enemy will no longer oppose your society in whatever venture you are currently at odds over. Where the "race" comes in, is to achive those goals with a lower cost in whatever your society holds dear, in this case it's material loses and life of your citizens.
I didn't like the graphics.
I didn't like it, plus it's from late '97, kind of an old game for Loki to start publishing now.
This is true.
From 1979-1985, the Soviets using airmobile tactics like the US 1st Air Cav used in Vietnam, ran over the Afghans. From 1985 on, with Stinger and Blowpipe Manpack SAMs, the Afghanis started to win back the war. By late 1987 the Russians started to lower thier helo loses, but by then the costs of the war and worsening economic conditions in the Soviet Union led to a pull-out.
If you look at a time-line of Afghanistan, it has about the same ups and downs as the War in Vietnam from 1965-1973.
PS - One interesting thing about the arming of the Afghanis and Iranians is...most of it takes place after the 1984 Presidental Elections. It's almost as if Reagan didn't really start fouling up until after he won a second term.
Not sure about Postal Plus, but I ran Postal when it first came out on my Mac, and it was a bad game.
It's good to see more games for Linux, but if they are bad games that no one wants, it's not that good of a thing. See when the bad game doesn't sell, then people will say that Linux won't support a game maker and you get into that spiral that Macintosh was in back in '96-'98.
But maybe Postal Plus is better than regular Postal.
On Mac OS 7.6/8.x/9.x there is a Control Panel called File Exchange that has an index of every common file extension and lets you pick the application for it. Under the Internet Control Panel there is a similar feature for picking "helper applications" for Internet related file types and applications.
Or if you like, you can drag the file to the alias or the icon of the application you wish to open the files in. This works for the Desktop, Finder windows, the Dock (OS X) and the Application Switcher (OS 9.x).
Harris and LeMay ordered these attacks, and while some of it was done for terror, alot of industrial work had been outsourced to the houses and smaller businesses.
In Japan, by April of '45 all most all the aircraft part production and AAA munitions were outsourced to people's homes.
Bombing military sites in Afghanistan will have short term military benefits and no effects on a population that is under the thumb of the Taliban
There are a number in the UK, and some in France and Germany.
During the War, the Germans put some of them in to camps.
On the chart of Nazi symbols you can see markings other than the Star of David for Jews and the Pink Triangle.
Christan Scientists, strongly anti-Nazi Catholics and other religous persons were stuck into camps to keep them out of the general public. It wasn't just the Jews that were oppressed.
I'd bet that the Afghanis know what a US flag looks like.
There have been US flags being burned in Pakistan for decades, I'm sure the Taliban has burned thier share of them as well.
While in Kentucky, there are not many organized Afghani flag burnings.
"And we were no better than Germany when innocent civilians were killed by American bombing."
What about the innocent Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Poles, Serbians, Croats, French, Christan Scientists, Danes, Dutch that were overrun, killed, raped, gased and tortured by the Germans when the Allies did none of that?
The bombing of Germany and Japan is a bad comparison for "whos better".
Did the US or Commonwealth forces slaughter 70,000 people when they took Rome or Vienna like the Japanese did at Nanking?
No.
Did the US or Commonwealth gas 6,000,000 Germans at any point?
No.
Did the Germans bomb, burn, rape and murder a vast path across Africa and Europe?
Yes.
Did the Allies carpet bomb German and Japanese cites to slow down German and Japense industrial production, which by 1943 had been dispersed to homes and small businesses?
Yes.
Was that bombing needed?
It can be argued that it was, and that those bombings lead to a quicker end of the war and while it killed many, many Germans and Japanese, it saved many, many other people.
I figured it was because it's almost monday there in Afghanistan, and because it was a peak TV period for American males.
Pre-game show for the early Football game.
It seems quick enough on OS 10.0.4 on my TiBook, havn't messed with it much on 10.1 yet.
I think the whole Fast/Slow issue on 10.0x was really a YMMV issue.
I had alot of things that people whined about not seem slow, and some things people said screamed by, were slow as hell. 10.1 seems pretty quick all the way around though.
I doubt it, because in the four days I've been using IE 5 on Mac OS 10.1, it's been really fast and really stable.
This issue will only take a minor patch to fix.
On the issue of Skunk Works...I'd bet that Apple has been helping the Omni Web fellows work on that great Cocoa browser of thiers.
Who know...maybe there is a Cocoa version of CyberDog somewhere at Apple.
Yes, the Russians have boat loads of Ti laying around. Actually, thats one of the reasons they built those Fast Attack subs out of Ti instead of steel was because of cost, not strength or MAD avoidance. Ti as I understand it, is a bear to work with for a structural metal in aviation or naval engineering.
It conducts heat pretty well and it looks good on my Powerbook though.
The Myth of Soviet Fighters having vaccum tubes vs. the West's solid state technology making the Soviet's able to fight in a nuclear environment is just that a myth.
By the late 1970s and early 80s, the United States, Europe and Soviet next generation fighters had all progressed from a vaccum tube level of technology to solid states.
The Third Generation Jets
US - F-4, F-111, A-6, A-7, F-8
USSR - MiG-21, MiG-25, Su-17/19
Europe - Jaguar, Mirage III, Buccanner
Were being replaced by the Next Generation aircraft, and at the time (1976) Soviet CPU technology was just as good, if not better than that of the United States (The KGB Archives book talks about this). It was only in the mid 1980s that the economy of scale and massive money put into AMD, Intel, Samsung and Motorola designs began to outstrip Soviet clock-speeds and designs.
The older Soviet designs tended to be cheap and disposable aircraft, but by the late 70s, they were building smaller numbers of world class aircraft like the West, and they used advanced avionics and computer systems.
The Fourth Generation Jets
US - F-14, F-15, F-16, F/A-18
USSR - MiG-29, Su-27
Europe - Tornado, Mirage IIIE
(Note the F-14 is something of a bastard that crosses Generations with features of both. And the MiG-31 is just an upgraded MiG-25)
It's true that EMP and TREE has a serious effect on solid state electronics, and it's also true that the West spent billions of dollars hardening thier equipment against EMP.
The myth of Soviet gear being more survivable because of vaccum tubes, for the most part is a myth. The Soviets hung tight with the West until about 1985 in technology, and with each advance the West made, the Soivets matched it or passed it.
Since people know how big the shroud on the Titans are, we know how big the max diameter of the optics are. And if they aren't launched on Titans, we know how big the cargo bay of the Shutte is.
As for who says - The Federation of American Scientists, Aviation Week and Janes says. If the big three say it...it's probably true.
Thumb print out here in Oregon.
They've been doing it since at least 1995.
According to the FAS website, the KH-12 "IMPROVED CRYSTAL", which is the best the US has in orbit, can..."readily identify and distinguish differing types of vehicles and equipment with resolutions better than 10 centimeters."
a cr osse.htm
h -1 2.htm
So unless you are playing with big cards, I doubt the Man can read your hand.
The optical sensors like KH-11/KH-12 can't see through clouds, so they also have the Lacrosse series, which use Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) to image thier targets.
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/l
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/imint/k