It sounds ridiculous on the face of it because everyone is nominally adimantly opposed to it, but that is an actual possibility here. If any coalition ground troops end up getting deployed in response to these (or future) attacks, they'd take over eastern Syria, where Daesh has its "caliphate"...but stop advancing west because A) they have no interest in taking land from the FSA and probably don't want to turn the Army of Conquest into a hostile force, B) Russia is heavily bombing there, and C) Russia would only let go of Latakia through their cold dead hands - it has their only Mediterranean naval base, their largest airbase in the region, one of their most important listening posts, etc. So you have the "clearly Russian" zone, the "clearly Coalition" zone, and then this in-between squabble area (including Damascus).
Of course, this is all assuming that Russia can actually defend Latakia against the rebels. I mean, normally I'd assume that, but they've done a pretty crappy job of it so far. But I bet they could put a lot more assets there if they needed to (though it might take weakening their forces on Donbas). It's easy for them to deploy air assets to Syria because they're not needed in Donbas, but if they take too much ground forces from Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine might be tempted to reescalate. The other issue is Iran, Iran could also commit itself a lot more to Syria if they need to... the current few thousand Iranian troops (plus Hezbollah) is one thing, but it's a small fraction of their total military manpower. Plus, a lot of the Syrian/Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah assets are currently directed on the Aleppo offensive, which actually has gone pretty well for them... so that could be redirected to Latakia if need be. And to Hama too, the way things are going on that front.
Anyone working with ISIS is not a "civilian" in the classic sense.
You realize that Raqqah is one of the largest cities in Syria, right? People there don't have a choice about "working with Daesh". Daesh runs the city, and every city within a great distance around them. And does all sorts of measures to prevent people from leaving.
These are people living in a densely populated city. Their city is being bombed. This puts them at risk. Some targets are low civilian risk. Others are high civilian risk. France's sudden intensive wave of bombing means that they've shifted the dividing line on the amount of risk to civilians they're willing to take.
Yes, totally right, only this will not be won by "offloading" anything - the U.S. tried that and spent hundreds of millions to train a handful of soldiers, who promptly joined ISIS when they were sent in.
Where to start?
1) There were two separate programs: the Pentagon program and the CIA program. The Pentagon program was a total failure. The CIA program was an unexpectedly huge success (perhaps too much - the FSA's rapid advances and breakinto Latakia triggered Russia and Iran's freakout and doubling down in Syria).
2) None of the soldiers trained by the Pentagon "prompty joined Daesh". The first handful of soldiers were poorly inserted, in way too small numbers and unevenly. They never manged to form into a unit in Syria. Some of them never made it into Syria. Others made it into Syria but were captured by al-Nusra, only released after negotiators convinced al-Nusra that they were focused only on Daesh. The few that made it into Syria and weren't captured were too disorganized to form a unit.
The Pentagon program - in stark contrast to the CIA program - was a colossal failure. But let's not spew falsehoods about it.
Beyond all of this are other actions that have been taken that are not part of these "programs". Most recently has been the arming of the YPG and arab militias - nominally just the latter, so as not to tick off Turkey, but in practice both - to resist Daesh in northeastern Syria. This effort too has been quite success thusfar, although it's too young to really evaluate at this point, and there's some risk of future seeds of discord being sown.
implies that they had information about Daesh targets beforehand, but chose for some reason or another not to hit them before now. Because they sure hit them fast - the last I checked they hit over 30 targets in Raqqah today - they're not just suddenly discovering new things
Now why could that be - why would they have targets they weren't hitting? The only logical reason is that the combination of the value of the targets and their confidence in what they're hitting was lower than the risk of hitting innocent bystanders and fanning the flames of war. But now they've clearly made a different decision.
That doesn't mean that their course of action is inherently wrong. But it should be stated upfront that we're taking on more civilian risk/consequences in order to scale up the attack against them. I mean, France if they wanted could take the Russian route and drop (mostly unguided) munitions on anything that moves in a suspect area, or even the Assad route and pound their cities to rubble with barrels full of mining explosives. But what's the balance point of attack vs. protecting civilians - how much do you want to shift it in response to the Paris attacks?
And really, we all know this isn't going to be won from the air. So the real question is, how much weapons do you want to offload, to whom, how much do you actually trust them, what seeds for future conflict are you sowing... or conversely, dare you actually send in your own ground troops to do it yourself, into a conflict where half a dozen nuclear powers on different sides are uneasily circling each other?
It's a lot simpler than that... they're not motivated, by and large in these sort of things, by strategy. It's a desire for vengeance. They see their brothers being killed, and civilians caught in the crossfire, and want their attackers punished for it. With groups like Daesh there's also a religious aspect. France has earned a reputation for being "anti-muslim" for a lot of different things, such as the hijab ban, but extending well back to their colonial days, and they're additionally seen as a symbol of debauchery and general social immorality.
Honestly there are times I've actually found myself rooting for them, such as in their attempt to stop the Iranian/Lebanese troops with Russian air support... er, I mean "Syrian military's"... breaking the siege of Kiweiris airbase. Given that Assad is responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in this conflict, mainly from barrel bombing major cities into rubble, as well as extensive firings of chemical weapons into cities and torturing to death over 10k people at intelligence centers, I'm not exactly thrilled about the prospect of him regaining control over the country and purging anyone who he thinks might have ever opposed him to cement his power. But then things like this come reminding me that the people that they're killing are a force whose core is a bunch of sex-slaving antiquity-destroying international-terrorist assholes, so really, whichever way those sort of battles go, one doesn't need to see the outcome as a "bad thing".;) Likewise their western expansion overrunning al-Hader, that was mainly Nusra holding the town, which - while certainly better than Daesh - they're not exactly a bunch of role models. Now that the FSA is working on stopping Assad's overrun of the M5 near Aleppo, it might actually be worth caring about which side is winning that one (same as some of the north Hama conflicts and the advances into Latakia, which have actually been going quite well for the anti-Assad forces, particularly the FSA, thanks to their endless stocks of Turkey-sourced Saudi-supplied US-originated TOW missiles... if they had any effective way to takedown aircraft this conflict wouldn't even be a tossup).
