Some of the ones that just got upgraded will probably keep flying for another 50 years - the Air Force plans to keep flying them at least until 2040, and I see no reason why they won't just keep using it.
It's the pickup truck of strategic warfare. It's cheap, it can carry a huge payload, and it's reliable. Sure, it's slower than the speed of sound and is about as stealthy as a jackhammer, but for some jobs that doesn't matter.
To this very day, the Air Force has more active B-52s than B-1 or B-2 bombers.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But the key thing is that Apple's tablets are generalist - while they can be used for "artistic" work, they are most commonly used for casual or business use, much like Microsoft's offerings in the desktop arena.
And that gives it a certain reputation - a reputation Apple is still slightly coasting on (they've done nothing to deserve the "creative person's product" reputation for many years now, yet it's still part of their marketing). If Microsoft is smart (for once), they'll build that reputation and try to leverage that into their desktop/laptop systems, and even their game consoles.
I might have to try that, then - I'd never considered using it for that, but now that I think about it, all I'd need is a USB hub and audio adapter. If I ever get to the point of doing shows, I might have to get one.
Does anybody else find it a bit ironic that Microsoft's tablets seem to be fitting into the niche Apple's desktops once did? Being used most prominently for art and audio production? That seems to be the niche Surface fits into, while Apple and Google are making more general-purpose, lower-cost devices.
I actually do. Due to what I assume is some carrier NAT issues, Google detects my entire ISP as possible bots. Every Google search I do requires a CAPTCHA.
So I use Bing for my searching. I've not really noticed any difference in quality between it and Google.
I have a Fiat 500, the non-electric one. For $17,000, it's a good car. But it's clearly a sub-$20K car - and unless they completely redesign major sections of it that are completely unrelated to the propulsion, they aren't going to be getting it to a be worth $30K even with the value of an electric engine.
Just for one example of what isn't good, the sound system supposedly supports USB. It does, technically, but it does so in the least competent way possible. You would expect it would support folders - like it does for data CDs. It does not. You would expect it to play songs in filename order. It does not. It plays every song on there, in the order of file creation. I noticed in the manual that the entertainment system runs on Windows Phone 7 - I have a very difficult time believing that Windows, in any version, has such broken support for FAT32.
Another example? The seat belt warning alarm activates even if the car is in park, within a second of turning on the car. I've had to get into the habit of buckling up before even turning the key.
The Fiat 500 is a cheap car. I'd say an electric version is worth about $25K (I couldn't actually use one myself - I use street parking, so I literally have nowhere to charge it up).
Tesla got one thing right - because electric cars, for the foreseeable future, are going to add $20K-$30K to the cost of the car, you're better off doing so in high-end cars where that's an extra 10-20%, not double the cost.
There was a storm and my 3G was down. The cloud was down. Again. An update patch broke everything. My laptop overheated and died, Applecare says they'll have it back by next week. Adobe's DRM junk decided I hadn't paid them enough money and locked out all my files.
The Comet is the exact opposite of the kind of aircraft they were supposedly listing.
It was incredibly advanced for the time. The one major flaw it had was unknown at the time - the best engineers in the field couldn't figure it out even when they recovered 90% of the airframe from a crash.
In the various hearings, engineers from competing aircraft companies admitted that they wouldn't have found the flaw either, and the only reason it's Comets that flew with such a defect and not DC-8s or 707s is because the Comet came out first.
While you use statistic to back your claim, in theory, Space Shuttle has more components than Soyuz, rephrase, Soyuz is simpler than Shuttle, it's likely more reliable.
I had written up a rather lengthy rebuttal to most of your points, but then I noticed this gem hidden near the end.
You are literally claiming that it doesn't matter what the facts are, your theory says Soyuz is more reliable than the Shuttle was, therefore reality is wrong and you're right.
I can't argue with that - not because you're right, but because I can only argue using facts and logic, which evidently you want nothing to do with.
As much as I like SpaceX, a) they're far too new to compare on reliability, and b) they don't have anything comparable to Proton in lift capacity. Proton-M can lift 22Mg to LEO - over twice the capacity of a Falcon-9, closer to two-and-a-half when you count usable capacity (the landing/reuse feature requires most of their extra power from the v1.1 upgrade). The Falcon Heavy is supposed to lift 53Mg, but they haven't even built one yet, let alone flown one.
