Sorry, but the OP's sentiment is shared by most Americans these days. It's too bad Slashdot doesn't have something to show the poster's country next to their name, so we can ignore comments from people in countries infected by pure lunacy, and maybe even put in a filter to ignore such comments, just as we do for low-modded posts (though for the US, it'd help if it showed the state the poster was in; the post was probably made from someplace like Alabama or Nebraska, not from New York or California or Washington).
You have other choices about other things in life too. You don't HAVE TO have a house or apartment; you can just live under a bridge.
Having internet access is essential to participating in today's economy. Many jobs require it now. You can't apply for any decent job now without an internet connection and email account and a computer to maintain your resume on. You can't search for jobs without access to monster.com, dice.com, etc. And if you have a telecommuting job, high-speed internet access is essential, just like having your own car is essential to most other jobs (in the US).
Good point about the gorilla arm: it's not a factor on a small handheld device, but it is on a large monitor sitting in front of you on your desk. Too bad so many people (including everyone at MS) don't understand this.
Touchscreens have their problems, but the old-school phones have some major problems compared to a modern Android phone, and you hit on two of them: 1) with a big screen and high resolution, it's much easier to scroll through lots of contacts. You shouldn't need to dial numbers much any more. 2) texting is much, much easier on a touchscreen, and it all comes down to one thing: with a big touchscreen, you can show a whole QWERTY (or Dvorak in my phone's case) keyboard on-screen. You can also do the "Swype" thing which many people swear by. With the old-school phones, you were limited to 10 keys, so keying in text was a very slow and laborious process. Of course, a Blackberry-style thumb keyboard would be preferable to many people, but phones with those keyboards tend to be bulkier and/or have smaller screens, and if you don't really need to type that often, it might not be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Not only this, but the ST:TNG UIs had tactile feedback, just like mechanical buttons. They did it with miniaturized force fields or somesuch; it's in the TNG Technical Manual. Obviously, force fields aren't real (yet), just like warp drives and artificial gravity, but that's the official explanation which acknowledges that tactile feedback is desirable in a UI. This tech manual came out around 1991-1992, long before this whole touchscreen tactile-feedback-less craze got started.
At least Mitt, being a Republican, comes right out and let's you know you're gonna get corn-holed, instead of the Democrats who pretend to be your friends as they force you over the barrel.
This is an excellent and highly accurate summarization of the difference between the Republican and Democrat parties.
I don't see how this would happen. Cadillac's not the first automaker to jump on the touchscreen-for-everything paradigm; BMW and Ford have been doing it for years. If they haven't gotten sued yet, then I don't see why Cadillac would get in trouble for it.
That's my whole point. If it's that easy to neutralize drones (making them head back to their designated landing zone, if your human-piloted fighters don't take them out while they're flying autonomously), then they're really quite useless against a technologically advanced opponent. So if you shed all our human-piloted aircraft and the ability to fly them well (like the US did before Vietnam), then you'll be unable to fight any opponent who's more advanced than cave-dwelling simpletons.
And as I said to someone else here, what do you do when the enemy launches fighter jets against your now-autonomous drones? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just use cruise missiles?
Ok, and what happens when the enemy launches a bunch of fighter jets to take out all your drones, which are now flying autonomously and just looking for a target, because communications and GPS are blocked? Your drones are nothing more than cruise missiles at this point. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just launch cruise missiles? The whole point of drones is that you have remote human pilots who can respond to changing mission needs, rather than a fire-and-forget long-range missile, I would assume. If you block communications (and some navigation), you lose that advantage entirely, so there's little point in even having the drones to begin with.
Ok, good point. However, if you're in an area with no friendly airports around, the OP's idea of launching drones from submarines isn't going to work, because you'll have no way at all to refuel them. With a carrier, you just return the drone to the carrier when fuel is low. I assume this is how modern Navy fighters do it, rather than relying on Air Force tankers to refuel them.
Of course; I don't think many people are under the illusion that Iran is a formidable threat, technologically. However, China and Russia are. Your global satellite system is no match for China's anti-satellite missiles.
