I disagree that the interests of the union are absolutely and without reservation the interests of the worker. We have many situations in which a given union will engage in behavior that either harms a portion of the labor pool merely to serve the interests of the union leadership or when the union does something that helps often the senior union members while utterly destroying the younger union members.
I understand quite clearly how unions are SUPPOSED to work.
What you don't seem to grasp is that you do not live everywhere or have knowledge of every place on earth.
I will not presume to tell you how unions work in Australia. You could all be hoping around on Kangaroos for all I know. But in the US, unions are often intensely political organizations that often belong to larger political coalitions. They serve as a source of revenue, labor, and political power for those coalitions. The notion being that there is reciprocity between the two and the unions will get something they want in return for the money, time, and influence.
However, politicians only invest political capital in you when they think they might lose you. Often as not, unions become linked to a given political faction and can't really switch sides if they don't get what they want. They create enemies and that binds them to allies that might not have done anything for them in a long time.
Rather then serving the workers or the unions or the industries, the consequence is to polarize populations and make controversial something that otherwise might not have been controversial. It makes everything adversarial. And often unions and the workers and the industries will suffer as part of regular political quid pro quo gamesmanship. You hurt me yesterday so I'm going to hurt you today.
This means the unions have to protect themselves by getting even more involved... raising dues... increasing political action... and the idea is that whomever you're fighting will break before you do.
Well, what tends to happen over time is that whole industries get turned into scarred battlefields.
Look at the once great city of Detroit.
That is what unions do in the US.
I have no patience for little fools elsewhere in the world that think they know everything about everywhere. You know something about where you live. Congratulations. You don't know much of anything about where we live. Presuming otherwise is merely hubris.
Okay, so long as you admit that you're irrational on the subject and simply want unions for their own sake.
If you actually think unions are utterly blameless and have a completely undeserved bad reputation then fine. Live in that fantasy world.
Everyone I know that has any contact with unions has revealed only corruption, coercion, and theivery.
Am I saying they're utterly without value? Of course not. Against the worst sorts of businesses and employers they are often the last resort. What is more, they are a reasonable response to the plight of unskilled labor.
However, they serve no utility for skilled labor. Which is in large part why they're in rapid decline. Because most of the positions unions would otherwise have represented are increasingly skilled labor. If you can go anywhere and get people to fight over your contract then why do you need a union?
You need a union when you're easily replaceable and have no skills that are particularly rare.
If you're a low level IT drone then maybe you need a union. But if you're much of a step above that then you don't.
As to what the tech companies did in this case... its clearly fraud and I agree that people should go to jail for it.
They won't and this union talk not only will not accomplish that but I can guarantee you that most of the people you presume to include in the union will fight against you to avoid being represented by you.
The problem here is that the unions often do not have the interests of the workers in mind. They are often mostly concerned with the union itself. And that often means workers get hurt or just as bad the industry that the workers supply with labor is damaged.
What good is it to auto workers for example if the auto companies go out of business? You want to call that win?
the only places unions are doing well is in government. And only there because they can draw upon tax dollars to subsidize their excesses. Even so, many towns have gone totally bankrupt because the compensations became excessive. And that isn't compensations just to the mayor or whatever but rather blanket compensations to everyone.
You want me to tell you what a city sanitation worker makes in many cities? You want to pretend that we couldn't find someone else to do that job for a lot less? And who pays for it? Everyone.
That is what your unions are doing these days. And while some might be insane enough to want to spread that rot around... you will find extreme resistance in the tech industry against the idea.
No one trusts you. We've seen what your ideology has done everywhere it has been given free reign and everyone with a clue wants nothing to do with you.
The protection is that their authority is enshrined in law. And IT people and programmers should likewise have that same sort of privilege. They have too much responsibility to not have a special relationship.
Once that is in place, you really don't need anything else.
Most of the problems we've run into have come from management giving unethical orders to programmers and IT people.
Unions don't do that. They keep people in with seniority, not competence.
Look at the teacher's unions. They literally are protecting pedophiles and even some teachers that are literally illiterate.
THAT is what unions do. Now, I grasp your concerns. But if you want that, you want something similar to what doctors and lawyers have. Not what teachers and auto workers have.
