if an enemy can spend 1.2 billion for 100 12 million dollar fighters and deploy them for every B2 bomber, what is the chance that they will get through? "Get through"? Do you mean employing them as bombers? Approximately zero. You'd probably do better with 10,000.12 million dollar civilian aircraft loaded with TNT, and trying a "human wave" attack. Trouble is, it's a one shot deal, while that $1.2billion bomber will just keep coming back to bomb you over, and over, and over...
If you mean "get through" as in "find/shoot down the attacking B-2", that is ALSO approximately zero.
Maybe it is time to rethink the cost vs. benefit equation. I once saw a TV show on discovery about this arrogant kit plane guy who said he'd built the ultimate third-world fighter plane. It was this dinky thing with a single M-61 vulcan cannon on it. His reasoning was thus:
"Imagine if, during the Falkland's War, Argentina had bought my aircraft instead of 30 Mirages. Instead of the British being able to shoot the few Mirages down, there'd be this massive wave of 1000 aircraft.... and behind it 1000 more.... and behind that another 1000.... Things would have turned out differently!"
What that dumbass didn't consider is that Argentina didn't have 3,000 combat ready pilots! Cost vs benefit is more than just a game of multiply-and-divide. You have to remember that achieving certain goals requires a certain degree of technical sophistication. Just as you can't get a baby in less than nine months no matter how many women you assign to the task, you'll never conquer the world with a million $1,200 ultralights.
In a way, yes. Friend of mine's father was flying an F-4 Phantom (aka, "the triumph of thrust over aerodynamics") and was shot down over Vietnam. After spending some time as a "guest" of the VC, he was mailed a bill for the aircraft and it's armaments upon returning home. This was written off, of course, as the bill was merely a formality. Insane crap like that happens when an expensive piece of hardware is lost while signed out under your name. I have no reason to believe it will be any different for these two guys. Indeed, it's the same process whether you sign for a $90 kevlar helmet or a $2.1 billion dollar aircraft. THey will indeed send you a "bill" for the lost item, even if it's been written off. THe important part is that you retain that bill showing that it's been written off. When it comes time for Packing and CLearing when your reassigned, there's a distinct possibility that someone, somewhere, didn't get the message that the item was written off and will refuse to let you leave post until you account for the missing item! I had to invent and show a "receipt" for a kevlar helmet the Air Force lost when they "vanished" one of my duffel bags somewhere between Afghanistan and Germany back in 2003 when I got out of the Army.
Incorrect. The first Spirit was delivered to Whiteman in 1989. My father was on the ground crew and the whole town (Warrensburg MO) was notified when the first flyover would be. I personally saw it. I just don't see how that could be possible. AV-1 "Spirit of America/Fatal Beauty", the first B-2A built, was the only operational B-2A airframe in 1989, and it was kept by Northrop as a flight test aircraft--- i.e. with flight test recording gear installed in its weapons bays--- until it was refitted to Block 30 after 1997 and finally delivered to the USAF. AV-2 was rolled out of the factory in Oct 90, but being one of the 6 initial test aircraft, it wasn't refitted for combat and delivered until Mar 98. I'm not saying you didn't see a B-2A, or that one wasn't there at Whiteman in 89; I'm just saying that the US Air Force did not have in its operational inventory at Whiteman a single combat ready B-2A until Dec 93. I think the problem is you don't know what "delivered" means in Air Force parlance.
I thought we redeployed a lot of our B-2 fleet to Diego Garcia? They've only built four B2 Shelter Systems on Diego Garcia, so they haven't rededployed more than four. Then again, I guess 20% of the fleet could be considered "a lot".
The "Strike Eagle" is just an F-15 variant (F-15E). The F-15 has been in service since '76. What's even funnier is that the Strike Eagle he cites is the ground attack variant of the F-15, and therefore is specifically not an air-superiority fighter.
Jet Fuel isn't 3 dollars a gallon. No way. Try more like 5 or 6. And you base this price on what? Super Idiot Powers of Clairvoyance? It's certainly not based on the actual prices at the pump. I find they range from $2.79 to $4.50, based on investing thirty fucking seconds in a google search. JP-8 is virtually identical to Jet-A, and you can bet your ass that the military doesn't buy at full retail price. Honestly, dolts like you seem to think jet fuel is something special. It's goddamn kerosene!
Does the entire military fleet really run off of JP-8? I would think that the large transport aircraft that are based on the 707, DC-10 and similar airframes would run off of Jet-A like their civilian badged counterparts.