I have a lot of concerns about the anti-Daesh YPG (Kurdish) operations. Not that the YPG isn't orders of magnitude better than Daesh in behavior - they are. But they have done some bad things still, such as entirely driving Arab residents out of some villages they've captured (small-scale ethnic cleansing). And now they're going to be capturing some sizeable cities that have long held simmering Arab-Kurdish conflicts over who controls them. I have deep concerns that this is going to be setting, or at least, renewing, the seeds for future Arab-Kurdish conflicts unless they can learn to behave themselves properly...
I really can't see any situation where this is going to turn out well, and I can see many situations where it turns out unimaginably bad (now Israel has started randomly bombing inside Syria, hitting the Damascus airport just a few days ago... hey, who else wants to come bomb Syria, why not just invite the whole world?). But hopefully the "best of the terrible options" will be the result rather than the worst one. IMHO that would be the situation reverting to how it was before the Russian-Iranian surge, with Assad slowly but steadily losing ground, forcing him into a negotiating position - wherein the reigns of government could be passed off to someone who's at least less of a torturous tyrant and acceptable to the moderate resistance... then the international community could agree to help them wipe out the radical resistance. Russia won't be happy and won't support any resolution unless they can keep their Latakia airbase and Tartous naval base, but that could be arranged. I think something along those lines could result in a "best of the terrible options" scenario.
Worst of the terrible options? Literal nuclear war. Nuclear powers actively attacking in Syria at the moment: Russia,
You have no clue of the complexity of these systems. A three-man team is sufficient to hobble them along and keep them functional, not to port them. We've had an ongoing project to port one of our systems from AIX to Linux here for much of a decade and it's still only partly done, and we have a much larger team.
ATC systems sound simple on the face of them, but they're so ridiculously full of diverse, unreliable datasources (which can conflict with each other) and edge cases that they have to deal with it's not even funny.
If you want to fund the migration of a (almost assuredly large and complex) ancient system that has to deal with countless rare edge cases, be my guest, I'm sure they'll greatly appreciate your generosity.
My favorite I've encountered about ATC systems is how the documentation lies. For example, how checksums are to be computed computed for a particular broad class of messages. The ARINC specs go into detail, with diagrams and everything about the computation process. But when you look at existing samples of code, they don't do this - they do this weird thing with a lookup table and uncalled-for bitshifts and the like. After spending a day or so studying the code, I finally figured out what they were trying to do - they were trying to "optimize" the algorithm in the specs. But in the process they made it deviate from what is actually supposed to be computed in about four different ways (plus, their "optimizations" don't actually save compute time, the simple math operations are faster than the lookup in the "precompute" table that they made).
So what do we do when we need to compute and check checksums? We use the wrong code, of course! It's what's "out in the wild", so who cares what the specs say we're supposed to use, it's what we have to use if we want checksums to ever to come up valid. Hopefully they'll eventually update the specs to reflect the reality.
Here, can we compromise? The homeopaths get their £4m, only we'll first dilute it down 60X before giving it to them. That'll only increase it's buying power, right?;)
It continually amazes me how much so many people don't care about security, or design it in as an afterthought. I've worked on the Linux client for a MMORPG, and their entire security model was built around "TCP will protect us". No actual attempt to verify that packets coming from a client or the server were actually from who they said they were. No attempt to make sure that any fields within them were valid. And no care to actually fix the problem out of fear of "breaking things". I once had to write a zero-day exploit for a particularly egregious bug (based on popen injection) that would allow any ordinary player with a non-hacked client to execute arbitrary other code on other players machines, before they'd let me implement the very simple fix.
For many people, security is "that thing that doesn't matter unless someone is actively abusing it, and then only fix the particular thing that's being actively abused".
Even protocols which practically summon abuse down on them are often designed without any sort of security in mind. I was reading a while back about MainlineDHT, the distributed hash table networking system that enables trackerless torrents in bittorrent. You know, if there's anything out there that you'd expect parties with resources to want to hack (to monitor for copyright abusers, to disrupt the network, to return compromised information, etc) it'd be something like that, they'd be naive to think otherwise. But the protocol is so pathetically weak it practically screams, "Please, Sybil attack us, it'll only take 10 minutes for you to implement the attack!" You can turn a standard MainlineDHT implementation into a Sybil-attacking information simply by changing it to respond to all requests by claiming that you are the host that the client was requesting instead of directing them toward the requested client. The program doesn't even have to remember all the lies it told to other clients, they're trusted instantly and completely, and in fact, the clients that they lied to forward the lies to others. A program that wants to pretend to be a million nodes incurs no additional performance, hardware, or networking requirements over a normal client with just one identity, beyond the data flood that they're trying to receive or manipulate.
Sybils can be hard to entirely prevent, particularly if you want to support clients behind NAT and you don't want to involve any external "trusted" identity-verifying system. But for crying out loud you don't have to make it so easy for them, on a target that you just know people are going to want to attack.
Sure looks like a candidate for an ig-Nobel Prize. News flash: People with names like "g0ats3x" are likely to be trolls and still live with their mothers!
Mars is quite capable of forcing a tiny fraction of tiny bodies into resonance. That's a far cry from saying "Mars would have cleared its celestial neighborhood of the planetissimals left over after it accreted, in the absence of aid from Jupiter". People have long been abusing the Stern-Levison parameter to say things that it doesn't.
