Mod me down if you like, but I'm sick and tired of seeing people being demonized simply because they want to create wealth and live the American dream. Presumably, when you go home tonight, you're going to fix yourself a meal to eat. Consider this: the employees of Adobe would like to do the very same thing. Do your lofty ideals of socialistic code-sharing take precedence over the health and well-being of decent families?
probably the best explanation of why the 'dream' is a nightmare.
WAKE UP DICKHEAD AND SMELL THE ROSES.
Wealth 'creation' isn't a dream, its taking the bread off someone else's table. This isn't some kind of self renewing table, that 'wealth' comes from somewhere.
You need to understand that this is in essence a closed system. No new resources, no new opportunities. Something does not come out of nothing, its TAKEN, its USED UP.
What does this have to do with the DCMA and the story? Sure Adobe gets hoist by their own petard, but its only one more example of how we need a new social contract, a new way in which those that create are recompensed, those that consume are not held hostage....and those that feast on the work of others do not prosper - but are instead destroyed like the parasites they are.
Face it, the 'dream' doesn't work. Wake up and greet the new dawn.
I think this is getting to the heart of what I was saying.
I seem to spend time everyday helping out someone who is trying to fight Word into doing what THEY want, rather than what it wants to do. This is not you or me, the people who can just pick it up and use it; its the non expert, the majority. They simply find today's Wordprocessors no great advance over those textmode wordprocessors of yesteryear.
The reason? Back then they KNEW what it was doing, they could SEE the control codes, and delete them if they were wrong. Sure it couldn't tell you your grammer was wrong, but it never really fought against you either.
If you look back to Word 2.0 and compare it against today you can see certain elements that you can think of as advances. But you can't really see much, and its certainly not an order of magnitude better. But we do have a whole load of attendant junk. Basically, we're going backward again.
If we are going to go in the direction of a 'smart' wordprocessor then I want a truely smart one. Something that means I do less work and produce a much better result. I don't want something with a level of complexity that means I'm forever fighting it in doing the actual job - the one of transfering knowledge from my head to someone else's with the minimum of time and effort.
Quality is designed IN, taking bugs OUT is an admission that you really didn't pay enough attention at the beginning. Sure you get the odd typo, but the real bugs are the ones in the logic of what your writing - and you often don't catch all of those.
If you are thinking about what is actually happening, rather than just pasting in a bit of gash code, you are much more likely to create something with quality engineered IN. Trust me, its the only way its going to get there.
As for the 'speed it up after the event' crowd - did you ever think that if you used the right approaches, the right concepts, from the start, you wouldn't have to spend the time tweaking some supposed critical element at the end? It should be second nature IF you really understand what you are doing. Sure there are always the games, device drivers etc., but I'm talking about the day to day code that gets executed every day by millions of people around the world. It generally takes no more effort to use the right technique as the wrong one - if you only knew the difference.
Have a little pride in your work man! You might find that your 'good enough, lets stuff it out the door' mentality is why you don't go forward and your company goes to the wall as a result of a buggy product.
The problem is not that certain tools have issues; but rather that today's programmers have no interest in creating efficient code.
Those of us that started programming in 1k and sub megahurts can really feel the time taken by badly coded applications. We know that forgetting what is happening on the silcon can kill how well our code will run.
However, those who started coding after ~1987 don't really have a gut feeling for it. To them the latest processor will make up for their bad coding. To a certain extent they are right. Today's advances STILL keep up with Moore's law, still make up for their lack of skill. However, when one looks at what is actually performed with all that power, one tends to question why we are paying so much, for so little.
Can you actually say that MS WordXP is much better than the non-WYSIWYG wordprocessor of yesteryear (itself a blast from the past) ?
We don't need profilers, we need coders have have that tacit knowledge of what really counts, where they should put real effort.
Unfortunately that doesn't come in a software box.
If Hammer= 1.4 x Athlon
& Athlon = 1.2 x P4 (non Northwood)
then if the word of hammer starting at 3400+ and 4000+ is true it would result in Hammer having a 2.0Ghz to 2.4Ghz clock (assuming AMD do nothing regards 64bit being faster)
Given the small size of the die, this sounds quite feasible, indeed 5000+ sounds possible with 0.13 and SOI
OK, ok, so its very iffy to extrapolate like that, but Intel may well have some significant problems if AMD can roll out Hammer fast enough to beat the P4 0.09 die strink.
Re:What he is saying is there is room for all.
on
Unlimited Airwaves
·
· Score: 2
*sigh*
What he says is there is no scarcity of bandwidth, providing you totally change the way you use that spectrum.
The problem you seem to ignore is how you move from where you are now, to where you would like to be. You (and he) seem to say "scrap the regulations, let the market decide". Well, this is the market that fights in court over software patents. This is the market that makes other smaller companies "offers they cannot refuse". This is the market where betamax lost.
