1. These are not modern big ones. Older ones indeed do. We were however talking about (relatively) new aircraft, not jury-rigging old ones. 2. If the air is coming from outside, your "human extinguisher" would be useless due to loss of pressure incapacitating him. Automatic systems can still purge such fire with foam. 3. Aircraft have accelerometers that are far more accurate then our vestibular system as a part of their standard avionics kit. 4. Just downlink the avionics to the ground control?
While large jumbos, be they cargo, passenger or various military versions are indeed far more complex then drones because of their sheer size, it doesn't mean that automation and ground control of the aircraft are an impossibility. It is simply a step forward from controlling the drones from the ground, not unlike the step that was made when jumbos where put in the air for the first time.
1. There are no hydraulic lines from stick to control system in modern planes. That's why fly-by-wire electronics have multiple redundancies - if they fail, you lose control of the aircraft. Period. 2. Automatic auto-extinguishing systems fare far better without humans. They can simply purge all oxygen from the aircraft and replace it with CO2. No humans in need of O2 to continue to function on board... 3. In most cases, cameras around aircraft will do a far better job then human pilot. They can be placed to show places where human will have no way of getting to.
You'd be amazed how many married women over 30 are interested in "no strings attached" sex if your hand or sex aids get tiring. And frankly, I now understand why several of my girlfriends from 20s preferred married men - they are just much better in bed if married women are a valid comparison.
This however is one of those "deal of the decade" deals, which allows for a whole different level of competition between banks. 40 million USD is no pocket change, even for them, especially with marketing value of "we can pull a deal this huge off well".
You need to check the timelines. This is one of the favourite things of USA-based pundits to "get wrong" when they try to diss T-34 and promote their own tanks.
First models of T-34 was rolled out in 1940 with a cannon that was a massive overkill for tanks of that period. Panzer 3 tanks had 30mm frontal armour, which could be penetrated with much lower calibre. End choice of 76.2mm gun was made as a compromise between having enough penetrating power against future threats and reload speed. A great example of this was KV-1, which had a 110mm in early war, which was for all bits and purposes inferior to T-34 in fire power, because it had just as much practical killing power against German tanks (due to targeting systems not allowing for accurate fire at ranges where it's 110mm main gun would remain viable while T-34's 76.2mm would not), while having a lower rate of fire.
One has to be reminded that reloading tank shells is a very demanding task. You have to consistently lift heavy shells from boxes under your feet up to the cannon. The bigger the calibre, the heavier the shell, the lower the reload rate. With rudimentary targeting systems of tanks in WW2, ability to fire in quick succession was of paramount importance. This is why Germans equipped their medium tanks with even lower calibres early in war, and only put 75mm in last versions of Panzer 3 and later Panzer 4 and later in war 88mm in Panther. When hitting lightly armoured tanks of various European nations in early war as well as suppressing infantry, rate of fire was simply far more important then calibre, just like it was with T-34 vs KV-1.
You are completely misunderstanding the issue. Outside force conquering another country for the sake of conquest typically installs its own power structure. It also generally tries to preserve infrastructure as infrastructure is useful to the conqueror.
Same was not true for Iraq. US forces couldn't care less what happened to locals beyond mandatory PR (we don't kill civilians, but who cares if they kill each other fighting for food and shelter most of which we destroyed) and oil infrastructure. You present two great cases of how conquering war is done when conqueror wants the entire country controlled, rather then just a certain resource: Germans conquering France cared for entire infrastructure, rather then small part of it and Gestapo combined with local marionette government made for an effective power structure to control the country. USSR and Allies taking Germany resulted in harsh military law which was a very brutal form of power structure holding the chaotic aftermath of war in line as entire country was essentially razed. Most of the looting back then was done by Allies and Red Army and for obvious reasons not documented all that well.
To try to claim that "being conquered by another power that installs its own power structure at a barrel of a gun" is the same as "loss of power structure" is an example of extreme naivete as to how controlling the masses actually works.
I think you need to go and study the actual history, preferably not one written by US historians with an agenda. Between the fact that USSR retrofitted most of heavy tank and light tank production lines to produce T-34 variants in later stages of the war, and the fact that even Wermacht largely agreed and admitted that T-34 was technologically superior to anything they had in the beginning of the war by a large margin, I would suggest that whatever you have been reading on this topic is largely wrong.
The main reason for losses of T-34, especially in early stages of the war was shitty leadership exacerbated by lack of radios. Tank itself was vastly superior to anything else in its early life cycle, and while it had been caught up with by Wermacht later in war, it remained an excellent tank.
Hell, Panther has basically been an attempt to copy T-34, which was largely proven by Wermacht archives.
