>>Where do the extents of a 'public performance' end? Radios on in cabs?" That royalty collecting agent has already done that in Hong Kong (it was a British colony) 20 years ago. It may just politically too incorrect to carry out the same extortion campaign back in Britain at that time. They sent undercover agents around to ride taxis, visiting small mom-and-pa shops. Then they show their ID and the recording industry style letter to extort thousand dollars of money. They are greedy bastards.
Yeah right. Please send a custom officer to each academic conference to arrest those evil foreign professors who "illegally" delivers workshops in advance of the main conferences. As long as the conference is truly international and world class, the officer can be guaranteed to catch a few Indian, Chinese, Japanese, German or Brits "work illegally without a permit".
As far as I know nearly every single one of them fills in the entry form as an individual who travels to US to attend a conference/ workshop. People got to realize these foreign professors or experts are doing US favor, rather than skimming the work opportunity of US citizen.
>>Now, I get around that by using free (if old and unmaintained) software like ZipCentral and >>Crimson Editor, but not everybody feels that way. You can get something better than that. In my company, the IT manager has just replaced all the expired trial copies of Winzip and TextPad with 7zip and Notepad++ (both are OSS). Better quality than the sharewares IMO.
In fact, it is a good indication why the top 500 site is a bad indication for web dominance. If you are a sucessful global company (e.g. Sony, Siemens, Samsung, same for internet companies like google, yahoo, eBay etc), you tend to use a.com domain name at the top and direct the traffic to the localised version in accordance to the selected language. In that case, it is really not that sure what the top 500 site statistics mean. For example, a hypothetical site www.example.com can choose either www.example.co.uk or www.example.com/uk for its British localised version. This affects the statistics for arbitrary reasons.
Also, the beauty of web is decentralisation. Suppose all 1 million bloggers in my country all choose one out of two main blogger sites, then you will see both of them enter top 500. Suppose now we have 2 million bloggers, but the market is now more diversified and spread amongst 10 blogger sites, the statistics may well show 0 sites out of top 500 (and wrongly suggested that Internet is no longer popular in my region).
Aggregated access data for each region is a much more reliable indication if can be obtained....
I add one more medical profession. It is probably one of the most self servicing professional group.
Every developed country seems to have a shortage of medical doctor. According to the prevalent god of free market economy, labour shortage leads to a rise in salary (already happened), which in turn attracts more people to join the trade and thus restored the equilibrium point. It happened to IT guys, engineers and lawyers. But, I cannot see that happen anywhere in the world (with exception to Cuba, how ironic).
The fact is in medical councials/ associations are the most powerful lobby group. They always claim that it is expensive to train medical doctors. That's why they could not afford the chance of overtrain junior doctors. But, if we break down the cost, we can see that labour cost (medical professors have clinical loading, who are actually medical doctor themselves) is the big part. The argument goes into circle by itself.
Yes, and of those, only 137 million Chinese are online. In contrast, the US has about 185 million online. In terms of Internet usage, with 137 Million users, China has already occupied the second place in the world. The country with the highest number of Internet users (US) find that the biggest source of external attack is from zombie machines of the second highest one (China) is not a surprise to me.
Some may argue that broadband subscription is not that high in China. I don't think that's the case. In 2005, the number of DSL line in China reached 25 million (c.f. US has 49 millions subscribers of DSL+Cable in 2006, and Japan which is in the third place has 22 millions). Even if the broadband growth in China is zero percent in 2006, the DSL figure in 2005 has already place her to the second place in terms of broadband subscriptions...
>>So far, to get Avian Flu a person needs to eat or have contact >>with infected birds. Largely correct. But, I don't think the flu virus is heat-stable. The danger lies in the food processing stage, rather than eating.
I think DNA tests are way better than 99% (ie. 1% false positive). However, massive collection of DNA do care a very serious problem in statistical sense.
Suppose we have got a test which will give wrong answer in one out of 10 millions tests and we need to solve a homocide case. If we start with a number of suspects (say 10 gang associate deal recently with the victim) and use DNA test to nail down the right guy, the test is pretty robust (as long as the lab does not cross-contaminate/ mis-label the samples). The chance of accusing the wrong guy is (1-(1-1e-7)^10), about one in one million.
But, if the government is going to collect massive amount of samples and use DNA test to screen, the picture can be very different. I won't be suprised if 20 million records will be collected in 5 years. On average we will find two person to match the profile...
