You lost me at Correlation !=Causation. Seriously...what yells "I'm a college Freshman!!!" louder than this stupid cliche?
I would say that attacking the title of his post because you consider it a cliche, while completely ignoring the arguments he presented, that yells it much louder.
Waterboarding is essentially forced drowning with a medic in attendance, to revive the "patient" in case his/her vitals falter.
Actually, it's not drowning at all. If they wanted to force drowning all it would take would be a kitchen sink. For waterboarding, the subject is placed at a slight head-down angle and the cloth over the face prevents aspiration of any meaningful quantity of water, so drowning is actually mechanically impossible. It just gives a thoroughly convincing sensation of drowning. al Zarqawi lasted almost 2 1/2 minutes (a superhuman feat) before he gave in and agreed to talk--- which means he wasn't drowning. This is the reason the technique is used. Asphyxiation due to drowning limits one to as long as it takes for the subject to pass out, then requires medical attention. Waterboarding, it can go on and on....
Thing is, if the job needs doing, it's almost certainly worth doing right.
The thing about that saying is that frequently the opposite is the case:
"If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right"
Things tend to start out small, so small that you could probably keep track of them in a paper notebook. Then they grow, and gain complexity by insidious accretion. What was once a single sheet table in excel acquires a few lookups, more calculations, and additional sheets. Soon you have a growing nightmare, which some wise guy massages and stuffs behind an Access front end. Access hides the sores and boils for a while, until you start getting weird bugs, or a boss somewhere asks for more functionality. The original Access guy is gone, so they let the new kid work on it. He manages to hack in a few workarounds to bad database design and clean up a few bugs.... but then it reaches critical mass, and one day quits working. Suddenly, everyone realizes that they've been stuffing all their eggs in one really shitty basket. Then they ask me "can you fix it"? When I ask why they didn't do it right to begin with, nobody knows; but the truth is, who hires a developer to create a single sheet Excel workbook? It's not planned idiocy, it's just an evil form of Stone Soup. Nobody in the organization knows enough about computers to know what they're doing is wrong.
[1] They'd made a non-unique element a primary key. Whenever the database wouldn't let them add an entry because it would create a duplicate key, they just cloned the structure of the affected table structure and carried on adding the entries in the new table.
Ouch. Where I work they weren't "smart" enough for that, so instead they had to be more subtle. The unique key was an 8 digit job number, so on the rare occasion one job required two or three entries, they overrode the field and substituted lowercase 'L' for one, and uppercase 'O' for zero (the job number had to remain visually identical when printed). Subsequently, there were (for example) three entries, keyed each to 41309883, 4l309883, and 413O9883.
And then there was a lookup table of 4-digit "location codes" originally derived from an Excel sheet where any number under 1000 had the letter 'O' as the leading "digits" because the original maker of the sheet didn't know how to force Excel to show leading zeroes. This error was then pushed directly into the Access tables without correction. Just try doing math with the "number" ooo9. The job clearly wasn't worth doing, because it obviously wasn't worth doing right.
Afraid you're describing a very natural behavior that's unlikely to disappear. Developers (not just software) tend to work until each constraint is just met and then stop to work on the next constraint.
And let's hope it never does disappear or we can kiss new software goodbye.
Some of that behavior I've seen, we'd be better off if it disappeared. Sometimes, simply expanding till limits are met is like the old saying "some day, computers will be the size of buildings, and have millions of vacuum tubes!"
Perhaps I'm just pessimistic because where I work they're in the process of replacing the huge, unwieldy FileMaker monstrosity that handles payroll.... with an even bigger, more unwieldy FileMaker monstrosity that does the same thing, but requires us to feed it more information (more detailed job codes, time tracked in 6 minute increments, etc). All this extra data will be used to generate reports explaining why we're always releasing late. Never mind that we've been badgering them to hire more people for months. No, it's clearly a time management issue! As the PHB in Dilbert once said, "I want hourly reports on why we're behind schedule!"
Wow, given your description, it's a miracle the AF hasn't nuked the our own country into oblivion yet since it's clearly all filled with dumbasses while the army is loaded with geniuses. I never would have guessed it given that the AF has a higher standard for ASVAB scores and education than the Army. Not that you're biased or anything...
His post is a bit extreme--- and undoubtedly hyperbole--- but having been in the Army myself, I know exactly what he's talking about. The Air Force is, in a way, a sort of "Bizarro World" armed service. The vast majority of AF personnel are non-combat, pure support staff. Subsequently, AF basic training is largely devoid of purpose. Army and Marine Corps training are both based on (to varying degrees) the "infantryman/rifleman first" theory, and even Navy personnel have to learn the basics of the rather serious business of surviving shipboard combat. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps enlistees need to possess a certain degree of drive, discipline, and maturity to get through such training. This tends to weed out the lazy, slack, and childish ones early on. Air Force basic training consists mostly of learning to make your bed and march in a straight line. The road marches, bayonet fighting, shipboard rescue, and the like just aren't there. It does require something to get through Air Force basic, getting up early 6 days a week and exercising regularly; but it just doesn't require as much of it as the other services training does.
