I understand where you're coming from, but I think there's plenty of evidence to show that is simply not how it works. The old west is an example of it not working: everyone was ready to kill and yet things were not peaceful.
Ah, yet another case of people believing the movies. Yes, violence occured in the west, but on average it was actually much more peaceful than the east coast. The Violence was overstated
Pretty much any inner city where lots of people have guns would also serve as an example of this failing. All the shootings don't seem to stop further shootings. Pretty much any war zone or terrorized area shows the idea that violence stops violence to be false.
I consider war zones a seperate concern; requiring seperate solutions. But I consider 'terrorized' areas in desperate need of additional arms - in the hands of the right people, preferably those being terrorized.
As for gang violence - I view much of that in terms of warfare and law enforcement - The gangs are like miniature tribes operating seperately from legal law enforcement. I mean, how do you punish somebody who steals your drugs? You can't report them to the police, about the only option remaining is vigilante justice. On seperate note, drugs are big business in inner cities. They're divided up into territories, and territories shift by what's essentially warfare. They can't get much in the way of stability(like some of the old mobs), because their leaders are often removed by the police.
Legalize drugs and work on some economic enrichment and I'd bet on crime dropping like a rock.
The tours are generally a profit maker. So it'd be the fans funding the tours. In the case of funding stuff before ticket monies are available, that's what investors(backers) would be for.
The band's a business. They hire somebody to do an IPO for them or something. There's also nothing preventing a theater from operating on credit for the concert. While it would increase the theater's risk, it might help get booking. Have the theater operate the ticketing booth and collect the cash with a clause in the contract that they get paid from those monies first.
That's where more traditional methods come into your place. IE agents pick the lock on your place, enter your house and place a keylogger in your keyboard.
Or open your computer and copy your HD.
They want it badly enough, they're going to get it.
I'm just surprised to see this now, I mean, it's been months since the news that the USAF is forming a command to conduct cyberwarfare.
Agent hauls in and gets successful convictions for all sorts of high impact criminals - gets $$$$$ as a result. Meanwhile Officer Joe Minor Stuff keeps arresting jaywalkers and such and makes less than minimum. I wonder how much victimless crimes would rate?
Still, the parent was talking about economic impact - that's where this would come in. Theoretically if we had no crime we wouldn't need to hire those agents, and they could go get work as a bookie or consultant or something.;)
I work around some areas that would have this much sensitivity, it'd be more like 'there's somebody/somthing over there that's not authorized', they'd go check everyone, find the device and arrest.
Shooting would only come into effect if they resisted.
Of course, at those security levels they don't use wireless.
This is, of course, just as arbitrary as any other metric and most notably does not measure anything which can be reasonably termed "loss".
I get mad at you and hit you a few times with a baseball bat, rendering you unable to work for two weeks. Are you trying to say that when you haul me into court you wouldn't be suing for lost wages?
Those agents could have been going after somebody else, the IT guys could have been catching up on their research, pushing patches, not worked as much overtime, or gotten by with 2 security guys.
Consider that many large businesses have losses in the millions per hour of system downtime. So a single successful DoS against one of them would add cost on real fast.
You're simply making up what you imagine to be his activities, and then making up figures to assign to that.
Looks like he was, at least a bit - part of the losses quoted in the article aparently deal with funds stolen from bank acounts, in the millions of pounds. So it could be that the £9.7M figure comes from what they currently figure was stolen. On the other hand, it wasn't 100k computers compromised, it was 'more than 1.3 Million'. That's only about £7.5 per computer, or ~ $15USD. Not going to get much cleaning done at that price.
If anything, I'd say that the 9.7M figure is probably low, only including the monetary thefts.
After: Chaos ensues, the country splits up, wars start between factions, thousands or millions die (More than were dying before) before they finally (If ever) decide to just live their own lives as separate nation-states.
When I read his post I assumed a deliberate splitting up, not a 'arm everyone and pull out without replacing the government' scenario.
I was thinking more along the lines of the east/west germany split, though for internal factional concerns, not victor spoils splitting.
I made the above comment about Russia and Germany before checking out your website and learning that you were raised in Russia.
While I love Oleg Volk's work, I am not him. I'm a natural US Citizen. I just link to his site as a bit of propaganda for one of the things I advocate, self defense, and the right to be armed to be able to do so.
