I've worked for a company where "free" philosophy was felt from top to bottom. yet even there, we were running MS office in Wine on every desktop. there is just no way of functioning in corporate world without it.
Simply not true. My company has been functioning without MS Office quite happily for about 5 years now. We have precisely one seat of MS Office which is on my personal laptop that we can bust out if there is an emergency but the last time I did that was about 2-3 years ago. Unless you are already an MS Office shop or have a very specific use case where you need it, you can exist quite happily without it.
the only way to successfully use open/libre-office is to export your documents to pdf before emailing them to clients.
That is a good practice in general. I almost never send anything but a PDF to someone unless they have a need to edit the document or they specifically request some other format. Then you don't have any formatting issues or someone editing the document without authorization.
the only other place i've ever come across who sent us.ODT documents was LINX (london internet exchange). other than them, every single time i sent somebody a document in ODT format, i got an email back asking for a different format. that is the unfortunate reality we live in today.
So send them a.DOC file. LibreOffice does a more than respectable job with all but the hairiest MS Office documents. We send and receive files from other companies all the time. Internally we mostly use ODT but some stuff in DOC as well. Even a few in DOCX.
The absence of a serious alternative to MS Access or easy/documemnted scripting [via macros] and VBA, as found in Excel is a non starter for me.
There are plenty of alternatives to MS Access unless you have some peculiar requirement that it be shipped to you in an office suite. Kind of ridiculous that you think it should be a clone of MS Office. Personally I use Filemaker when I'm going with proprietary small databases but there are plenty of open source options too.
As for macros LibreOffice Calc has fairly robust macro capability. It doesn't use VBA but so what? If you have tied yourself to Excel with a bunch of VBA scripts then you're probably stuck with Excel unless you want to do a lot of coding. Probably not good planning to hog tie yourself with proprietary technology but I know a lot of people do it with Excel+VBA.
LibreOffce or Open Office just do not cut it!
That's funny. I've standardized my company on LibreOffice and it works great for us. Been using it exclusively for 5 years now without problems. Not the right solution for everyone but it works great for us.
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
That would imply there is a viewpoint to be censored instead of a troll just out to cause trouble. I think the latter happens FAR more often than the former.
Well then, would you prefer Bush or Clinton? Neither of them qualifies either...
If the alternative is Trump then yes I would prefer either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton. That's not an endorsement of them but rather an indication of how little regard I have for Trump.
Sadly, the type of person who is actually qualified won't run and can't win anyway.
Too often that is true. There have been some well qualified candidates but not nearly enough. The last guy who had the resume was probably George H.W. Bush (Bush 41, NOT Bush 43). Before him we'd probably have to go back to LBJ or Eisenhower. Nixon was probably adequately qualified for the job but obviously lacked a moral compass more than most presidents. Not judging how good they were, just whether they had good qualifications coming into the job. The former governors who have gotten the job recently (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 43) have been a mixed bag of mostly mediocrity with Bush 43 being absolute crap.
Pretty much comes with the territory if you browse from your home or cell phone.
Doesn't mean I'm ok with it. And on a PC my options to block their ads and tracking tools are fairly robust so they'll have a hard time getting useful information from me that way.
Remember, they also track by IP address and browser attributes, which often allows advertisers to watch you even if you don't store any cookies
Even if they track those things they have no business model if they cannot get the ads in front of my face. An IP address doesn't really tell who is behind it and I'm certainly not about to give up and make it easy for them.
I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video.
But you are ok with them tracking your browsing? Personally I find most ads to be intrusive, annoying and sometimes downright creepy but the tracking is the worst aspect of the whole thing. And the people doing the advertising can't help themselves in trying to track what I'm doing which is why I have AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, PrivacyBadger, Flashblock, etc all installed at the same time. They started this arms race and I'll be damned if I'm going to lose.
I have NO problem paying for a site or service I find valuable and I do pay for some. If they base their business model on pushing annoying ads at me that I can block then that is their problem, not mine.
Then freedom is not possible to ever happen. Some peopel want to do things to others, and consider it a restriction of their freedoms to do those things to others.
If you take an absurdly absolutist definition of freedom (no restrictions on me ever) then yes, it isn't possible for a population >1. I don't really think that is a useful discussion however.
Freedom in more practical terms is a relative state within a society. It is minimizing the restrictions on behavior rather than eliminating them altogether. It also provide reasonable protections against the harmful actions of others. It's sort of akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You cannot simultaneously have both absolute freedom of action AND absolute freedom from the actions of others in a society. You can only have both up to a certain point. If they aren't balanced then you end up in a dictatorship or anarchy.
We cannot have freedom when we have any laws at all.
Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want. Never has been. That is anarchy which is not the same thing. Freedom is FAR more complicated than the absence of laws. Freedom is not just absence of restrictions on you but also absence of things being done TO you. A complete absence of laws for you necessarily means a loss of freedom for me because there is nothing restraining you (or me) from removing other people's freedom. Societies cannot exist without rules, both formal and informal and yet freedom under reasonable definitions of the term still exists.