It's amazing to me just how ancient most Russian rocket designs are. The Soyuz launcher is literally based on the same design that launched Sputnik, with the addition of a second stage. And even after fifty years of iteration, they still have only a 97.5% success rate with the current Soyuz launchers (Soyuz-U, Soyuz-U2, and Soyuz-FG). That's a full point worse than the Space Shuttle (98.5%), which was a completely new design that didn't have several decades of production testing on basically any of the parts.
Proton is almost as old, dating back to the Soviet lunar program. It was actually first intended as an ICBM, to launch ridiculously heavy warheads (think Tsar Bomba on an ICBM). The changes since then have been fairly minimal, compared to the design changes American rockets went through. One of the biggest features of the latest Proton-M design is "uses less parts made outside Russia". Counting this latest failure, Proton-M has only an 88.9% success rate.
The oft-repeated engineering mantra is "quality, reliability, cost - pick two". Russia's antiquated designs don't give you quality (in terms of efficiency or even lifting power), and they really aren't as reliable as you'd expect from such well-established designs. I can only hope that they're cheap enough that it's worth it - and when you're launching multi-million-dollar satellites, maybe cheaping out on the launcher isn't such a good idea.
Even better - make it modular. You can do city driving on batteries, then swap them for fuel cells before going on a long trip. That will also help with battery replacement, which will need to happen eventually.
Automated weapons are already deployed - the Korean DMZ is guarded, in part, by autonomous sentry drones. If it moves, they shoot it - and they're armed with machine guns or automatic grenade launchers.
That's a good model. Don't try to make a drone that can distinguish targets from non-targets - make something that treats everything as a target, and deploy it only when you don't have non-targets to worry about. Or, to allow your own forces to operate in the area, provide an IFF transmitter to designate them as non-targets (civilians are still fucked though - so don't use it anywhere near civilians). Works fine for air, land and sea - we already have an established concept of "shoot to kill zones", this just replaces the soldiers under orders to shoot anything that moves with robots under programming to shoot anything that moves.
For automated weapons deployed outside such areas (or even ones within), I would say that a human still has to give the fire order. The automated system can identify targets, track them, pursue them, prioritize targets, do basically everything but pull the trigger, but it has to request permission to fire from a human operator. And for all legal and ethical purposes, that human operator can be considered the one who pulled the trigger. It's still some massive force multiplication even compared to modern drones, so I don't see why the military would have much problem with it.
Let's wait until after we get true AI before we try to give machines the responsibility to decide whether or not to kill someone.
Ease of use? Installing mods in previous games (UT99, UT2004 and UT3), while not particularly difficult for the tech-savvy, isn't exactly user-friendly, and when you mess up there's little information on how to fix it.
As for "why would you sell it on Epic's marketplace instead of on your own?", that's almost definitely going to be what most gamers will be using, so that's where all the customers are. I certainly wouldn't mind selling maps for a dollar a pop.
We're not at the level of Yakunovich. Yet. Give it another ten, maybe twenty years or so at the rate we're going, and we'll have no choice but for revolution.
I think it is somewhat naive to think that the US or EU did not play some part. However, the movement acted like a genuinely populist movement, so either the CIA is really, REALLY damn good at faking such things, or their role was limited to encouragement and advice, or perhaps putting some pressure on politicians at appropriate times. The revolution itself happened because the people wanted it, not because some other country wanted it to.
Crimea and the east seems fundamentally different. The rebels there are armed like a military, act like a military, and fight like a military. The Maidan was fighting with paving stones and molotov cocktails - the eastern "rebels" are taking down helicopters with anti-air missiles. The only thing that makes them not look like a military is the fact that they aren't wearing insignia on their uniforms (but most of them are wearing identical, military-looking clothes - a far cry from the "whatever is in your closet" the Maidan wore).
There is a blatant information war going on on both sides of this.
Here is basically what is going on:
1) US/EU has been actively trying to keep Russia from forming an Eurasian Union with some of the members of the former Soviet Union. (most probably because the people running US/EU foreign policy grew up with the Soviet Union and are afraid of repeating the cold war)
2) Russia pressured/bribed Ukraine to move towards the Russia side after a brief foray towards the EU.
With you so far.
