Al-Jazeera is not a 'shining example of independent journalism'. It is, however, much much better than the usual government-controlled stuff coming out that region (excluding Ha'aretz etc which also have articles from the left and right sides of the political spectrum).
If you read the Al-Jazeera article being discussed, rather than relying on your pre-formed perception, you would realise it that is was an opinion piece and unbalanced (as would be expect from an opinion). The author essentially considers the main Palestinian negotiator as a 'sell-out' for going for compromise/concessions. The ability for the Palestinians to make up their own mind to find something that could bring peace doesn't seem to enter into the author's head.
There are two other things worth noting that you may be unaware of (I have travelled a fair bit around that region, including Israel):
1) What is written and declared by the Palestinians in English generally does not match what is declared in Arabic. There has never been a recognition of Israel's right to exist in Arabic (try finding Israel on a Palenstinian map). In fact, most things (eg. soothing words to the West) are taken as temporary tactics until Israel is finally pushed into the sea and all Palestinian land reclaimed.
2) Concessions by the Palestinians are remarkable. Generally, offering a concession is viewed as a sign of weakness in many parts of Arab culture, and a sign of weakness means you should hold out for more rather than find a mutually acceptable solution. This is one of the reasons that Ehud Barak failed to achieve a settlement when he offered a very large number of concessions many years ago.
3) Both sides do not trust each other. It seems that settlement building will never stop, even in regions internationally accepted as Palestinian - so naturally Palestinians do ot trust the Israeli government. Plus even the dovish Israelis also seem to have resigned themselves that the Palestinians do not want peace (after two Intifada) - which is why the bulk of moderate Israelis (who don't want a 'Greater Israel', they just want a nice life) are tolerant of their increasingly hawkish governments. One big change was the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza by the Israelis which did not bring any peace and is now used as a staging post for missile attacks (which seek to 'liberate' the rest of the land, Gaza was only the beginning).
Bro, creating objects is easy. Configuring them can be trickier but you don't necessarily need something with the conceptual weight of Spring to do it. Spring certainly has its uses - it's just not a panacea. There are other ways of achieving the same thing without the bulk though.
> And as I have said before, anyone can misuse a framework, but it takes real ignorance to blame the framework for that misuse.
Ignorance? no. You can mis-use any framework or language. The problem is not Spring per-se, IMHO it is the documentation and zealots that suggest dependency injection is the One True Way and Spring is the One True Path - to be used everywhere. In practice it is far less clear cut, but the Spring documentation is very poor on when *not* to use it, and it is poor on keeping things absolutely simple. Now, this is no worse than many other frameworks, but Spring holds itself as better than the others - yet it falls short.
While you could debate the merits of the implementation of BeanKeeper, you'd be pretty hard pressed to beat its philosophy. Have a think whether Spring is designed with the same philosophy in mind.
IMHO the plumbing part is like code (if you have to rebuild your WAR to change it then it is the same as code), so prefer to write anything smaller than the huge applications in code alone (or annotations), and minimize the funky XML dialects (Spring included) for the plumbing. You should be trying to write your systems so that the number of skills required to maintain it are minimized (you might have been tracking Spring since day 1 and know all the variations over the versions, but how likely is your maintainer in Mumbai to also know this?). By composing your system in XML it means that debuggers and the great wealth of code maintenance tools are of no use, and the developer must know which of the dozens of XML files scattered around their source tree coloborate to configure anything. I personally hate debugging systems where something is magically injected and you have to search the whole source tree to find which of the layers of Spring (further indirected using property injection) is doing the config. Any developer can write a complex app - only a few have been around enough to simplify ruthlessly.
The plumbing you are talking about is mostly singleton stuff and most people use Spring to put singletons in more places they should. Singletons should only be for precious resources that you have one of because they are restricted (eg. hardware access, where two would interfere) or very expensive to create (eg. database pool). Mostly people could be using POJOs on the heap instead - which would force the POJOs to have proper getters setters (lots of Spring folk hide these, which hampers testing [wanna set a property to configure it for testing (or even mis-configure it deliberately to test your system robustness/error handling)?] ). This promotes re-usability (you can use the POJO in ways the creator never envisaged as you are not bound by the straight-jacket of how they thought you might use it [this straight-jacket affects more development than developers mis-configuring properly documented class]). This also promotes code efficiency since you can create as many threads as you need with the POJOs created in the thread (without the overhead of synchronizing access to a singleton). POJOs are still underused by many developers as they are too simple for minds that love the latest and greatest (those who think they are great developers for building complex systems in multiple programming languages when a much more straightforward design could have been used [at the expense of slightly more lines of code]).