Now I'd agree that the government-bound, big business-bound, regulation authorities that you have at the moment are not ideal - BUT YOU NEED SOME REGULATION - some long term thought, some arbiter of fair play.
You seem to be taking a statement that "there is no scarcity of bandwidth" as an article of faith, a personal religion to add to your other god of the free market. You ignore that while technically it maybe possible to significantly increase total bandwidth (but it will never be unlimited) there are a whole host of problems that tend to prevent it happening. These are NOT majorly the problem of the evil FCC getting in the way of the good private enterprise, but problems to do with bandwidth already being used by systems that would need to be replaced in your future world. Who is going to pay for that? Do you have deep pockets?
Whether you like it or not, you need a workable process, and yes regulation, to effect change.
He's postulating no FCC, no ITC, so no regulations. Now I tend to agree that not limiting 'who' can use bandwidth, but saying 'how' is workable, but his argument is competition red in tooth and claw.
Imagine a scenario where someone sells a "802.11 killer". Set it up and it kills off bandwidth for any such devices, but still allows Bluetooth to function. Call it a 'router enhancer'.
Sure people will complain, but it isn't likely to do them any good in this low regulation environment. Don't forget, they already sell jammers for mobile phones !
What occured to me after posting the last message is that this is very similar to Dubya's solution to global warming - minimise the regulation and the money will push technology to solve all your problems. It seems to be a pecularly US viewpoint - most everyone else recognises the limitations of the market in rational decision making.
There is a whole other question of where the optimum regulation vs market balance is - maybe that's what this guy should be researching instead?
Having trawled through the presentation on his site, it appears it boils down to:
If you use better technology (low power, repeaters, signal extraction) then you can fit more information into the same bandwidth.
You could always use more bandwidth.
Private industry is better at cooperating than the government is a regulation.
At no point does he really try and dispute Shannon, there is a finite limit to the information that can be transmitted, he just thinks we should be smarter at approaching that theoretical limit. He does the usual job of trying to confuse the issue and make it more complicated than it actually is, but when you get down to it, its fairly obvious.
Now I'd tend to agree that we could do with being smarter. But to say that the commercial world is going to make systems that all work nicely together is just plain ignoring realities. Look at the 802.11 / Bluetooth cockup - in reality the aim will be the fast buck and market share. If you can do that by riding roughshod over the competition, so much the better.
In the end you need to engineer a balance between the short term and long term perspectives. I'd agree that its wrong at the moment, but that is a call to shake up the regulations and those that create them, not to throw out all long term thought in an orgy of competing, incompatible systems.
Maybe we could start by allocating bandwidth to particular purposes on a lease term basis. Once you reach the end of your term, you have to show that continuing to allow you that bandwidth is the optimum use for the next lease period, if not, then no bandwidth.
Maybe then we would have faster evolution, and even revolution, in the use of the EM spectrum.
OK, thanks to (H)elix1 for making my point for me.
A simple cruise missile, using GPS and/or INS is quite simple, accurate to 100m without much sweat and quite capable of delivering a payload from several hundred miles away - all using some pretty low level skills.
Mucking around with image based guidance is not - but then again, its not really needed for these purposes.
A fission device takes some serious engineering, especially if you want to get a working yield - added to which is the problem of sourcing the material. Is probably easier to buy a nuke from Russia, and the number of nukes you've seen detonated demonstrate that its not that easy.
None of the above is unknown to those that need to know - and getting good 24hour look down cover is fairly important in dealing with it, since you can fairly easily go low enough to put yourself in the clutter.
Still think that someone is trying to protect their funding though....
Come off it, just how is this supposed to fight terrorism ?
High altitude balloons are hardly likely to trouble an Arab terrorist coming in on the American Airlines redeye service. Let alone the domestic terrorist who lives in Florida and mails you Anthrax.
Nope, they are useful for three things: observation, communication relay and radar. Now either someone is trying to hop on the 'terrorism' funding bandwagon, or someone is attempting to hide a technology that effect civil liberties under the same cover.
My personal guess is both. Someone has finally worked out that cruise missiles are easy to knock up and a threat to US cities - hence the need for good look down 24hour radar coverage. At the same time, an observation platform that could hover over a city, watching everyone, but not seen by anyone, has certain advantages.
Neither really does much to prevent the average terrorist - but its a nice way to sell your system.
Your correct about the catastrophic change element, mainly because the military is incapable emotionally to keep up with the pace of change technologically. It takes the regular reality shot to reset that emotional clock.
As for which direction the future will actually take, rather than just the possibilities, I'd suggest that we are past the tipping point, in terms of technological capability, into a world where physical wars are fought without humans. Once you get there, you get the probability of what amounts to the precambrian explosion in equipment and doctrine. Much focus has been on getting inside the decision loop of your opponent in the past - there is a limit to that approach.