Now I'm extra curious: what would lead you to believe that a small well funded army (like Germany or the US) could so cleanly defeat a huge underfunded army (like Russia or China)?
It wouldn't be as clean as taking out Saddam by any means, but Saddam took many plays out of the Russian playbook, and we rolled right over him. Russia has better quality troops, but everything I've read indicates that their readyness for actually high intensity conflict is in the toilet.
Yes, the world can take out the USA, especially if they're willing to push the button on the nukes - the point is that as long as we don't threaten attacking them, is it worth the mauling we'd give them to attack us?
Oh: and I like (clean) cops too... but really these days the vast majority of people in developed countries are 90% motivated by the carrot and not the stick.
Yes, dirty cops should be sent to prison at the very least, it was unwritten that I was thinking about a competent, non-corrupt police force. People in developed countries are heavily indocrinated in 'cooperation is better than conflict', and I agree. I just think that people need to remember that violence is a possibility.
As for the carrot and stick, I agree, but in our system the carrot pretty much takes care of itself, while the stick needs work.
As for self defense, I like the saying 'Those who wish for peace should prepare for war'. IE if people in the USA were on average willing to commit extreme violence to protect themselves, there'd be far less violent crime in this country.
these planes are too feeble and trivial to have any impact on a conflict between nations
As others have noted, this ability increases the reach and survival chances of an aircraft. Even if it can only carry two bombs - it can be used on high value targets not otherwise reachable, like taking out major SAM sites. Once air defenses have been sufficiently supressed the B1 and B52 can come along and plow under opposing forces.
Besides, look at the Philippines, the Spanish-American War, and the Boer War - why the fuck are we building bigger and better and more expensive bombs when all of our operations are counter-insurgency ops?
This can be used in counter-insurgency(get a bomb on target faster and from further away).
War between mighty industrialized nations is impossible these days!"
No it isn't. They said that after WWI, 'The war to end all wars'. It was repeated after WWII. The difference I see is that conflicts are a low smaller in scale today, but I'd be careful about throwing 'impossible' around.
As others said - you don't want to just prepare for the current war, you want to look to the future.
We have leafelet bombs for propaganda- they aren't intended to kill anyone, along with some carbon fiber bomb that's supposed to short out electrical substations.
Don't know if you'd count the kinetic kill 'bombs' or not, but they exist now.
There's a few others, like a mine dispensor that at least isn't immediately lethal.
Amusing. I assume you use this logic in running your own life then? Lots of punching people in the face? The occasional killing?
Punching people in the face is pretty much the definition of not using enough force. Otherwise, well, I'm running out of places to hide the bodies...;)
Heh. To be more serious, I have a philosophy of violence. I personally believe that just about everything is predicated on it. IE we form tribes, voluntarily surrendering our 'right' to commit violence within the group in order to get the others to surrender their 'right' to commit violence on us, and to increase the potential violence against outsiders - whether they're individuals or other tribes.
Everybody has a limit on the amount of violence they can commit - so if Tribe A has reason to believe that they cannot muster sufficient violence to overcome Tribe B without suffering too much violence in return, they'll seek alternate means. Witness the birth of diplomacy, and ever larger tribes (as Tribe A discover that Tribe B is more more likeable than Nasty tribe C, and merge to combat the menace - even if only temporarily).
So - Germany made a mistake, sure they could beat the surrounding 'sub-tribes', however in doing so they stirred the larger tribal group into action.
The question would be 'would a sufficient amount of the rest of the world stand up and attack the USA for smearing Iraq?'. Europe has nowhere near enough arms, Russia's broke, China doesn't have transport. We could absolutely smear Iraq if we chose to, and still retain most of our combat capability - and we're currently the proverbial 800lb Gorilla.
Please note that I could probably fill a book with this stuff, and that I firmly believe in the principle of self defense. I like cops - we all agree to a social contract(enforced by the police, or even the military), reducing violence so we can get on with our lives and be productive and happy. Still, I think that people need to remember that not everyone plays by the rules and that being able to defend yourself can substantially reduce the odds of you even being attacked.
However, I still think that we'll see F22's converted to drone operation during their operational combat lifetime.
I figure they're probably the last traditionally manned fighter plane the USA will develop. With advances in technology, removing the pilot from the plane will increase the plane's maneuverability enough to increase it's survivability.