The CEO represents the highest level of strategy. For example, if their models led them wrong in regards to a particular decision: why did the models lead them wrong? What did they miss? What additional data could we have provided them or what refined formulas could we have used so that it would have helped us account for this better? How can we get that data? What sort of processes can we set up to prevent similar instances from occurring in the future?
Computers can crunch the numbers, but they have no clue what the numbers mean. They just take the raw datapoints you give them and the formulas you gave them for how the datapoints interplay, and give you the output that provides the most profit. They don't understand at all what the datapoints mean, what the formulas mean, when the significance of the data or formulas has changed, when they should be considering something new, when they should no longer be considering something, etc. They don't reason. They just crunch. You need humans to reason. And not just one - in a sizeable company, you need a lot of them, because the data and optimization formulae are so complex. And every time you have a lot of people working on a single goal, they need management of some kind. It's not a "five minutes and you're done" job, every little part of the process requires deep understanding of the business itself and the market environment.
Contrary to popular slashdotter myth, CEOs don't just sit at their desks all day counting money. My father has for decades let much if not most of his vacation time expire rather than take it in order to not let the companies he's worked for down.
My father has long worked in a variety of CEO and president roles for different large companies, on the very fields that this software is designed to optimize. My thoughts?
1) This is nothing new. It's called operations research/operations management, and it's been around for a long time. 2) Except for in perhaps small companies, CEOs don't do this themselves. They direct the team of experts that manage the system. 3) The systems don't run themselves. They require significant setup, maintenance, and ongoing improvement. In particular the ever-changing data streams that can play a role need to be worked into the model. And they're often based on very complex issues that require specialist understanding.
These are tools that help you make the right decision. They're not people. People are the ones who run the tools.
Oh, and while we're at it, according to the IAU's definition, Jupiter shouldn't be a planet. They define planets as bodies that orbit the sun that have cleared their neighborhoods. Jupiter does not orbit the sun. It orbits the Sol-Jupiter barycentre, which is outside of the sun - the sun and Jupiter roughly co-orbit this point.
Mars does not gravitationally dominate its neighborhood and force things into resonance with it. The vast majority of asteroids are locked into resonances with Jupiter, not Mars. There's only about 1500 known asteroids, the Polana group, which are locked into a 2:1 resonance with Mars (Mars also has 4 trojans which do not appear related to each other).
The Stern-Levison parameter is based around the principle of scattering small bodies, bodies far smaller than the parent, which can be scattered on a single pass at distance b to an angle greater than or equal to a given value. Pluto is a "small body" compared to Neptune, but not so compared to Mars. And Mars's Stern-Levison parameter is, again, far less than Neptune's.
The claim that "a value of over 900 for Mars is more than enough to clear out other bodies" is false even if we ignore this troublesome "small body" aspect. Again, read the Stern-Levison paper. The value of 900 for Mars comes from assuming a scattering angle of one radian from its approach angle, which hardly means ejection or single-pass domination. It assumes 12 billion years for the age, several times older than the solar system. It relies on the "small bodies" having high eccentricities, which would probably not be the case in a gas-giant-less solar system - the lower the eccentricity, the far weaker the scattering potential. And of course, they assume actual small bodies - typical asteroid sizes.
Interestingly enough, I would have been happy with the classification actually laid forth in Stern-Levison (2002). They proposed a size/composition matrix similar to that of stars, with all objects large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium included. The mass would be grouped into "subdwarf" (Ceres, Pluto, Charon, etc), "dwarf" (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), "subgiant" (Uranus, Neptune, Saturn), "giant" (Jupiter), and "supergiant" categories, while the composition grouped into "rock" (terrestrial planets, asteroids), "ice" (KBOs, uranus, neptune), and "hydrogen" (saturn, jupiter). So for example Jupiter would be a "hydrogen giant planet". Pluto would be a "rocky subdwarf planet". Titan would be a "icy subdwarf satellite". Etc.
Most near-term commercial "space mining" proposals are about mining metallic asteroids which contain high concentrations of metals which are rare/valuable on Earth, and which could be taken back to Earth via ion tug or rail gun/coil gun/etc at little cost compared to the value of the resources.
There is a hypothetical future market for resources mined in space to be used in space, that would theoretically pay lots of money for common things like water and base metals. However, there is a very real, present market for valuable metals on Earth today.
We may be sending a probe soon to a potential mining target (although not to mine it, just to study it) - 16 Psyche. It's over 200 kilometers in diameter, contains about 1% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt, and is believed to be 90% metal (the same sort of iron-nickel combination that we find in some meteorites). Nickel is a reasonably valuable metal on its own and Psyche has enough for millions of years at Earth's current consumption rate, but that's not really the target of mining. It's things like gold, iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, tungsten, etc that mining companies are after. They're far more concentrated on metallic asteroids than in Earth rocks, and they're unoxidized to boot. Also some asteroids have gem-quality peridot in them in abundance. That alone could be worth a fortune even if it weren't from space (ignoring what some people pay for otherwise uninteresting "rocks" from space). Metallic asteroids usually show a beautiful Widmanstätten patterns as well, which would give them value as decorative stone even if they became commonplace on Earth. Picture how much some luxury-obsessed sheikh would pay for say a countertop of Widmanstätten-patterened asteroid studded with peridot from the birth of our solar system.
But again, the prime mining market is the rare metals.
If a US company launches into space, reaches an asteroid, mines it, takes the stuff, and lands back in the US.... they want to know whether the US government is going to let them call what they mined their property. They could care less what Tajikistan thinks. The launch, operations, and returned goods would be within the US. If someone from some other country wants to try to intercept and destroy them en route, that's a "hurdle" this doesn't address. It's also not a realistic scenario in the near-term, or even mid-term, future.
