Most of the real predators don't shoot missiles, and none shoot bullets. Too heavy. The real killers are significantly heavier drones like reapers, specifically designed as weapon platforms.
Of course, there are also ground versions of the drones, and those can come with machineguns. But these aren't very popular (yet).
More like "hover around your neighbourhood, get photographic evidence on neighbours and blackmail them for vacation money".
You know, mundane stuff like cheating, watching porn, maybe even following the political party that isn't accepted in the neighbourhood and then threaten with anonymous exposure.
Tablet is a TOY. Not a production machine. Please understand this simple fact. It's a great thing to passively watch something off, and utterly useless for productivity suites.
Asus EEE PC pushes around 6-7 hours with decent screen brightness, decent CPU usage (watching h.264 720p w/o hardware acceleration) and Wi-Fi (internet connectivity) and bluetooth (headphones) on.
My 15" laptop's battery dies in about two hours with that usage.
I was looking for a work laptop to give to my mother for her birthday about six month ago after she said complained her current one to me a few times. We went to a large shop and I offered her a lot of these big laptops (I didn't know that her employer would pay for it but figured I could afford anything below 600 or so). Her verdict was crushing: "Why would I want to lug around something this big and heavy, I'm just a small woman".
Essentially I sat down with her and talked to her about her priorities. They were in order of importance:
1. She can use her office suit and a couple of specialized pieces of production software on it (needs to be win xp or 7). 2. As light as possible. 3. As small as possible. 4. Reasonable battery life.
Nothing else mattered to her. Literally. Of two 10 inch netbooks she fell in love with in the store after me trying to get her to get interested in 15inch models, I tried to offer her the more powerful version or the ten inch one with nvidia ion on board. Her verdict? "What are the differences? Is it going to be heavier? No? Oh, it's going to run a little hotter and have a little less battery time? No thanks."
Fact is, there is apparently plenty of people out there to whom bigger screen size means more weight to carry around = bad thing. To nerds like us who want desktop space it's an upgrade. I could barely use the 10 inch screen desktop, and many configuration menu buttons were actually not fitting the screen in defaul menu views.
Guess if my mother cared about this? I honestly never heard her gush half as much about any birthday present I got her before this laptop. I can't ever see myself use a computer with screen that small. And my mom? I don't think she'll ever get a portable with bigger screen then those 10".
You're arguing against history here. Not a single time did US and USSR enter a war against each other. In fact, even in real hot proxy wars such as Vietnam, both took painstaking efforts to make sure that their official forces to not ever meet directly, down to stripping markings from their hardware or teaching local languages to their soldiers so they could be plausibly passed as locals.
If US and USSR ever entered a conventional war against one another, one without nuclear weapons, most cities in both US and USSR would simply not exist today. You think 9/11 was terrible? Imagine 9/11 level of destruction on HOURLY basis. That is what conventional war between US and USSR would bring.
Our existence itself is about killing. We compete with each other for resources. We compete with each other for spouses. Conflict is hard-wired into our DNA and is the main driving force behind humanity.
One should understand that while conflict is not fully preventable, it can be contained to minimally harmful levels. In this regard, it's not very different from disease prevention, which is a war itself - war of our immune systems against micro-organisms.
In reference to your talk about losses, you sound like someone who has never seen a hot war zone, or victims of it. As a result you get sensitive to horrors of cold war, forgetting that hot war is orders of magnitude worse. This shit we fight in Afghanistan is not a real hot war - it's an occupation. Pakistan isn't even occupied, it's just torn apart from inside by internal conflicts.
Do you want to know how that is different from a real, honest HOT war? Look at African wars. Millions of dead. Entire nationalities completely displaced in a fashion that makes nazis look nice, which in comparison to modern African wars they were.
If Pakistan and India came to a real hot war anytime in the recent history, you'd have seven figures of dead, and probably eight or even nine displaced. They are just that densely populated, you're not going to evacuate big cities in range of bombers and artillery. Comparing that to their current losses is literally saying that a couple of bombs in a city center maybe once every two decades and low key dirty war killing a four figure number in nation that has ten figure population is worse result then having entire cities flattened with artillery on monthly basis with likely five to six figures of losses as well as order of magnitude more displaced. It's irrational and completely disconnected from reality.
But it also shows the depth of how most of us have become disconnected from reality. War is a thing that happens on TV to other people, or in case of Western soldiers happens to those "natives" that aren't "us". Tragedies are what befalls individuals - when masses die in a war, it's just statistics and aren't worth caring about in a significantly greater way then individuals. Masses are just that, masses, and aren't worthy of being tragic until they gain a "face", some individual on which media can focus to bring his/her suffering to our living rooms.