I notice that there is not any sidebar text ad when I search "yahoo" from google. And it is the same vice versa. I am a bit curious to know whether yahoo and google block their rivals ad explicitly or simply because they (and other advertisers) don't advertise in such crazy way.
What would happen if you create such keyword in banner auction. For those with advertiser account in google/yahoo, do you mean running this little experiment for the rest of us?
Yeah. I remember those "good" old days. Floppy disk swapping was a fun (and often annoying) experience. It was not uncommon to bring stacks of floppies (>50) to school.
Like most high school geeks, we were cheap. We used to buy single high density 720kB, drilled a hole on the side, and format that as if 1.44MB double high density. Sometimes, we made further mayhem by using one of those non-standard 1.72+MB format. Floppy disks (esp the cheap ones) are failure prone to start with. Our obsessive in maximising the data/dollar figure increased the disk failure to double digit. So, we often duplicated the important disks. Quite a good training in control quality in retrospect.
I do academic research on online auction (although not on the legal side). I believe I have a bit to say upon this topic.
Shill bidding is illegal at least in UK. In fact, making any artificial distortion to an auction market is illegal. I can make two examples and most will agree while collusion between bidders/sellers *should* be classified as a crime. First example: in a fish market, the fish buyers form an illegal cartel. Only one of them bid for the whole lot of fish at the min price and divide the loot amongst themselves afterwards. The poor fishman gets $1 for his boat load of fish. Clearly it is a rid off to him. Second example: auction exists in many different from in the financial market. For example, stock exchange uses continuous double auctions which match the bids with the asks. Suppose a client want to buy 100 shares of Googles right now at the market price, an unhonest broker can instruct a collaborator to buy 100 shares first and immediate resell that to his client at a higher price.
In the above two examples, the victim (and the loss) can be identified easily. But, in the eBay / flea market shilling example, it is not that clear who is the victim. Just like those $9.99, $29.99, $999.99 price tag, you can consider that as a marketing plot. One may be tempted to ask the rationale behind that law. I believe the paradox is caused by the confusion between pricing of the goods: the fish/stock is a common value good while most eBay items are private value goods. People values a common value good the same way as the next person. Therefore, manipulating its price affect everyone. But, for private goods (e.g. special edition of your college newspaper in 1980 may be valuable to the alumnus in your school, more so to some people, but clearly I have no interest in this), everyone has his own value. So, one can just bid up to his private value. If the shill bid turns out to be unrealistically too high, let the seller burns himself. Because of this reason, I see little point to legislate against shill bid against private value items.
Technically, it is often difficult to classify which item is private/ common. Therefore, the law is in place. But, I would say it is mainly focusing on the big fish esp in financial market (and to a lesser extend, the agriculture/fishery markets. Controlling the auctions used to be the lifeline of many Mafia/Triad groups in various part of the world). No one really cares about eBay even until now.
Here is my entry to BBC. I have the right attitude, I understand the community and I know the jargon. I should be the winner for the FOSS catagory if the BBC judges are half way decent.
My entry ====================== To BBC: can't you RTFA
>>Two: "Borrowed" corporate editions, etc. will validate despite being, well, "borrowed". I don't want to turn this into flamewar... But, one problem of the current world is your boss "borrowed" your time even when you are at home. Boss: You want to leave "early" (which can be N hours already after your supposed end of your work hour) fine. But, still I want to see this {program/report/proposal/and what not} by tomorrow morning....
What's wrong with borrowing the corporate edition when the "home" PC is occupied by work....
100% different. These satellites are designed to accept command for de-orbit. They are not capturing the satellite or whatever. If you have to compare, I would have to say launching a satellite is closer to test an ASAT than this.
Someone knowledgable to this topic told me that the difficulty of retrieving satellite this way is not on the sky, but on the ground (ocean).... because you have to get a worldwide coverage of stations in order to observe and control the re-entry. It is not a trival task both technologically and politically.
Before calling the poor woman a lemming/ a candidate for Darwin's award blahblahblah, I got to ask why can't they (the organisers) supply isotonic sports drink in this sort of competition?
Water intoxication is more common than many of us would like to think. It is part of the reason why many marathons now supply sports drink in addition to water. Newbies in many cases either don't drink enough or cannot stop drinking until water drains them from the inside.