The practical upshot of all of this is that by the time enlistees get to their advanced training, you're going to see a lot more wrinkled shirts and immaturity among the Air Force folks. This isn't just anecdotal, it's universally recognized. Lots of Air Force guys won't admit it or might not even realize it, for that matter; but ask any member of the Army, Navy, or USMC who's served in a multiservice environment which service has the most goofballs, dingbats, and "ragbags", and you'll nearly always get the same answer: the Air Force. It's just the nature of the training. I served with plenty of sharp, squared away Air Force personnel, but there were a lot of exasperating dweebs too. It's nothing inherently wrong with the Air Force per se, it's more of a lack of purpose to the initial training.
The Army and Air Force use very different skills and for lack of a better term, types of people. The Army needs automatons that are essentially brainless, if they get smart they might start making their own decisions.
See, it's fucking dumbshit parochial 'tards like you that have turned the various branches of the military into little feuding fiefdoms. The Army has a fairly good collection of "meatballs", but none of us were trained to be "automatons".
The USAF needs technicians who can figure out things on their own.
Technicians are largely flowchart-following card swappers, and they're present in all the branches. You think an AF APG-66 (F-16 radar) tech is working on something more complicated than a Navy APG-73 (F-18 radar) tech, or an Army APG-78 (AH-64 radar) tech? It's all the same shit, man. It all comes from the same manufacturers, and it's all built to the same specs.
Autonamoustons?
What word is that supposed to be?
Retention of VERY expensive pilots and techies would be a nightmare. You can turn a kid into a tank driver or infantry goon in a few weeks.
You can turn a kid into an Air Force SP or a POL handler in SIX WEEKS. It takes 14 weeks to become an Army infantryman, and 16 weeks to become an armor crewman.
USAF training is typically months, sometimes up to a year.
Idiotic generalization. My training in the Army took 18 months*. I was trained as a Signal Intelligence Analyst/Linguist. Military Intelligence. Perhaps you've heard of it. The Air Force and Navy have it as well. I trained alongside airmen, sailors, and marines that whole time. Do you know who runs most of the military's intelligence training? The Army and the Air Force do--- together. And we all went to the same classes, because there's no real difference between the basic intelligence requirements of each service's mission that justifies completely separate training.
So quit jerking off to pictures of F-22's and take a moment to understand that the real members of the armed forces, the ones tasked with the hard work of getting the job of warfare done, we don't think like you do. My company in Afghanistan had Air Force FACs with us, eating the same dirt, ducking the same bullets. We had a mutual respect for one another than a pissant little shitbag like you could never understand. If you are, were, or in the future will be a member of the US Air Force, then you're a disgrace to the uniform. Why don't you go get a job at the meat packing plant and follow professional football instead, where you can trash talk other cities' teams in the bar after work, where it (like your life) doesn't fucking matter.
*(not counting my later additional HUMINT/Interrogator training, nor the tactical training required for me to do my job as an organic part of the infantry)
I don't see any reason to try to remerge the army and the airforce. You would just wind up with SAC, ACC, material cmd and space cmd with a new service flag and wearing brown instead of blue.
Army wears green.
Air power is every bit as important as ground and sea power.
Not really. Control of the air and the seas is a contributory goal towards the real goal of military action, which is control of real estate. We live on land. The land is where the vast majority of our resources and industrial capacity reside. No one ever defeated an enemy by sinking his navy with battleships, or by blowing up his cities with bombs. It takes grunts on the ground to conquer territory. This is Warfare 101.
So, what do you gain?
An aviation command that's under the direction of a commander that is also responsible for ground combat units and therefore gives a TREMENDOUS crap about how much close air support they get and how effective the aviation command is at supplying it? The current Air Force "management" has a tremendous woody for strategic bombing (thanks LeMay, you ass) and for air-to-air combat (thanks Boyd, you swaggering fighter jock) and now for "cyber warfare", and badly neglects what should be about HALF of their job, which is close air support.
That being said, I would like to see a wider expansion of dedicated air tools for the army (tactical attack craft like predators, ac130s, fighters, etc...) instead of trying to make a helecopter act like a jet.
Damn straight! I've long said that if the Air Force really doesn't want to do CAS and theater airlift, it should just turn those A-10's, C-130's, and AC-130's over to the Army and let us do it ourselves. That'd leave the fighter jocks and bomber guys free to have their tickle-fights or whatever, waiting for another USSR-sized superpower to reappear and give their air superiority fighters and stealth bomber a reason to exist.
Personally, I have no argument with the actual working members of the Air Force. For the most part they're on the ball and want to help us poor "legs" out. The source of the problem is pentagon asshats in blue uniforms structuring the force and shaping aircraft procurement such that they sometimes can't help. Most of my complaints about the Air Force leadership were originally voiced to me by an Air Force Forward Air Controller--- himself an A-10 pilot-- moving with my company in Afghanistan. I'm actually quite charitable towards the AF, compared to him!
Reducing the number of branches in the command structure will lead to even more institutionalized thinking
More or fewer branches has little effect on the amount of institutionalized thinking, it just varies the amount of parochialism. The Air Force was formed in 1948 on the premise that the US Army shouldn't be in the business of strategic bombing and air superiority. Unfortunately, the agreement that split the AF off from the Army also forbade the Army to operate aircraft. As a result the Army still has trouble getting the AF to provide adequate close air support. Under consideration at the same time was a proposal to attach the Marine Corps to the Army (where it more logically belongs) and transfer naval aviation assets to Air Force control; but Navy Secretary Forrestal had spent WW2 building up the Navy into his own little self-sufficient kingdom with its own air and ground assets. It's a completely asinine duplication of effort, but he had enough pull to kill the consolidation proposal. As a result of this sort of bureaucratic feudalism, we have: 4 1/2 air forces
Air Force, Naval aviation, USMC aviation, Coast Guard aviation, and Army helicopter aviation
1 1/2 armies
the real Army, and the Navy's light infantry, the USMC
2 1/2 navies
the Navy, the Coast Guard, and all the small watercraft operated by the AF and Army to fill the gaps the Navy won't cover.