It's funny that we in the West have become loyal followers of Stalin's favorite saying. "When you kill an individual, it's a tragedy. When you kill millions, it's a statistic". For that is behind the very principle of MAD - individuals will suffer the cold war, but masses will be saved from a hot one.
Wikipedia mentions that designers specifically omitted cutting edge tech because of platform having a single engine (a single point of critical failure) as well as being designed for deep penetration behind enemy lines. It's not so much a "cost", as "how much of our top secret tech can be copied from this". That means things from skin materials to shape to optics to software.
Something like this is nearly impossible to put a real price tag on, because frankly, it doesn't have one. We're talking about balance of power, something you cannot measure with money alone.
Their government has made multiple attempts of normalizing relations, only to be rebuked? Last documented and public ones were made during Bush Jr. era, after 9/11.
I would argue that we have a good example on how getting nukes on both sides of the major conflict works. From NATO vs Warsaw pact, to more modern and far more similar India vs Pakistan, nuclear weapons brought direct hostilities of any kind to a crushing halt. It's actually scary enough to have a nuclear MAD that even religious nuts in Pakistan and India can't find enough support for another nice little war in Kashmir like ones they were so fond of before they both got nukes. Now it's barely tough words anymore. Nukes are apparently scarier then Allah, Buddha and all the Hindu gods combined.
Perhaps Iran getting nukes and entering effective MAD with Israel would finally get some peace to Middle East, just like it did to Kashmir.
Thanks, I never imagined to be mentioned as "top 1%". I'm nowhere near wealthy enough, at least in my home country. I don't think I'm wealthy enough even by russian standards to qualify.
Anyway, I disagree with "nothing he did was magic" in sense that much of what he did improved lives of people. Quite a fewmy former employers/contractors want to sell to russian consumer, which would in turn require significant buying power from said consumer. Pre-Putin that was in the shitter and sales were marginal at best. Right now, it's on a very good level, and stuff like diary products from my country sells really well, and we have a big influx of middle class (not top 1% as you put it, but real MIDDLE class) buying properties in the border region and spending money on tourism in that region. Economy on our eastern border has gotten out of shitter and is quite well off because of that. This simply didn't exist ten years ago.
In other words, what Putin did in eight-ten years is very visibly different from what was done in eight-ten years before him on both sides of the border. Imho that difference is indeed "magic" in terms of success, and is often dismissed by critics when it really shouldn't be - when you increase average salary of your people by almost twenty times in less then a decade, you deserve recognition.
Worth noting, I worked with people in Russian market throughout last 15 years in on-off relationship and have a fairly decent view on what happened in there from corporate perspective. From moments like paying people under the table in cash "for repairs" to get permits, to simply having to watch over russian workmen and having to teach them that drinking on the job is unacceptable, I've encountered a lot of very interesting parts of their culture. That said, I've also observed the change, and these are my observations: of a person that worked in that market, met and known (and still knows) people who live there, in some cases intimately.
You point of view may differ from mine, but if there's one thing that I am not, that is a paid stooge. Or stooge in general. My main interests are that Russia doesn't sink in the same economic hole it was in the end of last millenium, so that my job prospects on that market remain positive. And having communists in power would put that possibility into "very likely" category.
Does this help you understand my point of view, and why I view stable continuation of current power structure as an overall positive?
I agree, I'm merely pointing out that from Western point of view, United Russia is still a better choice then two other meaningful options, and that we're mostly lucky that the "opposition parties" aren't getting a lot more votes, but instead less people seem to be voting.
I would really hate to see Russia being led by communists or even worse, ultra-nationalists.
In 2000 or so, when Putin came to power. You can see the results in standards of living, average salary went from around 455 USD to 7680USD. That's almost twenty times in just eight years of rule - consider the numbers for a moment before you quote your favorite "but Russia is corrupt" stooge. These are changes that average people see in their every day lives and they have been massive, and if you ask people who actually live there, rather then stooges hired by specific parties and often interviewed in Western media, they will tell you this.
As mentioned above, the main reason Putin is no longer as popular as he was before was because these positive changes have been visibly stalled.
Yes, "real" choice means having an actual choice, more then choosing from two storefronts representing exactly the same shop. Perfect choice would mean having a separate shop for every issue, and I don't think anyone has been asking for that. I know I didn't.
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Most of the real predators don't shoot missiles, and none shoot bullets. Too heavy. The real killers are significantly heavier drones like reapers, specifically designed as weapon platforms.
Of course, there are also ground versions of the drones, and those can come with machineguns. But these aren't very popular (yet).
More like "hover around your neighbourhood, get photographic evidence on neighbours and blackmail them for vacation money".
You know, mundane stuff like cheating, watching porn, maybe even following the political party that isn't accepted in the neighbourhood and then threaten with anonymous exposure.