This is just out of curiosity, not a flame. With the exception of a few additives (anti icing, antistatic, anti corrosive) JP-8 and Jet-A are essentially the same thing, and with the exception of the odd aircraft type here or there with bizarre needs, basically the whole air fleet runs JP-8. But that's just the start. The interesting thing is that when I say "entire military fleet", I'm not just talking about aircraft, I'm talking about all combat deployed vehicles. JP-8 in planes, JP-8 in helicopters, JP-8 in CUCV's, JP-8 in tanks, JP-8 in APCs... JP-8 in EVERYTHING! It's all part of the Single Fuel initiative started in 1988. We had a hard time in Afghanistan, as a lot of the "JP-8" we were supplied with was actually locally procured "Russian formula" jet fuel, which wasn't quite the same. Thinner, or something; doesn't work right with the fuel pumps (not sure--- I was an intel analyst). I hate JP-8. Get it on your clothes, you smell it for days. od forbid you get it in you mouth or nose--- you taste/smell it for days and there's no way to escape it.
If they use smart bombs and smart rockets, they should be connecting these weapons via USB. Or aircraft to some base station. They don't
If it was a worm, it could mean the beginning of the end of the smart bombs and guided missiles. You're an idiot. You think the planes are running Windows Warfighter Edition? That the missiles are running under Windows CE For Guided Munitions? A "worm" isn't something you can just generically write for "computers". It requires some knowledge of the internals of the systems your exploiting. All such systems in the military are classified. Go back to watching Independence Day and quit bothering the adults.
Plus, people are starting to wonder if 1.2 billion dollars would be better spent teaching more intelligence analysts how to speak Arabic, Urdu, and Pashto Funny you should mention, but I can tell you that it isn't money they need on that front. I was an intelligence analyst/interpreter originally trained in Russian back in the good old days of the cold war, then quickly retrained in Pashto back in 2002 and sent to Afghanistan. The biggest problem they have is finding people. Learning screwed-up backwater languages isn't easy (though it is easier than Russian), and finding enough people both able to learn them and willing to deal with the Asian equivalent of a bunch of illiterate rednecks, some of which think God wants them to shoot you, that's a bit tricky. Add to that the fact that after a couple years of eating dirt in Kandahar, lots of the experienced old timers decide they'd rather not re-enlist, and it's a tough row to hoe. It's fairly easy to find enough yee-haw rednecks to go be infantry, but finding smart people to do ridiculously dangerous stuff requires finding a very rare, very specialized type of Stupid*.
* Largely youthful enthusiasm. I used to have some of that kind of stupid, but it went away about the time I got to be 15 years older than all the rest of the guys I was with, and realized I didn't like being tired all the time.
According to this story, you can use the path disruption caused by stealthy aircraft flying through areas covered by mobile phone masts and fix the aircraft's position to within 10m or so. Irrelevant. You're missing the point. Pretty hard to guide a SAM using that technique. The point of stealth isn't to keep people from knowing it's there (the explosions of the bombs are a dead giveaway), but to make it nigh-impossible to shoot down.
$3 per gallon? Are you kidding? These are stealth bombers we're talking about, they don't run off regular gasoline you know... Last I checked aircraft fuel (especially of the military variety) ain't cheap! Last you checked? When the fuck were you last a fuel purchaser for the military? The B-2 engines are nothing special, basically variants of the same engine in the F-16 and F-15. They run off JP-8, the standard fuel for the entire military vehicle fleet. JP-8 and Jet-A are basically kerosene (with some additives). The current price for JP-8 is around $2.65/gal.
Oh, and you must be new here if you expect the editors to actual edit or even proofread:) I prefer to think that if it were not for their constant exposure as little more than trained chimps, the Slashdot "editors" wouldn't even bother with the little effort the presently exert. Why keep pointing out that the illiterate Slashdot janitors are page-hit delivering errand boys? I think it helps keep people aware that the source of their reading is simply haphazard and thoroughly untrustworthy. I also secretly wish that such comments make the editors feel bad, but that's unlikely. People that dumb usually wear their ignorance like a badge of honor.
People said the dev kits for the PS2 were a nightmare too, and well...