I guess it is related to the thrust-to-weight ratio of their engine. Increasing from 3 to 4 stages improves efficiency a bit but certainly reduces the reliablity. But, if you don't have enough thrust, you leave with little choice. The other option is to strap a bunch of boosters or use heck lot of engines (You can find some very impressive photo on the web for one of the Soviet Union era rocket... It looks like a fire cracker to me)....
In my opinion, Spaghetti design pattern is the most important AJAX design pattern: It may look like a mess. But, it works somehow and it tastes good as well:)
Geeks try to rationalise everything in terms of measurable physical factors (e.g. reliablity, stability, performance per dollar). But, we tend to forget what everyone else cares more about the human factor...
Put that this way, Vaio is an overpriced laptop (so as designer clothing, Rolex and Ferrari). But, it makes the owner looks cool. It is more important than anything else. As long as the product kind of works and the price tag remains high, Sony can get away with it... According to my biased sampling from people around me, the attitude towards Sony is one of the fairly reliable test for (non)-geekiness.
The Far East, and in particular the Japanese, are absolutely light years ahead when it comes to robotics. This is one party that you have come to far, far, far too late to.
It is not at all conclusive to say Japanese are light years ahead if you have attended one of the major annual robotic conference (e.g. ICRA or IROS). In fact, I believe the US still leads.
The Japaneses built the best humanoid robot in this planet. Not many people has any doubts. The Honda robot is a prime example. The Americans have a different focus. In the theorectical side, they contribute a lot more on the system-wide problems (e.g. path planning, environment understanding and team co-op). The hottest application is in military. Search for PackBot for example... One may argue that it is nothing more a robust remote control bot... But, hey, Honda robot does not have much intelligence either... It champs in mechanical design. In addition, many design aspects of UAV are closely related to robotics research (object avoidance, target recognition etc).
Do you realise an interesting fact from the article: "[Appeals Judge] Beeson"? It is a typical Anglo Saxon surname. Even after the 1997 transition, Hong Kong still maintains its legal system is largely intact. It has full autonomy especially for the vast majority of cases that are not very political in nature. It follows the common law system as Britain, and still uses the same case laws. Many lawyers and even judges are from other common law countries...
However, Hong Kong is the bridge head for laissez-faire capitalism economy ideology since the colonial era. Many laws and the elites in the society are strongly pro-business. Milton Friedman, the influential Nobel prize economist, once said "if you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#Hong_ Kong. The case is just revealing how raw capitalism is supposed to work.
The Japanese dolphin hunting video is bloody pathetic. While the definition of what is edible varies between cultures, the point here is their way to hunt and kill dolphin is excessively violent and unnecessary (e.g. tie the dolphin tail to the back of a truck and drive away... for the surviving ones let them to die slowly after being stabbed with knief for a couple of times). Besides, dolphins tend to travel for a fair distance and are in the open ocean most of the time. They belong to more than a single nation. The Japanese do not farm them. It is not really comparable to say eating cattle or even dogs. http://www.youtube.com/watch?eurl=&v=4UOGgUdNhVM
I am *not* an environmentalist... If you don't like Joaquin Phoenix's commentary, switch off the speaker while watching the video... You can reach your own neutral judgement. But, please do watch.
I do waste some time to follow those links... They basically boast how the USAF got beaten up by Indian Air Force (IAF) in a joint exercise. But, I guess you can duplicate those results only in "simulated" situations, e.g. IAF suddenly fires live ammo at USAF.
USAF basically used the joint exercise to stress test its gear against the best available Soviet ones. It involves 10 Su-30 vs 4 F16. Su-30 is not a bad fighter, same class as F-15. Now, USAF use the small brother (F16) to fight against the bigger one... In addition, it is outnumbered by 2.5 to 1 and the primary mode of engagement is by dogfight.... It just tells us that in the absolute worst scenario, USAF can lose a few planes. Give me a baseball bat, I can probably destroy a F22 as well on the tarmac.
Sorry... The real world is also similar... A lot of people spend big money on racing car, exclusive club membership, trendy restaurant and clothing are because of similar reason. The impression that they belong to an "alpha" group make them feel great. Most of us, the geeks, just do not buy into this...
So, you and me hang round here. And you wasted your precious 30 seconds reading my rant:p
The problem is the quality of the "Google Answer" is not particularly high. And you cannot really use this sort of the answer to back up anything.