I described the process that led up to the vote, which you can easily read anywhere on the net. You can also readily find no shortage of planetary scientists complaining about it on the net. If there's any specific fact you disagree with, state it and I will reference it for you.
but simulations show Mars is more than capable of doing so on its own
Mars has a tiny fraction the Stern-Levison parameter of Neptune, and Neptune hasn't gotten rid of large bodies from its "neighborhood" (they're small compared to Neptune, but not compared to Mars).
What matters is it is much more difficult to develop any formula that has some relevance to planetary dynamics which doesn't make Pluto look like an outcast, and that is the problem.
It's not a "problem" at all. The definition that most planetary scientists wanted the IAU to choose (if they felt the need to pick one at all) was hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning there would be dozens of planets. Achieving a rough hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line - it means differentiation, mineralization processes, alteration of primordial materials, and so forth. It's also often associated with internal heat and, increasingly as we're realizing, a common association with subsurface fluids. In short, a body in a category of "not having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body which one would study to learn about the origins of our solar system, while a body in a category of "having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body one would study, for example, to learn more about tectonics, geochemistry, (potentially) biology, etc. By contrast, a dividing line of "clearing its neighborhood" - which isn't actually what half of the planets in our solar system have done - says little about the body itself.
And yes, there are many reasons why the whole process was grossly unscientific. I've first already covered the voting process above, which is absurd, especially in a day where they could have handled such a thing online. There's the obvious criticism of it being sun-centered, having no clear definition on what defines a "neighborhood" or "cleared", the pseudoscience of the planets all having cleared their own neighborhoods, the lie about how they planned to review further "dwarf planets" for inclusion (they haven't), the comparative inconsistency (really, Earth is more like Jupiter than it is like Pluto?), the atrocious name where a "dwarf X" isn't an "X", and on and on. But these are just minor points.
First off, the primary reason cited by virtually every scientist I've seen interviewed about their vote in favor of an exclusive standard over an inclusive standard is along the lines of, "It would be too hard for schoolchildren to memorize the names of all of them". This is such a blatantly unscientific standard that it doesn't even bear going into, and leads to absurd consequences when applied to other fields, such as the AMA declaring that there's only 8 bones in the human body and all others are "dwarf bones" that aren't real bones, or the USGS declaring that there's only 8 rivers in the world and all others are "dwarf rivers" that aren't real rivers, all for the purpose of making things easier for students to memorize. They decided that they wanted schoolchildren to be able to memorize the names of all the planets around the sun, and then contrived a definition of "planet" to try to make that happen. This is not science, it's idiocy.
Then there's the basic issue of scientific categorizations altogether. In every scientific field, the universe continually presents those making discoveries with a wide range of diversity. This is almost universally accepted in an inclusive manner, subdividing groups into subgroups, and subdividing those further. We will continue to find new types of planetary bodies in a wide range of diversity - large terrestrial planets, dwarf-scale planets, gas giants, ice giants, hot jupiters, super-earths, water worlds, supercomets, extremely large bodies orbiting as moons, planets without parent stars, and so forth. Rather than trying to hide diversity, science is supposed to embrace it.
Then there's the issue of the timing. For most of the history of humankind's knowledge of Ceres and Pluto, we have
Except a tiny fraction of planetary scientists actually disagree with the classification of Pluto.
In the words of Wikipedia, "Citation needed". The planetary scientists at the IAU meeting had been by and large pursuing a definition involving a body reaching gravitational equilibrium. They've also been leading the charge to get it overturned. There are numerous published papers by planetary scientists who continue to refer to large KBOs and the like as planets. The New Horizons team is particularly notable in continued references to them as planets.
The vote passed via a non-randomly-selected 4% of the IAU's membership who were - as previously mentioned - overwhelmingly not planetary scientists. Letting people who study stars (by the way, a "dwarf star" is still a "star") decide what a planet is is just plain stupid - it's not their field of expertise. The first draft proposal indeed went with the planetary scientists' version - hydrostatic equilibrium being the criteria, and was confirmed on the 18th, with intent to vote on the 24th. Many people left the IAU meeting thinking that this was the version that was going to be voted on, and since they supported either having it or no definition at all, they didn't need to be there. The proposal was changed however on the 22nd. Due to dischord among the IAU members there were "secret" negotiations held on the proposal on the evening of the 23rd, and it looked increasingly unlikely that anything was going to be agreed upon. But then they came out with the current version on the 24th - after most of the membership had left - and had it voted on during the same day, when most of the people remaining were the ones who had been fighting against the planetary scientists' equilibrium definition. They furthermore reverted the standard rules which only allow people in a specific field to vote on matters related to their field, declaring the definition of planet a matter applicable to the whole union, so that everyone, not just planetary scientists, could vote.
There are not little complaints about "the exact wording" - do I really need to go into a breakdown of all of the arguments against it?
Nope. A tiny fraction of a group who is overwhelmingly not planetary scientists has spoken and made their internally-inconsistent definition. It stands until they revoke or alter it.
.. to make up a formula to say what you want it to say for data like this.
Here, want an alternative formula to declare the 8 IAU "planets" as planets as well as exoplanets but exclude the IAU "dwarf planets", without using any of the terms he uses, and to be able to classify 100% (rather than the 99%) of exoplanets?
It's a functional formula. Does this mean that it's a reasonable formula? Of course not; it has no connection with the reality of what they actually are. But you know what? Neither does his or the IAU's "cleared the neighborhood" concept. There are no credible planetary models that show for example that Mars cleared its own neighborhood. While they differ on the details, they all agree that Jupiter cleared it (and cleared most of the debris from the inner solar system in general, with some help from Saturn). Neptune has (despite its distance from the sun) orders of magnitude more orbit-clearing power than Mars yet nonetheless contains multiple objects a couple percent the size of Mars in its "neighborhood". Is Mars not a "planet"?