This hasn't happened yet because we don't have drone technology good enough that the *big boys* like China and Russia wouldn't be able to jam the control signal and render the craft pretty much useless. Since I don't think that we can ever count on jamming not working, it means drone tech has to become good enough to complete the mission without human intervention. Still, it's coming.
You have to remember that there are anywhere from 0.5 to 1.3 million dead Iraqi civilians.
Huh, Iraq Body Count only has ~85k deaths by violence, mostly from terrorist* killings. You have to remember, in country of 27.5 million people, I'd expect 340k or so deaths a year from natural causes. The highest estimate I've seen is ~500k, and that's a mortality study, so most likely includes all causes of death.
Do you have a source for your figure? A time period would also be good for perspective.
*Fighting US Military in Iraq = Insurgent(mostly). Killing Iraqi civilians in deliberate attacks like bombing a Mosque = terrorist.
but I have to point out that wiping Iraq off the map would not solve any problem at all,
I'd tend to think that it'd solve the need for the occupation rather nicely. Given that the most efficent method would be nuclear, we wouldn't even have to worry about somebody else moving in and causing trouble for a while.
would cause a host of new problems the likes of which America has never seen.
What, other nations would stop screwing around with us?
I'm a bit weary with our arrogance. It's worth noting that military power did not forever save any of the previous empires that fell apart.
In my reading of history, a lot of times it was a decline in military might that resulted in empires falling apart - Rome started hiring mercenaries because they were cheaper, etc...
The second largest mistake was completely disbanding the Iraqi military, which would could have then used to smoothly transition power while they prevented the growth of the cancers which exist there today.
By leaving the Saddam selected, corrupt, sunni-serving, oppressive leaders in charge?
I could maybe see retaining some of the police forces, but the military needed the reboot - it's ugly, but there. Part of the problems we've run into is that we made a number of errors in trying to rebuild it. One thing that irks me is that the media seems to think that we should be able to rebuild a military in a couple years - it takes at least a decade to make barely competent general officers, and that's by training 'cream of the crop'.
One last note, 20mm high explosive rounds are more or less 20mm grenades fired at 600rpm, shot in 10-20 rounds bursts. Precision is relative.
It sure is. Heck, the buff has been running CAS* missions for a while. My reaction is kinda a 'WTF?'. My idea of a 'Close Air Support' plane is a A-10, not a B-52 up at 30k feet.
I don't know about you, but that'd be part of the 'efficient' part of 'efficient killing machine'.
Efficiency is about conserving resources/effort while still being effective.
Killing the target with a single sniper shot is more efficient than leveling the place with a 2k pound bomb to get that same target. Artillery barrages usually aren't that efficient, but much like air support, allows selective reinforcement of units - meaning said units can be smaller and more flexible(more efficient), outweighing the additional cost of the reinforcement.
This is one of the reasons that I get upset when people try to say that we deliberately target women&children. That's a loss of efficiency. It's a bomb that we no longer have, a mission flown, that we can no longer use against the people actually trying to kill us. Not to mention being a PR disaster.
Today, we literally have the ability to kill any target within a couple of hours or less. We chewed through Iraq's military almost as fast as we could drive our vehicles. I still remember hearing our media going on about 'Are we bogging down?!?!' when, after 48 hours of advancing at a sustained speed of nearly 25mph, we stopped some units to get some crew rest(and let supplies catch up).
Fact is, it's a lot like technology advances - some things have improved tremendously(ability to drop a bomb on a precision target), others have stagnated(intelligence gathering, target location when it's hiding in a civilian population). Some things turned out to be easier than others.
On a side note - it's a good part of why I don't believe PETA when they try to go on about how cruel slaughter houses/ranches are. It's simple enough: Pain causes stress. Stress causes adrenaline dumps, and you end up with an animal that suffers many of the same problems a human does. It gets sick easier, doesn't grow as fast, is jittery, doesn't taste as good. Medicine costs money, lower sale weight or having to wait longer to sell costs money, jittery farm animals are dangerous, and sucky meat = people shopping elsewhere. Remember, a pig or a cow doesn't have the same wants as us. A cow is pretty happy when it's in a herd of other cows, has food to eat, clean water to drink, a salt lick somewhere for the minerals and isn't being hassled by predators.