And even then, there are incompetent doctors and lawyers. Its just less common.
Sure, and if a dictatorship calls itself a democracy then its a democracy.
Listen you cheeky little fool, AMA is not a union. You don't get hired by the AMA. You get hired by the company. That is not how a union works. Your employment is controlled by the union.
If you want something like the AMA ABA for programmers, that would be fine. So long as neither group does collective employment negotiations for contracts or requires that all employment contracts go through them.
If I can hire a programmer or a programmer can contract on his own without interference from such a group... then that's fine. I believe people and companies should be free to hire whomever they want on whatever terms they want. The point of a larger organization would be to give workers some leverage in those discussions as well as get laws passed to allow workers to object to company directives on ethical, safety, moral, legal, etc grounds.
This does not address the H1B situation but that's largely the result of the chamber of commerce getting co-opted by some unsavory people and the political parties seeing it as in their interest to dilute domestic voting blocks.
If you like... and I wouldn't mind similar organizations existing for the tech world if only because we have no unified system of ethics for our profession unlike doctors and lawyers.
You cannot compel a lawyer legally to divulge private client correspondence. You cannot compel a doctor to harm a patient. Which is why executions for example are carried out by non-medical staff despite the use of medications, needles, etc.
This whole thing with the NSA is an example of something that shouldn't be possible because the tech workers should be able to cite an ethical principle that they are required to hold.
Now you might be a fan of a free wheeling system. I find a lot of be desirable in that. However, the price of such a system is that there are no rules for either side... the employee the employer... the contract can be whatever and can be changed the instant either side gets more leverage on the other.
Your idea of a union is interesting but I'd point out that unions often destroy their industries.
Now that is possibly a political problem that could be controlled by excluding political elements from the union that tend to destroy industries. The Dock Worker's union for example has rendered their industry uncompetitive which is why it is cheaper to debark goods in Mexico or Canada, then bring the freight in by train rather then unload in Long Beach or Miami.
And there are literally dozens of major examples of other unions that have famously destroyed their industries.
I want better for programmers. There are unions that do not destroy their industry. The coal miner's unions for example have been pretty successful at getting safety standards in mines while not raising costs so high that the mining companies shut down.
There are dozens of other examples of unions that are healthy and do not cause problems. But there are big political differences between them. Most people that advocate for unions are not actually interested in worker's rights. They just see unions as politically useful for their larger factional aspirations. In much the same way many people only advocate for open immigration because they want lots of undocumented workers to suddenly vote for their political faction thus overwhelming their domestic political rivals with shear weight of numbers.
My concern here is for the actual tech workers themselves. What is in their interest. Forget the larger politics. Those things are a different matter. What is in the interest of the tech workers?
A union poses serious problems for small start ups. It just makes things more complicated and the government has already made things very complicated for small companies as it is. US start ups are at record lows.
In the 1980s, about a third of all companies were new companies. Today, its less then 20 percent. If you ask small companies their biggest problem... its always red tape. its just very hard for some guy to deal with all of it. And for a new company that's who is managing ALL the red tape. Just some guy. He's rarely an expert on the red tape either. There is no one place to find all the information. He has to research everything exhaustively. And even then he's not going to be in compliance with something either because it is literally impossible or because he simply missed the regulation the first time he did research. Consider that most oil companies have been paying a fine every year for not including an additive into the gas that in one interpretation would void the warranties of most engines thus making it impossible to sell or in another interpretation simply does not exist in reality.
Yet the oil companies pay this fine every year as an effective stealth tax because their options are either to pay the fine, make their gas unsellable, or grind up magical unicorn horns to add to their fuel.
The point I'm making here is that the system is systemically fucked up on every level. I'm beyond disgusted with it and really don't see a solution here short of just spraying gasoline everywhere and lighting a match. Its futile.
If there is any hope it is in small start ups and transformative technology simply bypassing the rot. And a big monolithic union is not going to help that situation.
Skilled labor doesn't need unions. Do doctors need unions? Do lawyers? No. Neither do programmers.