I have a giant list of reasons why the IAU decision is poor and unscientific, but no need to post it again.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds ridiculous on the face of it because everyone is nominally adimantly opposed to it, but that is an actual possibility here. If any coalition ground troops end up getting deployed in response to these (or future) attacks, they'd take over eastern Syria, where Daesh has its "caliphate"...but stop advancing west because A) they have no interest in taking land from the FSA and probably don't want to turn the Army of Conquest into a hostile force, B) Russia is heavily bombing there, and C) Russia would only let go of Latakia through their cold dead hands - it has their only Mediterranean naval base, their largest airbase in the region, one of their most important listening posts, etc. So you have the "clearly Russian" zone, the "clearly Coalition" zone, and then this in-between squabble area (including Damascus).
Of course, this is all assuming that Russia can actually defend Latakia against the rebels. I mean, normally I'd assume that, but they've done a pretty crappy job of it so far. But I bet they could put a lot more assets there if they needed to (though it might take weakening their forces on Donbas). It's easy for them to deploy air assets to Syria because they're not needed in Donbas, but if they take too much ground forces from Donbas and Crimea, Ukraine might be tempted to reescalate. The other issue is Iran, Iran could also commit itself a lot more to Syria if they need to... the current few thousand Iranian troops (plus Hezbollah) is one thing, but it's a small fraction of their total military manpower. Plus, a lot of the Syrian/Russian/Iranian/Hezbollah assets are currently directed on the Aleppo offensive, which actually has gone pretty well for them... so that could be redirected to Latakia if need be. And to Hama too, the way things are going on that front.
You realize that Raqqah is one of the largest cities in Syria, right? People there don't have a choice about "working with Daesh". Daesh runs the city, and every city within a great distance around them. And does all sorts of measures to prevent people from leaving.
These are people living in a densely populated city. Their city is being bombed. This puts them at risk. Some targets are low civilian risk. Others are high civilian risk. France's sudden intensive wave of bombing means that they've shifted the dividing line on the amount of risk to civilians they're willing to take.
Where to start?
1) There were two separate programs: the Pentagon program and the CIA program. The Pentagon program was a total failure. The CIA program was an unexpectedly huge success (perhaps too much - the FSA's rapid advances and breakinto Latakia triggered Russia and Iran's freakout and doubling down in Syria).
2) None of the soldiers trained by the Pentagon "prompty joined Daesh". The first handful of soldiers were poorly inserted, in way too small numbers and unevenly. They never manged to form into a unit in Syria. Some of them never made it into Syria. Others made it into Syria but were captured by al-Nusra, only released after negotiators convinced al-Nusra that they were focused only on Daesh. The few that made it into Syria and weren't captured were too disorganized to form a unit.
The Pentagon program - in stark contrast to the CIA program - was a colossal failure. But let's not spew falsehoods about it.
Beyond all of this are other actions that have been taken that are not part of these "programs". Most recently has been the arming of the YPG and arab militias - nominally just the latter, so as not to tick off Turkey, but in practice both - to resist Daesh in northeastern Syria. This effort too has been quite success thusfar, although it's too young to really evaluate at this point, and there's some risk of future seeds of discord being sown.
implies that they had information about Daesh targets beforehand, but chose for some reason or another not to hit them before now. Because they sure hit them fast - the last I checked they hit over 30 targets in Raqqah today - they're not just suddenly discovering new things
Now why could that be - why would they have targets they weren't hitting? The only logical reason is that the combination of the value of the targets and their confidence in what they're hitting was lower than the risk of hitting innocent bystanders and fanning the flames of war. But now they've clearly made a different decision.
That doesn't mean that their course of action is inherently wrong. But it should be stated upfront that we're taking on more civilian risk/consequences in order to scale up the attack against them. I mean, France if they wanted could take the Russian route and drop (mostly unguided) munitions on anything that moves in a suspect area, or even the Assad route and pound their cities to rubble with barrels full of mining explosives. But what's the balance point of attack vs. protecting civilians - how much do you want to shift it in response to the Paris attacks?
And really, we all know this isn't going to be won from the air. So the real question is, how much weapons do you want to offload, to whom, how much do you actually trust them, what seeds for future conflict are you sowing... or conversely, dare you actually send in your own ground troops to do it yourself, into a conflict where half a dozen nuclear powers on different sides are uneasily circling each other?
It's a lot simpler than that... they're not motivated, by and large in these sort of things, by strategy. It's a desire for vengeance. They see their brothers being killed, and civilians caught in the crossfire, and want their attackers punished for it. With groups like Daesh there's also a religious aspect. France has earned a reputation for being "anti-muslim" for a lot of different things, such as the hijab ban, but extending well back to their colonial days, and they're additionally seen as a symbol of debauchery and general social immorality.
Honestly there are times I've actually found myself rooting for them, such as in their attempt to stop the Iranian/Lebanese troops with Russian air support ... er, I mean "Syrian military's"... breaking the siege of Kiweiris airbase. Given that Assad is responsible for the vast majority of the deaths in this conflict, mainly from barrel bombing major cities into rubble, as well as extensive firings of chemical weapons into cities and torturing to death over 10k people at intelligence centers, I'm not exactly thrilled about the prospect of him regaining control over the country and purging anyone who he thinks might have ever opposed him to cement his power. But then things like this come reminding me that the people that they're killing are a force whose core is a bunch of sex-slaving antiquity-destroying international-terrorist assholes, so really, whichever way those sort of battles go, one doesn't need to see the outcome as a "bad thing". ;) Likewise their western expansion overrunning al-Hader, that was mainly Nusra holding the town, which - while certainly better than Daesh - they're not exactly a bunch of role models. Now that the FSA is working on stopping Assad's overrun of the M5 near Aleppo, it might actually be worth caring about which side is winning that one (same as some of the north Hama conflicts and the advances into Latakia, which have actually been going quite well for the anti-Assad forces, particularly the FSA, thanks to their endless stocks of Turkey-sourced Saudi-supplied US-originated TOW missiles... if they had any effective way to takedown aircraft this conflict wouldn't even be a tossup).