Yes, but Baidu would be aiding an abetting the infringement of copyright law - subject to enforcement through international trade treaties (China was finally accepted into the WTO and there's a whole bunch of baggage that goes with that). The Chinese government would lose a lot of face (eg. future WTO battles) if a claim was brought against Baidu and Baidu was defiant about copyrights. Currently the Chinese are defiant about international norms but once they realise how bad they look they might start to behave (and they do look bad, even the Africans are getting tired of them - with the incidents of mine owners shooting at the African workers; then there was their complete unreasonable overreaction to Japan, when they rammed a Japanese ship in (internationally recognized) Japanese waters - simply dumb stuff).
You understand that this is illegal and that doing so is a risk for Baidu. All it would take is for some WTO-level horse-trading and Baidu would be in the sh!t. The fact that Google doesn't have that stuff is better for them as a company (sure, not as handy for the users wanting to get infringing stuff).
Sorry mate, you don't sound like a Hero, in fact you sound the opposite. Even if you don't enjoy partying you can still do lots of social/recreational stuff - unless you do want to stay single your whole life. Assuming you do converse with booty of some kind, what would you even talk about since it doesn't sound like you do much of anything out of work. The company pwnz you and unfortunately you can't see it. I hope you get a chance to make a change before your youth is spent.
The fortune at the bottom of the page is currently, "Be cheerful while you are alive. -- Phathotep, 24th Century B.C." [although it should be Ptahhotep, meaning: (the god) "Ptah" "is pleased"]. It is good you seem to be a positive kind of person from your post. Be wary people don't take too much of an advantage of that.
Everything can be replaced. There is no loyalty on the Web. In fact, it is remarkable how 'sticky' Google is considering the exceedingly fickle nature of Web denizens.
Yawn. Who gives a toss what the Chinese do? China may have the greatest population of any single country (for a while, until the teeming masses of India pass them) but *the rest of the World* pretty much use Google and not Baidu. Why is everyone techy who's not Chinese so Chinese obsessed these days? You always seem to miss the elephant in the room (and it is *the rest of the World*).
AltaVista was great until they put ads in your face everywhere. Then the switch to Google made sense (and they have deliberately resisted going the same way).
Awesome. It doesn't cause bluescreens like the Win7 64 driver for my Radeon 5970 did (required a recent driver hotfix for dual-GPU units since they would cause overheating and bluescreens).
I won't even start to talk about the other bluescreens I get from time to time with various Windows drivers - I'm always hesitant to update. I'm much less reticent to apt-get.
You really are another one behind the eight ball. OpenGL 4.1 drivers have been out for Nvidia since July 2010. ATI/AMD is a little behind at 4.0 but that's not unusual.
> You can get to the vendor specific features in directx also. But in either case, that's definitely the ugly way to write code.
lol. Some folks still don't get it. Direct X is 'vendor specific' no matter what manufacturer's chipset is supported. That's why the guys doing OpenGL (ES) can write for Android, and iPhone/iPad, and Linux, and Solaris, and Max OS X, *AND* Windows.
Incidentally, your "DX11 is a bit ahead of OGL in hardware requirements/capabilities" is incorrect (used to be true for a while not so anymore). Suggest you check out the latest and greatest OpenGL spec.Oh yeah, OpenGL can do what DX10 & 11 do (if you have the graphics hardware) on Windows XP too. Enjoy your homework reading the OpenGL spec.
The 'vulnerable' applet can only access files on your computer if the original signed applet did. By this I mean that malicious users that host an existing applet cannot tamper with the applet without breaking the signature.
