The problem with have with giving 16 year olds the right to vote is that it was a one time thing. If Scottish government had come out and said that 16 is an appropriate voting age, and kept that age for all votes then that is okay.
But they didn't do that. They only set the age at 16 for this vote because they believed that the younger crowd would vote yes, which is the way they wanted. Whether or not young people actually voted yes doesn't change the fact that the Scottish government played fast and loose with the democratic system. I don't really see how this is any different than the gerrymandering that goes on the in the US.
The problem I have with this debate is the lack of forks.
The whole premise of open source is that you can change the code to the way you like it. Look at XFREE86/Xorg, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, X/Mir/Wayland, Unity/Gnome3/MATE, MySQL/MariaDB, and so on. So if there is a large community of experienced Linux people who hate systemd there should be plenty of forks of major distros that use SysVinit instead. So where are they, where is the 'save SysVinit' project? Where is the Debian derivative that keeps the old scripts? For all of whining about systemd you would think where is enough people to maintain several distros. Yet the systemd and upstart teams seems to be the only groups of people actually doing anything concrete.
Linus said “Talk is cheap. Show me the code." and I think that applies perfectly here. No amount of trash talking is going to generate code, forks, or distros.
Sorry you feel that way. But if you look at my account I've been active since 2009, rather dedicated for an astroturfing account.
The truth is the track record on the F-35 is little different than any other post-cold war weapons program. They are always over budget and behind schedule.
F-22: Too slow, no air to ground, too expensive, stealth not proven, too little armament, no competitor for it to face, cold war relic, etc. Orders dropped from 750 to 195. Now people are proposing to buy more of them instead of the F-35.
B-2: Stealth not proven, too slow, too expensive, hangar queen, poor handling, etc. Orders dropped from 132 to 21. Now it's heralded as a sign of American military power.
Elements of Power: http://elementsofpower.blogspot.ca/2013/08/f-35-critics-same-sht-different-century.html Does a great job comparing the complaints about the F-35 to complaints made about the F-15.
It's always the same nonsense, complaining about specs that don't matter in modern combat, ignoring improvements to things that do matter, offering no alternative, complain about cost.
Claim the costs are increasing, except the price per plane is decreasing. Check.
Faux outrage at the $1 trillion price tag that has been part of the plan for decades and pays for R&D for 3 new fighters, a purchase order for ~2,500 aircraft, plus maintenance and training for 55 years. Check.
Complain that it has a part built in every state, just like every other military project in the last 50 years. Check.
Unfortunately the authors forgot to mention how important dog fighting is to a strike fighter. Also passed up the opportunity to talk about how we are not sure if stealth actually works. I mean, the least they could do is compare it to the F-16 using clean specs and a non-inflation adjusted price from the 80s.
Standard cheap-shots on the costs, but weak follow through on "manoeuvrability problems". I'll give it a 6/10.
But that doesn't excuse the government response. The justice department had no reason to act in such a heavy handed manner. They quite clearly wanted to make an example of him and were willing to bend the law to do so.
But the bigger issue here isn't Swartz, it's the fact that this kind of treatment has become common place. Putting a "hacker" in solitary confinement didn't make any sense when they did it to Kevin Mitnik, and it didn't make any sense with Swartz. It's an abuse of power, the tragedy is it took a suicide for people to notice.
The key take away is that they can no longer use this information as evidence in court. The government will still use this information to track you; but they will need to get more creative when they do parallel reconstruction.
As a Canadian I'm shocked that the government doesn't already do this. I alway just assumed that when I went to the hospital the medical staff could look up what shots I've had, what I'm allergic to, and any major surgeries I've undergone.
As a side note. I think this a good idea. I sure as shit don't want someone who isn't vacinated wandering around a hospital war full of people who's immune system is compromised.
The thing is there is a huge difference in what "reuseable" means for the Space Shuttle and for the Falcon.
The Space Shuttle was firing the engines for 540-761 seconds, taking the engines to orbit , staying in order for days or weeks, bringing the engines back through reentry, then refurbishing them. That is a pretty tall order.