If there is no law against slavery is the slave-owner free? The slave certainly isn't. But with laws against slavery we can fairly describe both people as free so the absolutist definition of freedom only existing when there are no laws simply makes no sense.
Why does it matter? Don't hate the player, hate the game. It doesn't bother me if Trump as a businessman engaged in standard business practices. He's now saying the game sucks and needs to be changed.
It's almost axiomatic that we need immigration reforms. Saying that fact is hardly a revelation. The real question is WHAT changes. Saying we need change without a credible and achievable plan to do it is meaningless. Nothing that has come out of Trump's mouth is a credible plan for change. It's rhetoric designed to pander to people who are already pissed off about the issue. Pointing out the obvious fact that there is a problem does not constitute a plausible plan to fix it.
I'd be inclined to see whether his various business ventures have exhibited this sort of hiring policy; or whether he's a "Buy American!" sort of guy when looking for votes; and a buy Mexican sort of guy when looking for labor...
Trump CLEARLY would never say anything that wasn't true or self serving... [/sarcasm]
Seriously, anyone thinking of actually voting for this guy is an idiot. Trump may be good for a laugh but he is not presidential material. We need someone who will actually try to understand issues before spewing whatever dumb idea jumps first into his mouth. Someone who has more nuance to their rhetoric than calling people "losers" or "rapists". There should be some dignity to the office and dignity is something Trump completely lacks. He might have said something that appeals on this one issue but that hardly makes him the guy you should vote for.
I don't think anyone's asking them to jump in front of a bullet. Though they are generally wearing body armor so they are better equipped than you or me. But their right to personal safety is not without bounds and they cannot do their job without accepting some risk. They signed up for the job and they knew it was risky. They don't have to be stupid about it but if someone is in danger I absolutely expect them to make reasonable efforts to help even if that involves some amount of risk to themselves. If they want a completely safe job they should have done something else.
A police officer's FIRST duty is to keep themselves alive so they can uphold the law and protect as many people as feasible.
If that were true a lot more people would have died on 9/11 than actually did. Fire fighters and cops ran TOWARDS danger and saved lives which did protect as many people as possible. A police officer's first duty is supposed to be to the people they serve. If they are not willing to accept any risk to their own well being then they should pick another profession.
I don't think this is realistic. You really can't blame people for wanting to protect their own lives.
Sure I can. They signed up voluntarily for the duty. "Protect and serve". That means it is their job to get in harms way when necessary to protect the community and enforce the laws. I'm not saying they have to be stupid about it but their job should be to protect others first.
People who choose to sacrifice themselves for others are lauded because what they've done is extraordinary, heroic, above and beyond what can reasonably be expected. You're saying that we should expect extraordinary heroism.
No. What we should expect police to not behave like they are in a war zone. What we should expect is for them to actually try to save the lives of others. We expect them to behave like they belong in civilized society and not brutalize the people they are supposed to protect.
If you demand that police de-prioritize their own safety, they won't last long because their job does regularly place them in dangerous situations
Police work is demonstrably not as dangerous as many other professions. Jobs that are more dangerous incude: Truck driver, farming, construction worker, airline pilot, taxicab drivers, timber cutters, roofers, fishermen, structural metal workers and electricians. All of those professions have higher fatality rates than police officers. Injuries? Cops don't even make the list. While nobody would argue that police work doesn't have risk, the risks are overblown and in many cases caused by the very actions of the police themselves.
I'm not making that fatuous old claim that being a police officer is an extraordinarily dangerous job -- but the only reason it isn't extraordinarily dangerous is because officers are allowed to put their own safety first.
It's only extraordinarily dangerous if they are stupid about it. Gearing up like they are going to war is tantamount to picking a fight with their community. Their own actions are provocative and puts them in greater danger. Nobody is asking them to jump in front of a bullet. Use of force by police in the US is WAY higher than in other parts of the world. They use force because they can, not because they have to.
Huh? I think it's pretty safe to assume EVERY police officer, average or not, is ALWAYS interested in de-escalating a dangerous situation.
You're not a minority are you? There are PLENTY of police who are the ones doing the escalating. One merely has to examine the data on excessive use of force by police and you will quickly understand that cops are NOT always interested in de-escalation.
The A10 is a beautiful solution to a forty year old problem.
A problem which still exists and for which the A10 is still apparently quite effective.
Unfortunately, the Russians figured out that since the Americans built a flying tank killer, they'd have to start putting decent armour on top of their tanks.
I've seen no evidence that the Russians have a tank that is immune to the gun on the A10. Perhaps you are aware of something I am not?
As for SAMs, that is not a new problem for the A10 either. In fact the A10 is arguably better equipped against SAMs than many of the faster sexier aircraft out there since it was actually designed to take a hit and keep flying.
Actually, as I recall from the 80's, the US never renounced the first use of tactical nuclear weapons due to the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact forces over NATO in Europe -- that was the NATO ultimate force multiplier.
That is more or less correct. Even if they did "renounce" such tactics it wouldn't have meant anything really. A promise by a nation state can be revoked at any time.
And I recall the plans of how the USAF was going to beat the Russian Air Force by having each F-15 shoot down 5 (or was it 10?) MIG-21s. No one know how that would have really turned out.