If the original applet could access files on your computer then it would be a problem if you visited the malicious site without knowing. Just as if you visited a malicious phishing site (written in PHP, or Javascript, or ASP, or AJAX or...) that looked like your bank's log-in screen. It is no different.
You do know that that article is from 2008 don't you, and it is now two and a half years later? There have been quite a few changes to applet security in the mean time.
Market share matters. If you only have the resources to develop for one platform then you'll develop for the biggest. Previously it was Apple and now it is Android. Apple pissing potential developers off (within inferior Objective-C compared to Java, and crappy licensing) means they will lose money in phones just as they once did in PCs. Apple need to relax in order to 'win', they didn't learn from "In order for Microsoft to win the Customer must lose". It took a long time but it did happen for Microsoft (profitability, but stagnation). Apple like to think they are smarter but they are currently making the same mistakes.
Chinese (when understood as Han ethnic group) demonstrated fabulous long term potential / they also started small.
I disagree. China started ahead of the West for thousands of years (which makes the Chinese justifiably proud in their history). In the last five hundred they fell far behind the West and only in the last two decades are they starting to close the gap (but still behind much of Europe and even Eastern Europe in terms of country-wide progression).
People see the rate of progress and extrapolate this as going to surpass the West. However, the people that make the extrapolation completely ignore the fact that the reason China fell behind is that they prefer conformity and harmony over 'progress' (let us not debate here whether such 'progress' is good, bad or otherwise). These forces are still in place in Chinese society. In the West society is much more chaotic (and lead to bad things, such as prevalent porn etc.), but the chaos also allows for a much greater degree of radical innovation (leading to good things such as spawning great progress in all areas, such as art, humanitarianism, tolerance, not just technology). China will be good at evolutionary progress but it unlikely to come up with the radical paradigm shifts that are coming out of the West (including Israel and India). That is not to say the Chinese don't innovate at all - just that their particular conformal culture discourages some forms of radical innovation (in a similar way to how the Japanese innovate cleverly, but not radically).
It is also worth noticing that the Chinese "Yellow Peril" is also being played up for many US internal military and political reasons. The media are dutifully following along but the facts simply don't support the sensationalism of China "owning" the US economy or being any where near the military strength or global influence of the US. So, you have to take many pronouncements about China with a 'grain of salt', since there are also sorts of motives for making the projections. If you look at China closely you'll see it is actually a delicate eggshell around an unstable center. You mentioned the Han, but omitted the unresolved violent issues with suppressed minorities such as the Uighur and Tibetans - which would disrupt China greatly if they came fully to the surface. China is also constrained by large neighbours in all directions. A misstep or further Chinese bullying (starting to come to the surface now it feels more confident) would be catastrophic for all involved (eg. China is damming the Brahmaputra river which will anger the Indians greatly).
IMHO, this will result in China leading in some areas it chooses to focus on (just as Russia could during the First Cold War), but generally remaining one step behind the West as a result of lower creativity. Maybe you weren't around but the exact same things were said of Japan three decades ago and it looks like China will follow the same path for similar reasons (partially due to bubble economics, partially due to severe cultural and political inhibitions relative to the West).
China will be very powerful regionally, but won't really have either superior technology nor desirable ideology for export to be a true global superpower. It is currently and probably will always play, "Me too" as a result.
The US us pretty much the best educated of all the global contenders (US, Russia, China, India). Sure I didn't qualify my statement, but was it really necessary? Johnny Hayseed in Arkansas might not be bright, but that doesn't mean the US doesn't have a very large pool of bright people and the resources for them to do advanced stuff.
As far as the OECD study goes, it is interesting, but although the Finnish students might currently be awesome at reading and maths (good on them, as well as jointly least corrupt country with New Zealand) does that actually matter on the world stage in terms of power projection?
You do know that the Su-27 is limited in how many targets it can engage and simultaneously track, and that its principle argument is still the R-27ER an ET against an F-22 with Aim-120C7 or better. Interesting that the Pentagon released a study where 6 F-22 defeated 72 Su-27 with 20-something kills and zero losses. The USAF painted it as a loss assuming a tanker got killed and the fighters couldn't make it back, but this was a set-up of the scenario assuming the F-22s came from CONUS (Alaska) rather than direct from Anderson - the USAF also wanted the 'loss' made public so they could scare up more F-22s in the Budget. The Su-30 with R-77s is more deadly, but again pretty much targets only against F-22.
