Pay has a lot less to do with it than you think. Marginal pay might influence the number of people who want to be full time life time teachers, but it as almost no influence on people who teach for the joy of teaching. I don't know about you, but all of my best profs in high school were once that worked a long career, decided that they were basically ready to retire, and decided to 'give back' by teaching. My best profs used their teaching salary to toss at the IRS to pay for the mount of money that they were sitting on. My worst teachers were all life long teachers that saw the job as a pay check and something they have to ride out until retirement.
Personally, I think we could do with FEWER life long professional teachers. I would like to see a system that encourages experienced individuals approaching retirement to come out and teach for a few years before retiring for good. Having an experienced engineer or physicist as a physics or math teacher makes a world of difference.
That isn't to imply that life long teachers are bad, just that I don't think that they are as valuable, especially in high school, when compared to someone who has spent their life doing rather than teaching. The people who spent their life 'doing' rather than 'teaching' come to the game with fresh energy, practical application of what they are teaching, and don't see what they are doing as 'work' they need to keep doing until they reach some magic retirement age and can get the fuck out.
I have had some great life teachers, but the vast majority of them were either young and still full of energy, or professionals when were teaching for the fun of it after having lived a life in academia/industry. On the other hand, I struggle to think of one 'good' teacher I had who was a life long teacher near retirement age.
I really wouldn't lose much sleep over the danger from non-state actors. This is a battle of technology, and in such battles it takes money and brains to win. Your average government can at the very least scrounge up money and buy what they need (including brains - see nuclear profileration vis a vi Pakistan). For individuals, it is far more difficult.
By the time assassination by drone becomes workable and 'cheap', the countermeasures will already start to be produced. We have actually already seen this cycle happen with other weapons. Shoulder mounted anti-tank and anti-air weapons are now very cheap. Despite this they have had less and less impact on the battlefield as time rolls on. The anti-air weapons still cost enough and their production is traceable enough that they are hard to get a hold of. Both anti-air and anti-tank weapons suffer from the fact that we developed shockingly good counter measures against them. The number of US soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan to RPGs is extremely low. IEDs are a vastly greater threat, but even those are starting to be mitigated with time and technology.
I really don't see individuals having the money to play with the big boys. What it does do is give states a viable method of striking out at other states that they normally could not touch. If Saddam had instead of the fourth largest army in the world, the fourth largest assassination drone fleet in the world, US politicians might have done the math differently. As it was, the most Saddam could ever hope to do against the US was bleed soldiers in Iraq or at best sneak some explosives into the US and make a symbolic gesture with a few hundred pounds of TNT that could in no way influence the war other than to perhaps harden American resolve. If on the other hand he could have bought a credible deterrent against US politicians in the form of assassination capabilities, he might have been more effective in warding off the US.
Of course, the flip side to this is that if the US had had the same deterrent, and one assumes it is a bigger and better version with far more ominous red LEDs, his personal fear for his own safety might have convinced him that playing chicken with the US wasn't worth it.
So after the first presidential candidate dies, say around 2020, the urge to retaliate will be overwhelming. After that, it's tit-for-tat, all the way to hell.
It won't be the parties doing the killing, either. These things are, or should be, relatively cheap, and the programming is not that difficult. The only reason they are currently expensive is that it is the US government doing it. An "open source" killer robot drone would cost at most a few thousand bucks (use an off-the shelf 1/10th scale RC model as the basic platform).
I personally think it sounds great. You mean if one nation declares war on another nation instead of mass amounts of civilians soldiers dying the people who made the decision leading up to war fight it? Hells yes! Where can we sign up for this new world paradise?
Personally, I think that assassination wars are vastly more humane than the alternative. When a politician puts his own personal life on the line when he decides to do something nasty to another nation and decides that it is worth risking his personal life, it is vastly more likely that the cause is 'just'. What sort of calculations might politicians have made if they knew that invading Iraq (for instance) was going to result in people coming after them and their families, personally. If anything, this is the exact opposite of a bush button war. It takes nothing other than a morally gray conscience to send a few thousand boys to go fight in a foreign land where foreigners will and soldiers will be killed. It takes guts, bravery, and conviction in your cause to make the same decision knowing that the enemy is going to retaliate by trying to kill you and your family.
This sounds like an improvement.
Re:like cross-bows in the middle ages
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Wired for War
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· Score: 2, Insightful
There is a flip side to pulling humans farther back from the killing. While yes, you don't have to put a gun in someone's face and pull the trigger physically and this might cause detachment, consider the much more common scenario. We tend to sensationalize when soldiers go nuts and kill civilians needlessly. What we miss is that these incidents are very very rare and account for only the thinest fraction of civilian casualties. Far more often what happens when civilians die is that a small squad of men take fire from a building and shoot up the building to kill the bad guys inside, killing innocent civilians in the process. Most armies, but especially democratic armies, are extremely casualty adverse. The result is that the doctrine they fight with generally employees extreme self defense measures.
When a square of men get caught flat footed and ambushed they tend to unload massive amounts of firepower to save themselves. Rules of engagement be damned, most people are unhappy about being shot dead and will do just about anything to avoid it. Close young comrades pumped up on adrenaline and armed with enough firepower to level a small city watching each other die make really shitty moralist. You don't need to see the world from a camera lens to dehumanize people, you just need to see your buddy get shot next to you and know that the surrounding civilians offered up no warning and are probably harboring the people that shot your friend. At that point, you become a lot less concerned about collateral damage when you try and defend your life and the life of your fellows.
Robotics offers up an alternative. When robots are doing the dying and fighting you are pulling men out of a dangerous situation. You remove the kill or be killed mentality. You are no longer bonded by a sense of kinship between the people in your square. If one robot in a square of robot "dies" you just turn off the screens and go have a coffee. On top of that, it is no longer a dozen guys and one low level leader making life and death decisions. Hell, you could station a military lawyer right next to a drone operator. Everything is recorded such that if you break the rules of engagement you get your ass kicked. A bunch of guys sitting in a room with computers with their every move recorded and superiors always right there to give direction is pretty much the polar opposite of a dozen guys surrounded by bad guys with their lives on the line and their every moral decision weighed against whether or not they live or die.
Robotics offer up the opportunity take the preservation of the life of the soldier out of the equation. Whatever extra fire power it adds is meaningless. If killing civilians is what you want, we don't need robots to do it. The US could have killed every living thing in Iraq if that had been its intention. What it really wants is to pull the lives out of the equation not because it makes the extermination of the populace easier, but because it makes deciding to not fight to save a few easily swayed civilians drastically easier.