So you see, while splitting up the services seems like it should promote efficiency by allowing each service to specialize, what you end up with is services narrowing their focus to the stuff that's completely "theirs", while neglecting the "overlap" areas where other services need their support. As it turns out, the Army is inevitably the biggest loser in all of this. They are the backbone of any sizable conflict, but can't get decent close air support or timely theater airlift support from the Air Force, and are forbidden by law to provide it for themselves. Likewise they can't get theater level waterborne transport from the Navy. Meanwhile, naval aviators whine about the Air Force getting to drop all the bombs in Iraq, when the justification for having them flying over Iraq is already weak at best. Then there's the USMC lobbying to be given sole operational responsibility over Afghanistan because they want to get out of Iraq, as their tactics there have only resulted in a greater casualty rate, rather than "upstaging" the Army as is their normal goal.
The root of the problem is that all the branches are run by politicians. They may wear uniforms full of ribbons and stars, but they're no different than your typical pork-barrel politician. They're always looking for some way to expand their power base so they can justify a bigger bite of the defense "pie". This silly Air Force "Cyber Command" is just more of the same. The Air Force hasn't a single justification in its charter for claiming "cyberspace" as their own, but they hope to get it by virtue of being the only service with applicable combat assets in-theater when the time comes to decide whose responsibility it is. Frankly, I think the military is ill suited to the job. I reckon the NSA is the better tool for the job. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point the Air Force was told "your Cyber Command is a needless duplication of assets already fielded by the NSA--- kill it". Heck, they may have been told that already...
But it looked weird as hell, and I don't believe that the official version is all that credible. I just don't see that running planes into the buildings that far up would make the entire buildings collapse into their own footprints.
"Looked weird as hell"? Of course it did. We've never seen anything on that scale before or since. Unless you have one or more other examples of 100+ story truss-stabilized tubular frame supported structures that were hit by aircraft and then collapsed, you have no grounds to claim that's not what happens. Really, if you have doubts, read the Popular Mechanics debunking. It logically lays the whole thing out. Seriously, the "truthers" theories are completely insane. It's not too to entertain the notion that perhaps the building was wired for demolition, but when you view that assertion in light of all the other things that would have to be true--- the various degrees of complicity in the hijacking that'd be necessary--- it's just complete and utter nonsense. Some fucktard jihadis found a loophole in the system and exploited it. Shit happens.
Oddly enough, people always suspect conspiracies whenever something bad happens and rarely seem to find the angry loner theory plausible.
Not so odd if you consider it for a moment. People like predictability and control in their lives. Conspiracy theories are a natural expression of that. The idea that there are wild cards out there that are largely unstoppable makes them uncomfortable. It's simply more reassuring to believe that there's a cabal of conspirators behind the evil deeds. Even if the conspiracy is beyond their personal power to stop, the notion that it's possible to stop it satisfies the desire for control.
It's not the bricks or all the concrete, it's the shingles, wooden window frames, and other stuff that burns through.
Make everything in your house completely of concrete and then you have no fire risk, otherwise all carbon can burn with enough fuel around (i.e. - organic chemicals). Plus, a large hydrocarbon fire will actually cause the water in concrete to explode, leading to structural failure of the wall and allowing fire to come in.
Due to a scarcity of wood, nearly all of Mexico City is made of concrete. Despite a population approximately double that of Los Angeles, it has less than 1/10th the amount of fire fighting equipment. When most of your building is not flammable, a burning window frame generally stops at the window. Your analysis is weak.
Not all zoning is dumb. In this case, with as large as chemical fuel load he had in the home, if his house went up it would likely take out the other houses nearby.
Speculation
I AM a fire safety researcher, and I know just how flammable most chemicals can be, especially since it looks like he was doing organic chemistry
Speculation
which is what I have my doctorate in. I assure you his house (and no one's is) [isn't] rated to address the fire risk that would have eventually happened.
Speculation
The fact that he had a fire in his AC tells me that all the fumes from his operation were starting to condense in there and then got activated by a spark in the fan motor.
INSANE speculation!
Tell me, what "fumes" evaporate from a cool basement, rise to the second floor, then condense in a hot AC motor casing?
Does your fire safety research involve making up long chains of unfounded assumptions like that?
According to at least one person, Mr Deeb had dioxins in his basement. Those are rather potent carcinogens which become airborne in a fire rather easily. That poses an unacceptable risk in a residential community.
Printed circuit boards produce tremendous quantities of dioxins when burned. A small bottle of dioxin is likely to be no worse than burning my server rack. SHould my server rack be banned too?
Abloy disc tumbler locks? The trouble with those is that the discs are not spring loaded and occasionally require repeated twisting of the key to get it to seat all the way before opening. Not a good feature when dealing with large numbers of dodos, which most large installations do.