I'm glad you mention numbers ("Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics" after all). Yes the Russians have a thousand combat aircraft stationed *all along its very long borders*. If we ignore the fact they can't concentrate that many in one place, and many would break down (just as many of their tanks did in 2008 in Georgia) that is still not nearly enough to be a threat to the US or NATO. The US Navy *alone* has that many combat aircraft - and the pilots are selected from only the best and get many more flight hours than the Russians. The Russians do have *some* good tech, and the US would take a few losses, but a fight wouldn't be close at all, or even 'fair'.
Until they shrink it down (to UAV size) the most lethal thing in the sky will be the modified-747 carrying the YAL-1 laser. If it can see you (and it has a lot of sensors) you are toast - literally!
Thanks for your comments, I've had 45 mod points in the last fortnight but unfortunately can't give you +1 Informative since I've already posted on the thread. Otherwise I would:)
Interestingly, the F-111 was actually built to be a carrier-capable missile-armed fighter. Hence the 'F'. The Tomcat came from the same line of massive fighters (very similar design).
The 'Fighter Mafia' fought against such big fighters, and the energy-maneuverability theories of Colonel Boyd resulted in a re-think of what was important in fighter design (resulting in the lightweight F-16 and F/A-18, while the F-15 design was a mix between the two). As a result, the F-111 was not used as a fighter and found a niche as a medium bomber suited for fast, low-level penetration. That's why the Aardvark is an F and not a B.
Actually, near the loss of the Roman Empire in the West (don't forget it continued for a thousand years in Constantinople) Rome's military was provided by barbarian "foederati". The US has always accepted foreigners but has assimilated them much better than the Romans did. The US 'decline' is only relative - not because of any fundamental defect in it. Similarly, even China will experience a relative 'decline' once India reaches ascendancy (fortunately the Indians seem much more responsible global citizens than the Chinese).
That $183 M covers the R&D so it not the series production cost. In wartime, things have historically cost around 1/3 once the R&D has been paid back and economies of scale achieved. This makes the F-22 very affordable (one reason the USAF was pushing for more of them is that it gets cheaper when you get more).
If a future war lasted long enough the US would still outproduce and out muscle anyone else (I'm not from the US and this is obvious even to me). Out of the biggest countries it still has the biggest economy; most internal natural resources; biggest, most advanced, best equipped and led military; best educated population (on average); most allies; and relatively attractive ideology to most of the World (meaning its allies would stick with it). Despite all the hand-wringing about it's fall (and it is interesting to see even the USAF release classified studies in an attempt to get even more F-22s, when the USAF is so much stronger than all the other countries combined) it is very unlikely that the US will not still be extremely influential into the future. The Chinese are not contenders at this point and no one apart from themselves and pariah states wants to see them dominate the rest of the World in the future.
Nope, the 'F' designation is so they would get fighter pilots to drive it (that is where all the F-117 pilots came from), not bomber pilots (who have a different outlook on things). If you didn't know it there have always been internal power struggles within the USAF between fighter (the famous "Fighter Mafia" of Colonel Boyd and others), bombers, transport and SAC (missiles). This is not even counting the inter-service struggles (eg. should helos and UAVs be controlled by the Air Force, Army and/or Marines).
The US can live without the Chinese, since manufacturing can (and eventually will) move from China (to India, Brazil etc) once it is more economical to do so. The Chinese depend on the US and the West, if these countries stopped buying Chinese made stuff then the domestic upheaval of unemployment would be extremely disruptive to China. The Chinese know this, so they are doing things slowly and cautiously without challenging the US directly. The US also has generally good relations with other countries to the extent that many countries vie for US bases. China has some bases but pretty much no country of much standing wants Chinese bases. China might have more people than the US alone (although will soon have fewer than India) but is very much smaller in every category compared to the US and likely allies. A confrontational approach would work badly for China (their image is considerably tarnished as a bully with recent events), fortunately most of the Chinese administration know it.