3) The EU/US fomented an overthrow of the government in Ukraine probably facilitated by covert operations in order to prevent the Eurasian Union from coming together with Ukraine as its economic crossroad to Europe.
I have seen little evidence of US/EU covert operations in the revolution, and I've been following it closely. There was definitely propaganda support, maybe political pressure, perhaps even covert advisors trying to make sure that the revolution was successful, but it was by and large a Ukrainian revolution.
The thrust of the revolution was forcing out a government that was blatantly corrupt and increasingly dictatorial, not to join up with the EU. While I usually frown on getting involved in other country's problems, I don't think I could get too upset about lending a hand to a revolution that was forcing out such a government, particularly when the support is only aiding a revolution that would have happened anyways, not forcing a revolution that the people did not really want
4) Russia tried to salvage something out of this collapse of the pro-Russian government by grabbing Crimea with its majority Russian population.
Crimea is "majority Russian" only because Stalin forced out the native Tatars. And while there was a separatist movement (nonviolent) before the revolution, it was a secessionist movement, not a Russian one. There was no way they got the numbers they claimed legitimately.
5) Russia is now fomenting separatists in Eastern Ukraine using the same tactics the CIA used in Kiev and the US/EU doesn't like it.
Russia's tactics are different. Even if you assume CIA involvement in the revolution, they let the actual people perform the revolution - which means a good number of people had to be ready to fight for it.
Russia is sending in their own military. They are the ones fighting this counter-revolution - not the people they claim to be helping. This is by and large a Russian military intervention.
The western revolution was fought with molotov cocktails by students and retired veterans. The eastern revolution is being fought by armed and trained soldiers, following radio orders from Moscow. It's impossible to claim they're the same tactics, which means it is completely valid to treat them differently.
The CIA isn't mad that Russia is using the same tactics - they're mad because Russia is unable to find enough people to actually fight this war in Ukraine, so they're just sending in soldiers and pretending it's a popular rebellion.
....
Next) Either Russia invades and annexes Eastern Ukraine following the Crimea model or they simply foment separatism which either succeeds in splitting the country or causes a bloody crackdown by Kiev which further de-legitimizes that interim government.
- Probably China is cheer leading this US/EU/Russia split on because if the EU and Russia are forced further apart, then it forces resource rich Russia towards China which needs all the wood/oil/natural gas/mining that Russia has to offer to sustain its manufacturing economy and China doesn't want a strong Eurasian Union coming together either. This has already started with announcements of greater cooperation with China.
I think the bitter irony in all this is that the foreign policy leaders in the West that are so afra
Oh, I'm aware of the danger (as well as the German use of it - I actually got the idea from the V-2 missile, which used an H2O2 monoprop rocket in the fuel pump).
It's still less dangerous than many alternatives (like nitric acid), particularly since I'd only be using a quarter-liter or so at most. And the marginally-safer oxidizers like LOX would be harder to handle.
But I can't really say that the safety issues didn't play a part in deciding not to go through with it.
My car (2013 Fiat 500) uses an ignition key, but has no accessory position (which is REALLY annoying). It also stops cranking automatically - I cannot hold it in the crank position to keep it cranking.
Trust me, even if they keep the current key system, they'll find ways to remove user control.
I recently considered getting back into model rocketry, but using more high-end rockets rather than little Estes kits. Since I've read plenty about rocket chemistry (read "Ignition!" if you like chemistry at all - it's worth it), I quickly figured out that a relatively easy* one to build would be a hydrogen peroxide monoprop - H2O2 decomposes into H2O + O2 in an exothermic manner, which can be used for thrust. It an also be used as an oxidizer with most fuels. For both you'll need high-strength peroxide - the CVS stuff is just a solution of like 1% H2O2 in H2O, but you'll want 80% or higher for rocketry. I decided to see how readily available it was, and how expensive it would be. It wasn't too expensive, and could be found fairly easily, but I wonder if I'm now on a watch list just for looking at a chemical that honestly wouldn't make a good terrorist weapon at all.
* This would be easy in comparison to, say, one using nitric acid or liquid oxygen. It would still be a very difficult thing to build, which is why I'm probably not going to actually build one.
Yet another hindsight bias. The American commanders had no knowledge of that - quite the opposite, in fact, since the Japanese were making active preparations to defend the south islands.