SpaceX is only trying to recover the first stage. It only burns for 180 seconds. Reaching a maximum height of around 90-100km (about the same as SpaceShipOne). Since it never reaches orbital velocity it doesn't experiance anything like the reentry forces the Space Shuttle does. It then does a powered landing on a launch pad. Still a tall order, but much less than what the Space Shuttle was trying to do.
Additionally the Falcon 9 has already demonstrated that it can complete is primary mission with one engine failure. And the resuable engines will not be used on man rated systems, so the reliability standards are not as high as for the SSME. We won't know how extensive the refurbisment costs are, but the Merlin engines are smaller and simpler than the SSME. Its possible that some of the 9 engines may have to be discarded, but even if only 5-6 are in good enough shape to be resued in non-man-rated launches; that is a pretty significant cost savings.
I find it very amusing how the tune has changed with regards to how vote with their wallet and corporate moral character.
For the longest time the argument was "Well if you don't like company x don't buy their products!". With the implication being that if you don't actually stop, then you are just a whiner or a hypocrite. But now people really are taking their business elsewhere. The actions of a company or the people that represent a company is effecting the bottom line. Yet somehow old "vote with your wallet" is no longer acceptable. Somehow judging a company based on it's moral character is an assault on free speech, maybe even down right persecution!
For a long time people (on Slashdot especially) have been warning of the dangers of putting your data in the cloud. Of the amount of personal information that can be gleaned from your web browsing habits. That that big business is cooperating with the government (willingly or not) in a massive breach of privacy. So how and can anyone be surprised that customers demand moral character from leadership of companies to whom we are handing over so much personal information?
If you had to make a choice between companies to store YOUR personal information and your choices are: Company A with Bruce Schneier on it's board of directors, and Company B with Dick Cheney on it's board of directors. Does anyone seriously think that difference shouldn't effect the decision?
I for one have no sympathy. Yes a company has every right to alienate their customers, but customers also have every right to vote with their wallets.
We know that the opponent must play rock 1/2 of the time.
If I play paper 4/6 of the time, than I should expect 1/2 of my paper to align with his rock. So 4/6 * 1/2 = 2/6 = 1/3. So I should expect to win 1/3 of the time, plus my winnings on the other combinations. That means 1/3 is the lower bound.
If you play 1/3 rock and 2/3 paper, his response will be 1/2 paper and 1/2 rock. So you are going to get 2/3 * 1/2 = 1/3 for your paper. But your 1/3 rock will never win because he will never play scissors either. But his 1/2 paper will meet your 1/3 rock, giving him 1/2 * 1/3 = 1/6 win. Putting you head by only 1/6.
This is where the two games key comes in. You and I both recognize that 2/3 paper is the right move because 1/2 of his moves will be rock. But by playing the other half as regular RPS with a win/tie/loss of 1/1/1 you can expect the win/loss to cancel out, leaving you with your 1/3 lower bound advantage.
The opponent doesn't have the option to play anything greater than 1/2 scissors because the other 1/2 must be rock. If he uses the "all scissors" response, he can only actually do a 1/2 scissors response. So is we play it out:
1/2 scissors x 4/6 paper = 2/6 = 1/3 victory for the opponent. 1/2 scissors x 1/6 scissors is 1/12 tie. And 1/2 scissors x 1/6 rock is 1/12 lose. So the "all scissors" strategy only nets him 1/3 victory not 4/6.
You should play paper 4/6 of the time, rock 1/6, and scissors 1/6 of the time.
The key (if you RFTA) is that whether or not your opponent plays rock is determined by a coin toss. So really you are playing a compound game. You are playing a coin toss and rock paper scissors (RPS). Since the coin toss determines your opponents move, you can think of it as playing 50% coin toss and 50% RPS. The RPS is a subgame of the coin toss.
Since the coin toss is the dominate game, you play with win that first. But instead of heads/tails, it is paper/other. The answer to the coin toss is a 50/50 guess of heads/tails, so the answer to the paper/other is 50% paper, 50% other.
The "other" is the RPS game. And since the answer to the RPS game is 1/3 rock, 1/3 paper, 1/3 scissors, we know what the solution to the other 50% of the game is.
So the equations are:choice = (Coin Toss) + (RPS) so: paper = 1/2 + 1/3, rock = 0 + 1/3, scissors = 0 + 1/3. Or paper = 4/6, rock = 1/6, scissors = 1/6.