The concerns that it might make war too easy are certainly valid, but if you just want to blow stuff up we have already come and gone from that point. The US can bomb pretty much any non-first world nation with complete impunity with the exception of China. The far more profound effect drones are going to have is when they start taking the preservation of the life of the soldier out of the question.
No, it's your obvious contempt for me and my viewpoint (without even knowing what it is) that makes this discussion impossible.
...so says that person that declares discussion pointless if I don't agree that the aesthetic value of trees trumps all other concerns and that any person who could believe such a thing so alien that they can't have a discussion.
You apparently are some sort of nature worshiper who holds a religious reverence for nature that trumps human life. Like speaking with most people of fanatical religious faith, unless you share their beliefs you are likely to be wasting time if your discussion starts to tread in the direction of questioning the wisdom of their fanatical zeal.
I like trees. I go camping often. I appreciate nature. I still wipe my ass with toilet paper. I am okay with a tree dying so that my tush is clean, and fanatical religious devotion to nature aside, I bet you are too, even if you would be loathed to admit it.
How much preservation is worthwhile is a question that has to be asked. How much is worth preserving is a question of ecology and aesthetics. Even if you found forests ugly, you wouldn't want to chop them down unless you also really like soil erosion. Conversely, even if you find nature aesthetically pleasing, you don't want to preserve all of it as that would require you to kill yourself and everyone you know. 6.5 billion humans don't live in a âoenaturalâ state.
What is interesting here is that in the thought exercise where we make the assumption that trees have no ecological value, your estimation of how much nature is worth preserving doesn't change. Apparently in your rather insane world the prettiness of trees is the only thing of value, or is of such a high value that the efforts taken today to prevent deforestation that include a great deal of human unhappiness and hardship doesn't cause you any sort of moral distress. Anyone who has wandered through the gutted ex-paper towns sees that there is a price to pay for ecological preservation. It is a price we might happily pay for the ecological benefits, but I wouldn't send rural towns to ruin with such glee if it was just so that I had a place to go backpack on the weekends.
Human suffering distresses me a whole hell of a lot more than my aesthetic senses being violated. Like you said though, we probably don't have a common framework to have a conversation.
A) If you look at a photo of Earth at night [energy.gov], you'll see why a clear view of the night sky is not just a train-ride to the suburbs away. Huge swaths of land are blanketed in artificial light. By the logic you're presenting here, it wouldn't matter if we cut down all the trees as long as we had tree museums for people to go visit.
If the only ecological consequence to cutting down the trees is that humans wouldn't be able to find them pretty, then yes, I would be a-okay with cutting more of them down.
C) Seeing the wonder of the universe is a good thing. Living in a cave is not. Is that distinction so difficult to comprehend? "The rest is technology at work, for better or worse." Oh, so maybe you do grasp the point! Except that we don't have to just accept technology "for better or worse"; we can choose to use technology in ways that makes our lives better and not to use technology in ways that makes it worse.
The point you are missing is that generally when someone is "light polluting" it is for a reason. Sure, it diminishes the view, but it is probably doing something else useful like lighting a room or a path. I am fine with taking cheap common sense approaches to reducing how much light we pump into the sky. I however have no desire to see us start going crazy trying to stamp out a "pollution" with a pretty minimal impact upon our lives.
I live in a city. I choose to live in a city. Can I see the milky way at night? Nope. But I can walk out my front door and be within a 15 minute walk of half a dozen universities, a greater variety of food than exists in many nations, and most important of all be in close proximity of a few hundred thousand of my fellow humans which is something I count as a very large plus. I like how in the city it is always so bright that you would never think to bring a flashlight on a walk at night as I would in my birth town. I'll happily trade seeing stars, as pretty as they are, for the joy of living surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other humans in a place where there is always activity 24/7. If I want to see the stars (or lots of trees for that matter), I just jump in a train or in my car and drive a couple hours in one direction.
Forest, stars, darkness at night? Eh, sounds like a nice place to visit. I wouldn't want to live there.
Remember, the guys from Al-Qaeda are very creative. They will find a way.
Pretty sure they won't. They knocked down two towers while the US wasn't looking and then went on to go whack a pile of poor, deeply impoverished bastards living in the ass end of the earth without any law or order. That is like whacking a big guy with a two by four while his back is turned and the running away to go beat up on elementary school children (and eventually getting your ass kicked by them). People give Al-Qaeda way too much credit. A bunch of bored and suicidal French chemistry college grads represent more danger. Hell, biking in Boston is more scary than Al-Qaeda. If you live in the US, you are a hell of a lot more likely to die by choking on a chicken bone than by being killed by Al-Qaeda.
The difference is that your Father wanted to know how things work because he was used to fixing things.
That really is not true. The teenager with an iPhone is just as much as an expert on the iPhone as your farther was with a car. You farther might have known how to replace various components, but dump him into a factory making engine parts and he is helpless. He certainly couldn't make a simple rubber gasket and wouldn't even be able to tell you where the raw materials to make it come from.
We tend to work on the surface of things because that is where we get the most rewards. Your farther doesn't know how to make a rubber gasket because even if he could make one, he would rarely use that knowledge. He is better off learning where to put a gasket and judge if one is damaged. The same is true for a teenager using an iPhone. She can't even begin to contemplate how to make a simple transistor. With some serious studying she might stand a rough chance of learning the phone on a component level such that she can determine after much pain if she has a leaky transistor and perhaps might be able to replace it. She could do that, or she could just learn how to crack and mod her iPhone to make it all manner of useful things.
Learning how to repair a car at a component level is useful because there is not much else to do beyond cosmetics other than to learn how to repair and upgrade it. Repairing an iPhone on the other hand is a waste. It is a skill you might use once ever two years and it will save you a trivial amount of money. Learning how to manipulate the software on the other hand is something that is always useful.
I think that people are just as curious as they always have been. We just like getting the most bang for our buck in terms of curiosity. With a car, that means knowing how to repair the car and save yourself a few thousand dollars. In an almost disposable iPhone, it means cracking the phone's software open and making it do things it was never meant to do.
Monopoly laws are a little odd. Whether or not you are violating the law depends upon your size and how much of the market you eat up. If Ubuntu wants to bundle a browser, they are not going to get pinged for it because they own 2% of the market. It isn't illegal unless you are big.
The whole point of this style of law isn't to punish companies for illegal activities. The activities are not clearly legal or illegal. The point is to keep companies from being a monopoly and nothing else.