Sometimes the stores will look at the key and refuse if it has a "do not duplicate" stamped on it but often not.
Indeed, there's not a single law against duplicating a "do not dupe" stamped key. I used to make copies of apartment building common area keys for people all the time based on my "landlords suck" philosophy, which says that if a landlord wants $10, $20, sometimes FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS to replace a lost perimeter key, I say "fuck that". I'll make it for $3. "DO NOT DUPLICATE" is just a feeble attempt at Jedi mind tricks anyway. Besides, even if duplication of such a key was unlawful, there's nothing to stop someone from breaking off the head of the key, bringing in the key sans head, and saying "the head broke off my key, can you make me a new one?"
>Cutting a key by sight based on a key sitting on the seat of an car is apparently a useful skill for locksmiths...
Sigh. My locksmith can't get a working copy 1 times in 3 even when I give him the original to make copies.
If you're just going in and having the key duplicated, there's a pretty good chance your original is crap. Garbage in, garbage out. A key duplicator is like a xerox machine. It makes a copy, but the copy is never going to be quite as good as the original. I keep my duplicator adjusted to within one thousandth of an inch after 10 generations, but even that is sometimes too much for a crappy key. A few "generations" removed from the factory original key by dodos with badly adjusted duplicators, and you'll have a key that works, but won't duplicate reliably. Instead of having your locksmith make you a $2 copy of a bad key, fork over the cash to have him decode the key and cut a new one by code. If he can't do that, you need to find a new locksmith. If your "locksmith" is the slackjawed guy at Home Depot that runs their badly-calibrated key duplicating machine, you need to find a real locksmith.
What's wrong with Abloy locks? Why don't they just use Abloy?
Abloy disc tumbler locks are great, but they have a serious ease-of-use problem. Since the discs have no return springs keeping them in the "ready" position, they can be inadvertently turned or even just vibrate out of alignment. This requires the user to insert the key and twist it back and forth to "capture", one layer at a time, all the discs before being able to turn the key and open the lock. It's not a hard trick to learn, but it is one more trick than is required for a standard pin tumbler lock, and most people are dodos.
...The patented, integrated design works so that the bitting performs two functions, lifting the pins and rotating them.
If that means what I think it means, it's completely worthless against a pick.
A pick doesn't care about how far apart the pins are, only that they're not perfectly in a line, thus allowing them to be set one at a time, turning an exponential process into a linear one.
You've obviously never actually seen the inner workings of a Medeco lock cylinder. They're like standard lock pins, only with a chisel point and a vertical groove down the side. The pins have to be rotated such that the groove faced perpendicular to the key, allowing the "fingers" of the sidebar to drop in. There are also one or more shallower false grooves that trap the sidebar but don't allow it to open. It's not unpickable, of course, but it's not as easy as you seem to think.
Schlage's drum-shaped "high security" pins are a much better solution.
Drum shaped? Don't you mean spool shaped? At any rate, Medeco not only uses those as well, but was using them long before Schlage even got around to developing a "high security" lock cylinder.
Or better yet, not pretending the classic pinned locks are security devices at all.
There's the real kicker. Even a truly unpickable lock is worthless in a wood door if you have a sawzall. One of my favorite "lockout" stories involved a lawyer who lost his keys, and his interior office door had a Medeco deadbolt. His spare keys were inside (dumbass) so all I needed to do was get in the office. I went to the truck and returned with a six foot ladder. I pushed up the suspended ceiling tile, climbed up. I pushed aside the tile over the inside of the door, hopped over, and opened his door from the inside. The guy seriously rethought his security measures in light of that.
On my car, an identical-toothed key with the wrong code (I was having a dealership make a spare, and they screwed up on it) won't even open the door.
What make of car is it? I'm not aware of any car that uses transponder interrogation to secure the doors. It seems more likely that the key is simply mis-cut, just not obviously so. The only way a dealership can actually "screw up" a key is to make the physical cuts in the metal wrong--- they don't do ANYTHING to the transponder module. The transponder is just an RFID chip that responds with a unique serial number, and this number is burned in at the factory, long before the dealer gets the key blank. The car's computer simply has a list of valid serial numbers and wont start if it doesn't see one of them.
There was a story about a prison a few months ago where a news photographer took a nice picture of bars and keys. Except the master key was clearly visible. (Wasn't a Medeco I don't think.) A good locksmith or picker can look at a key and glean the numbers to cut a key for themselves. (If you've seen a handheld key-cutting machine it's pretty nifty. You just enter a number from 1 to 7 and it makes a cut on the key. You just enter a series of numbers and it makes cuts all the way down the key and voila! a new key. Takes less than a minute.)
The prison came out with a statement saying they had changed their locks.
It seems unlikely that these keys were for anything beyond the prison offices. Prison keys are actually designed with a sliding guard that shields the cuts. It was discovered the hard way many years ago that, given enough time, a resourceful man with can make a working key given only a few glimpses of the cuts. Prisoners have nothing, if not time.
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a new slashdot meme?
No, it's a very old meatspace meme. Grumpy old man yelling at kids to get off his property is a cliche probably over 150 years old.
I would say that attacking the title of his post because you consider it a cliche, while completely ignoring the arguments he presented, that yells it much louder.
Great!! Now we will know if they decide to cross any border illegally.