One big issue is that virtual machines allows for different OSes. So if you are provides a variety of services, like legacy applications for example, you consolidate them all on to one machine.
It also allows for easier testing. Say for example you need to stress test your application on some combination Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, FreeBSD, WinServer, Mac, and Solaris, or even a variety of different versions of those OSes. Putting them all in virtual machines is much simpler than re-installing or having a dedicated machine for each one. It also makes it easy to call up your test environment if a customer reports a bug.
Aircraft are very sensitive to the weight. But ships are not. I wonder if it would be realistic to have a battery powered ship for cross ocean voyages. Especially for things like tankers and cargo ships. Pull into port and get hooked up with special massive power tx lines and fill up the battery.
I seem to recall that large ships are a big source of CO2 emissions. If it is possible I wonder what the trade off is in terms of costs.
Exception, after exception isn't being made. It made headlines for weeks. Then it had to go all the way to parliament to get an exception made. And even then is was only for a short term exemption until a proper solution to the shortage could be found.
The Chalk River medical isotope issue was different though.
Everyone agrees that the regulator did its job by shutting down the plant for not meeting the once in a million years safety ratio that is the standard. However the plant was not a power plant, it was a research plant producing medical isotopes. So issue wasn't whether the ractor met the standards, it didn't. The issue was the probability of people getting injured or dying from a plant malfunction was significantly less than the probability of people dying from not getting those medical isotopes.
When presented with instructions to provide a temporary exception to the rule until other sources of the isotope could be brought online, the regulator said no. So things escalated until someone (parliament) had the authority to over rule the regulator.
She was fired for not granting the exception, even though she knew what the balance of probabilities were. Basically she was power tripping.
There isn't really anything new going on here, its just never been put togther like this before.
While NASA prefers water landings, the Soviets landed all of their equipment on the ground. So returning things to the ground isn't really that exciting. Additionally there were landing people (who are much more fragile than mechanical parts) from orbit rather than just high in the atmosphere.
And while reusable engines didn't work out that great for the Space Shuttle for various reasons. Lots of rocket engines have been used over and over on test stands on the ground. Rocket engines that can be reused isn't new tech either.
I don't know who told you the F-35 was an air superiority fighter but that is totally wrong.
The F-35 Joint *Strike* Fighter is a replacement deep strike aircraft. It will be filling the roll of the now retired F-117, and soon the F-16 and F-18.
Since the 70's air forces have followed the high-low model. An expensive air superiority fighter in small numbers, and a cheaper multi-purpose fighter in larger numbers. This is why the USAF has F-15s and F-16, and the Soviets had the SU-27 and MiG-29. The next generation is the F-22 for air superiority and F-35 for multipurpose.
Also the F-35 has nothing to do with the retirement of the A-10. The F-35 wasn't designed to replace the A-10 any more than the F-16 or the F-18 were designed to. The A-10 isn't a sexy plane in the air force's eyes, it's getting old, and no one made plans to replace it. So rather than admitting that they dropped the ball on CAS the air force is claiming that the F-35 will do the job.
There is nothing wrong with using and IDE, that doesn't make you a bad programmer. Relying on an IDE does make you a bad programmer. Lets face it, there is a lot of boiler plate boring crap involved in programming. Using an IDE to handle the mundane stuff makes a lot of sense. But if you can't do your job without it then you are probably not very good at your job.
Using a calculator doesn't make you bad at math. Being unable to do math without a calculator makes you bad a math.
A big part of the issue is that some of these organizations shouldn't be doing any of this at all.
A big part missing the the discussion is that the NSA is a military outfit. It is part of the DoD and its commander is a serving member of the US armed forces. It is the signals intelligence branch of the US military. Their primay mission is ensure secure communications for the US command and control infastructure, and gather intelligence on foreign military powers.
How did we get from spying on the Soviet Union, to monitoring the phones of every American citizen? As a military outfit they shouldn't be operating in the the US at all. You wouldn't let soldiers patrol the streets acting like cops, so why are thay taking on tasks the rightfully belong on the hands of the FBI? The simple answer is secrecy. Whatever legal games they want to play, at the end of the day they knew that they shouldn't be doing it, so the tasked it to the DoD so they can call it a matter of national security.