The reason why no one is after Apple for bundling hardware, software, and browsers and chopping the testicles off of anyone who tries to pull them apart is because Apple isn't a monopoly (yet). If Microsoft is no long in a monopoly position (and I am not arguing that, they are), then it shouldn't come as some surprise that they want fine reduced. The point of the fine isn't to exact retribution on a non-sentient company. It is to make them not a monopoly.
The story was indeed fluff, but I think you miss the point. What made the new Star Trek movie wasn't the story or the special effects. What made the new movie great were the characters and the mini-sub stories that were spawned from the lack-luster overarching plot. This movie was really about great characters doing awesome stuff.
I personally would not have minded a better story (black hole time travel?), but I'll give it a pass because I simply loved the characters. I liked seeing how they dealt with various situations. I liked the little sub-components of the story. The fact that the over arching story was weak bordering on non-sense didn't cause me to lose any sleep.
There are a few issues here. First, if you are selling text books you are not selling (by and large) to a willing audience. You are selling to an impoverished audience that is coerced into picking whatever textbook it is that the teacher selects. This doesn't make happy customers that care all that much about your hurt feelings or pocket book.
It is a safe bet that the vast majority of people that actually pay for the book are people that want it and will use it for more than a semester, and the vast majority of people that pirate it get it because they are students and have to. Thus when given the choice between paying whatever the ransom price is or pirating, they are sympathetic to pirating, especially if they don't think they will have need of your book again. There is nothing to do to reach these people other than to drop the price such that they find the ease and convince of buying a book "cheaper" than the hassle of pirating it and the inconvenience of not having a physical object. There is some optimal price where you are making the most money, you probably are not at it. What that price actually is is anyone's guess.
As for the pirating itself, you can't stop it. Big powerful corporations with billions at their back can't stop it, so neither can you. The best you can hope for is to cash in on it. How do you cash in on it? There are a few good examples out there.
Scott Sigler writes absolutely horrible science fiction. This stuff is so bad it will melt your brain. Despite that, not only is he published, he has great sales figures. Why on earth is this sorry excuse for Sci-Fi making even a penny? He is making money because he gives a podcast version of his book out for free. A book that normally would not have gotten the time of day was listened to by tens of thousands of people because it was free. Apparently there is more than one diluted fool in the world who can stomach his horrible writing, and so, not only did he get published on the basis of his downloads, but scored sales figures a few orders of magnitude higher than his literary talents deserve. Go ahead and google him and be horrified at how big this terrible writer managed to get.
How do you do the same with data compression text books? Yours is probably a harder challenge. The vast majority of the people that buy the book likely want nothing to do with it or the topic once they get their grades. Your best bet is probably to try and get more professors to teach their classes with your book. More professors teaching means more students who might buy the book. Sure, some will pirate, but many will buy it.
You might consider finding a way to disseminate your book for free in an electronic form. This might prompt more professors to teach their class with your book. Think about it. You are a professor who needs to teach data compression. There are a handful of textbook options out there. One of those options though gives the electronic form of the book away for free. That means that you can review the entire book and decide if you like it. Further, the professor weighs in the fact that because the book is free, it will boost his popularity among students. So, he goes for your book, buys a physical copy for himself, and tells his class that they can either buy a copy or use the electronic version. Students that want a physical copy (and I suspect many would) will buy it, and those that don't want it won't. You might sell a few less books per class, but you would jack up the number of classes you sell to, in addition to increasing the prestige of the book as it is used in more classrooms.
The choice is yours of course, but you can't stop piracy. You can't even make a dent in it. The best you can hope to do is exploit it. Either exploit it or accept the sales numbers that you have. There really are no other options.
I think you miss what "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" shows. It doesn't show deep moral insight. It doesn't erase the other 98% of the movie that is characters in action. What made that final scene good wasn't hamfisted moralizing. What made that scene (and all of Star Trek II) good was that that scene showed Spock's character. Good Trek is about good characters. The Wrath of Kahn was great because the character's shined. On one end you have the wrathful and determined Kirk getting the chance to display his character as an idealistic leader, captain, and warrior. On the other hand you have the logical Spock who unflinchingly sacrifices himself for the good of his friends. You tie this all together by showing the depth of friendship between these two men in the touching final scene. This wasn't about morality. Kirk and Spock could have been pirates and it still would have been good. It was about character.
This also is the reason why the new Star Trek is the best Trek yet. Was the time travel plot a little flimsy? Sure. Was the villain so-so? Yeah. Did we get great characters getting the chance to display who they are? Hells yes! You could stick someone who had never seen Star Trek before and ask them about what defines these characters and they would have no trouble telling you what they are about.
Yeah, it might be a good action movie or whatever, but is hardly consistent with the philosophical underpinnings of the original work. That so few Star Trek fans "get" this is a bit unnerving.
Have you actually watched any Star Trek besides TNG? The idea that Star Trek is a 24/7 dissertation on morality is absurd. Star Trek, especially when it is good, revolves around characters. Characters some times face moralistic challenges, but it isn't a series of moral dilemmas that define Star Trek. It just so happens that tossing moral dilemmas at the characters is a good way to show character.
This movie was excellent Star Trek. The characters were extremely sharp. They were good not just in how they were faithful to the original characters, but good because they added more depth and personality to them.
Star Trek is about characters first and foremost, or did I perhaps miss the deep moral dilemma hidden in the Wrath of Kahn? Good Star Trek has good characters (DS9) being tossed into situations that bring their character in sharp resolve (Star Trek II, the new ST movie). Bad Trek has shitty characters (Voyager) tossed into over handed attempts at philosophy (Star Trek I and V, the past two TNG movies, etc). By this measure, the new Star Trek was one of the best yet. You had great characters been given a chance to show what their character was about.
The idea that you are going to win charging money when there exists an Internet a few billion strong that is devoted to passing and spreading information for basically nothing is on its face silly. Short of government mandate creating a cartel, basic news is going to be impossible to charge for.
The only people that can charge are folks who actually do investigative journalism and can bring something to the table that others can't. The Economist is a great of a publication that has actually managed to charge people. They manage to bring in heavy weight thinkers (Nobel laureates, high government officials, authors, etc.) that normally are harder to access. They serve their niche well and drag in a few extra bucks from the Intertubes for the effort.
What you can't charge for is basic news and random journalist opinion. The opinion of a journalist (no offense) is not any deeper or brighter than any other bloke. You might as well ask a hair dresser or an engineer for their opinion. Basic news is also impossible to charge for. News spreads too fast and someone will put it up for free.
If you serve a niche very very well in a way that absolutely no one else does credibly, you might be able to charge for access. Otherwise though, the only other alternative is to find a way to turn eyeballs on the page into cash. Usually, that means ads, but there are certainly other ways out there that no one has hit on yet. I mean hell, who would have thought 20 years ago that the print cartoonist who do the best are not actually in print, but on the web and make most of their money by selling merchandise?
