Not the SX 70 with the squidgy little whine... I mean the ones where you pulled the tab which dragged the film through the rollers... you had to wait a certain amount of time... like 2 minutes, no more, no less. Then peel the photo off the paper tab with the chemical cocktail that did Lord knows what.
You know, the monsters like that 70's show's Vista Cruiser. Mine was a Buick Le Sabre Estate Wagon, with the rear facing 3rd row seats. For reference, see the movie "Used Cars"
The device in number one was called a "card punch" or "key punch" machine. Had a great, loud hum. A room full of them would require hearing protection today, but we didn't know about hearing protection back then. There were also "coding sheets" where you could write out your program and a "key punch operator" would key in the cards line by line and return you a deck of cards.
The device in number two was called an "accoustic coupler" which was distinct from the modem. A great example is shown in the movie "War Games"
Typefaces were in place long before IBM, Apple, Microsoft entered the scene. I too wonder why the article refers to IBM creating a new "Helvetica", calling it IBM Plex, and including serif, sans-serif, and monotype. My main complaint is that there is essentially no such thing as a serif Helvetica, so how can there be a new IBM Plex that is serif? Same is true of monotype. And we should have no illusions about IBM Plex replacing Helvetica. Nothing is EVER going to replace Helvetica. The article summary would be much clearer if it never even used the word. (As for Mac's being associated with Helvetica, well, they paid Linotype for the name, along with Xerox and Adobe, so that the font would be included in Postscript). As for today, whether it is called Helvetica or Arial or FreeSans, it's basically the standard, basic sans serif font. Helvetica is Kleenex. Arial is facial tissue. Both will catch your snot.
I've been the programmer and the engineer and the QA tester. And this all boils down to the quality of each. I remember when I was the programmer/engineer on a long standing application. Management brought in a QA person, who was basically an intern who was tasked with finding bugs (probably because someone complained the app was "buggy" when it was really just overloaded and being used outside of its design parameters.)
This guy comes to me with a laundry list of bugs, and the biggest one was where the application crashed when they were not on a specific tab, and the user clicked a certain button. He thought he had found the holy grail of bugs. He was very excited.
His excitement turned to dismay when he asked when I would be fixing this bug. I told him "never". He was incredulous. Why? Don't you see how bad this is? I asked him how many times the bug had been reported. He said that it had NEVER been reported. HE had found it! And I explained that a user would never push that button without being on the tab it was associated with, because they would want to see the quote that was being sent out and it's amount before submitting it. So it was a VERY low priority and I wouldn't be doing anything about it anytime soon.
OTOH, I was a QA tester for a medical product at one point. I developed the test cases and executed unbelievably complex test scenarios (largely because I suffered from a disease this product was used to help manage) and so had a complete "user" mindset. My documentation on it was formidable as it all had to be made available to the FDA. So this was some very high stakes testing, and I was able to uncover many bugs that would have sunk the product had I not been as thorough as I was. The company that engaged me on this project was overwhelmed with just how detailed I had been, and turned to me again when they came out with another similar product. I declined that engagement as I had moved onto a full time gig instead of consulting, but I probably could have made a good living with just them as my only client had I chosen to.
Bottom line on all of this is that it depends on the people. Quality people, regardless of role, is what will make or break Quality Assurance in products and software. If you have slipshod, lazy programmers, no amount of QA will fix that. If you have slipshod, lazy QA engineers, no amount of QA will fix that either. Where the problem lay in this case is hard to determine. But my guess is that this org has a problem in both areas, which is a reflection of their management more than anything else.
Pros:
- less commute time
- good for the environment
- more flexibility
- potentially higher productivity
Cons:
- Out of sight, out of mind is not good at layoff time
- less social interaction
- less professional interaction (maybe)
Overall, I prefer to work from home, but since I have direct reports that I manage, I'm not allowed to do it full time. I do telecommute every friday though!
Then we should do this at Yellowstone. If we harnessed enough energy from there, we might be able to stave off a caldera super event, which is overdue.