Except Norway did pretty much opposite of what Venezuela did.
Norway created a state company owned company (a crown corporation for those familiar with the British system) called Statoil. Using public funds the company established itself in Norway and around the world. Once the company got established it was turned into a public stock company (NYSE: STO). The Norwegian government remains the primary shareholder, however it is a public corporation run by the private sector for profit.
Venezuela brought in foreign established firms to provide the expertise and capital to exploit the country's natural resources and to aid in the development of the national oil company. Later a more socialist government decided that they didn't like the deal anymore and nationalized the foreign owned assets into the PDVSA, a government run enterprises.
The result is that Norway's oil industry is well coordinated and on friendly terms with other governments and oil companies. And frequently engages in joint ventures with other oil companies outside of Norway. Statoil is run for profit by via private sector mechanisms providing a good return on investment for the country, and is relatively free of corruption. The country's ownership of the controlling share of the corporation is treated like a long term asset for the benefit of future generations.
Venezuela has for it's part burned bridges with everyone who had previously invested in the country. Making it hard to expand outside the country, and more importantly attract foreign investment which could provide the expertise that Venezuela lacks. The PDVSA is rife with corruption providing cushy jobs to 'friends of the family' for various political players. The ROI for the people and government of Venezuela is much lower than it should be. And rather than treating it's ownership of PDVSA as an investment (like Norway does with Statoil), they treat it like a cash cow to fund various ill conceived economic plans.
Norway acted as a sole proprietor in a free market. Venezuela acted like the post-revolution communist governments of the last century.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with have with giving 16 year olds the right to vote is that it was a one time thing. If Scottish government had come out and said that 16 is an appropriate voting age, and kept that age for all votes then that is okay.
But they didn't do that. They only set the age at 16 for this vote because they believed that the younger crowd would vote yes, which is the way they wanted. Whether or not young people actually voted yes doesn't change the fact that the Scottish government played fast and loose with the democratic system. I don't really see how this is any different than the gerrymandering that goes on the in the US.
The problem I have with this debate is the lack of forks.
The whole premise of open source is that you can change the code to the way you like it. Look at XFREE86/Xorg, OpenOffice/LibreOffice, X/Mir/Wayland, Unity/Gnome3/MATE, MySQL/MariaDB, and so on. So if there is a large community of experienced Linux people who hate systemd there should be plenty of forks of major distros that use SysVinit instead. So where are they, where is the 'save SysVinit' project? Where is the Debian derivative that keeps the old scripts? For all of whining about systemd you would think where is enough people to maintain several distros. Yet the systemd and upstart teams seems to be the only groups of people actually doing anything concrete.
Linus said “Talk is cheap. Show me the code." and I think that applies perfectly here. No amount of trash talking is going to generate code, forks, or distros.
Sorry you feel that way. But if you look at my account I've been active since 2009, rather dedicated for an astroturfing account.
The truth is the track record on the F-35 is little different than any other post-cold war weapons program. They are always over budget and behind schedule.
F-22: Too slow, no air to ground, too expensive, stealth not proven, too little armament, no competitor for it to face, cold war relic, etc. Orders dropped from 750 to 195. Now people are proposing to buy more of them instead of the F-35.
B-2: Stealth not proven, too slow, too expensive, hangar queen, poor handling, etc. Orders dropped from 132 to 21. Now it's heralded as a sign of American military power.
Elements of Power: http://elementsofpower.blogspot.ca/2013/08/f-35-critics-same-sht-different-century.html Does a great job comparing the complaints about the F-35 to complaints made about the F-15.
It's always the same nonsense, complaining about specs that don't matter in modern combat, ignoring improvements to things that do matter, offering no alternative, complain about cost.
Ah yes more F-35 hate.
Claim the costs are increasing, except the price per plane is decreasing. Check.
Faux outrage at the $1 trillion price tag that has been part of the plan for decades and pays for R&D for 3 new fighters, a purchase order for ~2,500 aircraft, plus maintenance and training for 55 years. Check.
Complain that it has a part built in every state, just like every other military project in the last 50 years. Check.
Unfortunately the authors forgot to mention how important dog fighting is to a strike fighter. Also passed up the opportunity to talk about how we are not sure if stealth actually works. I mean, the least they could do is compare it to the F-16 using clean specs and a non-inflation adjusted price from the 80s.