Jumping over a border doesn't magically make you immune from your home nations laws. For instance, if a US citizen zips over to Thailand to have sex with 12 year old girls, when he gets back to the US they can be arrested like the event happened in the US. You can violate a US law even when you are not in the US.
I would assume that the same is happening in South Korea. You can host where you like, but so long as you are a Korean citizen or live in Korea, they get to claim that their laws apply to you, and seeing as how the authorities have the guns, you really are in no position to argue.
The best you can do is obscure your own involvement. Having the server in Canada certainly makes it easier to break the law as the server is probably safe from search, but if they have other evidence that you are the owner, I imagine they can still bust you.
Maybe I am a freak, but to quote Davork, I get no spam. Gmail's filter catches pretty much everything. Once on a blue moon one will slip through, but I can tolerate one penis pump add every month or two. It might be true that a lot of spam is passing back and forth across the networks, but from a user point of view, it never makes it to me.
I am a pretty avid game buyer. I got out of college, got a job, and suddenly found tossing out a couple hundred on video games occasionally wasn't a large expense. If I see a game that I want, I generally just buy it.
I skipped over Red Alert 3 and Spore.
Those are two games that I normally would have not thought twice about buying. I like video games, and they are not such a big expense for me where I have to spend much time thinking about if I want to buy it or not, but in the case of those two games I took a pass because of DRM. I can merrily ignore DRM if it doesn't affect me. Limited licenses, crippling applications installed onto my computer, nice big loop holes for security breaches? Thanks. I'll pass. Video games are nice, but not worth crippling my computer or supporting that kind of anti-consumer behavior.
EA needed to be taught a lesson and hopefully they learned it. Spore had the most crippling DRM of all times and was the most pirated game of all times. Pssst... EA... DRM doesn't stop pirates. It sure does piss off people who on a normal day would hand you a sweat wad of cash without thinking twice.
If your only remaining fear of Steam is bricking, I would probably just get over it and come to the dark side. I have been playing video games since Zork. Do you know how many video games I have lost or destroyed along that path? I sure as hell don't have my original Doom CD sitting around somewhere. I weep over my loss of my Master of Orion 2 CD. I don't even have my original Half Life CD.
The difference of course is that I can still play Half Life because it is on Steam... I can't play Master of Orion 2.
Sure, Steam might one day die. Valve promised to unlock the games if they should ever die. Is that an ironclad agreement? Nah, but in truth, even if they brick my Steam account when they die and no one buys it up to continue offering the service, I'll still have called it a fair trade. Solid media is too easy to lose or break, and cracking DRM to making multiple backups is frankly a waste of time.
I personally call Steam a fare deal. If one day it dies, those games might possibly be bricked. What I get in return is painless instillation of games when I move computers, an easy way to get new games, and none of the hassle of physical media in terms of storage space or breakage. I personally like a world with Steam much better than loading my computer up with crippleware from physical media.
I really don't see why this is news worthy myself. So a court ordered someone to hand over private documents... this happens all the time. The fact that it is stuff posted on the quasi private Facebook doesn't really change much. If the government demanded that Facebook hand over its entire database to search for terrorist, I would be concerned. The fact that someone who is being sued is getting their Facebook page opened up as apart of normal evidence gathering is unremarkable.
People... if you are breaking a law, don't post it on Facebook and assume that the magic of the internet will keep it from the authorities.
I don't think anyone is arguing that it would be safe to park a blimp over China and assume it is safe because it is a few miles up the sky. That isn't the point of these.
That is like complaining that tanks are totally useless in middle the Pacific Ocean... no shit.
The point one of these things is to sit over an area that doesn't have massive air defenses. You can safely park one of these of Afghanistan. Hell, you could have parked one over Iraq during the 2nd invasion after a week of air strikes. The US almost always operates in areas where there is absolutely no resistance to air defense. At best, someone occasional gets lucky and knocks down a helicopter skimming the tree tops. A blimp 65,000 feet in the air? It might as well be on the moon for all the Taliban can do.
Even if an enemy like the Taliban was to gather up the resources it takes to knock of these down, the US would want them to. The cost both in terms of your supply lines and financial costs it would take to smuggle in a missile capable of knocking one of these down would be a terrible burden on a guerrilla enemy... and what would they get for it? They would knock down one blimp and have a new one in the sky to take its place the next day.
You can't outspend or out produce the US. Any enemy with half a brain knows that you dump your money into places where you can spend a little and inflict a lot of damage in terms of dollars and lives. Suicide bombings are so effective because they are cheap and can inflicted, a large tool in lives, and defending against them is very expensive.
Maybe if the US went up against another super power it might find these blimps worthless... of course, if you are trading shots with China and Russia, a few over priced blimps in the hanger is probably last on your list of concerns. Total economic ruination and a coming nuclear holocaust probably beat out other worries.
There are lots of ways to shoot these things down... they are all very expensive and require huge coordinated actions. If you want to smuggle in missiles or lasers capable of knocking one of these down, you are going to shell out cash and open up your entire operation to attack.
Playing a cash game with the US is a losing proposition. The Taliban isn't going to outspend the US. Hell, the US has airplanes that one of them cost more than every single asset the Taliban has combined. So sure, a guerrilla foe like the Taliban could conceivably gather up the cash to get a weapon that might knock out one of these. It would crush their budget and all of that money could have gone to equipping more guys with $15 rifles that could inflict real harm. For the US, it will be a minor irritation and they will just toss another one back up. It won't even show up as a blip on the budget.
People get too worked up about how defensible stuff like this is. It doesn't have to be defensible. It just has to cost so much to knock it down that if your opponent is stupid enough to spend the money you let them and call it a victory.
Against another super power of course this thing is an utter waste. You wouldn't bother fielding one of these against China or Russia... but if you are trading shots with China or Russia something has already gone horribly wrong and a few useless blimps in a hanger are the least of your concerns.
I wonder what all the animals that prepare to hibernate in the winter would think of your statement?
You are under the assumption that it is planning that causes an animal to prepare to hibernate and not pure instinct leading them by the nose.
You don't eat because you realize that if don't various mechanisms in your body are going to fail. You eat because you are hungry. The same is true for hibernation, mating, and a pile of other "planned" behaviors. Two deer don't bang in the fall because they realize that this is their chance to make babies and if they miss the window they will have none. They got at it because they are horny.