Basically correct I think. The US would have had to use their superior airpower combined with available NATO ground forces to slow the Soviets until they could get reinforcements across the Atlantic ocean. They would have been outnumbered for a time - how long would be a question of effectiveness and how fast reinforcements could be brought up. It would be pretty desperate for a while - trading territory for time.
But if it were a full out Soviet tank invasion there is a HIGH probability that tactical nukes would have come into play. That was the real deterrent. If the soviets massed their tanks they would be vulnerable to nukes. If they didn't they would be operationally ineffective and vulnerable to US air power.
Though the Cold War has ended this situation still technically exists since Russia still has substantial ground forces. The problem is lessened with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union but I'm sure the US military and NATO still plans for it - just in case.
If you had followed closely the whole debate about the F-35, you'd know that the 20:1 figure is indeed supported by facts. It has to do with the ability of the US to wage war against distant enemies, e.g. China. In an hypothetical war with China
So you are basically talking about a purely hypothetical worst case scenario.
In an hypothetical war with China, the US would have a bunch of scattered air bases on small islands in the Pacific Ocean, with very limited aircraft capacities, only a fraction of those thousands of aircraft could be operated from there.
You mean small islands like Japan? Or Hawaii? Or Taiwan? Or Guam? You also appear to have forgotten about US aircraft carriers. Each carrier can park the better part of 100 planes off the coast of any country. That sounds like anti-F35 propaganda. It's hardly a difficult exercise to come up with highly unlikely scenarios with bad outcomes for US forces. Not very useful though for discussing doctrine or procurement. I have no problem with the notion that the F35 is a badly run program wasting a lot of money
The result would be that the US air force would be outnumbered: it doesn't matter the total number of your forces, it matters how scattered or concentrated they are.
It is HIGHLY unlikely the US Air Force + US Navy would find themselves in a situation where their aircraft were outnumbered 20:1 or even 10:1 for more than a brief time. The most likely such scenarios would involve some sort of sudden invasion from China or Russia on a US ally like Korea, Taiwan or western Europe. The ONLY countries with air forces numerically large enough to stress the US are China, Russia, India and some of the NATO countries banded together. If China suddenly surprise attacked Taiwan for example then sure the nearby US forces would be outnumbered badly for a time.
It does matter how large your force is because the larger it is the less scattered it has to be. Furthermore the US typically has 3-4 carrier battle groups deployed at any given time and military bases scattered around the world. The US has active bases in Hawaii, Korea, Japan, Guam, Singapore, Bahrain, Diego Garcia, and quite a few others. The US can have substantial aircraft assets anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours.
If I remember the numbers correctly, the USSR had 10:1 in their favor versus the entire NATO alliance when it came to MBTs. That is why the A-10 was built. The US was expecting to encounter an overwhelming ground force and needed the air superiority roles and close air support to slow down Russian armor. I could be mistaken, though.
You pretty much have it correct. The USSR had a very large numerical advantage in ground forces, particularly tanks and artillery and Russia still does to this day. That is exactly why the A10 was built and what informed US and NATO doctrine to this day. The US based their strategy on winning the air battle but backed up by tactical nukes if necessary.
I saw an A10 take off near my office the other day. I know a lot of people think it isn't a "pretty" plane but I've always thought it was super cool looking. Honestly I think the Air Force should hand it over to the Army though I know they never will. Close Air Support should be handled by the service that actually needs it. The Marines can do their own so the Army should be able to as well even if it involves a fixed wing aircraft. I don't really get why the air force is so down on the A10. It seems like one of the more cost effective pieces of equipment we've ever developed.
And that's the point that's being missed in this discussion, the fact that the US hasn't really gone up against anyone in head-to-head air combat since the Vietnam War
You mean except for the first Gulf War? While it was a huge mismatch the Iraqi air force had plenty of Mig-29, Mig-25, Mig-23 and Mirage F1 fighters which were reasonably modern at the time of the conflict. 36 Iraqi aircraft were shot down in aerial combat. That counts as going head to head even if the outcome was decidedly lopsided.
Honestly there are only a handful of countries that really could go head to head with US airpower and have a prayer of not getting massacred and even then it would really only be over their home country or close to it. The US has more planes, (generally) better planes and pilots as well trained as any in the world PLUS better infrastructure like AWACS and refueling, not to mention exactly half the worlds supply of aircraft carriers.
You are stepping close to the "dirty little secret" of the USAF, that the F15 on up they have had to put limiters on the planes lower than its real abilities because the simple fact is the planes can pull off moves that will kill the pilot, the meatsack behind the stick just can't handle what the plane is actually capable of.
Which is only relevant during some types of air combat maneuvering and you may be putting a bit too fine a point on it. There is a LOT more to it than that. The F15 can pull more Gs in *some* maneuvers than pilots can handle but not all of them.
This is why building new planes (instead of simply building more of the teen series) is not only wasteful its pointless, the planes we have now can already do more than any human body can take.