Consider also that there was a mutiny against the emperor attempting to *continue* the war. The Japanese military (at least in the upper command) was more than ready to keep fighting, and up to that point the Japanese military had pretty much ignored any attempt by the government to rein them in.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the ones that just got upgraded will probably keep flying for another 50 years - the Air Force plans to keep flying them at least until 2040, and I see no reason why they won't just keep using it.
It's the pickup truck of strategic warfare. It's cheap, it can carry a huge payload, and it's reliable. Sure, it's slower than the speed of sound and is about as stealthy as a jackhammer, but for some jobs that doesn't matter.
To this very day, the Air Force has more active B-52s than B-1 or B-2 bombers.
Perhaps, perhaps not. But the key thing is that Apple's tablets are generalist - while they can be used for "artistic" work, they are most commonly used for casual or business use, much like Microsoft's offerings in the desktop arena.
And that gives it a certain reputation - a reputation Apple is still slightly coasting on (they've done nothing to deserve the "creative person's product" reputation for many years now, yet it's still part of their marketing). If Microsoft is smart (for once), they'll build that reputation and try to leverage that into their desktop/laptop systems, and even their game consoles.
I might have to try that, then - I'd never considered using it for that, but now that I think about it, all I'd need is a USB hub and audio adapter. If I ever get to the point of doing shows, I might have to get one.
Does anybody else find it a bit ironic that Microsoft's tablets seem to be fitting into the niche Apple's desktops once did? Being used most prominently for art and audio production? That seems to be the niche Surface fits into, while Apple and Google are making more general-purpose, lower-cost devices.
I actually do. Due to what I assume is some carrier NAT issues, Google detects my entire ISP as possible bots. Every Google search I do requires a CAPTCHA.
So I use Bing for my searching. I've not really noticed any difference in quality between it and Google.
I have a Fiat 500, the non-electric one. For $17,000, it's a good car. But it's clearly a sub-$20K car - and unless they completely redesign major sections of it that are completely unrelated to the propulsion, they aren't going to be getting it to a be worth $30K even with the value of an electric engine.
Just for one example of what isn't good, the sound system supposedly supports USB. It does, technically, but it does so in the least competent way possible. You would expect it would support folders - like it does for data CDs. It does not. You would expect it to play songs in filename order. It does not. It plays every song on there, in the order of file creation. I noticed in the manual that the entertainment system runs on Windows Phone 7 - I have a very difficult time believing that Windows, in any version, has such broken support for FAT32.
Another example? The seat belt warning alarm activates even if the car is in park, within a second of turning on the car. I've had to get into the habit of buckling up before even turning the key.
The Fiat 500 is a cheap car. I'd say an electric version is worth about $25K (I couldn't actually use one myself - I use street parking, so I literally have nowhere to charge it up).
Tesla got one thing right - because electric cars, for the foreseeable future, are going to add $20K-$30K to the cost of the car, you're better off doing so in high-end cars where that's an extra 10-20%, not double the cost.
You need a new set of excuses:
There was a storm and my 3G was down.
The cloud was down. Again.
An update patch broke everything.
My laptop overheated and died, Applecare says they'll have it back by next week.
Adobe's DRM junk decided I hadn't paid them enough money and locked out all my files.
The Comet is the exact opposite of the kind of aircraft they were supposedly listing.
It was incredibly advanced for the time. The one major flaw it had was unknown at the time - the best engineers in the field couldn't figure it out even when they recovered 90% of the airframe from a crash.
In the various hearings, engineers from competing aircraft companies admitted that they wouldn't have found the flaw either, and the only reason it's Comets that flew with such a defect and not DC-8s or 707s is because the Comet came out first.
No, it means he's an idiot for not asking for cash up front.
While you use statistic to back your claim, in theory, Space Shuttle has more components than Soyuz, rephrase, Soyuz is simpler than Shuttle, it's likely more reliable.
I had written up a rather lengthy rebuttal to most of your points, but then I noticed this gem hidden near the end.
You are literally claiming that it doesn't matter what the facts are, your theory says Soyuz is more reliable than the Shuttle was, therefore reality is wrong and you're right.
I can't argue with that - not because you're right, but because I can only argue using facts and logic, which evidently you want nothing to do with.