You are the first one to actually answer my questions. Perhaps because they were loaded questions. I want to be able to speed. So does the government. They make money on speeding tickets. (Ironically, I usually DO NOT speed). I'm wondering in my questions whether or not the government will mess with speed limits in the case that I am still allowed to drive. They will lower them as they need to make more money on those cars still with drivers. And the SDCs will go those lower speed limits. The questions about the bald tires, oil changes, and phoning home all relate to liability. If I don't change my tires on the manufacturer's schedule, I am personally liable. What happens when those manufactures decide that half the tire life we have today is good, as they also either own or are in kahoots with tire manufacturers. What happens when they decide oil changes at 3000 miles and requirements for synthetic oil are to be standard. They feed their dealerships that way. The phoning home is to keep track of all this. And if I don't concede their demands, I become liable in an accident, not them. Bottom line is that I don't want SDC's. Give me assists, but don't force me to become passive in my own car. If that happens, I'll end up as part of the sheeple.
I'm tired of this one. It's not gonna happen on a massive scale. Not unless you build special roads for the self driving cars. Sure, I've heard all the arguments about how AI driven cars will be safer, better drivers than humans. And overall, perhaps so. But overall isn't the standard this will be judged on.
Simple example: Suppose an AI driver gets into a position where it has to hit either a young kid, or an old lady. Who does it hit? Should it hit the old lady since she's already lived a full life? Should it hit the kid because they bounce better than old ladies, and the overall chance of saving them both is higher?
Who programs the heuristics here? And what does the spec say? And what happens when the expected results are not what we expect? Who is liable for the vehicular homicide?
And this is only the really big one. Can I tell my AI to speed? Can I tell it I'm in a hurry and will it respond by acceding to my wishes? Can I tell it to go past the oil changes? Can I tell it that I want to drive on bald tires? Can I tell it I don't want it to phone home?
And you don't get to say, "Well, you have to be there to take over if the AI gets confused. BZZZZZZT. That is not a self driving car. That is some version of driver assist and I'm still the pilot in command. If you want a true "driverless" car, I have to be able to sit in the "driver's seat", spin it around, and play yahtzee with my kids. Short of this, you just have more and more of driver assist.
Besides, if I don't like driving, why am I buying a car? Asshats that want a driverless car should take the bus
using up a resource at an increasing rate that we know is finite and will run out in the future [youtube.com].
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Hooey! We will never run out of oil and other fossil fuels. The market will fix it. It has to. Here's how:
As you "use up" this finite resource, its price will climb. This is natural as it will become harder and harder to extract what is left. Eventually, the price will rise to a point where alternative energy makes sense. It will likely be a combination of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and biofuel. It is already happening. As the price of oil spiked, many of these technologies made major leaps forward.
Of course, technology can also help you retrieve more fossil fuels at a lower cost. This, combined with lower global demand for energy, was what cause oil prices to tumble. Fracking increased the supply, demand went down, and the price cratered. Did you notice that when that happened, the US essentially became energy independent? No one EVER thought that could happen again.
The proof of all of this is the energy market for lamp oil in the 19th century. It used to run on whale oil. And we had almost hunted the whales to extinction over it. Ships went out hunting whales for YEARS before coming back to port. And these were wooden ships, not super tankers. Price of whale oil was going out of sight. Then Getty comes along, and figures out that kerosene will work, and that he can drill for it and the problem is solved. Fossil fuels were the answer to that crisis, and the alternative energy that we are researching now will be the answer in the future.
If you are a pilot, this is intuitive. Takeoff is the most dangerous phase of flight. You are low, and slow, and you have to run your engines at near full capacity to take off. Landing is similar, but you already have airspeed enough to fly the plane, and some altitude to play with, and you can trade one for the other to a limited degree, as well as power in reserve if needed.
But many of these immigrants do NOT integrate culturally. I work in the tech industry and the landscape has changed dramatically. Used to be that you hired junior programmers out of school and they rose through the ranks. I did that, and I might be the last generation of Americans who can. I have 5 employees reporting to me - they are all Indian. I work for an Indian boss. And I have over 100 consultants that work for me, mostly offshore. But some are onshore, and the culture is radically different. I now tell friends I work in the curry palace - the whole office smells of it. Worse, I have to accommodate people travelling back home for 4-5 weeks at a time. Sometimes they want to "work from India" for a week. I had one guy tell me he would work some days and not others. I couldn't keep track, so made a rule that if you want to work from home, you have to work EST and it has to be for a full week in these cases. I once asked for 3 weeks off for a family vacation to SoDak and Yellowstone. I got the hairy eyeball. Realistically, the unwritten rule for Americans is 2 weeks off. I get that going to India takes much more time. But still... anyway, some do integrate quite nicely. Most don't. Social norms are very different. Don't get me wrong... my India resources work VERY hard, and get the job done. But with the offshore rates so much lower than onshore rates, there is no room left in my company to hire historically American workers regardless of race, religion, or any other classification. They are just too expensive. So I worry about the company's future - where will they get the next "me" from? Will they outsource my IP to a consulting company? Will my company ultimately own any IT related IP? Yet I have no adequate answer either... if my company decided to insource everything, we'd be uncompetitive at least in the short run. We'd eventually go out of business. So what is the answer? I don't know. What I do know for sure is that this doesn't fit into "they're taking jobs Americans won't do" category. Lots of Americans would do this work. There are just far less positions than before, and as a country that is gonna hurt us.