Having said that, economic, political, emotional and cyber warfare are cheaper and easier to prosecute - physical warfare is always a last resort. So maybe the financing for equipment will just dry up...
BTW laser dazzle tends to be used against different targets to the ones you suggest.
Well, first off I wouldn't personally go for swinging pylons either, but short range rearward firing missiles, probably command guided, can be successfully employed. I was just pointing out, its not actually impossible to achieve.
The trick of really understanding new concepts is not to try and test those new concepts using old methodologies and doctrine. I've seen that done time and again - and not surprisingly the result doesn't look good. However any new system changes the concept of operation and thus the final result. Denying your opponent that attack aspect will change virtually every aspect of dogfighting. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how you would react and fight in that circumstance, and indeed what the total weapon mix would look like.
Without saying where my knowledge comes from, lets just say that I graduated many years ago and have done this for real. I'm personally betting on combat UAVs within a decade, which is faster than most people believe. The underlying drivers are right and I can detect the beginnings of the tipping in sentiment. Time will tell who's right.
Oh, and as a last point, Backfire is so named because it has a rear mounted automatic gun - nothing to do with missiles.
What do you know, a Slashdot discussion that is actually half way reasoned and intelligent - will wonders never cease.
OK, its perfectly possible for a conventional missile to have an angle of attack of greater than 50 degrees. 90 is not impossible, particularly since its only for a finite time. The control surfaces could still maintain a conventional aspect to the airflow.
In fact rearward firing is more difficult, purely because there is zero airflow over the control surfaces for a finite time.
As for it not being a useful tactic, well the US tend to say that about anything the Russians can do, only to change their minds later. A situation where you can successfully fire in a rearward aspect definitely does have tactical advantage in a dogfight; if only because it reduces the advantage of gaining this aspect to the defending aircraft. Where is a safe direction to attack from?
As for the usefulness of a pilot in the cockpit. The pilot can have advantages in high level strategic thinking and adapability to degraded performance. However this is in my opinion outweighed by the reduction in reaction time and higher acceleration possible with automated AI control. Couple in a remote pilot to add that high level thinking (which needs nothing more complex than a video game viewpoint, not VR) and the pilotless combat aircraft is likely to have significant advantage.
The only time this is likely to be accepted by any air force, however, is when human pilots have been beaten (and killed) in a real war situation. Think of it as akin to the use of mounted cavalry; slaughter is the only way break out of the old thinking.
JSF is almost certainly the last manned fighter to be designed, and even this is edging towards pilotless control as the design stage continues.
Except the Russians have a missile that can be fired rearward, and I've seen the video to prove it.
Yes its difficult to control, but its doable.
Thrust vectoring is OK as an approach, fairly old hat. However there are some problems with it in complexity/lifetime terms.
The question is not so much what this story is about - this is all fairly old stuff. The question is third party datalinking, high data rate sensors, and high speed terminal manoever.
And as has been said elsewhere, getting those dammed pilots out of the cockpit and on the ground where they belong.
The US *DOES* subsidise its steel industry and its aircraft industry, and to the tune of quite a bit of money.
Although some European states subsidise, in general most of these have been done away with it several decades ago - along with quite a lot of jobs.
Put very simply what the US is doing is protectionism. There is no way you are going to compete with Korea on bulk steel production - the economics just aren't there. Its a commodity market and your cost base is too high for you to stand an chance.
On the aircraft side, you have been used to your manufactuerers having a cartel - and now object that there is a real competitor. Instead you should welcome it - Boeing will either stop sleeping on the job; or go out of business. That's a good outcome of global competition - you get better planes, cheaper.
When you come down to it, there is very little that the US does best. Your not as smart as Europe, not as cheap or industrious as the far east, not as devout as the middle east.
What you do have is a large, protected, home market.
Don't confuse that advantage with some dream-like superiority - your long term future is a steady decline. In 50 years time, if things go as they currently look, you will be secondary to the primary superpower of China and its satellite manufacturers on the far east.
The action of the increase of technology has been to put power into smaller and smaller groups of people.
In the 1600s if you wanted to throw your weight around, you needed to be a country
In the 1900s you needed an empire.
In the middle of the last century you needed to be a superpower.
However from there, being large has actually been a disadvantage in the exercise of force (although its still there for economic warfare).
The US can't nuke someone, CNN wouldn't allow it, big business wouldn't allow it. Sure they can bomb a few hills, but thats not really that effective at imposing your will.
At the same time the individual has got access to more and more power, if they really want it. Want to bomb the US? No real problem is there. Particularly if you have the will to die for your cause.
In fact the more the US would try to throw its weight around, the more hatred is built up, the more likely is the use of force against it. Add to this that this action is bad for international business and an imperialistic superpower is a short lived affair.