Standard cheap-shots on the costs, but weak follow through on "manoeuvrability problems". I'll give it a 6/10.
Year of the Linux Extremist?
That has got me curious. I wonder how many terror groups use linux?
Because it is a test case for the limits of government search powers. What they are allow to do to him, they are allow to do to you.
For sure he made some poor choices.
But that doesn't excuse the government response. The justice department had no reason to act in such a heavy handed manner. They quite clearly wanted to make an example of him and were willing to bend the law to do so.
But the bigger issue here isn't Swartz, it's the fact that this kind of treatment has become common place. Putting a "hacker" in solitary confinement didn't make any sense when they did it to Kevin Mitnik, and it didn't make any sense with Swartz. It's an abuse of power, the tragedy is it took a suicide for people to notice.
The key take away is that they can no longer use this information as evidence in court. The government will still use this information to track you; but they will need to get more creative when they do parallel reconstruction.
As a Canadian I'm shocked that the government doesn't already do this. I alway just assumed that when I went to the hospital the medical staff could look up what shots I've had, what I'm allergic to, and any major surgeries I've undergone.
As a side note. I think this a good idea. I sure as shit don't want someone who isn't vacinated wandering around a hospital war full of people who's immune system is compromised.
I hope he gets everything that he asks for.
Yes the Timothy McVeigh, Andrew Stack, and Marvin Heemeyer part was in very poor taste. Yes his "open letter" is childish.
I don't care. The government doesn't get to abuse someones rights, no matter how much of an asshole that person may be.
The thing is there is a huge difference in what "reuseable" means for the Space Shuttle and for the Falcon.
The Space Shuttle was firing the engines for 540-761 seconds, taking the engines to orbit , staying in order for days or weeks, bringing the engines back through reentry, then refurbishing them. That is a pretty tall order.
SpaceX is only trying to recover the first stage. It only burns for 180 seconds. Reaching a maximum height of around 90-100km (about the same as SpaceShipOne). Since it never reaches orbital velocity it doesn't experiance anything like the reentry forces the Space Shuttle does. It then does a powered landing on a launch pad. Still a tall order, but much less than what the Space Shuttle was trying to do.
Additionally the Falcon 9 has already demonstrated that it can complete is primary mission with one engine failure. And the resuable engines will not be used on man rated systems, so the reliability standards are not as high as for the SSME. We won't know how extensive the refurbisment costs are, but the Merlin engines are smaller and simpler than the SSME. Its possible that some of the 9 engines may have to be discarded, but even if only 5-6 are in good enough shape to be resued in non-man-rated launches; that is a pretty significant cost savings.
I find it very amusing how the tune has changed with regards to how vote with their wallet and corporate moral character.
For the longest time the argument was "Well if you don't like company x don't buy their products!". With the implication being that if you don't actually stop, then you are just a whiner or a hypocrite. But now people really are taking their business elsewhere. The actions of a company or the people that represent a company is effecting the bottom line. Yet somehow old "vote with your wallet" is no longer acceptable. Somehow judging a company based on it's moral character is an assault on free speech, maybe even down right persecution!
For a long time people (on Slashdot especially) have been warning of the dangers of putting your data in the cloud. Of the amount of personal information that can be gleaned from your web browsing habits. That that big business is cooperating with the government (willingly or not) in a massive breach of privacy. So how and can anyone be surprised that customers demand moral character from leadership of companies to whom we are handing over so much personal information?
If you had to make a choice between companies to store YOUR personal information and your choices are: Company A with Bruce Schneier on it's board of directors, and Company B with Dick Cheney on it's board of directors. Does anyone seriously think that difference shouldn't effect the decision?
I for one have no sympathy. Yes a company has every right to alienate their customers, but customers also have every right to vote with their wallets.
If you play 2/3 paper 1/3 rock. He will play 1/2 paper, 1/2 rock.
Wins for you:
Paper vs rock: 2/3 * 1/2 = 1/3 win
Rock vs scissors: 1/3 * 0 = 0 win
Scissors vs paper: 0 * 1/2 = 0 win
For him:
Paper vs rock: 1/2 * 1/3 = 1/6
Rock vs scissors: 1/2 * 0 = 0
Scissors vs paper: 0 * 2/3 = 0
Your optimal strategy (2/3 paper, 1/3 rock) vs his optimal strategy (1/2 paper, 1/2 rock), results 1/3 win not a 1/2 win.