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Pay has a lot less to do with it than you think. Marginal pay might influence the number of people who want to be full time life time teachers, but it as almost no influence on people who teach for the joy of teaching. I don't know about you, but all of my best profs in high school were once that worked a long career, decided that they were basically ready to retire, and decided to 'give back' by teaching. My best profs used their teaching salary to toss at the IRS to pay for the mount of money that they were sitting on. My worst teachers were all life long teachers that saw the job as a pay check and something they have to ride out until retirement.
Personally, I think we could do with FEWER life long professional teachers. I would like to see a system that encourages experienced individuals approaching retirement to come out and teach for a few years before retiring for good. Having an experienced engineer or physicist as a physics or math teacher makes a world of difference.
That isn't to imply that life long teachers are bad, just that I don't think that they are as valuable, especially in high school, when compared to someone who has spent their life doing rather than teaching. The people who spent their life 'doing' rather than 'teaching' come to the game with fresh energy, practical application of what they are teaching, and don't see what they are doing as 'work' they need to keep doing until they reach some magic retirement age and can get the fuck out.
I have had some great life teachers, but the vast majority of them were either young and still full of energy, or professionals when were teaching for the fun of it after having lived a life in academia/industry. On the other hand, I struggle to think of one 'good' teacher I had who was a life long teacher near retirement age.
I really wouldn't lose much sleep over the danger from non-state actors. This is a battle of technology, and in such battles it takes money and brains to win. Your average government can at the very least scrounge up money and buy what they need (including brains - see nuclear profileration vis a vi Pakistan). For individuals, it is far more difficult.
By the time assassination by drone becomes workable and 'cheap', the countermeasures will already start to be produced. We have actually already seen this cycle happen with other weapons. Shoulder mounted anti-tank and anti-air weapons are now very cheap. Despite this they have had less and less impact on the battlefield as time rolls on. The anti-air weapons still cost enough and their production is traceable enough that they are hard to get a hold of. Both anti-air and anti-tank weapons suffer from the fact that we developed shockingly good counter measures against them. The number of US soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan to RPGs is extremely low. IEDs are a vastly greater threat, but even those are starting to be mitigated with time and technology.
I really don't see individuals having the money to play with the big boys. What it does do is give states a viable method of striking out at other states that they normally could not touch. If Saddam had instead of the fourth largest army in the world, the fourth largest assassination drone fleet in the world, US politicians might have done the math differently. As it was, the most Saddam could ever hope to do against the US was bleed soldiers in Iraq or at best sneak some explosives into the US and make a symbolic gesture with a few hundred pounds of TNT that could in no way influence the war other than to perhaps harden American resolve. If on the other hand he could have bought a credible deterrent against US politicians in the form of assassination capabilities, he might have been more effective in warding off the US.
Of course, the flip side to this is that if the US had had the same deterrent, and one assumes it is a bigger and better version with far more ominous red LEDs, his personal fear for his own safety might have convinced him that playing chicken with the US wasn't worth it.
So after the first presidential candidate dies, say around 2020, the urge to retaliate will be overwhelming. After that, it's tit-for-tat, all the way to hell.
It won't be the parties doing the killing, either. These things are, or should be, relatively cheap, and the programming is not that difficult. The only reason they are currently expensive is that it is the US government doing it. An "open source" killer robot drone would cost at most a few thousand bucks (use an off-the shelf 1/10th scale RC model as the basic platform).
I personally think it sounds great. You mean if one nation declares war on another nation instead of mass amounts of civilians soldiers dying the people who made the decision leading up to war fight it? Hells yes! Where can we sign up for this new world paradise?
Personally, I think that assassination wars are vastly more humane than the alternative. When a politician puts his own personal life on the line when he decides to do something nasty to another nation and decides that it is worth risking his personal life, it is vastly more likely that the cause is 'just'. What sort of calculations might politicians have made if they knew that invading Iraq (for instance) was going to result in people coming after them and their families, personally. If anything, this is the exact opposite of a bush button war. It takes nothing other than a morally gray conscience to send a few thousand boys to go fight in a foreign land where foreigners will and soldiers will be killed. It takes guts, bravery, and conviction in your cause to make the same decision knowing that the enemy is going to retaliate by trying to kill you and your family.
This sounds like an improvement.
There is a flip side to pulling humans farther back from the killing. While yes, you don't have to put a gun in someone's face and pull the trigger physically and this might cause detachment, consider the much more common scenario. We tend to sensationalize when soldiers go nuts and kill civilians needlessly. What we miss is that these incidents are very very rare and account for only the thinest fraction of civilian casualties. Far more often what happens when civilians die is that a small squad of men take fire from a building and shoot up the building to kill the bad guys inside, killing innocent civilians in the process. Most armies, but especially democratic armies, are extremely casualty adverse. The result is that the doctrine they fight with generally employees extreme self defense measures.
When a square of men get caught flat footed and ambushed they tend to unload massive amounts of firepower to save themselves. Rules of engagement be damned, most people are unhappy about being shot dead and will do just about anything to avoid it. Close young comrades pumped up on adrenaline and armed with enough firepower to level a small city watching each other die make really shitty moralist. You don't need to see the world from a camera lens to dehumanize people, you just need to see your buddy get shot next to you and know that the surrounding civilians offered up no warning and are probably harboring the people that shot your friend. At that point, you become a lot less concerned about collateral damage when you try and defend your life and the life of your fellows.
Robotics offers up an alternative. When robots are doing the dying and fighting you are pulling men out of a dangerous situation. You remove the kill or be killed mentality. You are no longer bonded by a sense of kinship between the people in your square. If one robot in a square of robot "dies" you just turn off the screens and go have a coffee. On top of that, it is no longer a dozen guys and one low level leader making life and death decisions. Hell, you could station a military lawyer right next to a drone operator. Everything is recorded such that if you break the rules of engagement you get your ass kicked. A bunch of guys sitting in a room with computers with their every move recorded and superiors always right there to give direction is pretty much the polar opposite of a dozen guys surrounded by bad guys with their lives on the line and their every moral decision weighed against whether or not they live or die.
Robotics offer up the opportunity take the preservation of the life of the soldier out of the equation. Whatever extra fire power it adds is meaningless. If killing civilians is what you want, we don't need robots to do it. The US could have killed every living thing in Iraq if that had been its intention. What it really wants is to pull the lives out of the equation not because it makes the extermination of the populace easier, but because it makes deciding to not fight to save a few easily swayed civilians drastically easier.
The concerns that it might make war too easy are certainly valid, but if you just want to blow stuff up we have already come and gone from that point. The US can bomb pretty much any non-first world nation with complete impunity with the exception of China. The far more profound effect drones are going to have is when they start taking the preservation of the life of the soldier out of the question.