The biggest problem you have right at the moment is that you've let them make you believe that bombing a few hillsides in the subcontinent has solved your problems.
Its a side show.
You are now MORE likely to suffer something worse than 9/11 not less, and nothing you can do in this vein is going to make you safer. What's the quote from the Usual Suspects "you don't need numbers or money or guns, you need to will to do what the other guy won't".
Your posting confuses the Americans view of themselves with the reality that they are impotent where it counts. They have been chasing the buck so long that they think it can buy anything they want. But it can't by other hearts, it can't buy their souls - and it can't buy their will.
Islam is a factor of an immature religion. Nobody dies for christ anymore - they've grown beyond that. Either you need time, or a crash course of education.
You are unfortunately a prime example of why America is derided in the rest of the world. Your simplistic, ignorant views on your position, and the reality of the rest of the world act as a wonderful example of what Americans have to work against if they are to grow up sufficiently to take their place in the adult world.
First off, you obviously know very little of the outside world, probably have never really traveled outside the bounds of the USA. Sorry, but I've met loads of your type, those who think an overseas trip is outside their state, and who therefore lack an education of the reality of the world. Note I say 'the world', remember that USA is but a very small part. You need to get out more, to experience different points of view and look back on your USA with different eyes. What you would see would surprise you.
As an obvious for instance, your insistance that you live in the land of the individual is laughable to those who look at your country from the outside. While there are regional variations, the reality is that you live in the land of 'mass consumer individualism' - where the real caller of the shots is business and the buck. You can't BE anything you want to be, only what your society deems acceptable. Try saying that "all big business should be banned" and that "real democracy (rather than paid for votes) should be the politics" and see what happens. Grow up a bit an realise that your country is controlled, maybe not as much as some others, but more than you are prepared to see.
BTW while we're at it, recognise that you live in a very class-bound society. Although people inhabit a class on the basis of the number of bucks in their pocket, the divisions are very real, very wide and horribly obvious to those who look from outside. I've heard more shocking socicially divisive views from those in the US than I would ever hear at home.
Foreign policy. Do you really realise what is done by your diplomats and business men abroad, in your name? Sorry but they are very much arrogant, and very much sneaky, underhand bastards. They CANNOT be trusted, and never are trusted by those who do business with them. Because you seem to believe that you are always the best (which is seldom true) you approach any contact with an attitude that immediately inspires 'hate' in those that deal with you. You confuse a protected, large home market with somehow being superior. You are not. Time and again others do more with less, which you never accept is due to your lack. When that attitude hits your forign policy, you create the majority of your problems.
Frankly, you would do well to employ others to mediate the exchange between yourselves and the rest of the world. Virtually as soon as you open your mouths, you put you feet straight in. Your attitude, from what appears to be your schooling, is at fault. I don't see you waking up to reality short of a major war and invasion.
Want a prediction? You have squandered the chance of 9/11 to learn - in an orgy of bombing. You think you have bombed you problems away, whilst everyone else can see you have bombed your problems to even greater highs. The lessons have been missed, you won't change.
You want the frightening prediction? You will suffer an attack costing hundreds of thousands of lives within a decade.
The hatred is there. The means are there. The people are there, and in greater numbers than before 9/11. You cannot keep them out, and they have every reason to use your knee jerk reactions against you. It would be so easy.
Until you learn that you are citizens of the world - and how to be good citizens - then you should consider 9/11 as a faint foreshock of what may well be to come.
Take the first step into a wider world. Buy a ticket to somewhere else in the world, somewhere you're not even sure where it is. Once there don't be a tourist; immerse yourself in the culture, see the world through their eyes. Then look back home and see what you see. Once you get back home, make sure that those around you also see what you have seen. Educate your fellow American to open their eyes, to question your country.
Then, maybe, you can avoid the abyss towards which you are rushing headlong.
And the web was created by a brit in switzerland. Maybe the UK should setup a body to control the web, set standards etc.
That would be fair, wouldn't it? You can control the Internet, if we can control the web.
Get real, its international and the sooner the US realises that whenever it plays bully boy they piss off several million more people, the sooner they will grow out of their childhood and take their place amongst the world nations.
Slightly tasteless, but appropriate I guess
I wonder who has the most lasting effect on the outlook of the world, the average US president, or Chuck Jones ?
Meep, meep !
This is in all probability a load of self serving, karma whoring, crap. However...
What do the young need to understand?
What would you have benefited from when you were 10-15 years old? Personally I'd say its an education of just how low down, scheming, conniving and duplicitous the adult world real is. How its not how capable you are that matters, but who you know and how much you lie that makes the difference.
Give the children an education of how to win at adult games, how to really influence things. Let the idealism of the teenage years convert that into action for the real world - just give them the raw materials.
Does that take a PDA ? Nope.