In 95% of cases, a bit of googling will bring you something of the same quality. I guess the Yahoo Answer is the not the exact reason whey Google Answer folds... This case is more like cannibalism between projects...
Slashdot Mirror
>>Where do the extents of a 'public performance' end? Radios on in cabs?"
That royalty collecting agent has already done that in Hong Kong (it was a British colony) 20 years ago. It may just politically too incorrect to carry out the same extortion campaign back in Britain at that time. They sent undercover agents around to ride taxis, visiting small mom-and-pa shops. Then they show their ID and the recording industry style letter to extort thousand dollars of money. They are greedy bastards.
Yeah right. Please send a custom officer to each academic conference to arrest those evil foreign professors who "illegally" delivers workshops in advance of the main conferences. As long as the conference is truly international and world class, the officer can be guaranteed to catch a few Indian, Chinese, Japanese, German or Brits "work illegally without a permit".
As far as I know nearly every single one of them fills in the entry form as an individual who travels to US to attend a conference/ workshop. People got to realize these foreign professors or experts are doing US favor, rather than skimming the work opportunity of US citizen.
>>Now, I get around that by using free (if old and unmaintained) software like ZipCentral and >>Crimson Editor, but not everybody feels that way.
You can get something better than that. In my company, the IT manager has just replaced all the expired trial copies of Winzip and TextPad with 7zip and Notepad++ (both are OSS). Better quality than the sharewares IMO.
In fact, it is a good indication why the top 500 site is a bad indication for web dominance. If you are a sucessful global company (e.g. Sony, Siemens, Samsung, same for internet companies like google, yahoo, eBay etc), you tend to use a .com domain name at the top and direct the traffic to the localised version in accordance to the selected language. In that case, it is really not that sure what the top 500 site statistics mean. For example, a hypothetical site www.example.com can choose either www.example.co.uk or www.example.com/uk for its British localised version. This affects the statistics for arbitrary reasons.
Also, the beauty of web is decentralisation. Suppose all 1 million bloggers in my country all choose one out of two main blogger sites, then you will see both of them enter top 500. Suppose now we have 2 million bloggers, but the market is now more diversified and spread amongst 10 blogger sites, the statistics may well show 0 sites out of top 500 (and wrongly suggested that Internet is no longer popular in my region).
Aggregated access data for each region is a much more reliable indication if can be obtained....
I add one more medical profession. It is probably one of the most self servicing professional group.
Every developed country seems to have a shortage of medical doctor. According to the prevalent god of free market economy, labour shortage leads to a rise in salary (already happened), which in turn attracts more people to join the trade and thus restored the equilibrium point. It happened to IT guys, engineers and lawyers. But, I cannot see that happen anywhere in the world (with exception to Cuba, how ironic).
The fact is in medical councials/ associations are the most powerful lobby group. They always claim that it is expensive to train medical doctors. That's why they could not afford the chance of overtrain junior doctors. But, if we break down the cost, we can see that labour cost (medical professors have clinical loading, who are actually medical doctor themselves) is the big part. The argument goes into circle by itself.
Some may argue that broadband subscription is not that high in China.
I don't think that's the case. In 2005, the number of DSL line in China reached 25 million (c.f. US has 49 millions subscribers of DSL+Cable in 2006, and Japan which is in the third place has 22 millions). Even if the broadband growth in China is zero percent in 2006, the DSL figure in 2005 has already place her to the second place in terms of broadband subscriptions...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DSL_countries.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_Internet_a
>>So far, to get Avian Flu a person needs to eat or have contact
>>with infected birds.
Largely correct. But, I don't think the flu virus is heat-stable. The danger lies in the food processing stage, rather than eating.
I think DNA tests are way better than 99% (ie. 1% false positive). However, massive collection of DNA do care a very serious problem in statistical sense.
Suppose we have got a test which will give wrong answer in one out of 10 millions tests and we need to solve a homocide case. If we start with a number of suspects (say 10 gang associate deal recently with the victim) and use DNA test to nail down the right guy, the test is pretty robust (as long as the lab does not cross-contaminate/ mis-label the samples). The chance of accusing the wrong guy is (1-(1-1e-7)^10), about one in one million.
But, if the government is going to collect massive amount of samples and use DNA test to screen, the picture can be very different. I won't be suprised if 20 million records will be collected in 5 years. On average we will find two person to match the profile...
Now, I reveal the best kept secret in academia, which is ..........