A well reasoned post, however, reinsurance is not as much "insurance for the insurance" but really looks more like financing so as to maintain working capital to grow your insurance business. By sloughing off your insured limits to another party, it frees you up to write even more insurance. The cost of doing that is akin to interest on a loan.
I've been watching the media coverage (and listening - NPR) on this whole encryption mudslinging by law enforcement. The media is eating it up, and while they are careful to say that the jury is out on whether or not the terrorists in Paris used encrypted communications, they are quick to say that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had no inkling that this attack was on the horizon. I will leave aside the notion that Occum's Razor can be used to evaluate the two scenarios - one where the agencies and law enforcement were simply incompetent and are now blaming this evil encryption for being caught flatfooted, vs. their premise that the terrorists MUST be using encryption now...
What is lost on all of them (agencies, law enforcement) is THAT THEY DID THIS TO THEMSELVES either way. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been "hoovering up" all available communications data and metadata. They demanded and got kangaroo courts (FISA - I'm looking at you) where secret search warrants are being executed. There is no regulation by the citizenry, only by government "you can trust us" types who don't understand that when the stories about this stuff break, consumers begin to demand secure communications. Every time the government executed these warrants on the communications and computer industries, they gave them both an incentive to ditch the whole cooperation thing, and finally those companies started encrypting things in a way that they did not have the ability to "listen in" because lets face it, that is a pain in the neck and takes them away from their core mission.
Now they are crying about encryption, without understanding that the ship already sailed... And they are the ones that kicked it out of the harbor.
Me and thousands of people saw an F-117 up close at the New England Airshow at Westover AFB about 20 years ago. You couldn't touch it or walk under it, as it was cordoned off with ropes. A soldier with an M-16 guarded it. My dad struck up a conversation and said "That gun isn't loaded." and the soldier said "Yes sir, it is loaded" My dad took that at face value but went on and said "But if I crossed the rope you wouldn't shoot me." and the soldier replied "Yes sir, I would shoot you". At that point, I took my dad's arm and started walking him away from the display saying "Come on, Dad, let's stop annoying the man with the automatic weapon"
Looking back at the soldier, I could see just the hint of a smile on his face as we walked away.
In the Palormares incident in 1966, a B-52 collided with a refueling tanker and both planes were lost. The plane was carrying 4 nuclear weapons, 3 of which were found on land (and two had their conventional explosives go off), but one fell into the Med. Dr. John P. Craven used a Bayesian Search theory to locate the lost bomb. The first step in the Bayesian Search is to formulate hypotheses for where the bomb might have gone down. Craven put a bottle of Scotch up as a prize for the person who came closest to where the bomb would actually be found, and got several hypotheses for where the bomb went down. While this isn't exactly the type of gambling discussed above, putting a real reward up clearly motivates people to give their very best guesses! Oh yeah, they found the bomb, and the actual recovery of it was fictionalized in the movie Men of Honor with Deniro and Cuba Gooding Jr.
Mod parent up. The F111 is the perfect example of why you DON'T try and build a plane to take on more than one, maybe two, roles. Why did we build both the F16 and the F15 at essentially the same time? Two different roles. The F15 was originally designed to be a deep interdiction plane to shoot down Russian bombers. F16's are not meant to do that. They are supposed to provide in theater air superiority. So the 16 has one engine, the 15 has two. Not to mention the 16 is cheaper. The F14 was of the same era, but designed around the all important tail hook. Add the A-10's and you've got yourself a great air force (AF, Navy, Marines) and nobody's gonna stop you.