Tablet is a TOY. Not a production machine. Please understand this simple fact. It's a great thing to passively watch something off, and utterly useless for productivity suites.
Netbook fits into a stylish woman handbag. Notebook does not.
Courtesy: my mother, happy user of her notebook for some six months now.
Believe it or not, many people care about things that you don't, and don't care about things you do.
Asus EEE PC pushes around 6-7 hours with decent screen brightness, decent CPU usage (watching h.264 720p w/o hardware acceleration) and Wi-Fi (internet connectivity) and bluetooth (headphones) on.
My 15" laptop's battery dies in about two hours with that usage.
I was looking for a work laptop to give to my mother for her birthday about six month ago after she said complained her current one to me a few times. We went to a large shop and I offered her a lot of these big laptops (I didn't know that her employer would pay for it but figured I could afford anything below 600 or so). Her verdict was crushing: "Why would I want to lug around something this big and heavy, I'm just a small woman".
Essentially I sat down with her and talked to her about her priorities. They were in order of importance:
1. She can use her office suit and a couple of specialized pieces of production software on it (needs to be win xp or 7).
2. As light as possible.
3. As small as possible.
4. Reasonable battery life.
Nothing else mattered to her. Literally. Of two 10 inch netbooks she fell in love with in the store after me trying to get her to get interested in 15inch models, I tried to offer her the more powerful version or the ten inch one with nvidia ion on board. Her verdict? "What are the differences? Is it going to be heavier? No? Oh, it's going to run a little hotter and have a little less battery time? No thanks."
Fact is, there is apparently plenty of people out there to whom bigger screen size means more weight to carry around = bad thing. To nerds like us who want desktop space it's an upgrade. I could barely use the 10 inch screen desktop, and many configuration menu buttons were actually not fitting the screen in defaul menu views.
Guess if my mother cared about this? I honestly never heard her gush half as much about any birthday present I got her before this laptop. I can't ever see myself use a computer with screen that small. And my mom? I don't think she'll ever get a portable with bigger screen then those 10".
Point of reference: lesbian vaginal sex.
In other news, mr. Ballmer will be included in next intercontinental ballistic missile agreement?
You're arguing against history here. Not a single time did US and USSR enter a war against each other. In fact, even in real hot proxy wars such as Vietnam, both took painstaking efforts to make sure that their official forces to not ever meet directly, down to stripping markings from their hardware or teaching local languages to their soldiers so they could be plausibly passed as locals.
If US and USSR ever entered a conventional war against one another, one without nuclear weapons, most cities in both US and USSR would simply not exist today. You think 9/11 was terrible? Imagine 9/11 level of destruction on HOURLY basis. That is what conventional war between US and USSR would bring.
Our existence itself is about killing. We compete with each other for resources. We compete with each other for spouses. Conflict is hard-wired into our DNA and is the main driving force behind humanity.
One should understand that while conflict is not fully preventable, it can be contained to minimally harmful levels. In this regard, it's not very different from disease prevention, which is a war itself - war of our immune systems against micro-organisms.
Just wait till your wife gets her hands on a whip and a strap on.
"The reason why we have wars is because there are as many different concepts of good and evil as there are people on the planet".
You should ban alcohol too while at it, because it has far more effect on "ugly woman getting sex" factor then any amounts of makeup.
Reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L11fQ6-QTIc
In reference to your talk about losses, you sound like someone who has never seen a hot war zone, or victims of it. As a result you get sensitive to horrors of cold war, forgetting that hot war is orders of magnitude worse. This shit we fight in Afghanistan is not a real hot war - it's an occupation. Pakistan isn't even occupied, it's just torn apart from inside by internal conflicts.
Do you want to know how that is different from a real, honest HOT war? Look at African wars. Millions of dead. Entire nationalities completely displaced in a fashion that makes nazis look nice, which in comparison to modern African wars they were.
If Pakistan and India came to a real hot war anytime in the recent history, you'd have seven figures of dead, and probably eight or even nine displaced. They are just that densely populated, you're not going to evacuate big cities in range of bombers and artillery. Comparing that to their current losses is literally saying that a couple of bombs in a city center maybe once every two decades and low key dirty war killing a four figure number in nation that has ten figure population is worse result then having entire cities flattened with artillery on monthly basis with likely five to six figures of losses as well as order of magnitude more displaced. It's irrational and completely disconnected from reality.
But it also shows the depth of how most of us have become disconnected from reality. War is a thing that happens on TV to other people, or in case of Western soldiers happens to those "natives" that aren't "us". Tragedies are what befalls individuals - when masses die in a war, it's just statistics and aren't worth caring about in a significantly greater way then individuals. Masses are just that, masses, and aren't worthy of being tragic until they gain a "face", some individual on which media can focus to bring his/her suffering to our living rooms.