I'm not one to be politically correct, but I think that a better term would be Islamic Fundamentalists can't get along. Plenty of Muslims can get along with us just fine. When lacking a convienent external enemy like us or Israel, they simply shift back to fighting each other. In many respects I compare it to the Catholic/Protestant fights back in the day.
While I know it'd involve huge amounts of graft and waste, I think that a massive employment program ala the marshall plan would be of great benefit - people with full time jobs are less likely to cause trouble.
The hair in the pudding though is that a "consistent level of quality" is a judgment call. I watch all of the ATSC content via S-Video on a SD 27" television but according to those that have HD sets the quality impact of subchannels "stealing bits" from the main HD content is noticeable. So we're back to the similar problem seen with over compressed HD (and SD) content from DBS providers (Dish, DirecTV, etc).
Part of this is probably the fact that they're using ancient cpu cheap compression schemes. Some of the MPEG-4 type codecs would be able to give a superior picture even with a lower bitrate. If they were able to assume a couple extra bucks worth of additional decoder processing capacity it'd allow better picture quality.
Of course, this whole video thing came up because we were looking for bandwidth intensive tasks - and streaming video is still top dog. If we start streaming 3D video, or get so obsessed with quality that we shift towards 1080p(or higher) 60 fps low compression video, then yeah, we can saturate a gigabit link with a single stream. Today we'd need multiple HDTV streams, at pretty low compression, to saturate a gigabit link. Smart compression would allow it easily over a 100mbit connection.
Besides - once you start getting into gigabit ethernet you start getting into the range that a single HD can't keep up with it.
Those would be excellent, though I'm sure there'll still be complainers.
From the one picture I saw, the sleeper didn't look very convertable - that could be fixed though. Then again, not letting it be converted into a 'dayroom' might help control noise. Decisions, Decisions.
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I understand where you're coming from, but I think there's plenty of evidence to show that is simply not how it works. The old west is an example of it not working: everyone was ready to kill and yet things were not peaceful.
Ah, yet another case of people believing the movies. Yes, violence occured in the west, but on average it was actually much more peaceful than the east coast. The Violence was overstated
Pretty much any inner city where lots of people have guns would also serve as an example of this failing. All the shootings don't seem to stop further shootings. Pretty much any war zone or terrorized area shows the idea that violence stops violence to be false.
I consider war zones a seperate concern; requiring seperate solutions. But I consider 'terrorized' areas in desperate need of additional arms - in the hands of the right people, preferably those being terrorized.
As for gang violence - I view much of that in terms of warfare and law enforcement - The gangs are like miniature tribes operating seperately from legal law enforcement. I mean, how do you punish somebody who steals your drugs? You can't report them to the police, about the only option remaining is vigilante justice. On seperate note, drugs are big business in inner cities. They're divided up into territories, and territories shift by what's essentially warfare. They can't get much in the way of stability(like some of the old mobs), because their leaders are often removed by the police.
Legalize drugs and work on some economic enrichment and I'd bet on crime dropping like a rock.
The tours are generally a profit maker. So it'd be the fans funding the tours. In the case of funding stuff before ticket monies are available, that's what investors(backers) would be for.
The band's a business. They hire somebody to do an IPO for them or something. There's also nothing preventing a theater from operating on credit for the concert. While it would increase the theater's risk, it might help get booking. Have the theater operate the ticketing booth and collect the cash with a clause in the contract that they get paid from those monies first.
That's where more traditional methods come into your place. IE agents pick the lock on your place, enter your house and place a keylogger in your keyboard.
Or open your computer and copy your HD.
They want it badly enough, they're going to get it.
I'm just surprised to see this now, I mean, it's been months since the news that the USAF is forming a command to conduct cyberwarfare.
Good point. I just figure anybody willing to spend €2k on a computer would want the extra performance XP grants... ;)
Hmmm... Talk about your performance bonuses. ;)
;)
Agent hauls in and gets successful convictions for all sorts of high impact criminals - gets $$$$$ as a result. Meanwhile Officer Joe Minor Stuff keeps arresting jaywalkers and such and makes less than minimum. I wonder how much victimless crimes would rate?
Still, the parent was talking about economic impact - that's where this would come in. Theoretically if we had no crime we wouldn't need to hire those agents, and they could go get work as a bookie or consultant or something.