Today, we killed the A-10 to feed the F35 machine, a plane that essentially tries to be one aircraft for everyone. But that is even harder to do today, because all our planes have to have INTERNAL bomb bays for stealth now, which means that you lose flexibility on all those planes. Some of the 35's will be VSTAL, some will be Air Force fighters, some try to be Marine attack aircraft. The end result? They can't do any of them really well. At least the Air Force was able to hedge its bets with the F22 - the greatest fighter plane ever made. But they got too few of them as they are so expensive.
The bottom line is our military must work out what planes they need for what roles, share the components of those planes only when it makes sense to do so, and stop thinking about the export market. Let Lockheed Martin and Boeing figure that stuff out. Let our military spec the planes they need, and pay the contractors to build what they want. If you do that, no one will challenge the US from the air.
I think you are romanticizing the past. Will you get rid of automatic chokes, electronic ignition too? I'm old enough to remember cars in those days. My 1972 Buick Le Sabre Estate Wagon had a very intricate starting procedure. You had to push the gas pedal all the way to the floor to set the choke. Then pump the gas pedal 2-3 times to prime the carb. Then you had to "crack" the gas pedal just the right amount. THEN you could turn the ignition key. Assuming the car turned over, it MIGHT start. Then, if it did not, you pumped the gas pedal one more time in case there was not enough fuel yet. Don't do it twice though. If you did, the engine was now "flooded" and you had to wait 15 minutes to try again. It's also possible that the one extra pump of the pedal flooded it. If you were lucky, the car started on the first try, but more likely it took 2, maybe 3 turns of the key to get the thing to start.
Today, you get in, turn the key enough to engage the starter. I you let it go, the car continues to crank until started. At least that's what my Expedition does. Anyway, it starts every time unless the battery is dead, or there is some other big problem. Sure, your old car was easy to work on. That's just another way of saying that it was always broken by today's standards.
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If you can't get your Anti-Virus software off of your equipment, is it really anti-virus, or has it just become another virus?
Not the SX 70 with the squidgy little whine... I mean the ones where you pulled the tab which dragged the film through the rollers... you had to wait a certain amount of time... like 2 minutes, no more, no less. Then peel the photo off the paper tab with the chemical cocktail that did Lord knows what.
You know, the monsters like that 70's show's Vista Cruiser. Mine was a Buick Le Sabre Estate Wagon, with the rear facing 3rd row seats. For reference, see the movie "Used Cars"
The device in number one was called a "card punch" or "key punch" machine. Had a great, loud hum. A room full of them would require hearing protection today, but we didn't know about hearing protection back then. There were also "coding sheets" where you could write out your program and a "key punch operator" would key in the cards line by line and return you a deck of cards.
The device in number two was called an "accoustic coupler" which was distinct from the modem. A great example is shown in the movie "War Games"
Not quite. I was an elementary student in the 70's. I distinctly remember the "science" of the day pointing to a coming ICE AGE rather than warming.
Typefaces were in place long before IBM, Apple, Microsoft entered the scene. I too wonder why the article refers to IBM creating a new "Helvetica", calling it IBM Plex, and including serif, sans-serif, and monotype. My main complaint is that there is essentially no such thing as a serif Helvetica, so how can there be a new IBM Plex that is serif? Same is true of monotype. And we should have no illusions about IBM Plex replacing Helvetica. Nothing is EVER going to replace Helvetica. The article summary would be much clearer if it never even used the word. (As for Mac's being associated with Helvetica, well, they paid Linotype for the name, along with Xerox and Adobe, so that the font would be included in Postscript). As for today, whether it is called Helvetica or Arial or FreeSans, it's basically the standard, basic sans serif font. Helvetica is Kleenex. Arial is facial tissue. Both will catch your snot.