Wealthy Mexicans don't have to cross illegally. They just get visas.
Waterboarding is essentially forced drowning with a medic in attendance, to revive the "patient" in case his/her vitals falter.
Actually, it's not drowning at all. If they wanted to force drowning all it would take would be a kitchen sink. For waterboarding, the subject is placed at a slight head-down angle and the cloth over the face prevents aspiration of any meaningful quantity of water, so drowning is actually mechanically impossible. It just gives a thoroughly convincing sensation of drowning. al Zarqawi lasted almost 2 1/2 minutes (a superhuman feat) before he gave in and agreed to talk--- which means he wasn't drowning. This is the reason the technique is used. Asphyxiation due to drowning limits one to as long as it takes for the subject to pass out, then requires medical attention. Waterboarding, it can go on and on....
Thing is, if the job needs doing, it's almost certainly worth doing right.
The thing about that saying is that frequently the opposite is the case:
"If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right"
Things tend to start out small, so small that you could probably keep track of them in a paper notebook. Then they grow, and gain complexity by insidious accretion. What was once a single sheet table in excel acquires a few lookups, more calculations, and additional sheets. Soon you have a growing nightmare, which some wise guy massages and stuffs behind an Access front end. Access hides the sores and boils for a while, until you start getting weird bugs, or a boss somewhere asks for more functionality. The original Access guy is gone, so they let the new kid work on it. He manages to hack in a few workarounds to bad database design and clean up a few bugs.... but then it reaches critical mass, and one day quits working. Suddenly, everyone realizes that they've been stuffing all their eggs in one really shitty basket. Then they ask me "can you fix it"? When I ask why they didn't do it right to begin with, nobody knows; but the truth is, who hires a developer to create a single sheet Excel workbook? It's not planned idiocy, it's just an evil form of Stone Soup. Nobody in the organization knows enough about computers to know what they're doing is wrong.
[1] They'd made a non-unique element a primary key. Whenever the database wouldn't let them add an entry because it would create a duplicate key, they just cloned the structure of the affected table structure and carried on adding the entries in the new table.
Ouch. Where I work they weren't "smart" enough for that, so instead they had to be more subtle. The unique key was an 8 digit job number, so on the rare occasion one job required two or three entries, they overrode the field and substituted lowercase 'L' for one, and uppercase 'O' for zero (the job number had to remain visually identical when printed). Subsequently, there were (for example) three entries, keyed each to 41309883, 4l309883, and 413O9883.
And then there was a lookup table of 4-digit "location codes" originally derived from an Excel sheet where any number under 1000 had the letter 'O' as the leading "digits" because the original maker of the sheet didn't know how to force Excel to show leading zeroes. This error was then pushed directly into the Access tables without correction. Just try doing math with the "number" ooo9. The job clearly wasn't worth doing, because it obviously wasn't worth doing right.
you were doing so well, but you missed the last two words: "...going forward"
And let's hope it never does disappear or we can kiss new software goodbye.
Some of that behavior I've seen, we'd be better off if it disappeared. Sometimes, simply expanding till limits are met is like the old saying "some day, computers will be the size of buildings, and have millions of vacuum tubes!"
Perhaps I'm just pessimistic because where I work they're in the process of replacing the huge, unwieldy FileMaker monstrosity that handles payroll.... with an even bigger, more unwieldy FileMaker monstrosity that does the same thing, but requires us to feed it more information (more detailed job codes, time tracked in 6 minute increments, etc). All this extra data will be used to generate reports explaining why we're always releasing late. Never mind that we've been badgering them to hire more people for months. No, it's clearly a time management issue! As the PHB in Dilbert once said, "I want hourly reports on why we're behind schedule!"
You know where the best pilots in the US armed forces are?
The Navy, launching from carriers. (Remember Top Gun? That was about Navy pilots.)
The Air Force has never been needed.
Wow. Excellent argument. How can anyone counter the proof that "nAvy R00lz! woo!", the unequivocal evidence of a fucking Tom Cruise movie?
Genius. Absolute genius.
Wow, given your description, it's a miracle the AF hasn't nuked the our own country into oblivion yet since it's clearly all filled with dumbasses while the army is loaded with geniuses. I never would have guessed it given that the AF has a higher standard for ASVAB scores and education than the Army. Not that you're biased or anything...
His post is a bit extreme--- and undoubtedly hyperbole--- but having been in the Army myself, I know exactly what he's talking about. The Air Force is, in a way, a sort of "Bizarro World" armed service. The vast majority of AF personnel are non-combat, pure support staff. Subsequently, AF basic training is largely devoid of purpose. Army and Marine Corps training are both based on (to varying degrees) the "infantryman/rifleman first" theory, and even Navy personnel have to learn the basics of the rather serious business of surviving shipboard combat. Army, Navy, and Marine Corps enlistees need to possess a certain degree of drive, discipline, and maturity to get through such training. This tends to weed out the lazy, slack, and childish ones early on. Air Force basic training consists mostly of learning to make your bed and march in a straight line. The road marches, bayonet fighting, shipboard rescue, and the like just aren't there. It does require something to get through Air Force basic, getting up early 6 days a week and exercising regularly; but it just doesn't require as much of it as the other services training does.