More likely, it's just some junior programmer getting his panties in a knot because he has to learn something new. More likely, you don't know what you're talking about. The PS3 has 7 cores and less than awe inspiring memory bandwidth. Developing for multiple cores gets geometrically more difficult for every core or two you add, particularly when you have a memory bottleneck to keep track of. Developing for the PS3 is not just a matter of "learn[ing] something new". It piles on a whole lot of juggling onto an already difficult process. The complaints about the PS2 were with its irregular SDK. The underlying hardware was a bog-standard single core MIPS addressing two banks of 256MB RAM. No comparison.
Without the ability to make a good profit margin on their only product, Netscape had no way to raise the cash required to really innovate. What the hell are you talking about? Netscape gave away the Netscape Navigator browser for free, so they never really had the ability to make a good profit on it. Their real product was server software, of which they had many kinds for sale. Where MS really started to kill them was with bundling IIS free with WinNT Server.
And the old paper hole punch trick to make double sided floppies out of single sided ones. If I remember correctly, I think I saved more than 50 cents a floppy this way. I think it was more like a buck. That's a neat trick. It's also a great way to make the disks more unreliable than they are - those floppies would only properly work at 360K/720K and would collect bad sectors much more rapidly when formatted to 1.2M/1.44M. You're talking about the HD vs DD/QD IBM disks. That's not what we're talking about. As the GP poster SAID, the hole punch trick with was to make double sided floppies out of single sided ones. The only difference between a single sided and double sided disk WAS the second hole. Disk manufacturers made both sides of equal quality because some single-sided drives had the head on top, some had it on the bottom, and they had no way of knowing how the disks were going to be used.
People say the same thing about Ho Chi Minh, that he was just out to unite the country, and if we'd just been nice to him we'd all be friends and float around like angels, but I don't buy it. Angels, probably not, but on friendly terms? Why not? We were backing him and his Viet Minh partisans when they were fighting the Japanese and turncoat Vichy French in WW2. They lobbied for the US to back an independent Vietnam after WW2, but the French threatened to pull out of NATO unless we backed their reestablishment of colonial rule in French Indochina. Uncle Ho was a communist, sure, but he was born in 1890. He was one of the early communists, which in many ways were much like our own founding fathers. Ho greatly admired Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately, the influence of nasty, fucked up Stalinist communism turned North Vietnam into the same kind of creepy totalitarianism the Russians had.. Ho was by that time far too old to really be any more than a figurehead. If the US had told France to go piss up a rope back in the 50's, and Ho Chi Minh hadn't had to resort to playing footsie with the prick Russians, things might have turned out fairly nicely in Vietnam. Ho certainly wasn't wedded to international communism. He was, in fact, pretty much entirely a hard-core nationalist. Two quotes from him sum up his attitude pretty nicely:
"I follow only one party: the Vietnamese party.""
"It is better to sacrifice everything than to live in slavery!"
I like good ol' Uncle Ho, and I'm a freakin' US Army veteran who joined the army in '87 to guard against a Russian invasion in Europe. Seriously, Ho wasn't your average dickwad commie hiding behind populist bullshit to justify declaring himself dictator (cough)Castro(cough). He was one of those rare people that spoke all that Leninist claptrap about equality and egalitarianism and meant it.
If your close relative is such a potential patent shredder, then why wouldn't he hire himself out for a $100-200 million now and destroy this patent on behalf of the banks? Don't you think the banks would pay that much right now? "-1, Doesn't Get it". Because the USPTO still would have the same number of slackjaws, and the same bad court decisions , and the same stupid definition of prior art backing these bogus patents. What the GP poster is saying is that crap like this could be avoided if the USPTO had competent staffing, using rational criteria in reviewing these things. In short, the banks have fuck-all to gain by hiring someone to demonstrate prior art so long as the USPTO's definition of prior art remains "found in the patent archives".
read indy books like America Deceived (book) which was banned from Amazon and Wikipedia. I read the preview pages. It's utter rubbish. 136 page fiction novel? Most pages are short lines of bad dialogue? Full of misspellings*? Amazon doesn't take bad self-published short stories, and Wikipedia doesn't either.
* e.g. the derogatory term for Italians is "wop", not "whop"
I don't know what planet they were planning to use these vehicles on, but on *this* one, CO2 is a GAS.
Ever seen dry ice? C'mon, he's obviously talking about CO2 at STP.
No, pressure alone will suffice - And internal combustion engines excel at producing just that. I'd love to see the efficiency cost of tapping an engine to produce pressurized liquid CO2 from the hot CO2 exhaust out of an internal combustion engine. I can't find the specs on a CO2 compressor offhand. Regardless, I imagine it ain't pretty.