I've been the programmer and the engineer and the QA tester. And this all boils down to the quality of each. I remember when I was the programmer/engineer on a long standing application. Management brought in a QA person, who was basically an intern who was tasked with finding bugs (probably because someone complained the app was "buggy" when it was really just overloaded and being used outside of its design parameters.) This guy comes to me with a laundry list of bugs, and the biggest one was where the application crashed when they were not on a specific tab, and the user clicked a certain button. He thought he had found the holy grail of bugs. He was very excited. His excitement turned to dismay when he asked when I would be fixing this bug. I told him "never". He was incredulous. Why? Don't you see how bad this is? I asked him how many times the bug had been reported. He said that it had NEVER been reported. HE had found it! And I explained that a user would never push that button without being on the tab it was associated with, because they would want to see the quote that was being sent out and it's amount before submitting it. So it was a VERY low priority and I wouldn't be doing anything about it anytime soon. OTOH, I was a QA tester for a medical product at one point. I developed the test cases and executed unbelievably complex test scenarios (largely because I suffered from a disease this product was used to help manage) and so had a complete "user" mindset. My documentation on it was formidable as it all had to be made available to the FDA. So this was some very high stakes testing, and I was able to uncover many bugs that would have sunk the product had I not been as thorough as I was. The company that engaged me on this project was overwhelmed with just how detailed I had been, and turned to me again when they came out with another similar product. I declined that engagement as I had moved onto a full time gig instead of consulting, but I probably could have made a good living with just them as my only client had I chosen to. Bottom line on all of this is that it depends on the people. Quality people, regardless of role, is what will make or break Quality Assurance in products and software. If you have slipshod, lazy programmers, no amount of QA will fix that. If you have slipshod, lazy QA engineers, no amount of QA will fix that either. Where the problem lay in this case is hard to determine. But my guess is that this org has a problem in both areas, which is a reflection of their management more than anything else.
Not my favorites, but not mentioned and deserve to be...
Pros: - less commute time - good for the environment - more flexibility - potentially higher productivity Cons: - Out of sight, out of mind is not good at layoff time - less social interaction - less professional interaction (maybe) Overall, I prefer to work from home, but since I have direct reports that I manage, I'm not allowed to do it full time. I do telecommute every friday though!
Then we should do this at Yellowstone. If we harnessed enough energy from there, we might be able to stave off a caldera super event, which is overdue.
You are the first one to actually answer my questions. Perhaps because they were loaded questions. I want to be able to speed. So does the government. They make money on speeding tickets. (Ironically, I usually DO NOT speed). I'm wondering in my questions whether or not the government will mess with speed limits in the case that I am still allowed to drive. They will lower them as they need to make more money on those cars still with drivers. And the SDCs will go those lower speed limits. The questions about the bald tires, oil changes, and phoning home all relate to liability. If I don't change my tires on the manufacturer's schedule, I am personally liable. What happens when those manufactures decide that half the tire life we have today is good, as they also either own or are in kahoots with tire manufacturers. What happens when they decide oil changes at 3000 miles and requirements for synthetic oil are to be standard. They feed their dealerships that way. The phoning home is to keep track of all this. And if I don't concede their demands, I become liable in an accident, not them. Bottom line is that I don't want SDC's. Give me assists, but don't force me to become passive in my own car. If that happens, I'll end up as part of the sheeple.
I'm tired of this one. It's not gonna happen on a massive scale. Not unless you build special roads for the self driving cars. Sure, I've heard all the arguments about how AI driven cars will be safer, better drivers than humans. And overall, perhaps so. But overall isn't the standard this will be judged on.
Simple example: Suppose an AI driver gets into a position where it has to hit either a young kid, or an old lady. Who does it hit? Should it hit the old lady since she's already lived a full life? Should it hit the kid because they bounce better than old ladies, and the overall chance of saving them both is higher?
Who programs the heuristics here? And what does the spec say? And what happens when the expected results are not what we expect? Who is liable for the vehicular homicide?
And this is only the really big one. Can I tell my AI to speed? Can I tell it I'm in a hurry and will it respond by acceding to my wishes? Can I tell it to go past the oil changes? Can I tell it that I want to drive on bald tires? Can I tell it I don't want it to phone home?
And you don't get to say, "Well, you have to be there to take over if the AI gets confused. BZZZZZZT. That is not a self driving car. That is some version of driver assist and I'm still the pilot in command. If you want a true "driverless" car, I have to be able to sit in the "driver's seat", spin it around, and play yahtzee with my kids. Short of this, you just have more and more of driver assist.
Besides, if I don't like driving, why am I buying a car? Asshats that want a driverless car should take the bus
Hooey! We will never run out of oil and other fossil fuels. The market will fix it. It has to. Here's how:
As you "use up" this finite resource, its price will climb. This is natural as it will become harder and harder to extract what is left. Eventually, the price will rise to a point where alternative energy makes sense. It will likely be a combination of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, and biofuel. It is already happening. As the price of oil spiked, many of these technologies made major leaps forward.