The practical upshot of all of this is that by the time enlistees get to their advanced training, you're going to see a lot more wrinkled shirts and immaturity among the Air Force folks. This isn't just anecdotal, it's universally recognized. Lots of Air Force guys won't admit it or might not even realize it, for that matter; but ask any member of the Army, Navy, or USMC who's served in a multiservice environment which service has the most goofballs, dingbats, and "ragbags", and you'll nearly always get the same answer: the Air Force. It's just the nature of the training. I served with plenty of sharp, squared away Air Force personnel, but there were a lot of exasperating dweebs too. It's nothing inherently wrong with the Air Force per se, it's more of a lack of purpose to the initial training.
The Army and Air Force use very different skills and for lack of a better term, types of people. The Army needs automatons that are essentially brainless, if they get smart they might start making their own decisions.
See, it's fucking dumbshit parochial 'tards like you that have turned the various branches of the military into little feuding fiefdoms. The Army has a fairly good collection of "meatballs", but none of us were trained to be "automatons".
The USAF needs technicians who can figure out things on their own.
Technicians are largely flowchart-following card swappers, and they're present in all the branches. You think an AF APG-66 (F-16 radar) tech is working on something more complicated than a Navy APG-73 (F-18 radar) tech, or an Army APG-78 (AH-64 radar) tech? It's all the same shit, man. It all comes from the same manufacturers, and it's all built to the same specs.
Autonamoustons?
What word is that supposed to be?
Retention of VERY expensive pilots and techies would be a nightmare. You can turn a kid into a tank driver or infantry goon in a few weeks.
You can turn a kid into an Air Force SP or a POL handler in SIX WEEKS. It takes 14 weeks to become an Army infantryman, and 16 weeks to become an armor crewman.
USAF training is typically months, sometimes up to a year.
Idiotic generalization. My training in the Army took 18 months*. I was trained as a Signal Intelligence Analyst/Linguist. Military Intelligence. Perhaps you've heard of it. The Air Force and Navy have it as well. I trained alongside airmen, sailors, and marines that whole time. Do you know who runs most of the military's intelligence training? The Army and the Air Force do--- together. And we all went to the same classes, because there's no real difference between the basic intelligence requirements of each service's mission that justifies completely separate training.
So quit jerking off to pictures of F-22's and take a moment to understand that the real members of the armed forces, the ones tasked with the hard work of getting the job of warfare done, we don't think like you do. My company in Afghanistan had Air Force FACs with us, eating the same dirt, ducking the same bullets. We had a mutual respect for one another than a pissant little shitbag like you could never understand. If you are, were, or in the future will be a member of the US Air Force, then you're a disgrace to the uniform. Why don't you go get a job at the meat packing plant and follow professional football instead, where you can trash talk other cities' teams in the bar after work, where it (like your life) doesn't fucking matter.
*(not counting my later additional HUMINT/Interrogator training, nor the tactical training required for me to do my job as an organic part of the infantry)
I don't see any reason to try to remerge the army and the airforce. You would just wind up with SAC, ACC, material cmd and space cmd with a new service flag and wearing brown instead of blue.
Army wears green.
Air power is every bit as important as ground and sea power.
Not really. Control of the air and the seas is a contributory goal towards the real goal of military action, which is control of real estate. We live on land. The land is where the vast majority of our resources and industrial capacity reside. No one ever defeated an enemy by sinking his navy with battleships, or by blowing up his cities with bombs. It takes grunts on the ground to conquer territory. This is Warfare 101.
So, what do you gain?
An aviation command that's under the direction of a commander that is also responsible for ground combat units and therefore gives a TREMENDOUS crap about how much close air support they get and how effective the aviation command is at supplying it? The current Air Force "management" has a tremendous woody for strategic bombing (thanks LeMay, you ass) and for air-to-air combat (thanks Boyd, you swaggering fighter jock) and now for "cyber warfare", and badly neglects what should be about HALF of their job, which is close air support.
That being said, I would like to see a wider expansion of dedicated air tools for the army (tactical attack craft like predators, ac130s, fighters, etc...) instead of trying to make a helecopter act like a jet.
Damn straight! I've long said that if the Air Force really doesn't want to do CAS and theater airlift, it should just turn those A-10's, C-130's, and AC-130's over to the Army and let us do it ourselves. That'd leave the fighter jocks and bomber guys free to have their tickle-fights or whatever, waiting for another USSR-sized superpower to reappear and give their air superiority fighters and stealth bomber a reason to exist.
Personally, I have no argument with the actual working members of the Air Force. For the most part they're on the ball and want to help us poor "legs" out. The source of the problem is pentagon asshats in blue uniforms structuring the force and shaping aircraft procurement such that they sometimes can't help. Most of my complaints about the Air Force leadership were originally voiced to me by an Air Force Forward Air Controller--- himself an A-10 pilot-- moving with my company in Afghanistan. I'm actually quite charitable towards the AF, compared to him!