I have a lot of concerns about the anti-Daesh YPG (Kurdish) operations. Not that the YPG isn't orders of magnitude better than Daesh in behavior - they are. But they have done some bad things still, such as entirely driving Arab residents out of some villages they've captured (small-scale ethnic cleansing). And now they're going to be capturing some sizeable cities that have long held simmering Arab-Kurdish conflicts over who controls them. I have deep concerns that this is going to be setting, or at least, renewing, the seeds for future Arab-Kurdish conflicts unless they can learn to behave themselves properly...
I really can't see any situation where this is going to turn out well, and I can see many situations where it turns out unimaginably bad (now Israel has started randomly bombing inside Syria, hitting the Damascus airport just a few days ago... hey, who else wants to come bomb Syria, why not just invite the whole world?). But hopefully the "best of the terrible options" will be the result rather than the worst one. IMHO that would be the situation reverting to how it was before the Russian-Iranian surge, with Assad slowly but steadily losing ground, forcing him into a negotiating position - wherein the reigns of government could be passed off to someone who's at least less of a torturous tyrant and acceptable to the moderate resistance... then the international community could agree to help them wipe out the radical resistance. Russia won't be happy and won't support any resolution unless they can keep their Latakia airbase and Tartous naval base, but that could be arranged. I think something along those lines could result in a "best of the terrible options" scenario.
Worst of the terrible options? Literal nuclear war. Nuclear powers actively attacking in Syria at the moment: Russia,
You have no clue of the complexity of these systems. A three-man team is sufficient to hobble them along and keep them functional, not to port them. We've had an ongoing project to port one of our systems from AIX to Linux here for much of a decade and it's still only partly done, and we have a much larger team.
ATC systems sound simple on the face of them, but they're so ridiculously full of diverse, unreliable datasources (which can conflict with each other) and edge cases that they have to deal with it's not even funny.
If you want to fund the migration of a (almost assuredly large and complex) ancient system that has to deal with countless rare edge cases, be my guest, I'm sure they'll greatly appreciate your generosity.
My favorite I've encountered about ATC systems is how the documentation lies. For example, how checksums are to be computed computed for a particular broad class of messages. The ARINC specs go into detail, with diagrams and everything about the computation process. But when you look at existing samples of code, they don't do this - they do this weird thing with a lookup table and uncalled-for bitshifts and the like. After spending a day or so studying the code, I finally figured out what they were trying to do - they were trying to "optimize" the algorithm in the specs. But in the process they made it deviate from what is actually supposed to be computed in about four different ways (plus, their "optimizations" don't actually save compute time, the simple math operations are faster than the lookup in the "precompute" table that they made).
So what do we do when we need to compute and check checksums? We use the wrong code, of course! It's what's "out in the wild", so who cares what the specs say we're supposed to use, it's what we have to use if we want checksums to ever to come up valid. Hopefully they'll eventually update the specs to reflect the reality.
Here, can we compromise? The homeopaths get their £4m, only we'll first dilute it down 60X before giving it to them. That'll only increase it's buying power, right? ;)
It continually amazes me how much so many people don't care about security, or design it in as an afterthought. I've worked on the Linux client for a MMORPG, and their entire security model was built around "TCP will protect us". No actual attempt to verify that packets coming from a client or the server were actually from who they said they were. No attempt to make sure that any fields within them were valid. And no care to actually fix the problem out of fear of "breaking things". I once had to write a zero-day exploit for a particularly egregious bug (based on popen injection) that would allow any ordinary player with a non-hacked client to execute arbitrary other code on other players machines, before they'd let me implement the very simple fix.
For many people, security is "that thing that doesn't matter unless someone is actively abusing it, and then only fix the particular thing that's being actively abused".
Even protocols which practically summon abuse down on them are often designed without any sort of security in mind. I was reading a while back about MainlineDHT, the distributed hash table networking system that enables trackerless torrents in bittorrent. You know, if there's anything out there that you'd expect parties with resources to want to hack (to monitor for copyright abusers, to disrupt the network, to return compromised information, etc) it'd be something like that, they'd be naive to think otherwise. But the protocol is so pathetically weak it practically screams, "Please, Sybil attack us, it'll only take 10 minutes for you to implement the attack!" You can turn a standard MainlineDHT implementation into a Sybil-attacking information simply by changing it to respond to all requests by claiming that you are the host that the client was requesting instead of directing them toward the requested client. The program doesn't even have to remember all the lies it told to other clients, they're trusted instantly and completely, and in fact, the clients that they lied to forward the lies to others. A program that wants to pretend to be a million nodes incurs no additional performance, hardware, or networking requirements over a normal client with just one identity, beyond the data flood that they're trying to receive or manipulate.
Sybils can be hard to entirely prevent, particularly if you want to support clients behind NAT and you don't want to involve any external "trusted" identity-verifying system. But for crying out loud you don't have to make it so easy for them, on a target that you just know people are going to want to attack.
Sure looks like a candidate for an ig-Nobel Prize. News flash: People with names like "g0ats3x" are likely to be trolls and still live with their mothers!
Mars is quite capable of forcing a tiny fraction of tiny bodies into resonance. That's a far cry from saying "Mars would have cleared its celestial neighborhood of the planetissimals left over after it accreted, in the absence of aid from Jupiter". People have long been abusing the Stern-Levison parameter to say things that it doesn't.
A CEO is... wait for it... a person.
The CEO represents the highest level of strategy. For example, if their models led them wrong in regards to a particular decision: why did the models lead them wrong? What did they miss? What additional data could we have provided them or what refined formulas could we have used so that it would have helped us account for this better? How can we get that data? What sort of processes can we set up to prevent similar instances from occurring in the future?