That would have a positive economic impact.
You might have a point here...
Keep forcing system manufacturers to include Vista, not XP. Offer XP in stores for $99-299.
Extra money!
Doesn't that need to be placed on every computer at the moment?
I work around some areas that would have this much sensitivity, it'd be more like 'there's somebody/somthing over there that's not authorized', they'd go check everyone, find the device and arrest.
Shooting would only come into effect if they resisted.
Of course, at those security levels they don't use wireless.
This is, of course, just as arbitrary as any other metric and most notably does not measure anything which can be reasonably termed "loss".
I get mad at you and hit you a few times with a baseball bat, rendering you unable to work for two weeks. Are you trying to say that when you haul me into court you wouldn't be suing for lost wages?
Those agents could have been going after somebody else, the IT guys could have been catching up on their research, pushing patches, not worked as much overtime, or gotten by with 2 security guys.
Consider that many large businesses have losses in the millions per hour of system downtime. So a single successful DoS against one of them would add cost on real fast.
You're simply making up what you imagine to be his activities, and then making up figures to assign to that.
Looks like he was, at least a bit - part of the losses quoted in the article aparently deal with funds stolen from bank acounts, in the millions of pounds. So it could be that the £9.7M figure comes from what they currently figure was stolen. On the other hand, it wasn't 100k computers compromised, it was 'more than 1.3 Million'. That's only about £7.5 per computer, or ~ $15USD. Not going to get much cleaning done at that price.
If anything, I'd say that the 9.7M figure is probably low, only including the monetary thefts.
After: Chaos ensues, the country splits up, wars start between factions, thousands or millions die (More than were dying before) before they finally (If ever) decide to just live their own lives as separate nation-states.
When I read his post I assumed a deliberate splitting up, not a 'arm everyone and pull out without replacing the government' scenario.
I was thinking more along the lines of the east/west germany split, though for internal factional concerns, not victor spoils splitting.
You think that's bad, you should have seen version 1. I toned it down quite a bit.
I made the above comment about Russia and Germany before checking out your website and learning that you were raised in Russia.
While I love Oleg Volk's work, I am not him. I'm a natural US Citizen. I just link to his site as a bit of propaganda for one of the things I advocate, self defense, and the right to be armed to be able to do so.
Now I'm extra curious: what would lead you to believe that a small well funded army (like Germany or the US) could so cleanly defeat a huge underfunded army (like Russia or China)?
It wouldn't be as clean as taking out Saddam by any means, but Saddam took many plays out of the Russian playbook, and we rolled right over him. Russia has better quality troops, but everything I've read indicates that their readyness for actually high intensity conflict is in the toilet.
Yes, the world can take out the USA, especially if they're willing to push the button on the nukes - the point is that as long as we don't threaten attacking them, is it worth the mauling we'd give them to attack us?
Oh: and I like (clean) cops too... but really these days the vast majority of people in developed countries are 90% motivated by the carrot and not the stick.
Yes, dirty cops should be sent to prison at the very least, it was unwritten that I was thinking about a competent, non-corrupt police force. People in developed countries are heavily indocrinated in 'cooperation is better than conflict', and I agree. I just think that people need to remember that violence is a possibility.
As for the carrot and stick, I agree, but in our system the carrot pretty much takes care of itself, while the stick needs work.
As for self defense, I like the saying 'Those who wish for peace should prepare for war'. IE if people in the USA were on average willing to commit extreme violence to protect themselves, there'd be far less violent crime in this country.
these planes are too feeble and trivial to have any impact on a conflict between nations
As others have noted, this ability increases the reach and survival chances of an aircraft. Even if it can only carry two bombs - it can be used on high value targets not otherwise reachable, like taking out major SAM sites. Once air defenses have been sufficiently supressed the B1 and B52 can come along and plow under opposing forces.
Besides, look at the Philippines, the Spanish-American War, and the Boer War - why the fuck are we building bigger and better and more expensive bombs when all of our operations are counter-insurgency ops?
This can be used in counter-insurgency(get a bomb on target faster and from further away).
War between mighty industrialized nations is impossible these days!"
No it isn't. They said that after WWI, 'The war to end all wars'. It was repeated after WWII. The difference I see is that conflicts are a low smaller in scale today, but I'd be careful about throwing 'impossible' around.