The main reason why SPGs and heavy tanks kept being produced was for head-on breakthrough elements of tank force and bunker busting, both of which required high-caliber weapons that were too heavy for a medium tank of that period. Pretty much everything else that tanks were needed for in WW2 was done better by T-34.
But they did not disable the missiles. Merely supplied the information on how they worked, which is expected in war time between allies. You're comparing rock throwing to gunning down with AAA.
You information is false. T-34 had multitude of innovations granting it advantages, and sloped armour was just one of them. Others included excellent main gun, significantly less flammable fuel, being very light for its capability while having wide tracks and very good suspension and finally significantly simplified construction process. There was also an issue of often remaining mobile even after losing its main turret, which meant loss of 2/3 of the crew, because of driver having his own front facing machine gun, allowing him to continue to provide cover and suppression fire against infantry.
Essentially T-34 could outrun, outmaneuver and outgun any early WW2 Wermacht medium tank, outrun and outmaneuver most light tanks and still stand toe to toe with heavy tanks because of its armour and gun. It's this versatility that allowed for cheap mass production because instead of having to build light, medium and heavy tanks, USSR could focus on one medium tank that could perform well in light and heavy roles as well.
You're missing the point by a mile and then some, mainly because you're stuck in your Western-born point of view with no other reference. To us, Arab Spring was literally marketed (as in advertised in news) as a "democratic movement" in sense that democratic = better life.
Those of us without the lack of long term memory induced by too much TV vividly remember what happens when a country that had to be on receiving end of Western diplomacy for decades or even centuries gets a democracy. We saw it in Iran, we saw it in Gaza, we saw it in several African countries and so on. It ends up being anti-Western for one simple reason - when you're been pounded into the poverty and watched the pompous rich Westerners and their marionette rulers get all respect and wealth in your country while you get none, you know who to hate.
And hate is a far better driver of poll numbers then any other emotion. Just look at US presidential campaign focus and you'll see it's exactly the same regardless of the nation. It's yet another aspect of human nature we really like to deny, even after it bites us in the ass. Repeatedly.
Also, no, Legion's victories are known to be very, very quiet. They are the ones that clean out all the hell holes that make other Western armies shake in fear of even a thought of having to go in. Their benefit is that they're not nearly as picky about getting down and dirty as modern armies are either. So their fights generally stay out of mass media.
Two problems: 1. Most of them didn't want to get rid of Saddam, they just wanted a better way of life, just like in case of Arab Spring. He may have been oppressive, but Maliki and his cohorts make Saddam look like a mother Theresa. 2. What the country was rid of was power structure and infrastructure. Once that is gone, it doesn't matter what source country originally was. It can be Iraq, Russia, USA, France or any other. Without those two things the country will slide into chaos, anarchy and eventual civil war which will decide who gets to form the new power structure in the country and how that power structure will function.
Again, at that point, it will not matter which country it was. This is the cold reality of the human nature, shown throughout history countless times, and one of the things that truly unites our species as one species, in spite of differences in morphology and culture.
Not to be a dick, but your argument comes about half a decade late. Microsoft really did everything right in terms of security since XP. They minimized the damage that the biggest issue, user, can cause to the system, hardened the system itself significantly, slapped a properly functional firewall into a default installation and so on.
One of the key aspects of our societies (and by our I mean that of relatively small, wealthy European countries) has typically been openness to new. This means that suggestions that you and I find stifling, or even crazy should be allowed to be suggested.
And when it's clearly against our ethics or culture, such suggestions should be shot down. As they do. To suggest stifling debate about those things on political level is to attempt to control the very freedom of speech we so cherish.
This is one of the most insane claims I've read on slashdot. Government that tells you when to pee? (Obvious concern troll, but I'll bite).
I think you're talking about things like making a law to ensure people wear helmets when riding bikes. Of course, being from a nordic, free and socialist... excuse me, communist, freedom hating degenerate land of free sex as your types likes to put it, we also trust that people understand that it's for their own good, and there is no punishment associated with it. You can ride a bike without a helmet, and police can legally stop you and tell you to get a helmet. But no fine.
Because people around here aren't batshit insane and imagine that hurting themselves on purpose is somehow sticking it up to the Man.
No offence, but the way graphics are handled in most simulators nowadays is afterthought at best. And it shows. BF3 can produce a beautiful scenery for several kilometers, while utterly ugly (both aesthetically and graphically) simulator graphics in most modern simulators can eat almost as much of both GPU and memory and end result will look like something utterly horrible in comparison to BF3.