Does that take a million dollers ? It helps.
The world is screwed over by those who can influence law, make the agenda, who can give YOU a job. In the end you end up slaves to those who lost their moral compass with their milk teeth. Give our children the raw understanding to recognise and play that game, their game, and win. Only then you do have the faintest chance that something will actually change in this world that we have fashioned.
The children are our future, and at the moment its a bleak, vapid, one.
Slashdot Mirror
probably the best explanation of why the 'dream' is a nightmare.
WAKE UP DICKHEAD AND SMELL THE ROSES.
Wealth 'creation' isn't a dream, its taking the bread off someone else's table. This isn't some kind of self renewing table, that 'wealth' comes from somewhere.
You need to understand that this is in essence a closed system. No new resources, no new opportunities. Something does not come out of nothing, its TAKEN, its USED UP.
What does this have to do with the DCMA and the story? Sure Adobe gets hoist by their own petard, but its only one more example of how we need a new social contract, a new way in which those that create are recompensed, those that consume are not held hostage....and those that feast on the work of others do not prosper - but are instead destroyed like the parasites they are.
Face it, the 'dream' doesn't work. Wake up and greet the new dawn.
Because you can't really do a good storyline if all people are doing is shooting their mates.
Because only a subset of the gamer community is interested in multiplayer. Many more don't want to have to go online to play.
Because, in the end, multiplayer limits what you can do, even in a FPS.
You can never return to the past, instead live in the present and create the future.
Take what was good and move on.
If you had to put a date on the singularity, what would it be ?
I seem to spend time everyday helping out someone who is trying to fight Word into doing what THEY want, rather than what it wants to do. This is not you or me, the people who can just pick it up and use it; its the non expert, the majority. They simply find today's Wordprocessors no great advance over those textmode wordprocessors of yesteryear.
The reason? Back then they KNEW what it was doing, they could SEE the control codes, and delete them if they were wrong. Sure it couldn't tell you your grammer was wrong, but it never really fought against you either.
If you look back to Word 2.0 and compare it against today you can see certain elements that you can think of as advances. But you can't really see much, and its certainly not an order of magnitude better. But we do have a whole load of attendant junk. Basically, we're going backward again.
If we are going to go in the direction of a 'smart' wordprocessor then I want a truely smart one. Something that means I do less work and produce a much better result. I don't want something with a level of complexity that means I'm forever fighting it in doing the actual job - the one of transfering knowledge from my head to someone else's with the minimum of time and effort.
Thanks for making my point for me.
Quality is designed IN, taking bugs OUT is an admission that you really didn't pay enough attention at the beginning. Sure you get the odd typo, but the real bugs are the ones in the logic of what your writing - and you often don't catch all of those.
If you are thinking about what is actually happening, rather than just pasting in a bit of gash code, you are much more likely to create something with quality engineered IN. Trust me, its the only way its going to get there.
As for the 'speed it up after the event' crowd - did you ever think that if you used the right approaches, the right concepts, from the start, you wouldn't have to spend the time tweaking some supposed critical element at the end? It should be second nature IF you really understand what you are doing. Sure there are always the games, device drivers etc., but I'm talking about the day to day code that gets executed every day by millions of people around the world. It generally takes no more effort to use the right technique as the wrong one - if you only knew the difference.
Have a little pride in your work man! You might find that your 'good enough, lets stuff it out the door' mentality is why you don't go forward and your company goes to the wall as a result of a buggy product.
Those of us that started programming in 1k and sub megahurts can really feel the time taken by badly coded applications. We know that forgetting what is happening on the silcon can kill how well our code will run.
However, those who started coding after ~1987 don't really have a gut feeling for it. To them the latest processor will make up for their bad coding. To a certain extent they are right. Today's advances STILL keep up with Moore's law, still make up for their lack of skill. However, when one looks at what is actually performed with all that power, one tends to question why we are paying so much, for so little.
Can you actually say that MS WordXP is much better than the non-WYSIWYG wordprocessor of yesteryear (itself a blast from the past) ?
We don't need profilers, we need coders have have that tacit knowledge of what really counts, where they should put real effort.
Unfortunately that doesn't come in a software box.
If Hammer= 1.4 x Athlon
& Athlon = 1.2 x P4 (non Northwood)
then if the word of hammer starting at 3400+ and 4000+ is true it would result in Hammer having a 2.0Ghz to 2.4Ghz clock (assuming AMD do nothing regards 64bit being faster)
Given the small size of the die, this sounds quite feasible, indeed 5000+ sounds possible with 0.13 and SOI
OK, ok, so its very iffy to extrapolate like that, but Intel may well have some significant problems if AMD can roll out Hammer fast enough to beat the P4 0.09 die strink.
What he says is there is no scarcity of bandwidth, providing you totally change the way you use that spectrum.