Of course, technology can also help you retrieve more fossil fuels at a lower cost. This, combined with lower global demand for energy, was what cause oil prices to tumble. Fracking increased the supply, demand went down, and the price cratered. Did you notice that when that happened, the US essentially became energy independent? No one EVER thought that could happen again.
The proof of all of this is the energy market for lamp oil in the 19th century. It used to run on whale oil. And we had almost hunted the whales to extinction over it. Ships went out hunting whales for YEARS before coming back to port. And these were wooden ships, not super tankers. Price of whale oil was going out of sight. Then Getty comes along, and figures out that kerosene will work, and that he can drill for it and the problem is solved. Fossil fuels were the answer to that crisis, and the alternative energy that we are researching now will be the answer in the future.
If you are a pilot, this is intuitive. Takeoff is the most dangerous phase of flight. You are low, and slow, and you have to run your engines at near full capacity to take off. Landing is similar, but you already have airspeed enough to fly the plane, and some altitude to play with, and you can trade one for the other to a limited degree, as well as power in reserve if needed.
But many of these immigrants do NOT integrate culturally. I work in the tech industry and the landscape has changed dramatically. Used to be that you hired junior programmers out of school and they rose through the ranks. I did that, and I might be the last generation of Americans who can. I have 5 employees reporting to me - they are all Indian. I work for an Indian boss. And I have over 100 consultants that work for me, mostly offshore. But some are onshore, and the culture is radically different. I now tell friends I work in the curry palace - the whole office smells of it. Worse, I have to accommodate people travelling back home for 4-5 weeks at a time. Sometimes they want to "work from India" for a week. I had one guy tell me he would work some days and not others. I couldn't keep track, so made a rule that if you want to work from home, you have to work EST and it has to be for a full week in these cases. I once asked for 3 weeks off for a family vacation to SoDak and Yellowstone. I got the hairy eyeball. Realistically, the unwritten rule for Americans is 2 weeks off. I get that going to India takes much more time. But still... anyway, some do integrate quite nicely. Most don't. Social norms are very different. Don't get me wrong... my India resources work VERY hard, and get the job done. But with the offshore rates so much lower than onshore rates, there is no room left in my company to hire historically American workers regardless of race, religion, or any other classification. They are just too expensive. So I worry about the company's future - where will they get the next "me" from? Will they outsource my IP to a consulting company? Will my company ultimately own any IT related IP? Yet I have no adequate answer either... if my company decided to insource everything, we'd be uncompetitive at least in the short run. We'd eventually go out of business. So what is the answer? I don't know. What I do know for sure is that this doesn't fit into "they're taking jobs Americans won't do" category. Lots of Americans would do this work. There are just far less positions than before, and as a country that is gonna hurt us.
And just picture the guy in prison that has to stamp out the license plates with the Live Free Or Die on them all day long.
A well reasoned post, however, reinsurance is not as much "insurance for the insurance" but really looks more like financing so as to maintain working capital to grow your insurance business. By sloughing off your insured limits to another party, it frees you up to write even more insurance. The cost of doing that is akin to interest on a loan.
Mission to Mars - Epcot Center - You can go for less than $100. And when you come back, you can watch people vomit!
I've been watching the media coverage (and listening - NPR) on this whole encryption mudslinging by law enforcement. The media is eating it up, and while they are careful to say that the jury is out on whether or not the terrorists in Paris used encrypted communications, they are quick to say that law enforcement and intelligence agencies had no inkling that this attack was on the horizon. I will leave aside the notion that Occum's Razor can be used to evaluate the two scenarios - one where the agencies and law enforcement were simply incompetent and are now blaming this evil encryption for being caught flatfooted, vs. their premise that the terrorists MUST be using encryption now...
What is lost on all of them (agencies, law enforcement) is THAT THEY DID THIS TO THEMSELVES either way. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies have been "hoovering up" all available communications data and metadata. They demanded and got kangaroo courts (FISA - I'm looking at you) where secret search warrants are being executed. There is no regulation by the citizenry, only by government "you can trust us" types who don't understand that when the stories about this stuff break, consumers begin to demand secure communications. Every time the government executed these warrants on the communications and computer industries, they gave them both an incentive to ditch the whole cooperation thing, and finally those companies started encrypting things in a way that they did not have the ability to "listen in" because lets face it, that is a pain in the neck and takes them away from their core mission.