Has it ever occurred to you that most of graphics engine design is not about looking as realistic as possible, but about making the result as good as possible while cutting as many corners as possible? BF3, as you yourself admit, has been very successful in this endeavour.
Finally, 1080p as a "minimum" for PC users shows your utter ignorance in the subject. 1080p is a reasonable maximum at the moment, with less then 5% of users actually having a higher resolution (if you count its 16:10 big brother, 1920:1200 in the same category). Source: steam hardware survey.
Again, if your game renders background the way you suggest it does, it does it TERRIBLY WRONG. I once again present the case study, battlefield 3. It often renders huge backgrounds without the catastrophically increasing impact on either video memory or GPU load (i.e. view from a plane looking over entire map vs view of a foot soldier looking at his spawn).
This is done using various LOD techniques and is called "optimization". Notably end result looks worlds better then any of the games you presented as examples.
I find that their POV is rather similar to that of microsoft. "We don't like piracy, but if you're going to pirate, we prefer you pirate our stuff then that of our competitors, because we will still make money on publicity, adaptation numbers and so on".
Not very likely to happen. Most modern games do put a lot of stress on GPU, which means that you either forego quality, fps, or you install a proper active cooling solution.
Market for functional "silent" solutions is generally an expensive one as it either uses expensive fans with high end bearings and bigger blades (allowing for slower rotation speeds for same air flow), or liquid cooling in high end. You're not going to enter it with a sub-150USD card with passive cooling - these cards are notorious for both having atrocious performance and actually crashing under heavy load due to overheating (as they are usually put into equally "silent" cases with no proper air flow).
There are console first person shooters, and then there are PC first person shooters.
Try running BF3 on high/ultra in high resolution. My reasonably overclocked GTX 560Ti can just barely handle high in 1080p, ultra utterly murders it with clear jerkiness present in many situations. On the other hand, it eats MW3 for breakfast in pretty much any resolution/quality I could throw at it. You don't need to crank out a "20 km horizon" to overload a modern card.
And frankly, if a game makes your card render 20km of ground in level of detail that actually affects it, of which you will literally see only a few hundred meters, it's doing it wrong. Badly wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Right hand, left hand...
Be afraid of the brain (i.e. money that buys the machine controls) actually realizing what's going on.
1. These are not modern big ones. Older ones indeed do. We were however talking about (relatively) new aircraft, not jury-rigging old ones.
2. If the air is coming from outside, your "human extinguisher" would be useless due to loss of pressure incapacitating him. Automatic systems can still purge such fire with foam.
3. Aircraft have accelerometers that are far more accurate then our vestibular system as a part of their standard avionics kit.
4. Just downlink the avionics to the ground control?
While large jumbos, be they cargo, passenger or various military versions are indeed far more complex then drones because of their sheer size, it doesn't mean that automation and ground control of the aircraft are an impossibility. It is simply a step forward from controlling the drones from the ground, not unlike the step that was made when jumbos where put in the air for the first time.
1. There are no hydraulic lines from stick to control system in modern planes. That's why fly-by-wire electronics have multiple redundancies - if they fail, you lose control of the aircraft. Period.
2. Automatic auto-extinguishing systems fare far better without humans. They can simply purge all oxygen from the aircraft and replace it with CO2. No humans in need of O2 to continue to function on board...
3. In most cases, cameras around aircraft will do a far better job then human pilot. They can be placed to show places where human will have no way of getting to.
You'd be amazed how many married women over 30 are interested in "no strings attached" sex if your hand or sex aids get tiring. And frankly, I now understand why several of my girlfriends from 20s preferred married men - they are just much better in bed if married women are a valid comparison.
This however is one of those "deal of the decade" deals, which allows for a whole different level of competition between banks. 40 million USD is no pocket change, even for them, especially with marketing value of "we can pull a deal this huge off well".
You need to check the timelines. This is one of the favourite things of USA-based pundits to "get wrong" when they try to diss T-34 and promote their own tanks.
First models of T-34 was rolled out in 1940 with a cannon that was a massive overkill for tanks of that period. Panzer 3 tanks had 30mm frontal armour, which could be penetrated with much lower calibre. End choice of 76.2mm gun was made as a compromise between having enough penetrating power against future threats and reload speed. A great example of this was KV-1, which had a 110mm in early war, which was for all bits and purposes inferior to T-34 in fire power, because it had just as much practical killing power against German tanks (due to targeting systems not allowing for accurate fire at ranges where it's 110mm main gun would remain viable while T-34's 76.2mm would not), while having a lower rate of fire.