Of course, to be fair, not everything is Made in China, such as cutting-edge microprocessors (still made in the USA by Intel), but you don't need absolute cutting-edge tech to deal with drones, and China is more than capable, technologically, of countering them.
Dead reckoning is pretty useless in an aircraft if you want any kind of accuracy. It's useful for ground-based navigation and that's about it. Airspeeds are much too variable to get any accuracy from that. The others can make up for it to a good extent, but again, accuracy is necessary if your goal is to drop a bomb on a particular building somewhere, and you're not going to get that kind of accuracy using primitive navigation techniques.
That's all fine and well, however if you block GPS over the entire conflict zone, then these aircraft will be useless for any missions within that zone. If you engineer them right, maybe you won't have to worry too much about someone taking them over, but without GPS in the conflict zone where you're trying to use them, they're effectively flying blind. The whole problem with these aircraft is that they rely on radio signals such as GPS for guidance and command and control. Blocking radio signals is not hard to do for someone more advanced than Taliban fighters, so these aircraft are really only good for fighting with very unsophisticated opponents, like the Taliban. Being able to pull 15gs isn't very useful against some yahoos on the ground armed with AK47s and RPGs; it's only useful against very sophisticated opponents, and those nations certainly have the ability to jam radio signals.
Iran's claim is very suspicious. However, Iran isn't exactly the most technologically-advanced nation out there. This drone stuff only works because all the opponents are decades behind the US technologically, so they have little ability (yet) to block the radio signals needed to keep these aircraft under control. If the US were up against an opponent at the same technological level, such as China, it'd be screwed. Blocking GPS signals is something well beyond the capabilities of some Taliban fighters living in a cave and carrying nothing more advanced than AK47s, however it's well within China's abilities.
It's not nitpicking; there's a giant difference between an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian regime. The Wikipedia article summarizes it well. Very few of the world's inhabitants have lived under a Hitler or Mussolini. Garden-variety dictators and other authoritarians don't try to control every aspect of peoples' lives. Living in an authoritarian regime isn't really very different from living in the USA; they just don't have the rigged elections that we do.
The receiver IS temporarily whoring himself to the tipper. What makes you think they aren't?
It's the same at any job. If I go to work at some company writing software, I'm whoring myself to that company for 8 hours/day (or more, when it's a salaried position). I do a job, I get paid for my time spent. It's the same with waiters, except they serve multiple customers at once and none of them last very long (usually an hour at most). Tipping just allows the customer to pay what they think is fair, rather than the waiter getting a flat hourly rate like at most jobs, sorta like how some music artists are letting customers pay what they think is fair, rather than charging a flat price.
This doesn't mean I advocate tipping-based pay (for servers at places that aren't top-tier, it's pretty crappy, esp. because many people don't tip properly), but it's not "degrading and corrupting" by any means, at least no more than any other job.
You have a point about the price of the food, however that's why if you're a server looking for work, you try to find the highest-priced restaurant that will take you. It's just like how, as a software engineer, I look for the highest-paying employer, even though the volume of work I do will theoretically be the same no matter where I work, whether it's some super-high-paying company in Silicon Valley or some cheap-ass place in Fargo. Even in the same geographical area, there's big differences between what employers will pay for the same skill level, so as a job-seeker it's your job to find the best offer. Same goes for waiters. If you're working at someplace with ultra-cheap food, presumably it's because you couldn't get the higher-end restaurants to hire you for some reason.
The comparison of Americans with penguins was unfair, I think. A better choice for the comparison would have been vultures. Big, butt-ugly birds that'll eat anything, no matter how horrible.
I don't see how that's legal. If it's a "commercial property", then it simply isn't allowed to be located there in the first place, because commercial properties are generally not allowed to be placed in areas which are zoned for residential properties (and vice versa). Besides, what happens when he sells the house and the new people don't use it for a "home office"?
Anyway, I guess the moral of the story here is: don't say "home office" when you get a building permit to expand your house.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but the OP's sentiment is shared by most Americans these days. It's too bad Slashdot doesn't have something to show the poster's country next to their name, so we can ignore comments from people in countries infected by pure lunacy, and maybe even put in a filter to ignore such comments, just as we do for low-modded posts (though for the US, it'd help if it showed the state the poster was in; the post was probably made from someplace like Alabama or Nebraska, not from New York or California or Washington).