The H1-B visa thing is largely enabled by political forces on both sides that see political advantage in allowing in as much immigration as possible. And the no poaching agreement was illegal.
What is stupid is that none of the people that approved the policy are going to jail. This is criminal.
The first radar systems were actually long wave radar. If anything much longer wave then anything used today. They required massive antenna arrays and were used to spot German raids on the English coast.
The Russians learned about radar from those systems and while the US and English subsequently went with short wave radar systems, the Russians stuck with long wave radar systems. This is why their radar systems look so very different from ours. They're receiving a different type of return.
There are pros and cons. But the the long wave basically sees everything. The drawback is that the return is very noisy. You can combine long wave and short wave or just employ very good signals processing on the long wave to get a clean picture.
Stealthing an aircraft from long wave have never been accomplished.
This is very bad news for the airforce that has invested a lot in the concept of stealth.
Absent stealth we're back to the old paradigms of speed and altitude. A hypersonic bomber for example would be very difficult to intercept at least without a hypersonic interceptor missile. Add to that all this drone stuff...
And I think I have a better way here... Its crazy... but war is crazy. What about an extreme low altitude bomber drone. I'm talking about a drone that would fly super sonic or hypersonic about 20-50 feet above the ground.
Now, I know what you're saying, "how do you stop that thing from randomly crashing into something." By mapping the terrain from space with extreme precision. Then you work out an exact flight path through enemy territory. By all means have it fly at higher altitudes before the bombing run. But when its going to enter dangerous territory, have it fly as close to the deck as possible as fast as possible. Have it scream in so fast and so low that their radar can't see it and can't intercept it. The bomber would be making course corrections at the speed of a high speed computer. Possibly thousands of course corrections per second. Whatever is needed. The plane would obviously have a lot of momentum so changing course by any large degree of angle is not possible but tiny corrections all the time are possible. And the point of the mapping is to get a course that the drone can handle at that speed and altitude.
Then you fire the drone off like a missile. It travels to the start of the run, drops to the attack attitude, goes super sonic or hypersonic, it will be close enough to the ground that ground effect turbulence might be a factor and that would be something the guidance system would have to deal with, it would drop its bomb which would be one a short delayed fuse, and then it would continue to race along until it got out of enemy territory. Where upon it would pull up to a safer altitude, possibly slow down, and head for a friendly airfield for refueling and maintenance.
The above is my crazy solution to the problem. To those that say "but what about peace"... I have no problem with that. But that isn't the issue here. The issue is how to do fight and win when peace fails. Having something like the above weapon actually makes peace more likely and sustainable because hostile forces understand that if they do something nasty you can hurt them.
Nothing is as likely to make hostiles attack us as the belief that they can get away with it.
A statement you can make in any situation and scuttle away so long as you don't have to substantiate it. And you didn't... so this is apparently your universal escape ploy, eh?
Fine. I accept your forfeiture. Better luck next time.
How many American evangelicals have gone over seas to murder scientists for abortion reasons.
Zero.
Do religious crazies sometimes do nutty stuff? Obviously... we're dealing with it all the time. That said, the danger posed by christian fundamentalists from the US is quite small. Its mostly passed around these days to their various factional enemies appear more reasonable by comparison.
Appreciate... I'm not even a christian. I just find this reflexive bigotry to be both offensive and dangerous. The real threat here is that because you think you're in the right, you won't monitor your own actions. Most of your self auditing mental processes are just turned off in these matters. And that sort of thing is extremely dangerous because you could unconsciously do something or approve of something terrible simply because the right tribal/ideological/factional boxes are checked.
Whatever you might think of American christian fundamentalists there is a great deal worse in this world and much of what is worse you can count on those same fundamentalists to stand at your side and fight beside you.
The animosity and gainsaying is mostly for domestic political oneupsmanship. Internationally and over the long haul you're probably more allies then not. There are of course radical exceptions but lets not pretend they're even a small minority. The sort that blow up buildings are literally about one in a million. That isn't even a minority. Its simply a failure to properly classify what you're talking about. If one in a million of a given group have a certain property you're not filtering the data properly.
Japanese man commits suicide and still you're going to sit there and blame the largely harmless fundamentalist Christians in the US?