No, it's your obvious contempt for me and my viewpoint (without even knowing what it is) that makes this discussion impossible.
...so says that person that declares discussion pointless if I don't agree that the aesthetic value of trees trumps all other concerns and that any person who could believe such a thing so alien that they can't have a discussion.
You apparently are some sort of nature worshiper who holds a religious reverence for nature that trumps human life. Like speaking with most people of fanatical religious faith, unless you share their beliefs you are likely to be wasting time if your discussion starts to tread in the direction of questioning the wisdom of their fanatical zeal.
I like trees. I go camping often. I appreciate nature. I still wipe my ass with toilet paper. I am okay with a tree dying so that my tush is clean, and fanatical religious devotion to nature aside, I bet you are too, even if you would be loathed to admit it.
How much preservation is worthwhile is a question that has to be asked. How much is worth preserving is a question of ecology and aesthetics. Even if you found forests ugly, you wouldn't want to chop them down unless you also really like soil erosion. Conversely, even if you find nature aesthetically pleasing, you don't want to preserve all of it as that would require you to kill yourself and everyone you know. 6.5 billion humans don't live in a âoenaturalâ state.
What is interesting here is that in the thought exercise where we make the assumption that trees have no ecological value, your estimation of how much nature is worth preserving doesn't change. Apparently in your rather insane world the prettiness of trees is the only thing of value, or is of such a high value that the efforts taken today to prevent deforestation that include a great deal of human unhappiness and hardship doesn't cause you any sort of moral distress. Anyone who has wandered through the gutted ex-paper towns sees that there is a price to pay for ecological preservation. It is a price we might happily pay for the ecological benefits, but I wouldn't send rural towns to ruin with such glee if it was just so that I had a place to go backpack on the weekends.
Human suffering distresses me a whole hell of a lot more than my aesthetic senses being violated. Like you said though, we probably don't have a common framework to have a conversation.
A) If you look at a photo of Earth at night [energy.gov], you'll see why a clear view of the night sky is not just a train-ride to the suburbs away. Huge swaths of land are blanketed in artificial light. By the logic you're presenting here, it wouldn't matter if we cut down all the trees as long as we had tree museums for people to go visit.
If the only ecological consequence to cutting down the trees is that humans wouldn't be able to find them pretty, then yes, I would be a-okay with cutting more of them down.
C) Seeing the wonder of the universe is a good thing. Living in a cave is not. Is that distinction so difficult to comprehend? "The rest is technology at work, for better or worse." Oh, so maybe you do grasp the point! Except that we don't have to just accept technology "for better or worse"; we can choose to use technology in ways that makes our lives better and not to use technology in ways that makes it worse.
The point you are missing is that generally when someone is "light polluting" it is for a reason. Sure, it diminishes the view, but it is probably doing something else useful like lighting a room or a path. I am fine with taking cheap common sense approaches to reducing how much light we pump into the sky. I however have no desire to see us start going crazy trying to stamp out a "pollution" with a pretty minimal impact upon our lives.
I live in a city. I choose to live in a city. Can I see the milky way at night? Nope. But I can walk out my front door and be within a 15 minute walk of half a dozen universities, a greater variety of food than exists in many nations, and most important of all be in close proximity of a few hundred thousand of my fellow humans which is something I count as a very large plus. I like how in the city it is always so bright that you would never think to bring a flashlight on a walk at night as I would in my birth town. I'll happily trade seeing stars, as pretty as they are, for the joy of living surrounded by hundreds of thousands of other humans in a place where there is always activity 24/7. If I want to see the stars (or lots of trees for that matter), I just jump in a train or in my car and drive a couple hours in one direction.
Forest, stars, darkness at night? Eh, sounds like a nice place to visit. I wouldn't want to live there.
Remember, the guys from Al-Qaeda are very creative. They will find a way.
Pretty sure they won't. They knocked down two towers while the US wasn't looking and then went on to go whack a pile of poor, deeply impoverished bastards living in the ass end of the earth without any law or order. That is like whacking a big guy with a two by four while his back is turned and the running away to go beat up on elementary school children (and eventually getting your ass kicked by them). People give Al-Qaeda way too much credit. A bunch of bored and suicidal French chemistry college grads represent more danger. Hell, biking in Boston is more scary than Al-Qaeda. If you live in the US, you are a hell of a lot more likely to die by choking on a chicken bone than by being killed by Al-Qaeda.
The difference is that your Father wanted to know how things work because he was used to fixing things.
That really is not true. The teenager with an iPhone is just as much as an expert on the iPhone as your farther was with a car. You farther might have known how to replace various components, but dump him into a factory making engine parts and he is helpless. He certainly couldn't make a simple rubber gasket and wouldn't even be able to tell you where the raw materials to make it come from.
We tend to work on the surface of things because that is where we get the most rewards. Your farther doesn't know how to make a rubber gasket because even if he could make one, he would rarely use that knowledge. He is better off learning where to put a gasket and judge if one is damaged. The same is true for a teenager using an iPhone. She can't even begin to contemplate how to make a simple transistor. With some serious studying she might stand a rough chance of learning the phone on a component level such that she can determine after much pain if she has a leaky transistor and perhaps might be able to replace it. She could do that, or she could just learn how to crack and mod her iPhone to make it all manner of useful things.
Learning how to repair a car at a component level is useful because there is not much else to do beyond cosmetics other than to learn how to repair and upgrade it. Repairing an iPhone on the other hand is a waste. It is a skill you might use once ever two years and it will save you a trivial amount of money. Learning how to manipulate the software on the other hand is something that is always useful.
I think that people are just as curious as they always have been. We just like getting the most bang for our buck in terms of curiosity. With a car, that means knowing how to repair the car and save yourself a few thousand dollars. In an almost disposable iPhone, it means cracking the phone's software open and making it do things it was never meant to do.
I wish I had a pile of mod points. That was wonderfully insightful.
Monopoly laws are a little odd. Whether or not you are violating the law depends upon your size and how much of the market you eat up. If Ubuntu wants to bundle a browser, they are not going to get pinged for it because they own 2% of the market. It isn't illegal unless you are big.
The whole point of this style of law isn't to punish companies for illegal activities. The activities are not clearly legal or illegal. The point is to keep companies from being a monopoly and nothing else.
The reason why no one is after Apple for bundling hardware, software, and browsers and chopping the testicles off of anyone who tries to pull them apart is because Apple isn't a monopoly (yet). If Microsoft is no long in a monopoly position (and I am not arguing that, they are), then it shouldn't come as some surprise that they want fine reduced. The point of the fine isn't to exact retribution on a non-sentient company. It is to make them not a monopoly.