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
[Frankly, many profs don't do any research anyway...]
I notice that there is not any sidebar text ad when I search "yahoo" from google. And it is the same vice versa. I am a bit curious to know whether yahoo and google block their rivals ad explicitly or simply because they (and other advertisers) don't advertise in such crazy way.
What would happen if you create such keyword in banner auction. For those with advertiser account in google/yahoo, do you mean running this little experiment for the rest of us?
Yeah. I remember those "good" old days. Floppy disk swapping was a fun (and often annoying) experience. It was not uncommon to bring stacks of floppies (>50) to school.
Like most high school geeks, we were cheap. We used to buy single high density 720kB, drilled a hole on the side, and format that as if 1.44MB double high density. Sometimes, we made further mayhem by using one of those non-standard 1.72+MB format. Floppy disks (esp the cheap ones) are failure prone to start with. Our obsessive in maximising the data/dollar figure increased the disk failure to double digit. So, we often duplicated the important disks. Quite a good training in control quality in retrospect.
I do academic research on online auction (although not on the legal side). I believe I have a bit to say upon this topic.
Shill bidding is illegal at least in UK. In fact, making any artificial distortion to an auction market is illegal. I can make two examples and most will agree while collusion between bidders/sellers *should* be classified as a crime. First example: in a fish market, the fish buyers form an illegal cartel. Only one of them bid for the whole lot of fish at the min price and divide the loot amongst themselves afterwards. The poor fishman gets $1 for his boat load of fish. Clearly it is a rid off to him. Second example: auction exists in many different from in the financial market. For example, stock exchange uses continuous double auctions which match the bids with the asks. Suppose a client want to buy 100 shares of Googles right now at the market price, an unhonest broker can instruct a collaborator to buy 100 shares first and immediate resell that to his client at a higher price.
In the above two examples, the victim (and the loss) can be identified easily. But, in the eBay / flea market shilling example, it is not that clear who is the victim. Just like those $9.99, $29.99, $999.99 price tag, you can consider that as a marketing plot. One may be tempted to ask the rationale behind that law. I believe the paradox is caused by the confusion between pricing of the goods: the fish/stock is a common value good while most eBay items are private value goods. People values a common value good the same way as the next person. Therefore, manipulating its price affect everyone. But, for private goods (e.g. special edition of your college newspaper in 1980 may be valuable to the alumnus in your school, more so to some people, but clearly I have no interest in this), everyone has his own value. So, one can just bid up to his private value. If the shill bid turns out to be unrealistically too high, let the seller burns himself. Because of this reason, I see little point to legislate against shill bid against private value items.
Technically, it is often difficult to classify which item is private/ common. Therefore, the law is in place. But, I would say it is mainly focusing on the big fish esp in financial market (and to a lesser extend, the agriculture/fishery markets. Controlling the auctions used to be the lifeline of many Mafia/Triad groups in various part of the world). No one really cares about eBay even until now.
Here is my entry to BBC. I have the right attitude, I understand the community and I know the jargon. I should be the winner for the FOSS catagory if the BBC judges are half way decent.
My entry
======================
To BBC: can't you RTFA
>>Two: "Borrowed" corporate editions, etc. will validate despite being, well, "borrowed".
I don't want to turn this into flamewar... But, one problem of the current world is your boss "borrowed" your time even when you are at home. Boss: You want to leave "early" (which can be N hours already after your supposed end of your work hour) fine. But, still I want to see this {program/report/proposal/and what not} by tomorrow morning....
What's wrong with borrowing the corporate edition when the "home" PC is occupied by work....
100% different. These satellites are designed to accept command for de-orbit. They are not capturing the satellite or whatever. If you have to compare, I would have to say launching a satellite is closer to test an ASAT than this.
Someone knowledgable to this topic told me that the difficulty of retrieving satellite this way is not on the sky, but on the ground (ocean).... because you have to get a worldwide coverage of stations in order to observe and control the re-entry. It is not a trival task both technologically and politically.
Before calling the poor woman a lemming/ a candidate for Darwin's award blahblahblah, I got to ask why can't they (the organisers) supply isotonic sports drink in this sort of competition?
Water intoxication is more common than many of us would like to think. It is part of the reason why many marathons now supply sports drink in addition to water. Newbies in many cases either don't drink enough or cannot stop drinking until water drains them from the inside.