Who the hell do you think you are, sport? Are you aware that you're a bigot? This sort of crap is textbook prejudicial behavior. The irony that you're actually the bigot in this situation is likely completely lost on you. In fact, you'll probably try to defend your bigotry here like any of the hate groups when backed into a corner. They'll say how the people they hate are inferior or they're descended from pigs and apes or some other load of crap.
And you know that would be fine... you wouldn't bother me if you were just a typical bigot. But what makes it worse is that your ideology deludes you into thinking you're morally pure... that you're incapable of political incorrectness... that your most hateful statements are all forgivable in the cause of your ideology.
Stalin was not warming to anything. The man did everything in his power to spit in our faces. The cold war only happened in the first place because of stalin. And that asshole was throwing how many poor people into labor camps?
Fuck you for even trying to rehabilitate that piece of shit.
I suppose if you stuck a shotgun in your mouth and blew your brains out the top of your skull that argument would be compelling.
As I still have my brain intact, the reasons for renewed hostilities with Russia are quiet obvious.
The US has legacy commitments to the security and freedom of eastern Europe. Russia is attempting to effectively rebuild the USSR by forcing old satellites into their regime again... either overtly or subtly.
What is more they are subverting NATO, undermining European security, and that ultimately undermines US security.
Again, if my brains were blown all over the walls like raspberry jam through table fan... then I might not have seen this obvious point either.
Since you've clearly lobotomized yourself... I of course don't expect you to be able to follow along.
Here's another another point, if the fossil fuel lobbies were half as strong as you think, why is the coal industry in the US getting regulated out of existence? The answer is that they're no where near as strong as you think. Most of the other lobbying groups are just as strong which tends to cancel these forces out.
Most of the groups that bitch about lobbying are really just upset that someone else is competing against their lobbyists. Like the child that cheats in a game but is first to point out someone else cheating. Its at best hypocritical... and at worst maliciously stupid.
Except for the hosts file can only stop communication from stated sources.
If the ads are hosted directly by the website you WANT to see then blocking the ads with the host file would also block the website you wish to access at the same time.
Here is the thing, your host file idea mostly works because its unconventional. And I really like unconventional solutions. In fact, I think the future of REAL security is using a spectrum of varied defensive tactics that are almost randomly employed making it very hard for any one threat source to anticipate all your defenses.
What is more, I think it is especially important for governments and large corporations to use totally custom security procedures to make it complicated for hackers to breach security.
If your online voting system is standardized and is a commonly used product then hackers will have stored programs and scripts to breach and compromise your system at will. I have no faith that your municipality will have taken reasonable security precautions.
However, if your municipality uses a one off system then its less likely that a casual hack will compromise the system.
That said, generally online voting is to be avoided mostly because governments are incompetent and/or corrupt when it comes to such things with disturbing frequency.
For example, lets say there is a vote on whether to boost city worker wages or give the IT staff a bonus... while an ethical person wouldn't tamper with the votes if the money starts being good enough a lot of people will be sorely tempted to fudge the numbers if they think they can get away with it.
This is one of the reasons why poll workers should be volunteers and not city workers.
Russia's economy is dominated by its energy exports. It can and is largely subsisting on that income.
If you want to break Russia's economy then you need to give europe an alternative energy source.
Controversial as it may be, we should probably be advocating hydrologic fracturing in Eastern Europe. If Ukraine and Poland can ween themselves off Russian energy imports and possibly become net exporters to Germany then Russia's economic position will collapse indifferent to whether or not they censor bloggers.
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think you'd even know bullshit if you saw it, you half educated cybermonkey?
I disagree that the interests of the union are absolutely and without reservation the interests of the worker. We have many situations in which a given union will engage in behavior that either harms a portion of the labor pool merely to serve the interests of the union leadership or when the union does something that helps often the senior union members while utterly destroying the younger union members.
I understand quite clearly how unions are SUPPOSED to work.
What you don't seem to grasp is that you do not live everywhere or have knowledge of every place on earth.