Slashdot Mirror
Al-Jazeera is not a 'shining example of independent journalism'. It is, however, much much better than the usual government-controlled stuff coming out that region (excluding Ha'aretz etc which also have articles from the left and right sides of the political spectrum).
If you read the Al-Jazeera article being discussed, rather than relying on your pre-formed perception, you would realise it that is was an opinion piece and unbalanced (as would be expect from an opinion). The author essentially considers the main Palestinian negotiator as a 'sell-out' for going for compromise/concessions. The ability for the Palestinians to make up their own mind to find something that could bring peace doesn't seem to enter into the author's head.
There are two other things worth noting that you may be unaware of (I have travelled a fair bit around that region, including Israel):
1) What is written and declared by the Palestinians in English generally does not match what is declared in Arabic. There has never been a recognition of Israel's right to exist in Arabic (try finding Israel on a Palenstinian map). In fact, most things (eg. soothing words to the West) are taken as temporary tactics until Israel is finally pushed into the sea and all Palestinian land reclaimed.
2) Concessions by the Palestinians are remarkable. Generally, offering a concession is viewed as a sign of weakness in many parts of Arab culture, and a sign of weakness means you should hold out for more rather than find a mutually acceptable solution. This is one of the reasons that Ehud Barak failed to achieve a settlement when he offered a very large number of concessions many years ago.
3) Both sides do not trust each other. It seems that settlement building will never stop, even in regions internationally accepted as Palestinian - so naturally Palestinians do ot trust the Israeli government. Plus even the dovish Israelis also seem to have resigned themselves that the Palestinians do not want peace (after two Intifada) - which is why the bulk of moderate Israelis (who don't want a 'Greater Israel', they just want a nice life) are tolerant of their increasingly hawkish governments. One big change was the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza by the Israelis which did not bring any peace and is now used as a staging post for missile attacks (which seek to 'liberate' the rest of the land, Gaza was only the beginning).
Bro, creating objects is easy. Configuring them can be trickier but you don't necessarily need something with the conceptual weight of Spring to do it. Spring certainly has its uses - it's just not a panacea. There are other ways of achieving the same thing without the bulk though.
> And as I have said before, anyone can misuse a framework, but it takes real ignorance to blame the framework for that misuse.
Ignorance? no. You can mis-use any framework or language. The problem is not Spring per-se, IMHO it is the documentation and zealots that suggest dependency injection is the One True Way and Spring is the One True Path - to be used everywhere. In practice it is far less clear cut, but the Spring documentation is very poor on when *not* to use it, and it is poor on keeping things absolutely simple. Now, this is no worse than many other frameworks, but Spring holds itself as better than the others - yet it falls short.
While you could debate the merits of the implementation of BeanKeeper, you'd be pretty hard pressed to beat its philosophy. Have a think whether Spring is designed with the same philosophy in mind.
IMHO the plumbing part is like code (if you have to rebuild your WAR to change it then it is the same as code), so prefer to write anything smaller than the huge applications in code alone (or annotations), and minimize the funky XML dialects (Spring included) for the plumbing. You should be trying to write your systems so that the number of skills required to maintain it are minimized (you might have been tracking Spring since day 1 and know all the variations over the versions, but how likely is your maintainer in Mumbai to also know this?). By composing your system in XML it means that debuggers and the great wealth of code maintenance tools are of no use, and the developer must know which of the dozens of XML files scattered around their source tree coloborate to configure anything. I personally hate debugging systems where something is magically injected and you have to search the whole source tree to find which of the layers of Spring (further indirected using property injection) is doing the config. Any developer can write a complex app - only a few have been around enough to simplify ruthlessly.
The plumbing you are talking about is mostly singleton stuff and most people use Spring to put singletons in more places they should. Singletons should only be for precious resources that you have one of because they are restricted (eg. hardware access, where two would interfere) or very expensive to create (eg. database pool). Mostly people could be using POJOs on the heap instead - which would force the POJOs to have proper getters setters (lots of Spring folk hide these, which hampers testing [wanna set a property to configure it for testing (or even mis-configure it deliberately to test your system robustness/error handling)?] ). This promotes re-usability (you can use the POJO in ways the creator never envisaged as you are not bound by the straight-jacket of how they thought you might use it [this straight-jacket affects more development than developers mis-configuring properly documented class]). This also promotes code efficiency since you can create as many threads as you need with the POJOs created in the thread (without the overhead of synchronizing access to a singleton). POJOs are still underused by many developers as they are too simple for minds that love the latest and greatest (those who think they are great developers for building complex systems in multiple programming languages when a much more straightforward design could have been used [at the expense of slightly more lines of code]).