There is more to the success of a fighter or bomber than maneuverability in a dog fight. How good is the radar and targeting? How fast and how well can it identify targets? How fast can the plane accelerate? What is it's service ceiling? How does it perform at various altitudes? How fuel efficient is it? How expensive is it to service? How good is the pilot's situational awareness? What sort of support infrastructure does it need? What sort of runway is required? How detectible is it by radar or other targeting systems?
Even if the plane isn't a step up in maneuverability there is PLENTY of room to improve fighters and attack aircraft in a multitude of other ways. I don't pretend to know if the F35 is better or worse than previous generations of jets but saying that humans are already at their G-load limits isn't a sufficient argument against it.
The enemy will always outnumber them by dozens if not hundreds to one. We have gotten lucky that the only ones we have been fighting are goat herders, because if we fought somebody like Russia or China with an abundance of fourth gen fighters? Our new toys would be facing 20+ to 1 odds and probably get spanked right out of the sky.
The battle doctrine of the US military takes this explicitly into account. Remember that during the Cold War they had to deal with the fact that the US might be asked to defend Western Europe from an invasion from the Soviet Union. The Soviets had more tanks they could put into the theater of combat than the US could so the only real option when you are outnumbered is to have better gear and better training. You HAVE to be able to win engagements at a better than 1:1 ratio. At least in recent days the US has proven more than capable of doing that in conventional warfare. Unless the US were so stupid as to attack China or Russia directly I don't think any country in the world would want to tangle directly with the US military.
Saying the US would be facing 20:1 odds simply isn't supported by the facts. The US has FAR more combat aircraft than any other country and the US has exactly half (11/22) of the world's supply of aircraft carriers.
Youtube LLC is a wholy owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Read the news much?
Alphabet doesn't exist yet and even when it does Youtube LLC will still be a wholly owned subsidiary of Google Inc which in turn will be a subsidiary of Alphabet.
Besides, Google+ is not a subsidiary of Google, neither is Youtube.
Incorrect. Youtube LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google Inc. Large companies routinely are composed of a large number of smaller entities and Google is no exception. Youtube is ALSO a product but it is a corporation too.
They are just products offered by Google. They don't need to sublicense it to move it form one service or another.
Also incorrect. Just because both corporate entities are owned by the same company does not mean they automatically share the same rights or licensing to property.
None of those links proves your point. The argument that you can't modify them and then safely transport them afterwards is demonstrably nonsense. It has already been done countless times.
If you cut holes in a shipping container, and want to move it afterwards, you're going to have to reinforce it.
Duh. Any time you modify a structure you're probably going to have to reinforce part of it. Doesn't matter if it is mobile or not.
That can easily cost hundreds in materials alone, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can actually reduce the structural integrity of the container by welding it.
"Hundreds"? Wow, blows my budget... And if you don't know what you are doing then don't do it. Do I really have to point that out? Sure you can do welding badly, news at 11... Anything can be screwed up but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.
I looked into this from both ends, and it's obvious you've only tried to confirm your biases.
My "biases"? Whatever dude. This discussion is finished. You clearly don't have a clue and I'm obviously wasting my time...
Well it looks like it will fit nicely into a standard 20 foot container with room to spare.
How are you going to get it in there? This egg thing clearly isn't designed to be handled by common material handling equipment like forklifts or cranes.
Besides if you are going to put it in a shipping container, you might as well just convert the shipping container itself and use that instead. It'll be more practical, cheaper, more durable, easier to modify, easier to fix, more recyclable, recyclable, easier to transport, have a more sensible layout, easier to insulate, have more room for solar cells and not look as stupid.
Basically this egg thing is an epic fail on close to every level.
Shipping containers are not structurally sound once you drill a hole in one and need to be framed like a regular house if you don't want to die of suffocation.
Both problems are trivially solved with a bit of reinforcing metal and a welding torch. This has been done countless times already. Twenty seconds on Google would have established that this is not a problem. At all.
Or of boredom of being inside a black box.
You mean black boxes like these? Or these? Or these? Yeah, those are terribly boring places to be be... [/sarcasm]
Not according to the people who actually build the things. I've read interviews with them, and they disagree with you. I'm going to do with the voice of experience rather than the voice of Slashdot, thanks.
Citation please. Twenty seconds on Google establishes that you are making crap up. While there are no doubt some corner cases where modifications are ill advised, there is no fundamental obstacle to modification while maintaining structural integrity. You may add weight but even an amateur like me could do it with little more than a welding torch and some scrap steel.
Once you put a bunch of holes and stuff in it, good luck getting it on the trailer without harming it.
That's just nonsense. We move entire conventional houses that were in no way designed to be moved without damaging anything routinely. Moving a shipping container is trivial by comparison, modified or not.
You know what else is far more economical and eco-friendly than dragging houses around the planet? Moving just the people, and a little bit of stuff, and they change which house they live in.
It is also cheaper and more eco-friendly to build one dwelling and move it than it is to build two dwellings and only occupy one. Sometimes you don't want a dwelling to be permanently located somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
I've worked for a company where "free" philosophy was felt from top to bottom. yet even there, we were running MS office in Wine on every desktop. there is just no way of functioning in corporate world without it.