I will not presume to tell you how unions work in Australia. You could all be hoping around on Kangaroos for all I know. But in the US, unions are often intensely political organizations that often belong to larger political coalitions. They serve as a source of revenue, labor, and political power for those coalitions. The notion being that there is reciprocity between the two and the unions will get something they want in return for the money, time, and influence.
However, politicians only invest political capital in you when they think they might lose you. Often as not, unions become linked to a given political faction and can't really switch sides if they don't get what they want. They create enemies and that binds them to allies that might not have done anything for them in a long time.
Rather then serving the workers or the unions or the industries, the consequence is to polarize populations and make controversial something that otherwise might not have been controversial. It makes everything adversarial. And often unions and the workers and the industries will suffer as part of regular political quid pro quo gamesmanship. You hurt me yesterday so I'm going to hurt you today.
This means the unions have to protect themselves by getting even more involved... raising dues... increasing political action... and the idea is that whomever you're fighting will break before you do.
Well, what tends to happen over time is that whole industries get turned into scarred battlefields.
Look at the once great city of Detroit.
That is what unions do in the US.
I have no patience for little fools elsewhere in the world that think they know everything about everywhere. You know something about where you live. Congratulations. You don't know much of anything about where we live. Presuming otherwise is merely hubris.
Okay, so long as you admit that you're irrational on the subject and simply want unions for their own sake.
If you actually think unions are utterly blameless and have a completely undeserved bad reputation then fine. Live in that fantasy world.
Everyone I know that has any contact with unions has revealed only corruption, coercion, and theivery.
Am I saying they're utterly without value? Of course not. Against the worst sorts of businesses and employers they are often the last resort. What is more, they are a reasonable response to the plight of unskilled labor.
However, they serve no utility for skilled labor. Which is in large part why they're in rapid decline. Because most of the positions unions would otherwise have represented are increasingly skilled labor. If you can go anywhere and get people to fight over your contract then why do you need a union?
You need a union when you're easily replaceable and have no skills that are particularly rare.
If you're a low level IT drone then maybe you need a union. But if you're much of a step above that then you don't.
As to what the tech companies did in this case... its clearly fraud and I agree that people should go to jail for it.
They won't and this union talk not only will not accomplish that but I can guarantee you that most of the people you presume to include in the union will fight against you to avoid being represented by you.
The problem here is that the unions often do not have the interests of the workers in mind. They are often mostly concerned with the union itself. And that often means workers get hurt or just as bad the industry that the workers supply with labor is damaged.
What good is it to auto workers for example if the auto companies go out of business? You want to call that win?
the only places unions are doing well is in government. And only there because they can draw upon tax dollars to subsidize their excesses. Even so, many towns have gone totally bankrupt because the compensations became excessive. And that isn't compensations just to the mayor or whatever but rather blanket compensations to everyone.
You want me to tell you what a city sanitation worker makes in many cities? You want to pretend that we couldn't find someone else to do that job for a lot less? And who pays for it? Everyone.
That is what your unions are doing these days. And while some might be insane enough to want to spread that rot around... you will find extreme resistance in the tech industry against the idea.
No one trusts you. We've seen what your ideology has done everywhere it has been given free reign and everyone with a clue wants nothing to do with you.
The protection is that their authority is enshrined in law. And IT people and programmers should likewise have that same sort of privilege. They have too much responsibility to not have a special relationship.
Once that is in place, you really don't need anything else.
Most of the problems we've run into have come from management giving unethical orders to programmers and IT people.
Unions don't do that. They keep people in with seniority, not competence.
Look at the teacher's unions. They literally are protecting pedophiles and even some teachers that are literally illiterate.
THAT is what unions do. Now, I grasp your concerns. But if you want that, you want something similar to what doctors and lawyers have. Not what teachers and auto workers have.
And even then, there are incompetent doctors and lawyers. Its just less common.
Sure, and if a dictatorship calls itself a democracy then its a democracy.
Listen you cheeky little fool, AMA is not a union. You don't get hired by the AMA. You get hired by the company. That is not how a union works. Your employment is controlled by the union.
You're saying you want accreditation and expert advocates to separate the men from the boys.
I have no problem with that. You don't need a trade union for that though.
They're not strictly speaking unions though.