Yes, but Baidu would be aiding an abetting the infringement of copyright law - subject to enforcement through international trade treaties (China was finally accepted into the WTO and there's a whole bunch of baggage that goes with that). The Chinese government would lose a lot of face (eg. future WTO battles) if a claim was brought against Baidu and Baidu was defiant about copyrights. Currently the Chinese are defiant about international norms but once they realise how bad they look they might start to behave (and they do look bad, even the Africans are getting tired of them - with the incidents of mine owners shooting at the African workers; then there was their complete unreasonable overreaction to Japan, when they rammed a Japanese ship in (internationally recognized) Japanese waters - simply dumb stuff).
You understand that this is illegal and that doing so is a risk for Baidu. All it would take is for some WTO-level horse-trading and Baidu would be in the sh!t. The fact that Google doesn't have that stuff is better for them as a company (sure, not as handy for the users wanting to get infringing stuff).
Sorry mate, you don't sound like a Hero, in fact you sound the opposite. Even if you don't enjoy partying you can still do lots of social/recreational stuff - unless you do want to stay single your whole life. Assuming you do converse with booty of some kind, what would you even talk about since it doesn't sound like you do much of anything out of work. The company pwnz you and unfortunately you can't see it. I hope you get a chance to make a change before your youth is spent.
The fortune at the bottom of the page is currently, "Be cheerful while you are alive. -- Phathotep, 24th Century B.C." [although it should be Ptahhotep, meaning: (the god) "Ptah" "is pleased"]. It is good you seem to be a positive kind of person from your post. Be wary people don't take too much of an advantage of that.
Everything can be replaced. There is no loyalty on the Web. In fact, it is remarkable how 'sticky' Google is considering the exceedingly fickle nature of Web denizens.
Yawn. Who gives a toss what the Chinese do? China may have the greatest population of any single country (for a while, until the teeming masses of India pass them) but *the rest of the World* pretty much use Google and not Baidu. Why is everyone techy who's not Chinese so Chinese obsessed these days? You always seem to miss the elephant in the room (and it is *the rest of the World*).
AltaVista was great until they put ads in your face everywhere. Then the switch to Google made sense (and they have deliberately resisted going the same way).
Awesome. It doesn't cause bluescreens like the Win7 64 driver for my Radeon 5970 did (required a recent driver hotfix for dual-GPU units since they would cause overheating and bluescreens).
I won't even start to talk about the other bluescreens I get from time to time with various Windows drivers - I'm always hesitant to update. I'm much less reticent to apt-get.
You really are another one behind the eight ball. OpenGL 4.1 drivers have been out for Nvidia since July 2010. ATI/AMD is a little behind at 4.0 but that's not unusual.
lol!
> You can get to the vendor specific features in directx also. But in either case, that's definitely the ugly way to write code.
lol. Some folks still don't get it. Direct X is 'vendor specific' no matter what manufacturer's chipset is supported. That's why the guys doing OpenGL (ES) can write for Android, and iPhone/iPad, and Linux, and Solaris, and Max OS X, *AND* Windows.
Incidentally, your "DX11 is a bit ahead of OGL in hardware requirements/capabilities" is incorrect (used to be true for a while not so anymore). Suggest you check out the latest and greatest OpenGL spec.Oh yeah, OpenGL can do what DX10 & 11 do (if you have the graphics hardware) on Windows XP too. Enjoy your homework reading the OpenGL spec.
The 'vulnerable' applet can only access files on your computer if the original signed applet did. By this I mean that malicious users that host an existing applet cannot tamper with the applet without breaking the signature.
...) that looked like your bank's log-in screen. It is no different.