I guess it is related to the thrust-to-weight ratio of their engine. Increasing from 3 to 4 stages improves efficiency a bit but certainly reduces the reliablity. But, if you don't have enough thrust, you leave with little choice. The other option is to strap a bunch of boosters or use heck lot of engines (You can find some very impressive photo on the web for one of the Soviet Union era rocket... It looks like a fire cracker to me)....
In my opinion, Spaghetti design pattern is the most important AJAX design pattern: :)
It may look like a mess. But, it works somehow and it tastes good as well
Geeks try to rationalise everything in terms of measurable physical factors (e.g. reliablity, stability, performance per dollar). But, we tend to forget what everyone else cares more about the human factor...
Put that this way, Vaio is an overpriced laptop (so as designer clothing, Rolex and Ferrari). But, it makes the owner looks cool. It is more important than anything else. As long as the product kind of works and the price tag remains high, Sony can get away with it... According to my biased sampling from people around me, the attitude towards Sony is one of the fairly reliable test for (non)-geekiness.
It is not at all conclusive to say Japanese are light years ahead if you have attended one of the major annual robotic conference (e.g. ICRA or IROS). In fact, I believe the US still leads.
The Japaneses built the best humanoid robot in this planet. Not many people has any doubts. The Honda robot is a prime example. The Americans have a different focus. In the theorectical side, they contribute a lot more on the system-wide problems (e.g. path planning, environment understanding and team co-op). The hottest application is in military. Search for PackBot for example... One may argue that it is nothing more a robust remote control bot... But, hey, Honda robot does not have much intelligence either... It champs in mechanical design. In addition, many design aspects of UAV are closely related to robotics research (object avoidance, target recognition etc).
Do you realise an interesting fact from the article: "[Appeals Judge] Beeson"? It is a typical Anglo Saxon surname. Even after the 1997 transition, Hong Kong still maintains its legal system is largely intact. It has full autonomy especially for the vast majority of cases that are not very political in nature. It follows the common law system as Britain, and still uses the same case laws. Many lawyers and even judges are from other common law countries...
_ Kong.
However, Hong Kong is the bridge head for laissez-faire capitalism economy ideology since the colonial era. Many laws and the elites in the society are strongly pro-business. Milton Friedman, the influential Nobel prize economist, once said "if you want to see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman#Hong
The case is just revealing how raw capitalism is supposed to work.
The Japanese dolphin hunting video is bloody pathetic. While the definition of what is edible varies between cultures, the point here is their way to hunt and kill dolphin is excessively violent and unnecessary (e.g. tie the dolphin tail to the back of a truck and drive away... for the surviving ones let them to die slowly after being stabbed with knief for a couple of times). Besides, dolphins tend to travel for a fair distance and are in the open ocean most of the time. They belong to more than a single nation. The Japanese do not farm them. It is not really comparable to say eating cattle or even dogs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?eurl=&v=4UOGgUdNhVM
I am *not* an environmentalist... If you don't like Joaquin Phoenix's commentary, switch off the speaker while watching the video... You can reach your own neutral judgement. But, please do watch.
I do waste some time to follow those links... They basically boast how the USAF got beaten up by Indian Air Force (IAF) in a joint exercise. But, I guess you can duplicate those results only in "simulated" situations, e.g. IAF suddenly fires live ammo at USAF.
USAF basically used the joint exercise to stress test its gear against the best available Soviet ones. It involves 10 Su-30 vs 4 F16. Su-30 is not a bad fighter, same class as F-15. Now, USAF use the small brother (F16) to fight against the bigger one... In addition, it is outnumbered by 2.5 to 1 and the primary mode of engagement is by dogfight.... It just tells us that in the absolute worst scenario, USAF can lose a few planes. Give me a baseball bat, I can probably destroy a F22 as well on the tarmac.
Sorry... The real world is also similar... A lot of people spend big money on racing car, exclusive club membership, trendy restaurant and clothing are because of similar reason. The impression that they belong to an "alpha" group make them feel great. Most of us, the geeks, just do not buy into this...
:p
So, you and me hang round here. And you wasted your precious 30 seconds reading my rant
The problem is the quality of the "Google Answer" is not particularly high. And you cannot really use this sort of the answer to back up anything.
In 95% of cases, a bit of googling will bring you something of the same quality. I guess the Yahoo Answer is the not the exact reason whey Google Answer folds... This case is more like cannibalism between projects...