As much as I like SpaceX, a) they're far too new to compare on reliability, and b) they don't have anything comparable to Proton in lift capacity. Proton-M can lift 22Mg to LEO - over twice the capacity of a Falcon-9, closer to two-and-a-half when you count usable capacity (the landing/reuse feature requires most of their extra power from the v1.1 upgrade). The Falcon Heavy is supposed to lift 53Mg, but they haven't even built one yet, let alone flown one.
It's amazing to me just how ancient most Russian rocket designs are. The Soyuz launcher is literally based on the same design that launched Sputnik, with the addition of a second stage. And even after fifty years of iteration, they still have only a 97.5% success rate with the current Soyuz launchers (Soyuz-U, Soyuz-U2, and Soyuz-FG). That's a full point worse than the Space Shuttle (98.5%), which was a completely new design that didn't have several decades of production testing on basically any of the parts.
Proton is almost as old, dating back to the Soviet lunar program. It was actually first intended as an ICBM, to launch ridiculously heavy warheads (think Tsar Bomba on an ICBM). The changes since then have been fairly minimal, compared to the design changes American rockets went through. One of the biggest features of the latest Proton-M design is "uses less parts made outside Russia". Counting this latest failure, Proton-M has only an 88.9% success rate.
The oft-repeated engineering mantra is "quality, reliability, cost - pick two". Russia's antiquated designs don't give you quality (in terms of efficiency or even lifting power), and they really aren't as reliable as you'd expect from such well-established designs. I can only hope that they're cheap enough that it's worth it - and when you're launching multi-million-dollar satellites, maybe cheaping out on the launcher isn't such a good idea.
Even better - make it modular. You can do city driving on batteries, then swap them for fuel cells before going on a long trip. That will also help with battery replacement, which will need to happen eventually.
Yeah, but it's not like they can re-hire Steve Jobs to save them this time.
Automated weapons are already deployed - the Korean DMZ is guarded, in part, by autonomous sentry drones. If it moves, they shoot it - and they're armed with machine guns or automatic grenade launchers.
That's a good model. Don't try to make a drone that can distinguish targets from non-targets - make something that treats everything as a target, and deploy it only when you don't have non-targets to worry about. Or, to allow your own forces to operate in the area, provide an IFF transmitter to designate them as non-targets (civilians are still fucked though - so don't use it anywhere near civilians). Works fine for air, land and sea - we already have an established concept of "shoot to kill zones", this just replaces the soldiers under orders to shoot anything that moves with robots under programming to shoot anything that moves.
For automated weapons deployed outside such areas (or even ones within), I would say that a human still has to give the fire order. The automated system can identify targets, track them, pursue them, prioritize targets, do basically everything but pull the trigger, but it has to request permission to fire from a human operator. And for all legal and ethical purposes, that human operator can be considered the one who pulled the trigger. It's still some massive force multiplication even compared to modern drones, so I don't see why the military would have much problem with it.
Let's wait until after we get true AI before we try to give machines the responsibility to decide whether or not to kill someone.
Ease of use? Installing mods in previous games (UT99, UT2004 and UT3), while not particularly difficult for the tech-savvy, isn't exactly user-friendly, and when you mess up there's little information on how to fix it.
As for "why would you sell it on Epic's marketplace instead of on your own?", that's almost definitely going to be what most gamers will be using, so that's where all the customers are. I certainly wouldn't mind selling maps for a dollar a pop.
We're not at the level of Yakunovich. Yet. Give it another ten, maybe twenty years or so at the rate we're going, and we'll have no choice but for revolution.
I think it is somewhat naive to think that the US or EU did not play some part. However, the movement acted like a genuinely populist movement, so either the CIA is really, REALLY damn good at faking such things, or their role was limited to encouragement and advice, or perhaps putting some pressure on politicians at appropriate times. The revolution itself happened because the people wanted it, not because some other country wanted it to.
Crimea and the east seems fundamentally different. The rebels there are armed like a military, act like a military, and fight like a military. The Maidan was fighting with paving stones and molotov cocktails - the eastern "rebels" are taking down helicopters with anti-air missiles. The only thing that makes them not look like a military is the fact that they aren't wearing insignia on their uniforms (but most of them are wearing identical, military-looking clothes - a far cry from the "whatever is in your closet" the Maidan wore).
There is a blatant information war going on on both sides of this.
Here is basically what is going on:
With you so far.