The problem you seem to ignore is how you move from where you are now, to where you would like to be. You (and he) seem to say "scrap the regulations, let the market decide". Well, this is the market that fights in court over software patents. This is the market that makes other smaller companies "offers they cannot refuse". This is the market where betamax lost.
Now I'd agree that the government-bound, big business-bound, regulation authorities that you have at the moment are not ideal - BUT YOU NEED SOME REGULATION - some long term thought, some arbiter of fair play.
You seem to be taking a statement that "there is no scarcity of bandwidth" as an article of faith, a personal religion to add to your other god of the free market. You ignore that while technically it maybe possible to significantly increase total bandwidth (but it will never be unlimited) there are a whole host of problems that tend to prevent it happening. These are NOT majorly the problem of the evil FCC getting in the way of the good private enterprise, but problems to do with bandwidth already being used by systems that would need to be replaced in your future world. Who is going to pay for that? Do you have deep pockets?
Whether you like it or not, you need a workable process, and yes regulation, to effect change.
Wishful thinking and a loud voice don't cut it.
- IPv6 takeup
- He's postulating no FCC, no ITC, so no regulations. Now I tend to agree that not limiting 'who' can use bandwidth, but saying 'how' is workable, but his argument is competition red in tooth and claw.
Imagine a scenario where someone sells a "802.11 killer". Set it up and it kills off bandwidth for any such devices, but still allows Bluetooth to function. Call it a 'router enhancer'.Sure people will complain, but it isn't likely to do them any good in this low regulation environment. Don't forget, they already sell jammers for mobile phones !
What occured to me after posting the last message is that this is very similar to Dubya's solution to global warming - minimise the regulation and the money will push technology to solve all your problems. It seems to be a pecularly US viewpoint - most everyone else recognises the limitations of the market in rational decision making.
There is a whole other question of where the optimum regulation vs market balance is - maybe that's what this guy should be researching instead?
- If you use better technology (low power, repeaters, signal extraction) then you can fit more information into the same bandwidth.
- You could always use more bandwidth.
- Private industry is better at cooperating than the government is a regulation.
At no point does he really try and dispute Shannon, there is a finite limit to the information that can be transmitted, he just thinks we should be smarter at approaching that theoretical limit. He does the usual job of trying to confuse the issue and make it more complicated than it actually is, but when you get down to it, its fairly obvious.Now I'd tend to agree that we could do with being smarter. But to say that the commercial world is going to make systems that all work nicely together is just plain ignoring realities. Look at the 802.11 / Bluetooth cockup - in reality the aim will be the fast buck and market share. If you can do that by riding roughshod over the competition, so much the better.
In the end you need to engineer a balance between the short term and long term perspectives. I'd agree that its wrong at the moment, but that is a call to shake up the regulations and those that create them, not to throw out all long term thought in an orgy of competing, incompatible systems.
Maybe we could start by allocating bandwidth to particular purposes on a lease term basis. Once you reach the end of your term, you have to show that continuing to allow you that bandwidth is the optimum use for the next lease period, if not, then no bandwidth.
Maybe then we would have faster evolution, and even revolution, in the use of the EM spectrum.
A simple cruise missile, using GPS and/or INS is quite simple, accurate to 100m without much sweat and quite capable of delivering a payload from several hundred miles away - all using some pretty low level skills.
Mucking around with image based guidance is not - but then again, its not really needed for these purposes.
A fission device takes some serious engineering, especially if you want to get a working yield - added to which is the problem of sourcing the material. Is probably easier to buy a nuke from Russia, and the number of nukes you've seen detonated demonstrate that its not that easy.
None of the above is unknown to those that need to know - and getting good 24hour look down cover is fairly important in dealing with it, since you can fairly easily go low enough to put yourself in the clutter.
Still think that someone is trying to protect their funding though....
High altitude balloons are hardly likely to trouble an Arab terrorist coming in on the American Airlines redeye service. Let alone the domestic terrorist who lives in Florida and mails you Anthrax.
Nope, they are useful for three things: observation, communication relay and radar. Now either someone is trying to hop on the 'terrorism' funding bandwagon, or someone is attempting to hide a technology that effect civil liberties under the same cover.
My personal guess is both. Someone has finally worked out that cruise missiles are easy to knock up and a threat to US cities - hence the need for good look down 24hour radar coverage. At the same time, an observation platform that could hover over a city, watching everyone, but not seen by anyone, has certain advantages.
Neither really does much to prevent the average terrorist - but its a nice way to sell your system.
As for which direction the future will actually take, rather than just the possibilities, I'd suggest that we are past the tipping point, in terms of technological capability, into a world where physical wars are fought without humans. Once you get there, you get the probability of what amounts to the precambrian explosion in equipment and doctrine. Much focus has been on getting inside the decision loop of your opponent in the past - there is a limit to that approach.