The story was indeed fluff, but I think you miss the point. What made the new Star Trek movie wasn't the story or the special effects. What made the new movie great were the characters and the mini-sub stories that were spawned from the lack-luster overarching plot. This movie was really about great characters doing awesome stuff.
I personally would not have minded a better story (black hole time travel?), but I'll give it a pass because I simply loved the characters. I liked seeing how they dealt with various situations. I liked the little sub-components of the story. The fact that the over arching story was weak bordering on non-sense didn't cause me to lose any sleep.
There are a few issues here. First, if you are selling text books you are not selling (by and large) to a willing audience. You are selling to an impoverished audience that is coerced into picking whatever textbook it is that the teacher selects. This doesn't make happy customers that care all that much about your hurt feelings or pocket book.
It is a safe bet that the vast majority of people that actually pay for the book are people that want it and will use it for more than a semester, and the vast majority of people that pirate it get it because they are students and have to. Thus when given the choice between paying whatever the ransom price is or pirating, they are sympathetic to pirating, especially if they don't think they will have need of your book again. There is nothing to do to reach these people other than to drop the price such that they find the ease and convince of buying a book "cheaper" than the hassle of pirating it and the inconvenience of not having a physical object. There is some optimal price where you are making the most money, you probably are not at it. What that price actually is is anyone's guess.
As for the pirating itself, you can't stop it. Big powerful corporations with billions at their back can't stop it, so neither can you. The best you can hope for is to cash in on it. How do you cash in on it? There are a few good examples out there.
Scott Sigler writes absolutely horrible science fiction. This stuff is so bad it will melt your brain. Despite that, not only is he published, he has great sales figures. Why on earth is this sorry excuse for Sci-Fi making even a penny? He is making money because he gives a podcast version of his book out for free. A book that normally would not have gotten the time of day was listened to by tens of thousands of people because it was free. Apparently there is more than one diluted fool in the world who can stomach his horrible writing, and so, not only did he get published on the basis of his downloads, but scored sales figures a few orders of magnitude higher than his literary talents deserve. Go ahead and google him and be horrified at how big this terrible writer managed to get.
How do you do the same with data compression text books? Yours is probably a harder challenge. The vast majority of the people that buy the book likely want nothing to do with it or the topic once they get their grades. Your best bet is probably to try and get more professors to teach their classes with your book. More professors teaching means more students who might buy the book. Sure, some will pirate, but many will buy it.
You might consider finding a way to disseminate your book for free in an electronic form. This might prompt more professors to teach their class with your book. Think about it. You are a professor who needs to teach data compression. There are a handful of textbook options out there. One of those options though gives the electronic form of the book away for free. That means that you can review the entire book and decide if you like it. Further, the professor weighs in the fact that because the book is free, it will boost his popularity among students. So, he goes for your book, buys a physical copy for himself, and tells his class that they can either buy a copy or use the electronic version. Students that want a physical copy (and I suspect many would) will buy it, and those that don't want it won't. You might sell a few less books per class, but you would jack up the number of classes you sell to, in addition to increasing the prestige of the book as it is used in more classrooms.
The choice is yours of course, but you can't stop piracy. You can't even make a dent in it. The best you can hope to do is exploit it. Either exploit it or accept the sales numbers that you have. There really are no other options.
I think you miss what "needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" shows. It doesn't show deep moral insight. It doesn't erase the other 98% of the movie that is characters in action. What made that final scene good wasn't hamfisted moralizing. What made that scene (and all of Star Trek II) good was that that scene showed Spock's character. Good Trek is about good characters. The Wrath of Kahn was great because the character's shined. On one end you have the wrathful and determined Kirk getting the chance to display his character as an idealistic leader, captain, and warrior. On the other hand you have the logical Spock who unflinchingly sacrifices himself for the good of his friends. You tie this all together by showing the depth of friendship between these two men in the touching final scene. This wasn't about morality. Kirk and Spock could have been pirates and it still would have been good. It was about character.
This also is the reason why the new Star Trek is the best Trek yet. Was the time travel plot a little flimsy? Sure. Was the villain so-so? Yeah. Did we get great characters getting the chance to display who they are? Hells yes! You could stick someone who had never seen Star Trek before and ask them about what defines these characters and they would have no trouble telling you what they are about.
Yeah, it might be a good action movie or whatever, but is hardly consistent with the philosophical underpinnings of the original work. That so few Star Trek fans "get" this is a bit unnerving.
Have you actually watched any Star Trek besides TNG? The idea that Star Trek is a 24/7 dissertation on morality is absurd. Star Trek, especially when it is good, revolves around characters. Characters some times face moralistic challenges, but it isn't a series of moral dilemmas that define Star Trek. It just so happens that tossing moral dilemmas at the characters is a good way to show character.
This movie was excellent Star Trek. The characters were extremely sharp. They were good not just in how they were faithful to the original characters, but good because they added more depth and personality to them.
Star Trek is about characters first and foremost, or did I perhaps miss the deep moral dilemma hidden in the Wrath of Kahn? Good Star Trek has good characters (DS9) being tossed into situations that bring their character in sharp resolve (Star Trek II, the new ST movie). Bad Trek has shitty characters (Voyager) tossed into over handed attempts at philosophy (Star Trek I and V, the past two TNG movies, etc). By this measure, the new Star Trek was one of the best yet. You had great characters been given a chance to show what their character was about.
The idea that you are going to win charging money when there exists an Internet a few billion strong that is devoted to passing and spreading information for basically nothing is on its face silly. Short of government mandate creating a cartel, basic news is going to be impossible to charge for.
The only people that can charge are folks who actually do investigative journalism and can bring something to the table that others can't. The Economist is a great of a publication that has actually managed to charge people. They manage to bring in heavy weight thinkers (Nobel laureates, high government officials, authors, etc.) that normally are harder to access. They serve their niche well and drag in a few extra bucks from the Intertubes for the effort.
What you can't charge for is basic news and random journalist opinion. The opinion of a journalist (no offense) is not any deeper or brighter than any other bloke. You might as well ask a hair dresser or an engineer for their opinion. Basic news is also impossible to charge for. News spreads too fast and someone will put it up for free.
If you serve a niche very very well in a way that absolutely no one else does credibly, you might be able to charge for access. Otherwise though, the only other alternative is to find a way to turn eyeballs on the page into cash. Usually, that means ads, but there are certainly other ways out there that no one has hit on yet. I mean hell, who would have thought 20 years ago that the print cartoonist who do the best are not actually in print, but on the web and make most of their money by selling merchandise?