One has to be reminded that reloading tank shells is a very demanding task. You have to consistently lift heavy shells from boxes under your feet up to the cannon. The bigger the calibre, the heavier the shell, the lower the reload rate. With rudimentary targeting systems of tanks in WW2, ability to fire in quick succession was of paramount importance. This is why Germans equipped their medium tanks with even lower calibres early in war, and only put 75mm in last versions of Panzer 3 and later Panzer 4 and later in war 88mm in Panther. When hitting lightly armoured tanks of various European nations in early war as well as suppressing infantry, rate of fire was simply far more important then calibre, just like it was with T-34 vs KV-1.
You are completely misunderstanding the issue. Outside force conquering another country for the sake of conquest typically installs its own power structure. It also generally tries to preserve infrastructure as infrastructure is useful to the conqueror.
Same was not true for Iraq. US forces couldn't care less what happened to locals beyond mandatory PR (we don't kill civilians, but who cares if they kill each other fighting for food and shelter most of which we destroyed) and oil infrastructure. You present two great cases of how conquering war is done when conqueror wants the entire country controlled, rather then just a certain resource: Germans conquering France cared for entire infrastructure, rather then small part of it and Gestapo combined with local marionette government made for an effective power structure to control the country. USSR and Allies taking Germany resulted in harsh military law which was a very brutal form of power structure holding the chaotic aftermath of war in line as entire country was essentially razed. Most of the looting back then was done by Allies and Red Army and for obvious reasons not documented all that well.
To try to claim that "being conquered by another power that installs its own power structure at a barrel of a gun" is the same as "loss of power structure" is an example of extreme naivete as to how controlling the masses actually works.
I think you need to go and study the actual history, preferably not one written by US historians with an agenda. Between the fact that USSR retrofitted most of heavy tank and light tank production lines to produce T-34 variants in later stages of the war, and the fact that even Wermacht largely agreed and admitted that T-34 was technologically superior to anything they had in the beginning of the war by a large margin, I would suggest that whatever you have been reading on this topic is largely wrong.
The main reason for losses of T-34, especially in early stages of the war was shitty leadership exacerbated by lack of radios. Tank itself was vastly superior to anything else in its early life cycle, and while it had been caught up with by Wermacht later in war, it remained an excellent tank.
Hell, Panther has basically been an attempt to copy T-34, which was largely proven by Wermacht archives.
The main reason why SPGs and heavy tanks kept being produced was for head-on breakthrough elements of tank force and bunker busting, both of which required high-caliber weapons that were too heavy for a medium tank of that period. Pretty much everything else that tanks were needed for in WW2 was done better by T-34.
Are you familiar with concept of "existential threat"?
But they did not disable the missiles. Merely supplied the information on how they worked, which is expected in war time between allies. You're comparing rock throwing to gunning down with AAA.
You information is false. T-34 had multitude of innovations granting it advantages, and sloped armour was just one of them. Others included excellent main gun, significantly less flammable fuel, being very light for its capability while having wide tracks and very good suspension and finally significantly simplified construction process. There was also an issue of often remaining mobile even after losing its main turret, which meant loss of 2/3 of the crew, because of driver having his own front facing machine gun, allowing him to continue to provide cover and suppression fire against infantry.
Essentially T-34 could outrun, outmaneuver and outgun any early WW2 Wermacht medium tank, outrun and outmaneuver most light tanks and still stand toe to toe with heavy tanks because of its armour and gun. It's this versatility that allowed for cheap mass production because instead of having to build light, medium and heavy tanks, USSR could focus on one medium tank that could perform well in light and heavy roles as well.
You're missing the point by a mile and then some, mainly because you're stuck in your Western-born point of view with no other reference. To us, Arab Spring was literally marketed (as in advertised in news) as a "democratic movement" in sense that democratic = better life.
Those of us without the lack of long term memory induced by too much TV vividly remember what happens when a country that had to be on receiving end of Western diplomacy for decades or even centuries gets a democracy. We saw it in Iran, we saw it in Gaza, we saw it in several African countries and so on. It ends up being anti-Western for one simple reason - when you're been pounded into the poverty and watched the pompous rich Westerners and their marionette rulers get all respect and wealth in your country while you get none, you know who to hate.
And hate is a far better driver of poll numbers then any other emotion. Just look at US presidential campaign focus and you'll see it's exactly the same regardless of the nation. It's yet another aspect of human nature we really like to deny, even after it bites us in the ass. Repeatedly.
When have the disbanded Legion?
Also, no, Legion's victories are known to be very, very quiet. They are the ones that clean out all the hell holes that make other Western armies shake in fear of even a thought of having to go in. Their benefit is that they're not nearly as picky about getting down and dirty as modern armies are either. So their fights generally stay out of mass media.