If the original applet could access files on your computer then it would be a problem if you visited the malicious site without knowing. Just as if you visited a malicious phishing site (written in PHP, or Javascript, or ASP, or AJAX or
You do know that that article is from 2008 don't you, and it is now two and a half years later? There have been quite a few changes to applet security in the mean time.
Market share matters. If you only have the resources to develop for one platform then you'll develop for the biggest. Previously it was Apple and now it is Android. Apple pissing potential developers off (within inferior Objective-C compared to Java, and crappy licensing) means they will lose money in phones just as they once did in PCs. Apple need to relax in order to 'win', they didn't learn from "In order for Microsoft to win the Customer must lose". It took a long time but it did happen for Microsoft (profitability, but stagnation). Apple like to think they are smarter but they are currently making the same mistakes.
Chinese (when understood as Han ethnic group) demonstrated fabulous long term potential / they also started small.
I disagree. China started ahead of the West for thousands of years (which makes the Chinese justifiably proud in their history). In the last five hundred they fell far behind the West and only in the last two decades are they starting to close the gap (but still behind much of Europe and even Eastern Europe in terms of country-wide progression).
People see the rate of progress and extrapolate this as going to surpass the West. However, the people that make the extrapolation completely ignore the fact that the reason China fell behind is that they prefer conformity and harmony over 'progress' (let us not debate here whether such 'progress' is good, bad or otherwise). These forces are still in place in Chinese society. In the West society is much more chaotic (and lead to bad things, such as prevalent porn etc.), but the chaos also allows for a much greater degree of radical innovation (leading to good things such as spawning great progress in all areas, such as art, humanitarianism, tolerance, not just technology). China will be good at evolutionary progress but it unlikely to come up with the radical paradigm shifts that are coming out of the West (including Israel and India). That is not to say the Chinese don't innovate at all - just that their particular conformal culture discourages some forms of radical innovation (in a similar way to how the Japanese innovate cleverly, but not radically).
It is also worth noticing that the Chinese "Yellow Peril" is also being played up for many US internal military and political reasons. The media are dutifully following along but the facts simply don't support the sensationalism of China "owning" the US economy or being any where near the military strength or global influence of the US. So, you have to take many pronouncements about China with a 'grain of salt', since there are also sorts of motives for making the projections. If you look at China closely you'll see it is actually a delicate eggshell around an unstable center. You mentioned the Han, but omitted the unresolved violent issues with suppressed minorities such as the Uighur and Tibetans - which would disrupt China greatly if they came fully to the surface. China is also constrained by large neighbours in all directions. A misstep or further Chinese bullying (starting to come to the surface now it feels more confident) would be catastrophic for all involved (eg. China is damming the Brahmaputra river which will anger the Indians greatly).
IMHO, this will result in China leading in some areas it chooses to focus on (just as Russia could during the First Cold War), but generally remaining one step behind the West as a result of lower creativity. Maybe you weren't around but the exact same things were said of Japan three decades ago and it looks like China will follow the same path for similar reasons (partially due to bubble economics, partially due to severe cultural and political inhibitions relative to the West).
China will be very powerful regionally, but won't really have either superior technology nor desirable ideology for export to be a true global superpower. It is currently and probably will always play, "Me too" as a result.
The US us pretty much the best educated of all the global contenders (US, Russia, China, India). Sure I didn't qualify my statement, but was it really necessary? Johnny Hayseed in Arkansas might not be bright, but that doesn't mean the US doesn't have a very large pool of bright people and the resources for them to do advanced stuff.
As far as the OECD study goes, it is interesting, but although the Finnish students might currently be awesome at reading and maths (good on them, as well as jointly least corrupt country with New Zealand) does that actually matter on the world stage in terms of power projection?
You do know that the Su-27 is limited in how many targets it can engage and simultaneously track, and that its principle argument is still the R-27ER an ET against an F-22 with Aim-120C7 or better. Interesting that the Pentagon released a study where 6 F-22 defeated 72 Su-27 with 20-something kills and zero losses. The USAF painted it as a loss assuming a tanker got killed and the fighters couldn't make it back, but this was a set-up of the scenario assuming the F-22s came from CONUS (Alaska) rather than direct from Anderson - the USAF also wanted the 'loss' made public so they could scare up more F-22s in the Budget. The Su-30 with R-77s is more deadly, but again pretty much targets only against F-22.