We know that the opponent must play rock 1/2 of the time.
If I play paper 4/6 of the time, than I should expect 1/2 of my paper to align with his rock. So 4/6 * 1/2 = 2/6 = 1/3. So I should expect to win 1/3 of the time, plus my winnings on the other combinations. That means 1/3 is the lower bound.
If you play 1/3 rock and 2/3 paper, his response will be 1/2 paper and 1/2 rock. So you are going to get 2/3 * 1/2 = 1/3 for your paper. But your 1/3 rock will never win because he will never play scissors either. But his 1/2 paper will meet your 1/3 rock, giving him 1/2 * 1/3 = 1/6 win. Putting you head by only 1/6.
This is where the two games key comes in. You and I both recognize that 2/3 paper is the right move because 1/2 of his moves will be rock. But by playing the other half as regular RPS with a win/tie/loss of 1/1/1 you can expect the win/loss to cancel out, leaving you with your 1/3 lower bound advantage.
The opponent doesn't have the option to play anything greater than 1/2 scissors because the other 1/2 must be rock. If he uses the "all scissors" response, he can only actually do a 1/2 scissors response. So is we play it out:
1/2 scissors x 4/6 paper = 2/6 = 1/3 victory for the opponent. 1/2 scissors x 1/6 scissors is 1/12 tie. And 1/2 scissors x 1/6 rock is 1/12 lose. So the "all scissors" strategy only nets him 1/3 victory not 4/6.
You should play paper 4/6 of the time, rock 1/6, and scissors 1/6 of the time.
The key (if you RFTA) is that whether or not your opponent plays rock is determined by a coin toss. So really you are playing a compound game. You are playing a coin toss and rock paper scissors (RPS). Since the coin toss determines your opponents move, you can think of it as playing 50% coin toss and 50% RPS. The RPS is a subgame of the coin toss.
Since the coin toss is the dominate game, you play with win that first. But instead of heads/tails, it is paper/other. The answer to the coin toss is a 50/50 guess of heads/tails, so the answer to the paper/other is 50% paper, 50% other.
The "other" is the RPS game. And since the answer to the RPS game is 1/3 rock, 1/3 paper, 1/3 scissors, we know what the solution to the other 50% of the game is.
So the equations are:choice = (Coin Toss) + (RPS) so: paper = 1/2 + 1/3, rock = 0 + 1/3, scissors = 0 + 1/3. Or paper = 4/6, rock = 1/6, scissors = 1/6.
One big issue is that virtual machines allows for different OSes. So if you are provides a variety of services, like legacy applications for example, you consolidate them all on to one machine.
It also allows for easier testing. Say for example you need to stress test your application on some combination Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, FreeBSD, WinServer, Mac, and Solaris, or even a variety of different versions of those OSes. Putting them all in virtual machines is much simpler than re-installing or having a dedicated machine for each one. It also makes it easy to call up your test environment if a customer reports a bug.
Aircraft are very sensitive to the weight. But ships are not. I wonder if it would be realistic to have a battery powered ship for cross ocean voyages. Especially for things like tankers and cargo ships. Pull into port and get hooked up with special massive power tx lines and fill up the battery.
I seem to recall that large ships are a big source of CO2 emissions. If it is possible I wonder what the trade off is in terms of costs.
Exception, after exception isn't being made. It made headlines for weeks. Then it had to go all the way to parliament to get an exception made. And even then is was only for a short term exemption until a proper solution to the shortage could be found.
The Chalk River medical isotope issue was different though.
Everyone agrees that the regulator did its job by shutting down the plant for not meeting the once in a million years safety ratio that is the standard. However the plant was not a power plant, it was a research plant producing medical isotopes. So issue wasn't whether the ractor met the standards, it didn't. The issue was the probability of people getting injured or dying from a plant malfunction was significantly less than the probability of people dying from not getting those medical isotopes.
When presented with instructions to provide a temporary exception to the rule until other sources of the isotope could be brought online, the regulator said no. So things escalated until someone (parliament) had the authority to over rule the regulator.