Now they are crying about encryption, without understanding that the ship already sailed... And they are the ones that kicked it out of the harbor.
Me and thousands of people saw an F-117 up close at the New England Airshow at Westover AFB about 20 years ago. You couldn't touch it or walk under it, as it was cordoned off with ropes. A soldier with an M-16 guarded it. My dad struck up a conversation and said "That gun isn't loaded." and the soldier said "Yes sir, it is loaded" My dad took that at face value but went on and said "But if I crossed the rope you wouldn't shoot me." and the soldier replied "Yes sir, I would shoot you". At that point, I took my dad's arm and started walking him away from the display saying "Come on, Dad, let's stop annoying the man with the automatic weapon"
Looking back at the soldier, I could see just the hint of a smile on his face as we walked away.
In the Palormares incident in 1966, a B-52 collided with a refueling tanker and both planes were lost. The plane was carrying 4 nuclear weapons, 3 of which were found on land (and two had their conventional explosives go off), but one fell into the Med. Dr. John P. Craven used a Bayesian Search theory to locate the lost bomb. The first step in the Bayesian Search is to formulate hypotheses for where the bomb might have gone down. Craven put a bottle of Scotch up as a prize for the person who came closest to where the bomb would actually be found, and got several hypotheses for where the bomb went down. While this isn't exactly the type of gambling discussed above, putting a real reward up clearly motivates people to give their very best guesses! Oh yeah, they found the bomb, and the actual recovery of it was fictionalized in the movie Men of Honor with Deniro and Cuba Gooding Jr.
On Earth, we refer to hydrocarbons as fuel, and we use the oxygen in our atmosphere to burn them. We call the air an "Oxidizer"
On Titan, if there were any "natives", would they call oxygen "fuel" and their hydrocarbons "Hydrocarbonizers"?
Mod parent up. The F111 is the perfect example of why you DON'T try and build a plane to take on more than one, maybe two, roles. Why did we build both the F16 and the F15 at essentially the same time? Two different roles. The F15 was originally designed to be a deep interdiction plane to shoot down Russian bombers. F16's are not meant to do that. They are supposed to provide in theater air superiority. So the 16 has one engine, the 15 has two. Not to mention the 16 is cheaper. The F14 was of the same era, but designed around the all important tail hook. Add the A-10's and you've got yourself a great air force (AF, Navy, Marines) and nobody's gonna stop you.
Today, we killed the A-10 to feed the F35 machine, a plane that essentially tries to be one aircraft for everyone. But that is even harder to do today, because all our planes have to have INTERNAL bomb bays for stealth now, which means that you lose flexibility on all those planes. Some of the 35's will be VSTAL, some will be Air Force fighters, some try to be Marine attack aircraft. The end result? They can't do any of them really well. At least the Air Force was able to hedge its bets with the F22 - the greatest fighter plane ever made. But they got too few of them as they are so expensive.
The bottom line is our military must work out what planes they need for what roles, share the components of those planes only when it makes sense to do so, and stop thinking about the export market. Let Lockheed Martin and Boeing figure that stuff out. Let our military spec the planes they need, and pay the contractors to build what they want. If you do that, no one will challenge the US from the air.
Don't forget that Shepard had to urinate in his suit because of delays in his launch. Seems like his suit should cost more to "preserve"...
I think you are romanticizing the past. Will you get rid of automatic chokes, electronic ignition too? I'm old enough to remember cars in those days. My 1972 Buick Le Sabre Estate Wagon had a very intricate starting procedure. You had to push the gas pedal all the way to the floor to set the choke. Then pump the gas pedal 2-3 times to prime the carb. Then you had to "crack" the gas pedal just the right amount. THEN you could turn the ignition key. Assuming the car turned over, it MIGHT start. Then, if it did not, you pumped the gas pedal one more time in case there was not enough fuel yet. Don't do it twice though. If you did, the engine was now "flooded" and you had to wait 15 minutes to try again. It's also possible that the one extra pump of the pedal flooded it. If you were lucky, the car started on the first try, but more likely it took 2, maybe 3 turns of the key to get the thing to start.
Today, you get in, turn the key enough to engage the starter. I you let it go, the car continues to crank until started. At least that's what my Expedition does. Anyway, it starts every time unless the battery is dead, or there is some other big problem. Sure, your old car was easy to work on. That's just another way of saying that it was always broken by today's standards.