Simply not true. My company has been functioning without MS Office quite happily for about 5 years now. We have precisely one seat of MS Office which is on my personal laptop that we can bust out if there is an emergency but the last time I did that was about 2-3 years ago. Unless you are already an MS Office shop or have a very specific use case where you need it, you can exist quite happily without it.
the only way to successfully use open/libre-office is to export your documents to pdf before emailing them to clients.
That is a good practice in general. I almost never send anything but a PDF to someone unless they have a need to edit the document or they specifically request some other format. Then you don't have any formatting issues or someone editing the document without authorization.
the only other place i've ever come across who sent us .ODT documents was LINX (london internet exchange). other than them, every single time i sent somebody a document in ODT format, i got an email back asking for a different format. that is the unfortunate reality we live in today.
So send them a .DOC file. LibreOffice does a more than respectable job with all but the hairiest MS Office documents. We send and receive files from other companies all the time. Internally we mostly use ODT but some stuff in DOC as well. Even a few in DOCX.
The absence of a serious alternative to MS Access or easy/documemnted scripting [via macros] and VBA, as found in Excel is a non starter for me.
There are plenty of alternatives to MS Access unless you have some peculiar requirement that it be shipped to you in an office suite. Kind of ridiculous that you think it should be a clone of MS Office. Personally I use Filemaker when I'm going with proprietary small databases but there are plenty of open source options too.
As for macros LibreOffice Calc has fairly robust macro capability. It doesn't use VBA but so what? If you have tied yourself to Excel with a bunch of VBA scripts then you're probably stuck with Excel unless you want to do a lot of coding. Probably not good planning to hog tie yourself with proprietary technology but I know a lot of people do it with Excel+VBA.
LibreOffce or Open Office just do not cut it!
That's funny. I've standardized my company on LibreOffice and it works great for us. Been using it exclusively for 5 years now without problems. Not the right solution for everyone but it works great for us.
Of course, that's primarily because censoring viewpoints tales quite a bit of work and the more reflective an echo chamber you want to built the more censoring there is to be done.
That would imply there is a viewpoint to be censored instead of a troll just out to cause trouble. I think the latter happens FAR more often than the former.
Well then, would you prefer Bush or Clinton? Neither of them qualifies either...
If the alternative is Trump then yes I would prefer either Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton. That's not an endorsement of them but rather an indication of how little regard I have for Trump.
Sadly, the type of person who is actually qualified won't run and can't win anyway.
Too often that is true. There have been some well qualified candidates but not nearly enough. The last guy who had the resume was probably George H.W. Bush (Bush 41, NOT Bush 43). Before him we'd probably have to go back to LBJ or Eisenhower. Nixon was probably adequately qualified for the job but obviously lacked a moral compass more than most presidents. Not judging how good they were, just whether they had good qualifications coming into the job. The former governors who have gotten the job recently (Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 43) have been a mixed bag of mostly mediocrity with Bush 43 being absolute crap.
Pretty much comes with the territory if you browse from your home or cell phone.
Doesn't mean I'm ok with it. And on a PC my options to block their ads and tracking tools are fairly robust so they'll have a hard time getting useful information from me that way.
Remember, they also track by IP address and browser attributes, which often allows advertisers to watch you even if you don't store any cookies
Even if they track those things they have no business model if they cannot get the ads in front of my face. An IP address doesn't really tell who is behind it and I'm certainly not about to give up and make it easy for them.
I don't mind ads (I really don't) as long as they stay in the side of the page and don't try to play audio or video.
But you are ok with them tracking your browsing? Personally I find most ads to be intrusive, annoying and sometimes downright creepy but the tracking is the worst aspect of the whole thing. And the people doing the advertising can't help themselves in trying to track what I'm doing which is why I have AdBlock Plus, BetterPrivacy, PrivacyBadger, Flashblock, etc all installed at the same time. They started this arms race and I'll be damned if I'm going to lose.
I have NO problem paying for a site or service I find valuable and I do pay for some. If they base their business model on pushing annoying ads at me that I can block then that is their problem, not mine.
Then freedom is not possible to ever happen. Some peopel want to do things to others, and consider it a restriction of their freedoms to do those things to others.
If you take an absurdly absolutist definition of freedom (no restrictions on me ever) then yes, it isn't possible for a population >1. I don't really think that is a useful discussion however.
Freedom in more practical terms is a relative state within a society. It is minimizing the restrictions on behavior rather than eliminating them altogether. It also provide reasonable protections against the harmful actions of others. It's sort of akin to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You cannot simultaneously have both absolute freedom of action AND absolute freedom from the actions of others in a society. You can only have both up to a certain point. If they aren't balanced then you end up in a dictatorship or anarchy.
We cannot have freedom when we have any laws at all.
Freedom is not the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want. Never has been. That is anarchy which is not the same thing. Freedom is FAR more complicated than the absence of laws. Freedom is not just absence of restrictions on you but also absence of things being done TO you. A complete absence of laws for you necessarily means a loss of freedom for me because there is nothing restraining you (or me) from removing other people's freedom. Societies cannot exist without rules, both formal and informal and yet freedom under reasonable definitions of the term still exists.