She was fired for not granting the exception, even though she knew what the balance of probabilities were. Basically she was power tripping.
There isn't really anything new going on here, its just never been put togther like this before.
While NASA prefers water landings, the Soviets landed all of their equipment on the ground. So returning things to the ground isn't really that exciting. Additionally there were landing people (who are much more fragile than mechanical parts) from orbit rather than just high in the atmosphere.
And while reusable engines didn't work out that great for the Space Shuttle for various reasons. Lots of rocket engines have been used over and over on test stands on the ground. Rocket engines that can be reused isn't new tech either.
I don't know who told you the F-35 was an air superiority fighter but that is totally wrong.
The F-35 Joint *Strike* Fighter is a replacement deep strike aircraft. It will be filling the roll of the now retired F-117, and soon the F-16 and F-18.
Since the 70's air forces have followed the high-low model. An expensive air superiority fighter in small numbers, and a cheaper multi-purpose fighter in larger numbers. This is why the USAF has F-15s and F-16, and the Soviets had the SU-27 and MiG-29. The next generation is the F-22 for air superiority and F-35 for multipurpose.
Also the F-35 has nothing to do with the retirement of the A-10. The F-35 wasn't designed to replace the A-10 any more than the F-16 or the F-18 were designed to. The A-10 isn't a sexy plane in the air force's eyes, it's getting old, and no one made plans to replace it. So rather than admitting that they dropped the ball on CAS the air force is claiming that the F-35 will do the job.
There is nothing wrong with using and IDE, that doesn't make you a bad programmer. Relying on an IDE does make you a bad programmer. Lets face it, there is a lot of boiler plate boring crap involved in programming. Using an IDE to handle the mundane stuff makes a lot of sense. But if you can't do your job without it then you are probably not very good at your job.
Using a calculator doesn't make you bad at math. Being unable to do math without a calculator makes you bad a math.
A big part of the issue is that some of these organizations shouldn't be doing any of this at all.
A big part missing the the discussion is that the NSA is a military outfit. It is part of the DoD and its commander is a serving member of the US armed forces. It is the signals intelligence branch of the US military. Their primay mission is ensure secure communications for the US command and control infastructure, and gather intelligence on foreign military powers.
How did we get from spying on the Soviet Union, to monitoring the phones of every American citizen? As a military outfit they shouldn't be operating in the the US at all. You wouldn't let soldiers patrol the streets acting like cops, so why are thay taking on tasks the rightfully belong on the hands of the FBI? The simple answer is secrecy. Whatever legal games they want to play, at the end of the day they knew that they shouldn't be doing it, so the tasked it to the DoD so they can call it a matter of national security.
Except Norway did pretty much opposite of what Venezuela did.
Norway created a state company owned company (a crown corporation for those familiar with the British system) called Statoil. Using public funds the company established itself in Norway and around the world. Once the company got established it was turned into a public stock company (NYSE: STO). The Norwegian government remains the primary shareholder, however it is a public corporation run by the private sector for profit.
Venezuela brought in foreign established firms to provide the expertise and capital to exploit the country's natural resources and to aid in the development of the national oil company. Later a more socialist government decided that they didn't like the deal anymore and nationalized the foreign owned assets into the PDVSA, a government run enterprises.
The result is that Norway's oil industry is well coordinated and on friendly terms with other governments and oil companies. And frequently engages in joint ventures with other oil companies outside of Norway. Statoil is run for profit by via private sector mechanisms providing a good return on investment for the country, and is relatively free of corruption. The country's ownership of the controlling share of the corporation is treated like a long term asset for the benefit of future generations.
Venezuela has for it's part burned bridges with everyone who had previously invested in the country. Making it hard to expand outside the country, and more importantly attract foreign investment which could provide the expertise that Venezuela lacks. The PDVSA is rife with corruption providing cushy jobs to 'friends of the family' for various political players. The ROI for the people and government of Venezuela is much lower than it should be. And rather than treating it's ownership of PDVSA as an investment (like Norway does with Statoil), they treat it like a cash cow to fund various ill conceived economic plans.
Norway acted as a sole proprietor in a free market. Venezuela acted like the post-revolution communist governments of the last century.