Reducing the number of branches in the command structure will lead to even more institutionalized thinking
More or fewer branches has little effect on the amount of institutionalized thinking, it just varies the amount of parochialism. The Air Force was formed in 1948 on the premise that the US Army shouldn't be in the business of strategic bombing and air superiority. Unfortunately, the agreement that split the AF off from the Army also forbade the Army to operate aircraft. As a result the Army still has trouble getting the AF to provide adequate close air support. Under consideration at the same time was a proposal to attach the Marine Corps to the Army (where it more logically belongs) and transfer naval aviation assets to Air Force control; but Navy Secretary Forrestal had spent WW2 building up the Navy into his own little self-sufficient kingdom with its own air and ground assets. It's a completely asinine duplication of effort, but he had enough pull to kill the consolidation proposal. As a result of this sort of bureaucratic feudalism, we have:
4 1/2 air forces
Air Force, Naval aviation, USMC aviation, Coast Guard aviation, and Army helicopter aviation
1 1/2 armies
the real Army, and the Navy's light infantry, the USMC
2 1/2 navies
the Navy, the Coast Guard, and all the small watercraft operated by the AF and Army to fill the gaps the Navy won't cover.
So you see, while splitting up the services seems like it should promote efficiency by allowing each service to specialize, what you end up with is services narrowing their focus to the stuff that's completely "theirs", while neglecting the "overlap" areas where other services need their support. As it turns out, the Army is inevitably the biggest loser in all of this. They are the backbone of any sizable conflict, but can't get decent close air support or timely theater airlift support from the Air Force, and are forbidden by law to provide it for themselves. Likewise they can't get theater level waterborne transport from the Navy. Meanwhile, naval aviators whine about the Air Force getting to drop all the bombs in Iraq, when the justification for having them flying over Iraq is already weak at best. Then there's the USMC lobbying to be given sole operational responsibility over Afghanistan because they want to get out of Iraq, as their tactics there have only resulted in a greater casualty rate, rather than "upstaging" the Army as is their normal goal.
The root of the problem is that all the branches are run by politicians. They may wear uniforms full of ribbons and stars, but they're no different than your typical pork-barrel politician. They're always looking for some way to expand their power base so they can justify a bigger bite of the defense "pie". This silly Air Force "Cyber Command" is just more of the same. The Air Force hasn't a single justification in its charter for claiming "cyberspace" as their own, but they hope to get it by virtue of being the only service with applicable combat assets in-theater when the time comes to decide whose responsibility it is. Frankly, I think the military is ill suited to the job. I reckon the NSA is the better tool for the job. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point the Air Force was told "your Cyber Command is a needless duplication of assets already fielded by the NSA--- kill it". Heck, they may have been told that already...
But it looked weird as hell, and I don't believe that the official version is all that credible. I just don't see that running planes into the buildings that far up would make the entire buildings collapse into their own footprints.
"Looked weird as hell"? Of course it did. We've never seen anything on that scale before or since. Unless you have one or more other examples of 100+ story truss-stabilized tubular frame supported structures that were hit by aircraft and then collapsed, you have no grounds to claim that's not what happens. Really, if you have doubts, read the Popular Mechanics debunking. It logically lays the whole thing out. Seriously, the "truthers" theories are completely insane. It's not too to entertain the notion that perhaps the building was wired for demolition, but when you view that assertion in light of all the other things that would have to be true--- the various degrees of complicity in the hijacking that'd be necessary--- it's just complete and utter nonsense. Some fucktard jihadis found a loophole in the system and exploited it. Shit happens.
Oddly enough, people always suspect conspiracies whenever something bad happens and rarely seem to find the angry loner theory plausible.
Not so odd if you consider it for a moment. People like predictability and control in their lives. Conspiracy theories are a natural expression of that. The idea that there are wild cards out there that are largely unstoppable makes them uncomfortable. It's simply more reassuring to believe that there's a cabal of conspirators behind the evil deeds. Even if the conspiracy is beyond their personal power to stop, the notion that it's possible to stop it satisfies the desire for control.
It's not the bricks or all the concrete, it's the shingles, wooden window frames, and other stuff that burns through. Make everything in your house completely of concrete and then you have no fire risk, otherwise all carbon can burn with enough fuel around (i.e. - organic chemicals). Plus, a large hydrocarbon fire will actually cause the water in concrete to explode, leading to structural failure of the wall and allowing fire to come in.
Due to a scarcity of wood, nearly all of Mexico City is made of concrete. Despite a population approximately double that of Los Angeles, it has less than 1/10th the amount of fire fighting equipment. When most of your building is not flammable, a burning window frame generally stops at the window. Your analysis is weak.
Not all zoning is dumb. In this case, with as large as chemical fuel load he had in the home, if his house went up it would likely take out the other houses nearby.
Speculation
I AM a fire safety researcher, and I know just how flammable most chemicals can be, especially since it looks like he was doing organic chemistry
Speculation
which is what I have my doctorate in. I assure you his house (and no one's is) [isn't] rated to address the fire risk that would have eventually happened.
Speculation
The fact that he had a fire in his AC tells me that all the fumes from his operation were starting to condense in there and then got activated by a spark in the fan motor.
INSANE speculation!
Tell me, what "fumes" evaporate from a cool basement, rise to the second floor, then condense in a hot AC motor casing?
Does your fire safety research involve making up long chains of unfounded assumptions like that?
According to at least one person, Mr Deeb had dioxins in his basement. Those are rather potent carcinogens which become airborne in a fire rather easily. That poses an unacceptable risk in a residential community.
Printed circuit boards produce tremendous quantities of dioxins when burned. A small bottle of dioxin is likely to be no worse than burning my server rack. SHould my server rack be banned too?
These keys have been around for a long time now:
http://www.assaabloy.com/Global/News/Image bank/Products/High res/Abloy_Key2_2649x841.jpg
.