Computers can crunch the numbers, but they have no clue what the numbers mean. They just take the raw datapoints you give them and the formulas you gave them for how the datapoints interplay, and give you the output that provides the most profit. They don't understand at all what the datapoints mean, what the formulas mean, when the significance of the data or formulas has changed, when they should be considering something new, when they should no longer be considering something, etc. They don't reason. They just crunch. You need humans to reason. And not just one - in a sizeable company, you need a lot of them, because the data and optimization formulae are so complex. And every time you have a lot of people working on a single goal, they need management of some kind. It's not a "five minutes and you're done" job, every little part of the process requires deep understanding of the business itself and the market environment.
Contrary to popular slashdotter myth, CEOs don't just sit at their desks all day counting money. My father has for decades let much if not most of his vacation time expire rather than take it in order to not let the companies he's worked for down.
And this mountain is covered in wolves. Hear them howling, my hungry children?
My father has long worked in a variety of CEO and president roles for different large companies, on the very fields that this software is designed to optimize. My thoughts?
1) This is nothing new. It's called operations research/operations management, and it's been around for a long time.
2) Except for in perhaps small companies, CEOs don't do this themselves. They direct the team of experts that manage the system.
3) The systems don't run themselves. They require significant setup, maintenance, and ongoing improvement. In particular the ever-changing data streams that can play a role need to be worked into the model. And they're often based on very complex issues that require specialist understanding.
These are tools that help you make the right decision. They're not people. People are the ones who run the tools.
But few orbit a barycentre *outside either body*. When they're the same type of object we usually call these binaries or doubles.
The place Jupiter orbits is not the sun. It's quite near the sun, but it's not the sun.
Oh, and while we're at it, according to the IAU's definition, Jupiter shouldn't be a planet. They define planets as bodies that orbit the sun that have cleared their neighborhoods. Jupiter does not orbit the sun. It orbits the Sol-Jupiter barycentre, which is outside of the sun - the sun and Jupiter roughly co-orbit this point.
Mars does not gravitationally dominate its neighborhood and force things into resonance with it. The vast majority of asteroids are locked into resonances with Jupiter, not Mars. There's only about 1500 known asteroids, the Polana group, which are locked into a 2:1 resonance with Mars (Mars also has 4 trojans which do not appear related to each other).
The Stern-Levison parameter is based around the principle of scattering small bodies, bodies far smaller than the parent, which can be scattered on a single pass at distance b to an angle greater than or equal to a given value. Pluto is a "small body" compared to Neptune, but not so compared to Mars. And Mars's Stern-Levison parameter is, again, far less than Neptune's.
The claim that "a value of over 900 for Mars is more than enough to clear out other bodies" is false even if we ignore this troublesome "small body" aspect. Again, read the Stern-Levison paper. The value of 900 for Mars comes from assuming a scattering angle of one radian from its approach angle, which hardly means ejection or single-pass domination. It assumes 12 billion years for the age, several times older than the solar system. It relies on the "small bodies" having high eccentricities, which would probably not be the case in a gas-giant-less solar system - the lower the eccentricity, the far weaker the scattering potential. And of course, they assume actual small bodies - typical asteroid sizes.
Interestingly enough, I would have been happy with the classification actually laid forth in Stern-Levison (2002). They proposed a size/composition matrix similar to that of stars, with all objects large enough to be in hydrostatic equilibrium included. The mass would be grouped into "subdwarf" (Ceres, Pluto, Charon, etc), "dwarf" (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars), "subgiant" (Uranus, Neptune, Saturn), "giant" (Jupiter), and "supergiant" categories, while the composition grouped into "rock" (terrestrial planets, asteroids), "ice" (KBOs, uranus, neptune), and "hydrogen" (saturn, jupiter). So for example Jupiter would be a "hydrogen giant planet". Pluto would be a "rocky subdwarf planet". Titan would be a "icy subdwarf satellite". Etc.
And you're assuming it would be a multinational why?
Most near-term commercial "space mining" proposals are about mining metallic asteroids which contain high concentrations of metals which are rare/valuable on Earth, and which could be taken back to Earth via ion tug or rail gun/coil gun/etc at little cost compared to the value of the resources.
There is a hypothetical future market for resources mined in space to be used in space, that would theoretically pay lots of money for common things like water and base metals. However, there is a very real, present market for valuable metals on Earth today.
We may be sending a probe soon to a potential mining target (although not to mine it, just to study it) - 16 Psyche. It's over 200 kilometers in diameter, contains about 1% of the mass of the entire asteroid belt, and is believed to be 90% metal (the same sort of iron-nickel combination that we find in some meteorites). Nickel is a reasonably valuable metal on its own and Psyche has enough for millions of years at Earth's current consumption rate, but that's not really the target of mining. It's things like gold, iridium, silver, osmium, palladium, platinum, rhenium, rhodium, ruthenium, tungsten, etc that mining companies are after. They're far more concentrated on metallic asteroids than in Earth rocks, and they're unoxidized to boot. Also some asteroids have gem-quality peridot in them in abundance. That alone could be worth a fortune even if it weren't from space (ignoring what some people pay for otherwise uninteresting "rocks" from space). Metallic asteroids usually show a beautiful Widmanstätten patterns as well, which would give them value as decorative stone even if they became commonplace on Earth. Picture how much some luxury-obsessed sheikh would pay for say a countertop of Widmanstätten-patterened asteroid studded with peridot from the birth of our solar system.
But again, the prime mining market is the rare metals.
If a US company launches into space, reaches an asteroid, mines it, takes the stuff, and lands back in the US.... they want to know whether the US government is going to let them call what they mined their property. They could care less what Tajikistan thinks. The launch, operations, and returned goods would be within the US. If someone from some other country wants to try to intercept and destroy them en route, that's a "hurdle" this doesn't address. It's also not a realistic scenario in the near-term, or even mid-term, future.