In fact, every other form of energy they produce requires the conversion of pressure into
something else. Now you're just being ridiculous. There's no simple way to run an efficient compression system directly off the combustion expansion cycle of a conventional piston-driven engine. Given the thermal isolation needs plus the need for rotary output to provide propulsion, you'd have to be a screaming idiot to think you could come up with an (economical) better way than a modern rotary compressor driven by the crankshaft of a modern piston engine.
Aren't the hydrocarbons on earth (oil, coal, etc) the remains of LIFE? The biogenic oil theory is from the 18th century--- Mikhail Lomonosov, in 1757 to be exact--- when no one could imagine any other way traces of organic matter could have gotten into something that came from such a deep, hot, inhospitable place. Extremophile life has been confirmed in even more inhospitable places since then. Most of the objections to abiogenic oil theory have been specific objections the various formation theories. The presence of that much "organic" hydrocarbon material on Titan, raises an interesting question: are abiogenic hydrocarbons just plentiful in the universe, or was titan crawling with organic life? Personally, I don't think much of the latter...
So, who got screwed the most in this one? I'm assuming the writers since the studios have deeper pocketses. Actually, the freelance writers got screwed the most, but that's nothing new as they have always gotten the shaft. Dirty little secret about the "writing industry": a huge portion of the writing is done by freelancers who essentially have their work bought up whole for a flat amount up front. The writers who make the big bucks are the credited staff writers, the ones who take the hard work of the freelance writers and screw with it until it looks like all the other crap on TV. Those are the guys who got all the concessions in the new contract, because they're largely the ones who get royalties (as they retain the rights to their work). WGA sent me a shitload of letters, "come join us on the picket lines, fight for your rights". Oh, you mean fight for your rights to continue to charge me union dues for the "privilege" of writing for the screen? Fight for the rights of a small minority of writers to demand enough money to buy another antique brass espresso machine and a house on the beach to put it in, while we still get told by producers "I'll give you $8,000 for the script, but we get the rights to it"? Fuck those shitheads. They didn't get screwed. They just slightly renegotiated the collaborative screwing of everyone else.
It's on tomorrow night and is called Lost. And while it may look like a Survivor-themed soap opera on the surface, make no mistake: it's a sci-fi show. But it's not any good. It's a game of "enigma of the week set to the tune of group politics". It obviously has no underlying "secret" that remains to be discovered. Oh, it may eventually get one, but I think it's obvious that the writers have only the vaguest notion of what's behind all the nonsense in a world they created! It's as compelling as a bunch of kids telling ghost stories while shining a flashlight under their face. It's a mystery, wrapped in an enigma, inside a puzzle, coated with dogshit, and placed in a burning bag on my doorstep, and JJ Abrams is ringing the doorbell.
And what nerds forget is that the characters in the story are supposed to be real humans in real situations with real emotions. Actually, you are entirely incorrect. Characters in stories like Heroes are fictional, and aren't supposed to be real humans in real situations with real emotions. This isn't even just a matter of them having super powers, either. In fiction writing, it is far more important to be internally consistent than it is to be a slave to realism. There is a famous assertion by Chekhov (the writer, not the Star Trek character) that states that if a pistol is introduced at the beginning of a story, it must be fired by the end of the story. The wider corollary to that is that the internal aspects of a good story should fit neatly together, without loose ends or gaps. No one should be able to look back at the story arc and say "but wait, why didn't X just do Y?" A well-written story should, in hindsight, have a strong degree of inevitability to it. Every part of the story leading up to the ending should do the work of sending the plot to its inevitable and unavoidable conclusion. Heroes is not written in this way. Heroes is slapped together by hacks with only the faintest of notions of where they're going and how they're going to get there. They repeatedly use the superpowers as a deus ex machina when it suits their needs (getting out of the corner they've painted themselves into), and ignore them completely when their utilization would spoil the aim of their plotting. This is bad writing. Bad writing is bad writing regardless of its "realism". Real life makes for bad story. Real life is all loose ends and inconclusive arcs and unsatisfying conclusions. People watch stories to get away from that shit, not to see more of it.
Why is it always naturalized citizens from china, or American-born citizens who's parents were born in China that are in the news for doing this? You mean unlike the "joe schmoe american" Soviet double agents? I suspect the Chinese have found it easier/cheaper to find potential double agents with some sense of Chinese nationalism and work that angle, as the Chinese aren't technically "the enemy". In the "good ol' days" of the Cold War, the Russkies mostly had KGB agents hand over big suitcases full of cash because nobody believed the "workers paradise" crap about the USSR in the post-Stalin years, and it was kinda hard to find anyone in government with any particular liking for Soviet-style communism.