If you want something like the AMA ABA for programmers, that would be fine. So long as neither group does collective employment negotiations for contracts or requires that all employment contracts go through them.
If I can hire a programmer or a programmer can contract on his own without interference from such a group... then that's fine. I believe people and companies should be free to hire whomever they want on whatever terms they want. The point of a larger organization would be to give workers some leverage in those discussions as well as get laws passed to allow workers to object to company directives on ethical, safety, moral, legal, etc grounds.
This does not address the H1B situation but that's largely the result of the chamber of commerce getting co-opted by some unsavory people and the political parties seeing it as in their interest to dilute domestic voting blocks.
If you like... and I wouldn't mind similar organizations existing for the tech world if only because we have no unified system of ethics for our profession unlike doctors and lawyers.
You cannot compel a lawyer legally to divulge private client correspondence. You cannot compel a doctor to harm a patient. Which is why executions for example are carried out by non-medical staff despite the use of medications, needles, etc.
This whole thing with the NSA is an example of something that shouldn't be possible because the tech workers should be able to cite an ethical principle that they are required to hold.
Now you might be a fan of a free wheeling system. I find a lot of be desirable in that. However, the price of such a system is that there are no rules for either side... the employee the employer... the contract can be whatever and can be changed the instant either side gets more leverage on the other.
Your idea of a union is interesting but I'd point out that unions often destroy their industries.
Now that is possibly a political problem that could be controlled by excluding political elements from the union that tend to destroy industries. The Dock Worker's union for example has rendered their industry uncompetitive which is why it is cheaper to debark goods in Mexico or Canada, then bring the freight in by train rather then unload in Long Beach or Miami.
And there are literally dozens of major examples of other unions that have famously destroyed their industries.
I want better for programmers. There are unions that do not destroy their industry. The coal miner's unions for example have been pretty successful at getting safety standards in mines while not raising costs so high that the mining companies shut down.
There are dozens of other examples of unions that are healthy and do not cause problems. But there are big political differences between them. Most people that advocate for unions are not actually interested in worker's rights. They just see unions as politically useful for their larger factional aspirations. In much the same way many people only advocate for open immigration because they want lots of undocumented workers to suddenly vote for their political faction thus overwhelming their domestic political rivals with shear weight of numbers.
My concern here is for the actual tech workers themselves. What is in their interest. Forget the larger politics. Those things are a different matter. What is in the interest of the tech workers?
A union poses serious problems for small start ups. It just makes things more complicated and the government has already made things very complicated for small companies as it is. US start ups are at record lows.
In the 1980s, about a third of all companies were new companies. Today, its less then 20 percent. If you ask small companies their biggest problem... its always red tape. its just very hard for some guy to deal with all of it. And for a new company that's who is managing ALL the red tape. Just some guy. He's rarely an expert on the red tape either. There is no one place to find all the information. He has to research everything exhaustively. And even then he's not going to be in compliance with something either because it is literally impossible or because he simply missed the regulation the first time he did research. Consider that most oil companies have been paying a fine every year for not including an additive into the gas that in one interpretation would void the warranties of most engines thus making it impossible to sell or in another interpretation simply does not exist in reality.
Yet the oil companies pay this fine every year as an effective stealth tax because their options are either to pay the fine, make their gas unsellable, or grind up magical unicorn horns to add to their fuel.
The point I'm making here is that the system is systemically fucked up on every level. I'm beyond disgusted with it and really don't see a solution here short of just spraying gasoline everywhere and lighting a match. Its futile.
If there is any hope it is in small start ups and transformative technology simply bypassing the rot. And a big monolithic union is not going to help that situation.
Skilled labor doesn't need unions. Do doctors need unions? Do lawyers? No. Neither do programmers.
The H1-B visa thing is largely enabled by political forces on both sides that see political advantage in allowing in as much immigration as possible. And the no poaching agreement was illegal.
What is stupid is that none of the people that approved the policy are going to jail. This is criminal.
For literal decades.
The first radar systems were actually long wave radar. If anything much longer wave then anything used today. They required massive antenna arrays and were used to spot German raids on the English coast.