Two problems:
1. Most of them didn't want to get rid of Saddam, they just wanted a better way of life, just like in case of Arab Spring. He may have been oppressive, but Maliki and his cohorts make Saddam look like a mother Theresa.
2. What the country was rid of was power structure and infrastructure. Once that is gone, it doesn't matter what source country originally was. It can be Iraq, Russia, USA, France or any other. Without those two things the country will slide into chaos, anarchy and eventual civil war which will decide who gets to form the new power structure in the country and how that power structure will function.
Again, at that point, it will not matter which country it was. This is the cold reality of the human nature, shown throughout history countless times, and one of the things that truly unites our species as one species, in spite of differences in morphology and culture.
Much of orthopedics is basically mechanics as applied to human bodies.
We are considering W7, and to a smaller degree, Vista. We are comparing them to modern up to date Mac OS and Linux desktop installations.
Not to be a dick, but your argument comes about half a decade late. Microsoft really did everything right in terms of security since XP. They minimized the damage that the biggest issue, user, can cause to the system, hardened the system itself significantly, slapped a properly functional firewall into a default installation and so on.
One of the key aspects of our societies (and by our I mean that of relatively small, wealthy European countries) has typically been openness to new. This means that suggestions that you and I find stifling, or even crazy should be allowed to be suggested.
And when it's clearly against our ethics or culture, such suggestions should be shot down. As they do. To suggest stifling debate about those things on political level is to attempt to control the very freedom of speech we so cherish.
This is one of the most insane claims I've read on slashdot. Government that tells you when to pee? (Obvious concern troll, but I'll bite).
I think you're talking about things like making a law to ensure people wear helmets when riding bikes. Of course, being from a nordic, free and socialist... excuse me, communist, freedom hating degenerate land of free sex as your types likes to put it, we also trust that people understand that it's for their own good, and there is no punishment associated with it. You can ride a bike without a helmet, and police can legally stop you and tell you to get a helmet. But no fine.
Because people around here aren't batshit insane and imagine that hurting themselves on purpose is somehow sticking it up to the Man.
P.S. Nice concern troll.
No offence, but the way graphics are handled in most simulators nowadays is afterthought at best. And it shows. BF3 can produce a beautiful scenery for several kilometers, while utterly ugly (both aesthetically and graphically) simulator graphics in most modern simulators can eat almost as much of both GPU and memory and end result will look like something utterly horrible in comparison to BF3.
Has it ever occurred to you that most of graphics engine design is not about looking as realistic as possible, but about making the result as good as possible while cutting as many corners as possible? BF3, as you yourself admit, has been very successful in this endeavour.
Finally, 1080p as a "minimum" for PC users shows your utter ignorance in the subject. 1080p is a reasonable maximum at the moment, with less then 5% of users actually having a higher resolution (if you count its 16:10 big brother, 1920:1200 in the same category). Source: steam hardware survey.
Again, if your game renders background the way you suggest it does, it does it TERRIBLY WRONG. I once again present the case study, battlefield 3. It often renders huge backgrounds without the catastrophically increasing impact on either video memory or GPU load (i.e. view from a plane looking over entire map vs view of a foot soldier looking at his spawn).
This is done using various LOD techniques and is called "optimization". Notably end result looks worlds better then any of the games you presented as examples.
I find that their POV is rather similar to that of microsoft. "We don't like piracy, but if you're going to pirate, we prefer you pirate our stuff then that of our competitors, because we will still make money on publicity, adaptation numbers and so on".
Not very likely to happen. Most modern games do put a lot of stress on GPU, which means that you either forego quality, fps, or you install a proper active cooling solution.
Market for functional "silent" solutions is generally an expensive one as it either uses expensive fans with high end bearings and bigger blades (allowing for slower rotation speeds for same air flow), or liquid cooling in high end. You're not going to enter it with a sub-150USD card with passive cooling - these cards are notorious for both having atrocious performance and actually crashing under heavy load due to overheating (as they are usually put into equally "silent" cases with no proper air flow).
There are console first person shooters, and then there are PC first person shooters.
Try running BF3 on high/ultra in high resolution. My reasonably overclocked GTX 560Ti can just barely handle high in 1080p, ultra utterly murders it with clear jerkiness present in many situations. On the other hand, it eats MW3 for breakfast in pretty much any resolution/quality I could throw at it. You don't need to crank out a "20 km horizon" to overload a modern card.
And frankly, if a game makes your card render 20km of ground in level of detail that actually affects it, of which you will literally see only a few hundred meters, it's doing it wrong. Badly wrong.
In a pinch, you can extract gold from sea water as well. That doesn't make it viable to do so either.