It's funny that we in the West have become loyal followers of Stalin's favorite saying. "When you kill an individual, it's a tragedy. When you kill millions, it's a statistic". For that is behind the very principle of MAD - individuals will suffer the cold war, but masses will be saved from a hot one.
Wikipedia mentions that designers specifically omitted cutting edge tech because of platform having a single engine (a single point of critical failure) as well as being designed for deep penetration behind enemy lines. It's not so much a "cost", as "how much of our top secret tech can be copied from this". That means things from skin materials to shape to optics to software.
Something like this is nearly impossible to put a real price tag on, because frankly, it doesn't have one. We're talking about balance of power, something you cannot measure with money alone.
Because you know, US and EU are in dire threat of being conquered by rising economic and military might of Iran. Awesome comparison.
They seem to have perfectly fine relations with Saudi Arabia?
Also, you do know that most of his "outlandish quotes" are usually either purposefully mistranslated, or ripped massively out of context?
Their government has made multiple attempts of normalizing relations, only to be rebuked? Last documented and public ones were made during Bush Jr. era, after 9/11.
I would argue that we have a good example on how getting nukes on both sides of the major conflict works. From NATO vs Warsaw pact, to more modern and far more similar India vs Pakistan, nuclear weapons brought direct hostilities of any kind to a crushing halt. It's actually scary enough to have a nuclear MAD that even religious nuts in Pakistan and India can't find enough support for another nice little war in Kashmir like ones they were so fond of before they both got nukes.
Now it's barely tough words anymore. Nukes are apparently scarier then Allah, Buddha and all the Hindu gods combined.
Perhaps Iran getting nukes and entering effective MAD with Israel would finally get some peace to Middle East, just like it did to Kashmir.
Thanks, I never imagined to be mentioned as "top 1%". I'm nowhere near wealthy enough, at least in my home country. I don't think I'm wealthy enough even by russian standards to qualify.
Anyway, I disagree with "nothing he did was magic" in sense that much of what he did improved lives of people. Quite a fewmy former employers/contractors want to sell to russian consumer, which would in turn require significant buying power from said consumer. Pre-Putin that was in the shitter and sales were marginal at best. Right now, it's on a very good level, and stuff like diary products from my country sells really well, and we have a big influx of middle class (not top 1% as you put it, but real MIDDLE class) buying properties in the border region and spending money on tourism in that region. Economy on our eastern border has gotten out of shitter and is quite well off because of that. This simply didn't exist ten years ago.
In other words, what Putin did in eight-ten years is very visibly different from what was done in eight-ten years before him on both sides of the border. Imho that difference is indeed "magic" in terms of success, and is often dismissed by critics when it really shouldn't be - when you increase average salary of your people by almost twenty times in less then a decade, you deserve recognition.
Worth noting, I worked with people in Russian market throughout last 15 years in on-off relationship and have a fairly decent view on what happened in there from corporate perspective. From moments like paying people under the table in cash "for repairs" to get permits, to simply having to watch over russian workmen and having to teach them that drinking on the job is unacceptable, I've encountered a lot of very interesting parts of their culture. That said, I've also observed the change, and these are my observations: of a person that worked in that market, met and known (and still knows) people who live there, in some cases intimately.
You point of view may differ from mine, but if there's one thing that I am not, that is a paid stooge. Or stooge in general. My main interests are that Russia doesn't sink in the same economic hole it was in the end of last millenium, so that my job prospects on that market remain positive. And having communists in power would put that possibility into "very likely" category.
Does this help you understand my point of view, and why I view stable continuation of current power structure as an overall positive?
I agree, I'm merely pointing out that from Western point of view, United Russia is still a better choice then two other meaningful options, and that we're mostly lucky that the "opposition parties" aren't getting a lot more votes, but instead less people seem to be voting.
I would really hate to see Russia being led by communists or even worse, ultra-nationalists.
In 2000 or so, when Putin came to power. You can see the results in standards of living, average salary went from around 455 USD to 7680USD. That's almost twenty times in just eight years of rule - consider the numbers for a moment before you quote your favorite "but Russia is corrupt" stooge. These are changes that average people see in their every day lives and they have been massive, and if you ask people who actually live there, rather then stooges hired by specific parties and often interviewed in Western media, they will tell you this.
As mentioned above, the main reason Putin is no longer as popular as he was before was because these positive changes have been visibly stalled.
That means that you're willing to watch banners of huge, well-off sites and are willing to let every single small specialized site you visit die.
Are you sure you're not mixing your priorities?
Yes, "real" choice means having an actual choice, more then choosing from two storefronts representing exactly the same shop. Perfect choice would mean having a separate shop for every issue, and I don't think anyone has been asking for that. I know I didn't.