If there is no law against slavery is the slave-owner free? The slave certainly isn't. But with laws against slavery we can fairly describe both people as free so the absolutist definition of freedom only existing when there are no laws simply makes no sense.
Why does it matter? Don't hate the player, hate the game. It doesn't bother me if Trump as a businessman engaged in standard business practices. He's now saying the game sucks and needs to be changed.
It's almost axiomatic that we need immigration reforms. Saying that fact is hardly a revelation. The real question is WHAT changes. Saying we need change without a credible and achievable plan to do it is meaningless. Nothing that has come out of Trump's mouth is a credible plan for change. It's rhetoric designed to pander to people who are already pissed off about the issue. Pointing out the obvious fact that there is a problem does not constitute a plausible plan to fix it.
I'd be inclined to see whether his various business ventures have exhibited this sort of hiring policy; or whether he's a "Buy American!" sort of guy when looking for votes; and a buy Mexican sort of guy when looking for labor...
Trump CLEARLY would never say anything that wasn't true or self serving... [/sarcasm]
Seriously, anyone thinking of actually voting for this guy is an idiot. Trump may be good for a laugh but he is not presidential material. We need someone who will actually try to understand issues before spewing whatever dumb idea jumps first into his mouth. Someone who has more nuance to their rhetoric than calling people "losers" or "rapists". There should be some dignity to the office and dignity is something Trump completely lacks. He might have said something that appeals on this one issue but that hardly makes him the guy you should vote for.
How many people can a dead cop protect?
I don't think anyone's asking them to jump in front of a bullet. Though they are generally wearing body armor so they are better equipped than you or me. But their right to personal safety is not without bounds and they cannot do their job without accepting some risk. They signed up for the job and they knew it was risky. They don't have to be stupid about it but if someone is in danger I absolutely expect them to make reasonable efforts to help even if that involves some amount of risk to themselves. If they want a completely safe job they should have done something else.
A police officer's FIRST duty is to keep themselves alive so they can uphold the law and protect as many people as feasible.
If that were true a lot more people would have died on 9/11 than actually did. Fire fighters and cops ran TOWARDS danger and saved lives which did protect as many people as possible. A police officer's first duty is supposed to be to the people they serve. If they are not willing to accept any risk to their own well being then they should pick another profession.
I don't think this is realistic. You really can't blame people for wanting to protect their own lives.
Sure I can. They signed up voluntarily for the duty. "Protect and serve". That means it is their job to get in harms way when necessary to protect the community and enforce the laws. I'm not saying they have to be stupid about it but their job should be to protect others first.
People who choose to sacrifice themselves for others are lauded because what they've done is extraordinary, heroic, above and beyond what can reasonably be expected. You're saying that we should expect extraordinary heroism.
No. What we should expect police to not behave like they are in a war zone. What we should expect is for them to actually try to save the lives of others. We expect them to behave like they belong in civilized society and not brutalize the people they are supposed to protect.
If you demand that police de-prioritize their own safety, they won't last long because their job does regularly place them in dangerous situations
Police work is demonstrably not as dangerous as many other professions. Jobs that are more dangerous incude: Truck driver, farming, construction worker, airline pilot, taxicab drivers, timber cutters, roofers, fishermen, structural metal workers and electricians. All of those professions have higher fatality rates than police officers. Injuries? Cops don't even make the list. While nobody would argue that police work doesn't have risk, the risks are overblown and in many cases caused by the very actions of the police themselves.
I'm not making that fatuous old claim that being a police officer is an extraordinarily dangerous job -- but the only reason it isn't extraordinarily dangerous is because officers are allowed to put their own safety first.
It's only extraordinarily dangerous if they are stupid about it. Gearing up like they are going to war is tantamount to picking a fight with their community. Their own actions are provocative and puts them in greater danger. Nobody is asking them to jump in front of a bullet. Use of force by police in the US is WAY higher than in other parts of the world. They use force because they can, not because they have to.
Huh? I think it's pretty safe to assume EVERY police officer, average or not, is ALWAYS interested in de-escalating a dangerous situation.
You're not a minority are you? There are PLENTY of police who are the ones doing the escalating. One merely has to examine the data on excessive use of force by police and you will quickly understand that cops are NOT always interested in de-escalation.
The A10 is a beautiful solution to a forty year old problem.
A problem which still exists and for which the A10 is still apparently quite effective.
Unfortunately, the Russians figured out that since the Americans built a flying tank killer, they'd have to start putting decent armour on top of their tanks.
I've seen no evidence that the Russians have a tank that is immune to the gun on the A10. Perhaps you are aware of something I am not?
As for SAMs, that is not a new problem for the A10 either. In fact the A10 is arguably better equipped against SAMs than many of the faster sexier aircraft out there since it was actually designed to take a hit and keep flying.
Actually, as I recall from the 80's, the US never renounced the first use of tactical nuclear weapons due to the numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact forces over NATO in Europe -- that was the NATO ultimate force multiplier.
That is more or less correct. Even if they did "renounce" such tactics it wouldn't have meant anything really. A promise by a nation state can be revoked at any time.