I have seen little evidence of US/EU covert operations in the revolution, and I've been following it closely. There was definitely propaganda support, maybe political pressure, perhaps even covert advisors trying to make sure that the revolution was successful, but it was by and large a Ukrainian revolution.
The thrust of the revolution was forcing out a government that was blatantly corrupt and increasingly dictatorial, not to join up with the EU. While I usually frown on getting involved in other country's problems, I don't think I could get too upset about lending a hand to a revolution that was forcing out such a government, particularly when the support is only aiding a revolution that would have happened anyways, not forcing a revolution that the people did not really want
Crimea is "majority Russian" only because Stalin forced out the native Tatars. And while there was a separatist movement (nonviolent) before the revolution, it was a secessionist movement, not a Russian one. There was no way they got the numbers they claimed legitimately.
Russia's tactics are different. Even if you assume CIA involvement in the revolution, they let the actual people perform the revolution - which means a good number of people had to be ready to fight for it.
Russia is sending in their own military. They are the ones fighting this counter-revolution - not the people they claim to be helping. This is by and large a Russian military intervention.
The western revolution was fought with molotov cocktails by students and retired veterans. The eastern revolution is being fought by armed and trained soldiers, following radio orders from Moscow. It's impossible to claim they're the same tactics, which means it is completely valid to treat them differently.
The CIA isn't mad that Russia is using the same tactics - they're mad because Russia is unable to find enough people to actually fight this war in Ukraine, so they're just sending in soldiers and pretending it's a popular rebellion.
Next) Either Russia invades and annexes Eastern Ukraine following the Crimea model or they simply foment separatism which either succeeds in splitting the country or causes a bloody crackdown by Kiev which further de-legitimizes that interim government.
- Probably China is cheer leading this US/EU/Russia split on because if the EU and Russia are forced further apart, then it forces resource rich Russia towards China which needs all the wood/oil/natural gas/mining that Russia has to offer to sustain its manufacturing economy and China doesn't want a strong Eurasian Union coming together either. This has already started with announcements of greater cooperation with China.
I think the bitter irony in all this is that the foreign policy leaders in the West that are so afra
No.
Crimea was pro-secession, but not by a significant amount, and they were most definitely NOT pro-Russian.
Oh, I'm aware of the danger (as well as the German use of it - I actually got the idea from the V-2 missile, which used an H2O2 monoprop rocket in the fuel pump).
It's still less dangerous than many alternatives (like nitric acid), particularly since I'd only be using a quarter-liter or so at most. And the marginally-safer oxidizers like LOX would be harder to handle.
But I can't really say that the safety issues didn't play a part in deciding not to go through with it.
My car (2013 Fiat 500) uses an ignition key, but has no accessory position (which is REALLY annoying). It also stops cranking automatically - I cannot hold it in the crank position to keep it cranking.
Trust me, even if they keep the current key system, they'll find ways to remove user control.
I recently considered getting back into model rocketry, but using more high-end rockets rather than little Estes kits. Since I've read plenty about rocket chemistry (read "Ignition!" if you like chemistry at all - it's worth it), I quickly figured out that a relatively easy* one to build would be a hydrogen peroxide monoprop - H2O2 decomposes into H2O + O2 in an exothermic manner, which can be used for thrust. It an also be used as an oxidizer with most fuels. For both you'll need high-strength peroxide - the CVS stuff is just a solution of like 1% H2O2 in H2O, but you'll want 80% or higher for rocketry. I decided to see how readily available it was, and how expensive it would be. It wasn't too expensive, and could be found fairly easily, but I wonder if I'm now on a watch list just for looking at a chemical that honestly wouldn't make a good terrorist weapon at all.
* This would be easy in comparison to, say, one using nitric acid or liquid oxygen. It would still be a very difficult thing to build, which is why I'm probably not going to actually build one.
Well, sure. Gotta secure that Republican vote somehow!
"Climate Terrorism"
Yet another hindsight bias. The American commanders had no knowledge of that - quite the opposite, in fact, since the Japanese were making active preparations to defend the south islands.
Consider also that there was a mutiny against the emperor attempting to *continue* the war. The Japanese military (at least in the upper command) was more than ready to keep fighting, and up to that point the Japanese military had pretty much ignored any attempt by the government to rein them in.