You have other choices about other things in life too. You don't HAVE TO have a house or apartment; you can just live under a bridge.
Having internet access is essential to participating in today's economy. Many jobs require it now. You can't apply for any decent job now without an internet connection and email account and a computer to maintain your resume on. You can't search for jobs without access to monster.com, dice.com, etc. And if you have a telecommuting job, high-speed internet access is essential, just like having your own car is essential to most other jobs (in the US).
Good point about the gorilla arm: it's not a factor on a small handheld device, but it is on a large monitor sitting in front of you on your desk. Too bad so many people (including everyone at MS) don't understand this.
Touchscreens have their problems, but the old-school phones have some major problems compared to a modern Android phone, and you hit on two of them:
1) with a big screen and high resolution, it's much easier to scroll through lots of contacts. You shouldn't need to dial numbers much any more.
2) texting is much, much easier on a touchscreen, and it all comes down to one thing: with a big touchscreen, you can show a whole QWERTY (or Dvorak in my phone's case) keyboard on-screen. You can also do the "Swype" thing which many people swear by. With the old-school phones, you were limited to 10 keys, so keying in text was a very slow and laborious process. Of course, a Blackberry-style thumb keyboard would be preferable to many people, but phones with those keyboards tend to be bulkier and/or have smaller screens, and if you don't really need to type that often, it might not be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Not only this, but the ST:TNG UIs had tactile feedback, just like mechanical buttons. They did it with miniaturized force fields or somesuch; it's in the TNG Technical Manual. Obviously, force fields aren't real (yet), just like warp drives and artificial gravity, but that's the official explanation which acknowledges that tactile feedback is desirable in a UI. This tech manual came out around 1991-1992, long before this whole touchscreen tactile-feedback-less craze got started.
At least Mitt, being a Republican, comes right out and let's you know you're gonna get corn-holed, instead of the Democrats who pretend to be your friends as they force you over the barrel.
This is an excellent and highly accurate summarization of the difference between the Republican and Democrat parties.
I don't see how this would happen. Cadillac's not the first automaker to jump on the touchscreen-for-everything paradigm; BMW and Ford have been doing it for years. If they haven't gotten sued yet, then I don't see why Cadillac would get in trouble for it.
That's my whole point. If it's that easy to neutralize drones (making them head back to their designated landing zone, if your human-piloted fighters don't take them out while they're flying autonomously), then they're really quite useless against a technologically advanced opponent. So if you shed all our human-piloted aircraft and the ability to fly them well (like the US did before Vietnam), then you'll be unable to fight any opponent who's more advanced than cave-dwelling simpletons.
Your fighter drone jet will be useless in combat for two reasons:
1) latency
2) you can't control it when the opponent jams your radio
And as I said to someone else here, what do you do when the enemy launches fighter jets against your now-autonomous drones? Wouldn't it be cheaper to just use cruise missiles?
Ok, and what happens when the enemy launches a bunch of fighter jets to take out all your drones, which are now flying autonomously and just looking for a target, because communications and GPS are blocked? Your drones are nothing more than cruise missiles at this point. Wouldn't it be cheaper to just launch cruise missiles? The whole point of drones is that you have remote human pilots who can respond to changing mission needs, rather than a fire-and-forget long-range missile, I would assume. If you block communications (and some navigation), you lose that advantage entirely, so there's little point in even having the drones to begin with.
Ok, good point. However, if you're in an area with no friendly airports around, the OP's idea of launching drones from submarines isn't going to work, because you'll have no way at all to refuel them. With a carrier, you just return the drone to the carrier when fuel is low. I assume this is how modern Navy fighters do it, rather than relying on Air Force tankers to refuel them.
Of course; I don't think many people are under the illusion that Iran is a formidable threat, technologically. However, China and Russia are. Your global satellite system is no match for China's anti-satellite missiles.
Exactly.
Of course, to be fair, not everything is Made in China, such as cutting-edge microprocessors (still made in the USA by Intel), but you don't need absolute cutting-edge tech to deal with drones, and China is more than capable, technologically, of countering them.