As others said - you don't want to just prepare for the current war, you want to look to the future.
We have leafelet bombs for propaganda- they aren't intended to kill anyone, along with some carbon fiber bomb that's supposed to short out electrical substations.
Don't know if you'd count the kinetic kill 'bombs' or not, but they exist now.
There's a few others, like a mine dispensor that at least isn't immediately lethal.
Amusing. I assume you use this logic in running your own life then? Lots of punching people in the face? The occasional killing?
;)
Punching people in the face is pretty much the definition of not using enough force. Otherwise, well, I'm running out of places to hide the bodies...
Heh. To be more serious, I have a philosophy of violence. I personally believe that just about everything is predicated on it. IE we form tribes, voluntarily surrendering our 'right' to commit violence within the group in order to get the others to surrender their 'right' to commit violence on us, and to increase the potential violence against outsiders - whether they're individuals or other tribes.
Everybody has a limit on the amount of violence they can commit - so if Tribe A has reason to believe that they cannot muster sufficient violence to overcome Tribe B without suffering too much violence in return, they'll seek alternate means. Witness the birth of diplomacy, and ever larger tribes (as Tribe A discover that Tribe B is more more likeable than Nasty tribe C, and merge to combat the menace - even if only temporarily).
So - Germany made a mistake, sure they could beat the surrounding 'sub-tribes', however in doing so they stirred the larger tribal group into action.
The question would be 'would a sufficient amount of the rest of the world stand up and attack the USA for smearing Iraq?'. Europe has nowhere near enough arms, Russia's broke, China doesn't have transport. We could absolutely smear Iraq if we chose to, and still retain most of our combat capability - and we're currently the proverbial 800lb Gorilla.
Please note that I could probably fill a book with this stuff, and that I firmly believe in the principle of self defense. I like cops - we all agree to a social contract(enforced by the police, or even the military), reducing violence so we can get on with our lives and be productive and happy. Still, I think that people need to remember that not everyone plays by the rules and that being able to defend yourself can substantially reduce the odds of you even being attacked.
As the other posters mentioned, yes they can.
However, I still think that we'll see F22's converted to drone operation during their operational combat lifetime.
I figure they're probably the last traditionally manned fighter plane the USA will develop. With advances in technology, removing the pilot from the plane will increase the plane's maneuverability enough to increase it's survivability.
This hasn't happened yet because we don't have drone technology good enough that the *big boys* like China and Russia wouldn't be able to jam the control signal and render the craft pretty much useless. Since I don't think that we can ever count on jamming not working, it means drone tech has to become good enough to complete the mission without human intervention. Still, it's coming.
To be honest, I don't see why we're so set on keeping Iraq whole.
You have to remember that there are anywhere from 0.5 to 1.3 million dead Iraqi civilians.
Huh, Iraq Body Count only has ~85k deaths by violence, mostly from terrorist* killings. You have to remember, in country of 27.5 million people, I'd expect 340k or so deaths a year from natural causes. The highest estimate I've seen is ~500k, and that's a mortality study, so most likely includes all causes of death.
Do you have a source for your figure? A time period would also be good for perspective.
*Fighting US Military in Iraq = Insurgent(mostly). Killing Iraqi civilians in deliberate attacks like bombing a Mosque = terrorist.
You're not using enough of it...
but I have to point out that wiping Iraq off the map would not solve any problem at all,
I'd tend to think that it'd solve the need for the occupation rather nicely. Given that the most efficent method would be nuclear, we wouldn't even have to worry about somebody else moving in and causing trouble for a while.
would cause a host of new problems the likes of which America has never seen.
What, other nations would stop screwing around with us?
I'm a bit weary with our arrogance. It's worth noting that military power did not forever save any of the previous empires that fell apart.
In my reading of history, a lot of times it was a decline in military might that resulted in empires falling apart - Rome started hiring mercenaries because they were cheaper, etc...
The second largest mistake was completely disbanding the Iraqi military, which would could have then used to smoothly transition power while they prevented the growth of the cancers which exist there today.
By leaving the Saddam selected, corrupt, sunni-serving, oppressive leaders in charge?