And I recall the plans of how the USAF was going to beat the Russian Air Force by having each F-15 shoot down 5 (or was it 10?) MIG-21s. No one know how that would have really turned out.
Basically correct I think. The US would have had to use their superior airpower combined with available NATO ground forces to slow the Soviets until they could get reinforcements across the Atlantic ocean. They would have been outnumbered for a time - how long would be a question of effectiveness and how fast reinforcements could be brought up. It would be pretty desperate for a while - trading territory for time.
But if it were a full out Soviet tank invasion there is a HIGH probability that tactical nukes would have come into play. That was the real deterrent. If the soviets massed their tanks they would be vulnerable to nukes. If they didn't they would be operationally ineffective and vulnerable to US air power.
Though the Cold War has ended this situation still technically exists since Russia still has substantial ground forces. The problem is lessened with the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union but I'm sure the US military and NATO still plans for it - just in case.
If you had followed closely the whole debate about the F-35, you'd know that the 20:1 figure is indeed supported by facts. It has to do with the ability of the US to wage war against distant enemies, e.g. China. In an hypothetical war with China
So you are basically talking about a purely hypothetical worst case scenario.
In an hypothetical war with China, the US would have a bunch of scattered air bases on small islands in the Pacific Ocean, with very limited aircraft capacities, only a fraction of those thousands of aircraft could be operated from there.
You mean small islands like Japan? Or Hawaii? Or Taiwan? Or Guam? You also appear to have forgotten about US aircraft carriers. Each carrier can park the better part of 100 planes off the coast of any country. That sounds like anti-F35 propaganda. It's hardly a difficult exercise to come up with highly unlikely scenarios with bad outcomes for US forces. Not very useful though for discussing doctrine or procurement. I have no problem with the notion that the F35 is a badly run program wasting a lot of money
The result would be that the US air force would be outnumbered: it doesn't matter the total number of your forces, it matters how scattered or concentrated they are.
It is HIGHLY unlikely the US Air Force + US Navy would find themselves in a situation where their aircraft were outnumbered 20:1 or even 10:1 for more than a brief time. The most likely such scenarios would involve some sort of sudden invasion from China or Russia on a US ally like Korea, Taiwan or western Europe. The ONLY countries with air forces numerically large enough to stress the US are China, Russia, India and some of the NATO countries banded together. If China suddenly surprise attacked Taiwan for example then sure the nearby US forces would be outnumbered badly for a time.
It does matter how large your force is because the larger it is the less scattered it has to be. Furthermore the US typically has 3-4 carrier battle groups deployed at any given time and military bases scattered around the world. The US has active bases in Hawaii, Korea, Japan, Guam, Singapore, Bahrain, Diego Garcia, and quite a few others. The US can have substantial aircraft assets anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours.
If I remember the numbers correctly, the USSR had 10:1 in their favor versus the entire NATO alliance when it came to MBTs. That is why the A-10 was built. The US was expecting to encounter an overwhelming ground force and needed the air superiority roles and close air support to slow down Russian armor. I could be mistaken, though.
You pretty much have it correct. The USSR had a very large numerical advantage in ground forces, particularly tanks and artillery and Russia still does to this day. That is exactly why the A10 was built and what informed US and NATO doctrine to this day. The US based their strategy on winning the air battle but backed up by tactical nukes if necessary.
I saw an A10 take off near my office the other day. I know a lot of people think it isn't a "pretty" plane but I've always thought it was super cool looking. Honestly I think the Air Force should hand it over to the Army though I know they never will. Close Air Support should be handled by the service that actually needs it. The Marines can do their own so the Army should be able to as well even if it involves a fixed wing aircraft. I don't really get why the air force is so down on the A10. It seems like one of the more cost effective pieces of equipment we've ever developed.
And that's the point that's being missed in this discussion, the fact that the US hasn't really gone up against anyone in head-to-head air combat since the Vietnam War
You mean except for the first Gulf War? While it was a huge mismatch the Iraqi air force had plenty of Mig-29, Mig-25, Mig-23 and Mirage F1 fighters which were reasonably modern at the time of the conflict. 36 Iraqi aircraft were shot down in aerial combat. That counts as going head to head even if the outcome was decidedly lopsided.
Honestly there are only a handful of countries that really could go head to head with US airpower and have a prayer of not getting massacred and even then it would really only be over their home country or close to it. The US has more planes, (generally) better planes and pilots as well trained as any in the world PLUS better infrastructure like AWACS and refueling, not to mention exactly half the worlds supply of aircraft carriers.
You are stepping close to the "dirty little secret" of the USAF, that the F15 on up they have had to put limiters on the planes lower than its real abilities because the simple fact is the planes can pull off moves that will kill the pilot, the meatsack behind the stick just can't handle what the plane is actually capable of.
Which is only relevant during some types of air combat maneuvering and you may be putting a bit too fine a point on it. There is a LOT more to it than that. The F15 can pull more Gs in *some* maneuvers than pilots can handle but not all of them.
This is why building new planes (instead of simply building more of the teen series) is not only wasteful its pointless, the planes we have now can already do more than any human body can take.