Having said that, economic, political, emotional and cyber warfare are cheaper and easier to prosecute - physical warfare is always a last resort. So maybe the financing for equipment will just dry up...
BTW laser dazzle tends to be used against different targets to the ones you suggest.
The trick of really understanding new concepts is not to try and test those new concepts using old methodologies and doctrine. I've seen that done time and again - and not surprisingly the result doesn't look good. However any new system changes the concept of operation and thus the final result. Denying your opponent that attack aspect will change virtually every aspect of dogfighting. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to work out how you would react and fight in that circumstance, and indeed what the total weapon mix would look like.
Without saying where my knowledge comes from, lets just say that I graduated many years ago and have done this for real. I'm personally betting on combat UAVs within a decade, which is faster than most people believe. The underlying drivers are right and I can detect the beginnings of the tipping in sentiment. Time will tell who's right.
Oh, and as a last point, Backfire is so named because it has a rear mounted automatic gun - nothing to do with missiles.
What do you know, a Slashdot discussion that is actually half way reasoned and intelligent - will wonders never cease.
In fact rearward firing is more difficult, purely because there is zero airflow over the control surfaces for a finite time.
As for it not being a useful tactic, well the US tend to say that about anything the Russians can do, only to change their minds later. A situation where you can successfully fire in a rearward aspect definitely does have tactical advantage in a dogfight; if only because it reduces the advantage of gaining this aspect to the defending aircraft. Where is a safe direction to attack from?
As for the usefulness of a pilot in the cockpit. The pilot can have advantages in high level strategic thinking and adapability to degraded performance. However this is in my opinion outweighed by the reduction in reaction time and higher acceleration possible with automated AI control. Couple in a remote pilot to add that high level thinking (which needs nothing more complex than a video game viewpoint, not VR) and the pilotless combat aircraft is likely to have significant advantage.
The only time this is likely to be accepted by any air force, however, is when human pilots have been beaten (and killed) in a real war situation. Think of it as akin to the use of mounted cavalry; slaughter is the only way break out of the old thinking.
JSF is almost certainly the last manned fighter to be designed, and even this is edging towards pilotless control as the design stage continues.
Yes its difficult to control, but its doable.
Thrust vectoring is OK as an approach, fairly old hat. However there are some problems with it in complexity/lifetime terms.
The question is not so much what this story is about - this is all fairly old stuff. The question is third party datalinking, high data rate sensors, and high speed terminal manoever.
And as has been said elsewhere, getting those dammed pilots out of the cockpit and on the ground where they belong.
The US *DOES* subsidise its steel industry and its aircraft industry, and to the tune of quite a bit of money.
Although some European states subsidise, in general most of these have been done away with it several decades ago - along with quite a lot of jobs.
Put very simply what the US is doing is protectionism. There is no way you are going to compete with Korea on bulk steel production - the economics just aren't there. Its a commodity market and your cost base is too high for you to stand an chance.
On the aircraft side, you have been used to your manufactuerers having a cartel - and now object that there is a real competitor. Instead you should welcome it - Boeing will either stop sleeping on the job; or go out of business. That's a good outcome of global competition - you get better planes, cheaper.
When you come down to it, there is very little that the US does best. Your not as smart as Europe, not as cheap or industrious as the far east, not as devout as the middle east.
What you do have is a large, protected, home market.
Don't confuse that advantage with some dream-like superiority - your long term future is a steady decline. In 50 years time, if things go as they currently look, you will be secondary to the primary superpower of China and its satellite manufacturers on the far east.
Learn humility now.
The action of the increase of technology has been to put power into smaller and smaller groups of people.
In the 1600s if you wanted to throw your weight around, you needed to be a country
In the 1900s you needed an empire.
In the middle of the last century you needed to be a superpower.
However from there, being large has actually been a disadvantage in the exercise of force (although its still there for economic warfare).
The US can't nuke someone, CNN wouldn't allow it, big business wouldn't allow it. Sure they can bomb a few hills, but thats not really that effective at imposing your will.
At the same time the individual has got access to more and more power, if they really want it. Want to bomb the US? No real problem is there. Particularly if you have the will to die for your cause.
In fact the more the US would try to throw its weight around, the more hatred is built up, the more likely is the use of force against it. Add to this that this action is bad for international business and an imperialistic superpower is a short lived affair.
The biggest problem you have right at the moment is that you've let them make you believe that bombing a few hillsides in the subcontinent has solved your problems.
Its a side show.
You are now MORE likely to suffer something worse than 9/11 not less, and nothing you can do in this vein is going to make you safer. What's the quote from the Usual Suspects "you don't need numbers or money or guns, you need to will to do what the other guy won't".