The Russians learned about radar from those systems and while the US and English subsequently went with short wave radar systems, the Russians stuck with long wave radar systems. This is why their radar systems look so very different from ours. They're receiving a different type of return.
There are pros and cons. But the the long wave basically sees everything. The drawback is that the return is very noisy. You can combine long wave and short wave or just employ very good signals processing on the long wave to get a clean picture.
Stealthing an aircraft from long wave have never been accomplished.
This is very bad news for the airforce that has invested a lot in the concept of stealth.
Absent stealth we're back to the old paradigms of speed and altitude. A hypersonic bomber for example would be very difficult to intercept at least without a hypersonic interceptor missile. Add to that all this drone stuff...
And I think I have a better way here... Its crazy... but war is crazy. What about an extreme low altitude bomber drone. I'm talking about a drone that would fly super sonic or hypersonic about 20-50 feet above the ground.
Now, I know what you're saying, "how do you stop that thing from randomly crashing into something." By mapping the terrain from space with extreme precision. Then you work out an exact flight path through enemy territory. By all means have it fly at higher altitudes before the bombing run. But when its going to enter dangerous territory, have it fly as close to the deck as possible as fast as possible. Have it scream in so fast and so low that their radar can't see it and can't intercept it. The bomber would be making course corrections at the speed of a high speed computer. Possibly thousands of course corrections per second. Whatever is needed. The plane would obviously have a lot of momentum so changing course by any large degree of angle is not possible but tiny corrections all the time are possible. And the point of the mapping is to get a course that the drone can handle at that speed and altitude.
Then you fire the drone off like a missile. It travels to the start of the run, drops to the attack attitude, goes super sonic or hypersonic, it will be close enough to the ground that ground effect turbulence might be a factor and that would be something the guidance system would have to deal with, it would drop its bomb which would be one a short delayed fuse, and then it would continue to race along until it got out of enemy territory. Where upon it would pull up to a safer altitude, possibly slow down, and head for a friendly airfield for refueling and maintenance.
The above is my crazy solution to the problem. To those that say "but what about peace"... I have no problem with that. But that isn't the issue here. The issue is how to do fight and win when peace fails. Having something like the above weapon actually makes peace more likely and sustainable because hostile forces understand that if they do something nasty you can hurt them.
Nothing is as likely to make hostiles attack us as the belief that they can get away with it.
Show one example where it ever happened.
It is zero. And your evasions, lack of intellectual integrity, and outright cowardice in this matter have been noted.
By all means... scuttle away. Your concession is accepted.
You're ignoring the point that the research the scientist said he was working on would have made fetal stem cells unnecessary.
As such, this guy is if anything liked by the anti abortion people.
Ultimately, the reference to the evangelicals was just a stupid cheap shot that did little more then reveal casual bigotry.
You can admit that can carry on or persist in this farce that you had any deeper point.
A statement you can make in any situation and scuttle away so long as you don't have to substantiate it. And you didn't... so this is apparently your universal escape ploy, eh?
Fine. I accept your forfeiture. Better luck next time.
Really? Then tell me about the evangelicals that fly around the world assassinating scientists and making it look like a suicide.
Or you're both morons.
Denial is not an argument.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
How many American evangelicals have gone over seas to murder scientists for abortion reasons.
Zero.
Do religious crazies sometimes do nutty stuff? Obviously... we're dealing with it all the time. That said, the danger posed by christian fundamentalists from the US is quite small. Its mostly passed around these days to their various factional enemies appear more reasonable by comparison.
Appreciate... I'm not even a christian. I just find this reflexive bigotry to be both offensive and dangerous. The real threat here is that because you think you're in the right, you won't monitor your own actions. Most of your self auditing mental processes are just turned off in these matters. And that sort of thing is extremely dangerous because you could unconsciously do something or approve of something terrible simply because the right tribal/ideological/factional boxes are checked.
Whatever you might think of American christian fundamentalists there is a great deal worse in this world and much of what is worse you can count on those same fundamentalists to stand at your side and fight beside you.
The animosity and gainsaying is mostly for domestic political oneupsmanship. Internationally and over the long haul you're probably more allies then not. There are of course radical exceptions but lets not pretend they're even a small minority. The sort that blow up buildings are literally about one in a million. That isn't even a minority. Its simply a failure to properly classify what you're talking about. If one in a million of a given group have a certain property you're not filtering the data properly.