There is more to the success of a fighter or bomber than maneuverability in a dog fight. How good is the radar and targeting? How fast and how well can it identify targets? How fast can the plane accelerate? What is it's service ceiling? How does it perform at various altitudes? How fuel efficient is it? How expensive is it to service? How good is the pilot's situational awareness? What sort of support infrastructure does it need? What sort of runway is required? How detectible is it by radar or other targeting systems?
Even if the plane isn't a step up in maneuverability there is PLENTY of room to improve fighters and attack aircraft in a multitude of other ways. I don't pretend to know if the F35 is better or worse than previous generations of jets but saying that humans are already at their G-load limits isn't a sufficient argument against it.
The enemy will always outnumber them by dozens if not hundreds to one. We have gotten lucky that the only ones we have been fighting are goat herders, because if we fought somebody like Russia or China with an abundance of fourth gen fighters? Our new toys would be facing 20+ to 1 odds and probably get spanked right out of the sky.
The battle doctrine of the US military takes this explicitly into account. Remember that during the Cold War they had to deal with the fact that the US might be asked to defend Western Europe from an invasion from the Soviet Union. The Soviets had more tanks they could put into the theater of combat than the US could so the only real option when you are outnumbered is to have better gear and better training. You HAVE to be able to win engagements at a better than 1:1 ratio. At least in recent days the US has proven more than capable of doing that in conventional warfare. Unless the US were so stupid as to attack China or Russia directly I don't think any country in the world would want to tangle directly with the US military.
Saying the US would be facing 20:1 odds simply isn't supported by the facts. The US has FAR more combat aircraft than any other country and the US has exactly half (11/22) of the world's supply of aircraft carriers.
Youtube LLC is a wholy owned subsidiary of Alphabet. Read the news much?
Alphabet doesn't exist yet and even when it does Youtube LLC will still be a wholly owned subsidiary of Google Inc which in turn will be a subsidiary of Alphabet.
And yes I read the news. I also comprehend it.
Besides, Google+ is not a subsidiary of Google, neither is Youtube.
Incorrect. Youtube LLC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google Inc. Large companies routinely are composed of a large number of smaller entities and Google is no exception. Youtube is ALSO a product but it is a corporation too.
They are just products offered by Google. They don't need to sublicense it to move it form one service or another.
Also incorrect. Just because both corporate entities are owned by the same company does not mean they automatically share the same rights or licensing to property.
None of those links proves your point. The argument that you can't modify them and then safely transport them afterwards is demonstrably nonsense. It has already been done countless times.
If you cut holes in a shipping container, and want to move it afterwards, you're going to have to reinforce it.
Duh. Any time you modify a structure you're probably going to have to reinforce part of it. Doesn't matter if it is mobile or not.
That can easily cost hundreds in materials alone, and if you don't know what you're doing, you can actually reduce the structural integrity of the container by welding it.
"Hundreds"? Wow, blows my budget... And if you don't know what you are doing then don't do it. Do I really have to point that out? Sure you can do welding badly, news at 11... Anything can be screwed up but that doesn't mean it isn't possible.
I looked into this from both ends, and it's obvious you've only tried to confirm your biases.
My "biases"? Whatever dude. This discussion is finished. You clearly don't have a clue and I'm obviously wasting my time...
Well it looks like it will fit nicely into a standard 20 foot container with room to spare.
How are you going to get it in there? This egg thing clearly isn't designed to be handled by common material handling equipment like forklifts or cranes.
Besides if you are going to put it in a shipping container, you might as well just convert the shipping container itself and use that instead. It'll be more practical, cheaper, more durable, easier to modify, easier to fix, more recyclable, recyclable, easier to transport, have a more sensible layout, easier to insulate, have more room for solar cells and not look as stupid.
Basically this egg thing is an epic fail on close to every level.
Shipping containers are not structurally sound once you drill a hole in one and need to be framed like a regular house if you don't want to die of suffocation.
Both problems are trivially solved with a bit of reinforcing metal and a welding torch. This has been done countless times already. Twenty seconds on Google would have established that this is not a problem. At all.
Or of boredom of being inside a black box.
You mean black boxes like these? Or these? Or these? Yeah, those are terribly boring places to be be... [/sarcasm]
Not according to the people who actually build the things. I've read interviews with them, and they disagree with you. I'm going to do with the voice of experience rather than the voice of Slashdot, thanks.
Citation please. Twenty seconds on Google establishes that you are making crap up. While there are no doubt some corner cases where modifications are ill advised, there is no fundamental obstacle to modification while maintaining structural integrity. You may add weight but even an amateur like me could do it with little more than a welding torch and some scrap steel.
Once you put a bunch of holes and stuff in it, good luck getting it on the trailer without harming it.
That's just nonsense. We move entire conventional houses that were in no way designed to be moved without damaging anything routinely. Moving a shipping container is trivial by comparison, modified or not.
You know what else is far more economical and eco-friendly than dragging houses around the planet? Moving just the people, and a little bit of stuff, and they change which house they live in.
It is also cheaper and more eco-friendly to build one dwelling and move it than it is to build two dwellings and only occupy one. Sometimes you don't want a dwelling to be permanently located somewhere.