Dead reckoning is pretty useless in an aircraft if you want any kind of accuracy. It's useful for ground-based navigation and that's about it. Airspeeds are much too variable to get any accuracy from that. The others can make up for it to a good extent, but again, accuracy is necessary if your goal is to drop a bomb on a particular building somewhere, and you're not going to get that kind of accuracy using primitive navigation techniques.
Drones can launched from submarines, barges, or cargo planes, and can be refueled with aerial refueling tankers.
And where do you launch the aerial refueling tankers from, if you don't have a friendly airport nearby? That's what carriers are for.
That's all fine and well, however if you block GPS over the entire conflict zone, then these aircraft will be useless for any missions within that zone. If you engineer them right, maybe you won't have to worry too much about someone taking them over, but without GPS in the conflict zone where you're trying to use them, they're effectively flying blind. The whole problem with these aircraft is that they rely on radio signals such as GPS for guidance and command and control. Blocking radio signals is not hard to do for someone more advanced than Taliban fighters, so these aircraft are really only good for fighting with very unsophisticated opponents, like the Taliban. Being able to pull 15gs isn't very useful against some yahoos on the ground armed with AK47s and RPGs; it's only useful against very sophisticated opponents, and those nations certainly have the ability to jam radio signals.
Iran's claim is very suspicious. However, Iran isn't exactly the most technologically-advanced nation out there. This drone stuff only works because all the opponents are decades behind the US technologically, so they have little ability (yet) to block the radio signals needed to keep these aircraft under control. If the US were up against an opponent at the same technological level, such as China, it'd be screwed. Blocking GPS signals is something well beyond the capabilities of some Taliban fighters living in a cave and carrying nothing more advanced than AK47s, however it's well within China's abilities.
It's not nitpicking; there's a giant difference between an authoritarian regime and a totalitarian regime. The Wikipedia article summarizes it well. Very few of the world's inhabitants have lived under a Hitler or Mussolini. Garden-variety dictators and other authoritarians don't try to control every aspect of peoples' lives. Living in an authoritarian regime isn't really very different from living in the USA; they just don't have the rigged elections that we do.
The receiver IS temporarily whoring himself to the tipper. What makes you think they aren't?
It's the same at any job. If I go to work at some company writing software, I'm whoring myself to that company for 8 hours/day (or more, when it's a salaried position). I do a job, I get paid for my time spent. It's the same with waiters, except they serve multiple customers at once and none of them last very long (usually an hour at most). Tipping just allows the customer to pay what they think is fair, rather than the waiter getting a flat hourly rate like at most jobs, sorta like how some music artists are letting customers pay what they think is fair, rather than charging a flat price.
This doesn't mean I advocate tipping-based pay (for servers at places that aren't top-tier, it's pretty crappy, esp. because many people don't tip properly), but it's not "degrading and corrupting" by any means, at least no more than any other job.
You have a point about the price of the food, however that's why if you're a server looking for work, you try to find the highest-priced restaurant that will take you. It's just like how, as a software engineer, I look for the highest-paying employer, even though the volume of work I do will theoretically be the same no matter where I work, whether it's some super-high-paying company in Silicon Valley or some cheap-ass place in Fargo. Even in the same geographical area, there's big differences between what employers will pay for the same skill level, so as a job-seeker it's your job to find the best offer. Same goes for waiters. If you're working at someplace with ultra-cheap food, presumably it's because you couldn't get the higher-end restaurants to hire you for some reason.
I don't think you understand what the word "totalitarian" means. Not all dictatorships qualify for this term, in fact most don't.
The comparison of Americans with penguins was unfair, I think. A better choice for the comparison would have been vultures. Big, butt-ugly birds that'll eat anything, no matter how horrible.
Whoosh...
(obviously you're not a Dilbert fan)
I don't see how that's legal. If it's a "commercial property", then it simply isn't allowed to be located there in the first place, because commercial properties are generally not allowed to be placed in areas which are zoned for residential properties (and vice versa). Besides, what happens when he sells the house and the new people don't use it for a "home office"?
Anyway, I guess the moral of the story here is: don't say "home office" when you get a building permit to expand your house.