I could maybe see retaining some of the police forces, but the military needed the reboot - it's ugly, but there. Part of the problems we've run into is that we made a number of errors in trying to rebuild it. One thing that irks me is that the media seems to think that we should be able to rebuild a military in a couple years - it takes at least a decade to make barely competent general officers, and that's by training 'cream of the crop'.
One last note, 20mm high explosive rounds are more or less 20mm grenades fired at 600rpm, shot in 10-20 rounds bursts. Precision is relative.
It sure is. Heck, the buff has been running CAS* missions for a while. My reaction is kinda a 'WTF?'. My idea of a 'Close Air Support' plane is a A-10, not a B-52 up at 30k feet.
I don't know about you, but that'd be part of the 'efficient' part of 'efficient killing machine'.
Efficiency is about conserving resources/effort while still being effective.
Killing the target with a single sniper shot is more efficient than leveling the place with a 2k pound bomb to get that same target. Artillery barrages usually aren't that efficient, but much like air support, allows selective reinforcement of units - meaning said units can be smaller and more flexible(more efficient), outweighing the additional cost of the reinforcement.
This is one of the reasons that I get upset when people try to say that we deliberately target women&children. That's a loss of efficiency. It's a bomb that we no longer have, a mission flown, that we can no longer use against the people actually trying to kill us. Not to mention being a PR disaster.
Today, we literally have the ability to kill any target within a couple of hours or less. We chewed through Iraq's military almost as fast as we could drive our vehicles. I still remember hearing our media going on about 'Are we bogging down?!?!' when, after 48 hours of advancing at a sustained speed of nearly 25mph, we stopped some units to get some crew rest(and let supplies catch up).
Fact is, it's a lot like technology advances - some things have improved tremendously(ability to drop a bomb on a precision target), others have stagnated(intelligence gathering, target location when it's hiding in a civilian population). Some things turned out to be easier than others.
On a side note - it's a good part of why I don't believe PETA when they try to go on about how cruel slaughter houses/ranches are. It's simple enough: Pain causes stress. Stress causes adrenaline dumps, and you end up with an animal that suffers many of the same problems a human does. It gets sick easier, doesn't grow as fast, is jittery, doesn't taste as good. Medicine costs money, lower sale weight or having to wait longer to sell costs money, jittery farm animals are dangerous, and sucky meat = people shopping elsewhere. Remember, a pig or a cow doesn't have the same wants as us. A cow is pretty happy when it's in a herd of other cows, has food to eat, clean water to drink, a salt lick somewhere for the minerals and isn't being hassled by predators.
Muslims can't get along with infidels
I'm not one to be politically correct, but I think that a better term would be Islamic Fundamentalists can't get along. Plenty of Muslims can get along with us just fine. When lacking a convienent external enemy like us or Israel, they simply shift back to fighting each other. In many respects I compare it to the Catholic/Protestant fights back in the day.
While I know it'd involve huge amounts of graft and waste, I think that a massive employment program ala the marshall plan would be of great benefit - people with full time jobs are less likely to cause trouble.
The hair in the pudding though is that a "consistent level of quality" is a judgment call. I watch all of the ATSC content via S-Video on a SD 27" television but according to those that have HD sets the quality impact of subchannels "stealing bits" from the main HD content is noticeable. So we're back to the similar problem seen with over compressed HD (and SD) content from DBS providers (Dish, DirecTV, etc).
Part of this is probably the fact that they're using ancient cpu cheap compression schemes. Some of the MPEG-4 type codecs would be able to give a superior picture even with a lower bitrate. If they were able to assume a couple extra bucks worth of additional decoder processing capacity it'd allow better picture quality.
Of course, this whole video thing came up because we were looking for bandwidth intensive tasks - and streaming video is still top dog. If we start streaming 3D video, or get so obsessed with quality that we shift towards 1080p(or higher) 60 fps low compression video, then yeah, we can saturate a gigabit link with a single stream. Today we'd need multiple HDTV streams, at pretty low compression, to saturate a gigabit link. Smart compression would allow it easily over a 100mbit connection.
Besides - once you start getting into gigabit ethernet you start getting into the range that a single HD can't keep up with it.
Those would be excellent, though I'm sure there'll still be complainers.
From the one picture I saw, the sleeper didn't look very convertable - that could be fixed though. Then again, not letting it be converted into a 'dayroom' might help control noise. Decisions, Decisions.