Your posting confuses the Americans view of themselves with the reality that they are impotent where it counts. They have been chasing the buck so long that they think it can buy anything they want. But it can't by other hearts, it can't buy their souls - and it can't buy their will.
Islam is a factor of an immature religion. Nobody dies for christ anymore - they've grown beyond that. Either you need time, or a crash course of education.
Bombs are irrelevent.
You are unfortunately a prime example of why America is derided in the rest of the world. Your simplistic, ignorant views on your position, and the reality of the rest of the world act as a wonderful example of what Americans have to work against if they are to grow up sufficiently to take their place in the adult world.
First off, you obviously know very little of the outside world, probably have never really traveled outside the bounds of the USA. Sorry, but I've met loads of your type, those who think an overseas trip is outside their state, and who therefore lack an education of the reality of the world. Note I say 'the world', remember that USA is but a very small part. You need to get out more, to experience different points of view and look back on your USA with different eyes. What you would see would surprise you.
As an obvious for instance, your insistance that you live in the land of the individual is laughable to those who look at your country from the outside. While there are regional variations, the reality is that you live in the land of 'mass consumer individualism' - where the real caller of the shots is business and the buck. You can't BE anything you want to be, only what your society deems acceptable. Try saying that "all big business should be banned" and that "real democracy (rather than paid for votes) should be the politics" and see what happens. Grow up a bit an realise that your country is controlled, maybe not as much as some others, but more than you are prepared to see.
BTW while we're at it, recognise that you live in a very class-bound society. Although people inhabit a class on the basis of the number of bucks in their pocket, the divisions are very real, very wide and horribly obvious to those who look from outside. I've heard more shocking socicially divisive views from those in the US than I would ever hear at home.
Foreign policy. Do you really realise what is done by your diplomats and business men abroad, in your name? Sorry but they are very much arrogant, and very much sneaky, underhand bastards. They CANNOT be trusted, and never are trusted by those who do business with them. Because you seem to believe that you are always the best (which is seldom true) you approach any contact with an attitude that immediately inspires 'hate' in those that deal with you. You confuse a protected, large home market with somehow being superior. You are not. Time and again others do more with less, which you never accept is due to your lack. When that attitude hits your forign policy, you create the majority of your problems.
Frankly, you would do well to employ others to mediate the exchange between yourselves and the rest of the world. Virtually as soon as you open your mouths, you put you feet straight in. Your attitude, from what appears to be your schooling, is at fault. I don't see you waking up to reality short of a major war and invasion.
Want a prediction? You have squandered the chance of 9/11 to learn - in an orgy of bombing. You think you have bombed you problems away, whilst everyone else can see you have bombed your problems to even greater highs. The lessons have been missed, you won't change.
You want the frightening prediction? You will suffer an attack costing hundreds of thousands of lives within a decade.
The hatred is there. The means are there. The people are there, and in greater numbers than before 9/11. You cannot keep them out, and they have every reason to use your knee jerk reactions against you. It would be so easy.
Until you learn that you are citizens of the world - and how to be good citizens - then you should consider 9/11 as a faint foreshock of what may well be to come.
Take the first step into a wider world. Buy a ticket to somewhere else in the world, somewhere you're not even sure where it is. Once there don't be a tourist; immerse yourself in the culture, see the world through their eyes. Then look back home and see what you see. Once you get back home, make sure that those around you also see what you have seen. Educate your fellow American to open their eyes, to question your country.
Then, maybe, you can avoid the abyss towards which you are rushing headlong.
I mean really ?
Confined space; says it all really.
And the web was created by a brit in switzerland. Maybe the UK should setup a body to control the web, set standards etc.
That would be fair, wouldn't it? You can control the Internet, if we can control the web.
Get real, its international and the sooner the US realises that whenever it plays bully boy they piss off several million more people, the sooner they will grow out of their childhood and take their place amongst the world nations.
Slightly tasteless, but appropriate I guess
I wonder who has the most lasting effect on the outlook of the world, the average US president, or Chuck Jones ?
Meep, meep !
Looks rather simple, akin to simple range gating.
What do the young need to understand?
What would you have benefited from when you were 10-15 years old? Personally I'd say its an education of just how low down, scheming, conniving and duplicitous the adult world real is. How its not how capable you are that matters, but who you know and how much you lie that makes the difference.
Give the children an education of how to win at adult games, how to really influence things. Let the idealism of the teenage years convert that into action for the real world - just give them the raw materials.
Does that take a PDA ? Nope.
Does that take a million dollers ? It helps.
The world is screwed over by those who can influence law, make the agenda, who can give YOU a job. In the end you end up slaves to those who lost their moral compass with their milk teeth. Give our children the raw understanding to recognise and play that game, their game, and win. Only then you do have the faintest chance that something will actually change in this world that we have fashioned.
The children are our future, and at the moment its a bleak, vapid, one.