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If you mean "get through" as in "find/shoot down the attacking B-2", that is ALSO approximately zero. Maybe it is time to rethink the cost vs. benefit equation. I once saw a TV show on discovery about this arrogant kit plane guy who said he'd built the ultimate third-world fighter plane. It was this dinky thing with a single M-61 vulcan cannon on it. His reasoning was thus:
"Imagine if, during the Falkland's War, Argentina had bought my aircraft instead of 30 Mirages. Instead of the British being able to shoot the few Mirages down, there'd be this massive wave of 1000 aircraft.... and behind it 1000 more.... and behind that another 1000.... Things would have turned out differently!"
What that dumbass didn't consider is that Argentina didn't have 3,000 combat ready pilots! Cost vs benefit is more than just a game of multiply-and-divide. You have to remember that achieving certain goals requires a certain degree of technical sophistication. Just as you can't get a baby in less than nine months no matter how many women you assign to the task, you'll never conquer the world with a million $1,200 ultralights.
This is just out of curiosity, not a flame. With the exception of a few additives (anti icing, antistatic, anti corrosive) JP-8 and Jet-A are essentially the same thing, and with the exception of the odd aircraft type here or there with bizarre needs, basically the whole air fleet runs JP-8. But that's just the start. The interesting thing is that when I say "entire military fleet", I'm not just talking about aircraft, I'm talking about all combat deployed vehicles. JP-8 in planes, JP-8 in helicopters, JP-8 in CUCV's, JP-8 in tanks, JP-8 in APCs... JP-8 in EVERYTHING! It's all part of the Single Fuel initiative started in 1988. We had a hard time in Afghanistan, as a lot of the "JP-8" we were supplied with was actually locally procured "Russian formula" jet fuel, which wasn't quite the same. Thinner, or something; doesn't work right with the fuel pumps (not sure--- I was an intel analyst). I hate JP-8. Get it on your clothes, you smell it for days. od forbid you get it in you mouth or nose--- you taste/smell it for days and there's no way to escape it.
* Largely youthful enthusiasm. I used to have some of that kind of stupid, but it went away about the time I got to be 15 years older than all the rest of the guys I was with, and realized I didn't like being tired all the time.
Oh, and you must be new here if you expect the editors to actual edit or even proofread
More likely, it's just some junior programmer getting his panties in a knot because he has to learn something new. More likely, you don't know what you're talking about. The PS3 has 7 cores and less than awe inspiring memory bandwidth. Developing for multiple cores gets geometrically more difficult for every core or two you add, particularly when you have a memory bottleneck to keep track of. Developing for the PS3 is not just a matter of "learn[ing] something new". It piles on a whole lot of juggling onto an already difficult process. The complaints about the PS2 were with its irregular SDK. The underlying hardware was a bog-standard single core MIPS addressing two banks of 256MB RAM. No comparison.
"I follow only one party: the Vietnamese party.""
"It is better to sacrifice everything than to live in slavery!"
I like good ol' Uncle Ho, and I'm a freakin' US Army veteran who joined the army in '87 to guard against a Russian invasion in Europe. Seriously, Ho wasn't your average dickwad commie hiding behind populist bullshit to justify declaring himself dictator (cough)Castro(cough). He was one of those rare people that spoke all that Leninist claptrap about equality and egalitarianism and meant it.
* e.g. the derogatory term for Italians is "wop", not "whop"
Ever seen dry ice?
C'mon, he's obviously talking about CO2 at STP.
No, pressure alone will suffice - And internal combustion engines excel at producing just that. I'd love to see the efficiency cost of tapping an engine to produce pressurized liquid CO2 from the hot CO2 exhaust out of an internal combustion engine. I can't find the specs on a CO2 compressor offhand. Regardless, I imagine it ain't pretty.
In fact, every other form of energy they produce requires the conversion of pressure into something else.
Now you're just being ridiculous. There's no simple way to run an efficient compression system directly off the combustion expansion cycle of a conventional piston-driven engine. Given the thermal isolation needs plus the need for rotary output to provide propulsion, you'd have to be a screaming idiot to think you could come up with an (economical) better way than a modern rotary compressor driven by the crankshaft of a modern piston engine.