I described the process that led up to the vote, which you can easily read anywhere on the net. You can also readily find no shortage of planetary scientists complaining about it on the net. If there's any specific fact you disagree with, state it and I will reference it for you.
Mars has a tiny fraction the Stern-Levison parameter of Neptune, and Neptune hasn't gotten rid of large bodies from its "neighborhood" (they're small compared to Neptune, but not compared to Mars).
It's not a "problem" at all. The definition that most planetary scientists wanted the IAU to choose (if they felt the need to pick one at all) was hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning there would be dozens of planets. Achieving a rough hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line - it means differentiation, mineralization processes, alteration of primordial materials, and so forth. It's also often associated with internal heat and, increasingly as we're realizing, a common association with subsurface fluids. In short, a body in a category of "not having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body which one would study to learn about the origins of our solar system, while a body in a category of "having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body one would study, for example, to learn more about tectonics, geochemistry, (potentially) biology, etc. By contrast, a dividing line of "clearing its neighborhood" - which isn't actually what half of the planets in our solar system have done - says little about the body itself.
And yes, there are many reasons why the whole process was grossly unscientific. I've first already covered the voting process above, which is absurd, especially in a day where they could have handled such a thing online. There's the obvious criticism of it being sun-centered, having no clear definition on what defines a "neighborhood" or "cleared", the pseudoscience of the planets all having cleared their own neighborhoods, the lie about how they planned to review further "dwarf planets" for inclusion (they haven't), the comparative inconsistency (really, Earth is more like Jupiter than it is like Pluto?), the atrocious name where a "dwarf X" isn't an "X", and on and on. But these are just minor points.
First off, the primary reason cited by virtually every scientist I've seen interviewed about their vote in favor of an exclusive standard over an inclusive standard is along the lines of, "It would be too hard for schoolchildren to memorize the names of all of them". This is such a blatantly unscientific standard that it doesn't even bear going into, and leads to absurd consequences when applied to other fields, such as the AMA declaring that there's only 8 bones in the human body and all others are "dwarf bones" that aren't real bones, or the USGS declaring that there's only 8 rivers in the world and all others are "dwarf rivers" that aren't real rivers, all for the purpose of making things easier for students to memorize. They decided that they wanted schoolchildren to be able to memorize the names of all the planets around the sun, and then contrived a definition of "planet" to try to make that happen. This is not science, it's idiocy.
Then there's the basic issue of scientific categorizations altogether. In every scientific field, the universe continually presents those making discoveries with a wide range of diversity. This is almost universally accepted in an inclusive manner, subdividing groups into subgroups, and subdividing those further. We will continue to find new types of planetary bodies in a wide range of diversity - large terrestrial planets, dwarf-scale planets, gas giants, ice giants, hot jupiters, super-earths, water worlds, supercomets, extremely large bodies orbiting as moons, planets without parent stars, and so forth. Rather than trying to hide diversity, science is supposed to embrace it.
Then there's the issue of the timing. For most of the history of humankind's knowledge of Ceres and Pluto, we have
In the words of Wikipedia, "Citation needed". The planetary scientists at the IAU meeting had been by and large pursuing a definition involving a body reaching gravitational equilibrium. They've also been leading the charge to get it overturned. There are numerous published papers by planetary scientists who continue to refer to large KBOs and the like as planets. The New Horizons team is particularly notable in continued references to them as planets.
The vote passed via a non-randomly-selected 4% of the IAU's membership who were - as previously mentioned - overwhelmingly not planetary scientists. Letting people who study stars (by the way, a "dwarf star" is still a "star") decide what a planet is is just plain stupid - it's not their field of expertise. The first draft proposal indeed went with the planetary scientists' version - hydrostatic equilibrium being the criteria, and was confirmed on the 18th, with intent to vote on the 24th. Many people left the IAU meeting thinking that this was the version that was going to be voted on, and since they supported either having it or no definition at all, they didn't need to be there. The proposal was changed however on the 22nd. Due to dischord among the IAU members there were "secret" negotiations held on the proposal on the evening of the 23rd, and it looked increasingly unlikely that anything was going to be agreed upon. But then they came out with the current version on the 24th - after most of the membership had left - and had it voted on during the same day, when most of the people remaining were the ones who had been fighting against the planetary scientists' equilibrium definition. They furthermore reverted the standard rules which only allow people in a specific field to vote on matters related to their field, declaring the definition of planet a matter applicable to the whole union, so that everyone, not just planetary scientists, could vote.
There are not little complaints about "the exact wording" - do I really need to go into a breakdown of all of the arguments against it?
Nope. A tiny fraction of a group who is overwhelmingly not planetary scientists has spoken and made their internally-inconsistent definition. It stands until they revoke or alter it.
.. to make up a formula to say what you want it to say for data like this.
Here, want an alternative formula to declare the 8 IAU "planets" as planets as well as exoplanets but exclude the IAU "dwarf planets", without using any of the terms he uses, and to be able to classify 100% (rather than the 99%) of exoplanets?
MeanDistanceFromTheSun / DiscoveryYear ^5 > 0.21mm/y^5
It's a functional formula. Does this mean that it's a reasonable formula? Of course not; it has no connection with the reality of what they actually are. But you know what? Neither does his or the IAU's "cleared the neighborhood" concept. There are no credible planetary models that show for example that Mars cleared its own neighborhood. While they differ on the details, they all agree that Jupiter cleared it (and cleared most of the debris from the inner solar system in general, with some help from Saturn). Neptune has (despite its distance from the sun) orders of magnitude more orbit-clearing power than Mars yet nonetheless contains multiple objects a couple percent the size of Mars in its "neighborhood". Is Mars not a "planet"?
I have a giant list of reasons why the IAU decision is poor and unscientific, but no need to post it again.