Abloy disc tumbler locks? The trouble with those is that the discs are not spring loaded and occasionally require repeated twisting of the key to get it to seat all the way before opening. Not a good feature when dealing with large numbers of dodos, which most large installations do.
Men with rifles and grenades will not even look at someone else with a uniform and a clipboard.
They'll look twice at anyone without a visible security badge, though.
Sometimes the stores will look at the key and refuse if it has a "do not duplicate" stamped on it but often not.
Indeed, there's not a single law against duplicating a "do not dupe" stamped key. I used to make copies of apartment building common area keys for people all the time based on my "landlords suck" philosophy, which says that if a landlord wants $10, $20, sometimes FIFTY FUCKING DOLLARS to replace a lost perimeter key, I say "fuck that". I'll make it for $3. "DO NOT DUPLICATE" is just a feeble attempt at Jedi mind tricks anyway. Besides, even if duplication of such a key was unlawful, there's nothing to stop someone from breaking off the head of the key, bringing in the key sans head, and saying "the head broke off my key, can you make me a new one?"
>Cutting a key by sight based on a key sitting on the seat of an car is apparently a useful skill for locksmiths...
Sigh. My locksmith can't get a working copy 1 times in 3 even when I give him the original to make copies.
If you're just going in and having the key duplicated, there's a pretty good chance your original is crap. Garbage in, garbage out. A key duplicator is like a xerox machine. It makes a copy, but the copy is never going to be quite as good as the original. I keep my duplicator adjusted to within one thousandth of an inch after 10 generations, but even that is sometimes too much for a crappy key. A few "generations" removed from the factory original key by dodos with badly adjusted duplicators, and you'll have a key that works, but won't duplicate reliably. Instead of having your locksmith make you a $2 copy of a bad key, fork over the cash to have him decode the key and cut a new one by code. If he can't do that, you need to find a new locksmith. If your "locksmith" is the slackjawed guy at Home Depot that runs their badly-calibrated key duplicating machine, you need to find a real locksmith.
What's wrong with Abloy locks? Why don't they just use Abloy?
Abloy disc tumbler locks are great, but they have a serious ease-of-use problem. Since the discs have no return springs keeping them in the "ready" position, they can be inadvertently turned or even just vibrate out of alignment. This requires the user to insert the key and twist it back and forth to "capture", one layer at a time, all the discs before being able to turn the key and open the lock. It's not a hard trick to learn, but it is one more trick than is required for a standard pin tumbler lock, and most people are dodos.
If that means what I think it means, it's completely worthless against a pick. A pick doesn't care about how far apart the pins are, only that they're not perfectly in a line, thus allowing them to be set one at a time, turning an exponential process into a linear one.
You've obviously never actually seen the inner workings of a Medeco lock cylinder. They're like standard lock pins, only with a chisel point and a vertical groove down the side. The pins have to be rotated such that the groove faced perpendicular to the key, allowing the "fingers" of the sidebar to drop in. There are also one or more shallower false grooves that trap the sidebar but don't allow it to open. It's not unpickable, of course, but it's not as easy as you seem to think.
Schlage's drum-shaped "high security" pins are a much better solution.
Drum shaped? Don't you mean spool shaped? At any rate, Medeco not only uses those as well, but was using them long before Schlage even got around to developing a "high security" lock cylinder.
Or better yet, not pretending the classic pinned locks are security devices at all.
There's the real kicker. Even a truly unpickable lock is worthless in a wood door if you have a sawzall. One of my favorite "lockout" stories involved a lawyer who lost his keys, and his interior office door had a Medeco deadbolt. His spare keys were inside (dumbass) so all I needed to do was get in the office. I went to the truck and returned with a six foot ladder. I pushed up the suspended ceiling tile, climbed up. I pushed aside the tile over the inside of the door, hopped over, and opened his door from the inside. The guy seriously rethought his security measures in light of that.
On my car, an identical-toothed key with the wrong code (I was having a dealership make a spare, and they screwed up on it) won't even open the door.
What make of car is it? I'm not aware of any car that uses transponder interrogation to secure the doors. It seems more likely that the key is simply mis-cut, just not obviously so. The only way a dealership can actually "screw up" a key is to make the physical cuts in the metal wrong--- they don't do ANYTHING to the transponder module. The transponder is just an RFID chip that responds with a unique serial number, and this number is burned in at the factory, long before the dealer gets the key blank. The car's computer simply has a list of valid serial numbers and wont start if it doesn't see one of them.
There was a story about a prison a few months ago where a news photographer took a nice picture of bars and keys. Except the master key was clearly visible. (Wasn't a Medeco I don't think.) A good locksmith or picker can look at a key and glean the numbers to cut a key for themselves. (If you've seen a handheld key-cutting machine it's pretty nifty. You just enter a number from 1 to 7 and it makes a cut on the key. You just enter a series of numbers and it makes cuts all the way down the key and voila! a new key. Takes less than a minute.)
The prison came out with a statement saying they had changed their locks.
It seems unlikely that these keys were for anything beyond the prison offices. Prison keys are actually designed with a sliding guard that shields the cuts. It was discovered the hard way many years ago that, given enough time, a resourceful man with can make a working key given only a few glimpses of the cuts. Prisoners have nothing, if not time.