Jumping over a border doesn't magically make you immune from your home nations laws. For instance, if a US citizen zips over to Thailand to have sex with 12 year old girls, when he gets back to the US they can be arrested like the event happened in the US. You can violate a US law even when you are not in the US.
I would assume that the same is happening in South Korea. You can host where you like, but so long as you are a Korean citizen or live in Korea, they get to claim that their laws apply to you, and seeing as how the authorities have the guns, you really are in no position to argue.
The best you can do is obscure your own involvement. Having the server in Canada certainly makes it easier to break the law as the server is probably safe from search, but if they have other evidence that you are the owner, I imagine they can still bust you.
Maybe I am a freak, but to quote Davork, I get no spam. Gmail's filter catches pretty much everything. Once on a blue moon one will slip through, but I can tolerate one penis pump add every month or two. It might be true that a lot of spam is passing back and forth across the networks, but from a user point of view, it never makes it to me.
I am a pretty avid game buyer. I got out of college, got a job, and suddenly found tossing out a couple hundred on video games occasionally wasn't a large expense. If I see a game that I want, I generally just buy it.
I skipped over Red Alert 3 and Spore.
Those are two games that I normally would have not thought twice about buying. I like video games, and they are not such a big expense for me where I have to spend much time thinking about if I want to buy it or not, but in the case of those two games I took a pass because of DRM. I can merrily ignore DRM if it doesn't affect me. Limited licenses, crippling applications installed onto my computer, nice big loop holes for security breaches? Thanks. I'll pass. Video games are nice, but not worth crippling my computer or supporting that kind of anti-consumer behavior.
EA needed to be taught a lesson and hopefully they learned it. Spore had the most crippling DRM of all times and was the most pirated game of all times. Pssst... EA... DRM doesn't stop pirates. It sure does piss off people who on a normal day would hand you a sweat wad of cash without thinking twice.
Uh, have you used ever Steam? One of my favorite things about Steam is that it makes transferring my old games to a new computer easy and painless.
If your only remaining fear of Steam is bricking, I would probably just get over it and come to the dark side. I have been playing video games since Zork. Do you know how many video games I have lost or destroyed along that path? I sure as hell don't have my original Doom CD sitting around somewhere. I weep over my loss of my Master of Orion 2 CD. I don't even have my original Half Life CD.
The difference of course is that I can still play Half Life because it is on Steam... I can't play Master of Orion 2.
Sure, Steam might one day die. Valve promised to unlock the games if they should ever die. Is that an ironclad agreement? Nah, but in truth, even if they brick my Steam account when they die and no one buys it up to continue offering the service, I'll still have called it a fair trade. Solid media is too easy to lose or break, and cracking DRM to making multiple backups is frankly a waste of time.
I personally call Steam a fare deal. If one day it dies, those games might possibly be bricked. What I get in return is painless instillation of games when I move computers, an easy way to get new games, and none of the hassle of physical media in terms of storage space or breakage. I personally like a world with Steam much better than loading my computer up with crippleware from physical media.
I really don't see why this is news worthy myself. So a court ordered someone to hand over private documents... this happens all the time. The fact that it is stuff posted on the quasi private Facebook doesn't really change much. If the government demanded that Facebook hand over its entire database to search for terrorist, I would be concerned. The fact that someone who is being sued is getting their Facebook page opened up as apart of normal evidence gathering is unremarkable.
People... if you are breaking a law, don't post it on Facebook and assume that the magic of the internet will keep it from the authorities.
I don't think anyone is arguing that it would be safe to park a blimp over China and assume it is safe because it is a few miles up the sky. That isn't the point of these.
That is like complaining that tanks are totally useless in middle the Pacific Ocean... no shit.
The point one of these things is to sit over an area that doesn't have massive air defenses. You can safely park one of these of Afghanistan. Hell, you could have parked one over Iraq during the 2nd invasion after a week of air strikes. The US almost always operates in areas where there is absolutely no resistance to air defense. At best, someone occasional gets lucky and knocks down a helicopter skimming the tree tops. A blimp 65,000 feet in the air? It might as well be on the moon for all the Taliban can do.
Even if an enemy like the Taliban was to gather up the resources it takes to knock of these down, the US would want them to. The cost both in terms of your supply lines and financial costs it would take to smuggle in a missile capable of knocking one of these down would be a terrible burden on a guerrilla enemy... and what would they get for it? They would knock down one blimp and have a new one in the sky to take its place the next day.
You can't outspend or out produce the US. Any enemy with half a brain knows that you dump your money into places where you can spend a little and inflict a lot of damage in terms of dollars and lives. Suicide bombings are so effective because they are cheap and can inflicted, a large tool in lives, and defending against them is very expensive.
Maybe if the US went up against another super power it might find these blimps worthless... of course, if you are trading shots with China and Russia, a few over priced blimps in the hanger is probably last on your list of concerns. Total economic ruination and a coming nuclear holocaust probably beat out other worries.
There are lots of ways to shoot these things down... they are all very expensive and require huge coordinated actions. If you want to smuggle in missiles or lasers capable of knocking one of these down, you are going to shell out cash and open up your entire operation to attack.
Playing a cash game with the US is a losing proposition. The Taliban isn't going to outspend the US. Hell, the US has airplanes that one of them cost more than every single asset the Taliban has combined. So sure, a guerrilla foe like the Taliban could conceivably gather up the cash to get a weapon that might knock out one of these. It would crush their budget and all of that money could have gone to equipping more guys with $15 rifles that could inflict real harm. For the US, it will be a minor irritation and they will just toss another one back up. It won't even show up as a blip on the budget.
People get too worked up about how defensible stuff like this is. It doesn't have to be defensible. It just has to cost so much to knock it down that if your opponent is stupid enough to spend the money you let them and call it a victory.
Against another super power of course this thing is an utter waste. You wouldn't bother fielding one of these against China or Russia... but if you are trading shots with China or Russia something has already gone horribly wrong and a few useless blimps in a hanger are the least of your concerns.
I wonder what all the animals that prepare to hibernate in the winter would think of your statement?
You are under the assumption that it is planning that causes an animal to prepare to hibernate and not pure instinct leading them by the nose.
You don't eat because you realize that if don't various mechanisms in your body are going to fail. You eat because you are hungry. The same is true for hibernation, mating, and a pile of other "planned" behaviors. Two deer don't bang in the fall because they realize that this is their chance to make babies and if they miss the window they will have none. They got at it because they are horny.