I'm glad you mention numbers ("Amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics" after all). Yes the Russians have a thousand combat aircraft stationed *all along its very long borders*. If we ignore the fact they can't concentrate that many in one place, and many would break down (just as many of their tanks did in 2008 in Georgia) that is still not nearly enough to be a threat to the US or NATO. The US Navy *alone* has that many combat aircraft - and the pilots are selected from only the best and get many more flight hours than the Russians. The Russians do have *some* good tech, and the US would take a few losses, but a fight wouldn't be close at all, or even 'fair'.
Until they shrink it down (to UAV size) the most lethal thing in the sky will be the modified-747 carrying the YAL-1 laser. If it can see you (and it has a lot of sensors) you are toast - literally!
:)
Thanks for your comments, I've had 45 mod points in the last fortnight but unfortunately can't give you +1 Informative since I've already posted on the thread. Otherwise I would
Interestingly, the F-111 was actually built to be a carrier-capable missile-armed fighter. Hence the 'F'. The Tomcat came from the same line of massive fighters (very similar design).
The 'Fighter Mafia' fought against such big fighters, and the energy-maneuverability theories of Colonel Boyd resulted in a re-think of what was important in fighter design (resulting in the lightweight F-16 and F/A-18, while the F-15 design was a mix between the two). As a result, the F-111 was not used as a fighter and found a niche as a medium bomber suited for fast, low-level penetration. That's why the Aardvark is an F and not a B.
Actually, near the loss of the Roman Empire in the West (don't forget it continued for a thousand years in Constantinople) Rome's military was provided by barbarian "foederati". The US has always accepted foreigners but has assimilated them much better than the Romans did. The US 'decline' is only relative - not because of any fundamental defect in it. Similarly, even China will experience a relative 'decline' once India reaches ascendancy (fortunately the Indians seem much more responsible global citizens than the Chinese).
That $183 M covers the R&D so it not the series production cost. In wartime, things have historically cost around 1/3 once the R&D has been paid back and economies of scale achieved. This makes the F-22 very affordable (one reason the USAF was pushing for more of them is that it gets cheaper when you get more).
If a future war lasted long enough the US would still outproduce and out muscle anyone else (I'm not from the US and this is obvious even to me). Out of the biggest countries it still has the biggest economy; most internal natural resources; biggest, most advanced, best equipped and led military; best educated population (on average); most allies; and relatively attractive ideology to most of the World (meaning its allies would stick with it). Despite all the hand-wringing about it's fall (and it is interesting to see even the USAF release classified studies in an attempt to get even more F-22s, when the USAF is so much stronger than all the other countries combined) it is very unlikely that the US will not still be extremely influential into the future. The Chinese are not contenders at this point and no one apart from themselves and pariah states wants to see them dominate the rest of the World in the future.
Nope, the 'F' designation is so they would get fighter pilots to drive it (that is where all the F-117 pilots came from), not bomber pilots (who have a different outlook on things). If you didn't know it there have always been internal power struggles within the USAF between fighter (the famous "Fighter Mafia" of Colonel Boyd and others), bombers, transport and SAC (missiles). This is not even counting the inter-service struggles (eg. should helos and UAVs be controlled by the Air Force, Army and/or Marines).
The US can live without the Chinese, since manufacturing can (and eventually will) move from China (to India, Brazil etc) once it is more economical to do so. The Chinese depend on the US and the West, if these countries stopped buying Chinese made stuff then the domestic upheaval of unemployment would be extremely disruptive to China. The Chinese know this, so they are doing things slowly and cautiously without challenging the US directly. The US also has generally good relations with other countries to the extent that many countries vie for US bases. China has some bases but pretty much no country of much standing wants Chinese bases. China might have more people than the US alone (although will soon have fewer than India) but is very much smaller in every category compared to the US and likely allies. A confrontational approach would work badly for China (their image is considerably tarnished as a bully with recent events), fortunately most of the Chinese administration know it.