Justify bringing them up in a discussion about a disgraced japanese scientist killing himself. ... or concede.
Japanese man commits suicide and still you're going to sit there and blame the largely harmless fundamentalist Christians in the US?
Who the hell do you think you are, sport? Are you aware that you're a bigot? This sort of crap is textbook prejudicial behavior. The irony that you're actually the bigot in this situation is likely completely lost on you. In fact, you'll probably try to defend your bigotry here like any of the hate groups when backed into a corner. They'll say how the people they hate are inferior or they're descended from pigs and apes or some other load of crap.
And you know that would be fine... you wouldn't bother me if you were just a typical bigot. But what makes it worse is that your ideology deludes you into thinking you're morally pure... that you're incapable of political incorrectness... that your most hateful statements are all forgivable in the cause of your ideology.
They're not. Bigotry is bigotry.
Stalin was not warming to anything. The man did everything in his power to spit in our faces. The cold war only happened in the first place because of stalin. And that asshole was throwing how many poor people into labor camps?
Fuck you for even trying to rehabilitate that piece of shit.
I suppose if you stuck a shotgun in your mouth and blew your brains out the top of your skull that argument would be compelling.
As I still have my brain intact, the reasons for renewed hostilities with Russia are quiet obvious.
The US has legacy commitments to the security and freedom of eastern Europe. Russia is attempting to effectively rebuild the USSR by forcing old satellites into their regime again... either overtly or subtly.
What is more they are subverting NATO, undermining European security, and that ultimately undermines US security.
Again, if my brains were blown all over the walls like raspberry jam through table fan... then I might not have seen this obvious point either.
Since you've clearly lobotomized yourself... I of course don't expect you to be able to follow along.
Here's another another point, if the fossil fuel lobbies were half as strong as you think, why is the coal industry in the US getting regulated out of existence? The answer is that they're no where near as strong as you think. Most of the other lobbying groups are just as strong which tends to cancel these forces out.
Most of the groups that bitch about lobbying are really just upset that someone else is competing against their lobbyists. Like the child that cheats in a game but is first to point out someone else cheating. Its at best hypocritical... and at worst maliciously stupid.
Good day, sir.
Except for the hosts file can only stop communication from stated sources.
If the ads are hosted directly by the website you WANT to see then blocking the ads with the host file would also block the website you wish to access at the same time.
Here is the thing, your host file idea mostly works because its unconventional. And I really like unconventional solutions. In fact, I think the future of REAL security is using a spectrum of varied defensive tactics that are almost randomly employed making it very hard for any one threat source to anticipate all your defenses.
What is more, I think it is especially important for governments and large corporations to use totally custom security procedures to make it complicated for hackers to breach security.
The Russians won't go to nuclear war unless directly invaded by a nuclear power.
We should be able to slowly choke them to death just like we did to the soviets.
What you're effectively saying is that Putin is more dangerous then Stalin. I don't find that credible.
If your online voting system is standardized and is a commonly used product then hackers will have stored programs and scripts to breach and compromise your system at will. I have no faith that your municipality will have taken reasonable security precautions.
However, if your municipality uses a one off system then its less likely that a casual hack will compromise the system.
That said, generally online voting is to be avoided mostly because governments are incompetent and/or corrupt when it comes to such things with disturbing frequency.
For example, lets say there is a vote on whether to boost city worker wages or give the IT staff a bonus... while an ethical person wouldn't tamper with the votes if the money starts being good enough a lot of people will be sorely tempted to fudge the numbers if they think they can get away with it.
This is one of the reasons why poll workers should be volunteers and not city workers.
Russia's economy is dominated by its energy exports. It can and is largely subsisting on that income.
If you want to break Russia's economy then you need to give europe an alternative energy source.
Controversial as it may be, we should probably be advocating hydrologic fracturing in Eastern Europe. If Ukraine and Poland can ween themselves off Russian energy imports and possibly become net exporters to Germany then Russia's economic position will collapse indifferent to whether or not they censor bloggers.