Great for Sweden! There is simply no doubt that the real point is to have a system that everyone is comfortable with.
The point that I'm getting at in this thread is that one cannot expect to transfer something that works within one harmonious population into another, significantly larger one with the same good results.
Case in point to your Southeast: why did perestroika and glastnost (apparently) fail within Russia to bring about a western-style political and economic system? Maybe such did occur, and the media have distorted the situation. Could Garry Kasparov actually win the election, and carry Swedish-style reform there?
Motive in the grave,
Keep world balance in place?
Can't his name save.
Treachery on his face.
God have mercy on the knave,
And lather this disgrace: Burma Shave
Not being a bubblehead (submarine guy), I can't speak to any limitations on subs, but there are only so many, and a kamikaze diesel sub can and will cause a lot of tight sphincters on any ships in his area.
The word from the surface ASW types (if it was a mere excuse, it sure sounded good) was that the best platform to hunt a sub is another sub. Hair of the dog, the ability to lurk below the thermocline, or just the fact that submariners stay in practice by nature.
It's really all about advertising, isn't it? Until the need for imroved ASW focus is advertised by some uspeakable, history-making disaster, ASW is not going to sort very high on the priority list, alas.
The 'unimportant' things simply require human sacrifice to get noticed.
I may be wrong but it is my understanding is that passive detection methods are hindered during these changes of direction.
The good news is that forcing the submarine to alter course/speed is likely to increase their noise, as well.
The bad news is that, for a battlegroup trying to do flight operations and anti-submarine warfare simultaneously works about as well as playing bass and drums at the same time in the band.
"Spy vs Spy" is certainly an interesting way to put it, but it is indeed a poker match. Multiple audiences exist:
The opposing navy
The opposing government
The friendly navy
The friendly government
You'd need to do a full http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory treatment of each combination to wring out a full analysis of whether the Chinese 'won' or 'lost' in the encounter.
Looking historically, most assessments of opposing capabilities end up inflated. Consider the US assessments of Iraq, or of Soviet Capabilities. That's all well and good: you've got the hindsight working for you. Alas, we live in the present tense. Do you really want to low-ball your investments in, say, sonar development, just because you "guess" that the Chinese "really" wouldn't pickle off a round at one of your aircraft carriers?
Subsurface warfare preparation is really like studying for final exams in an unloved course. It really gets in the way of partying, which is why an event like this surfacing tends to be accompanied by a chorus of sphincters slamming shut like water-tight doors as the ships in the battlegroup go to general quarters.
Thus, my cynical guess is that the real audiences for this sort of article are the governments. In the US case, the subsurface Navy is more wallpaper than usual, based upon the previously mentioned lack of blue-water opponents, the (appropriate) mind-share commanded by Iraq, and the overall "un-shiny-ness" of subsurface warfare.
My knowledge of the Chinese is essentially 0. Can't hazard a guess as to how the event plays in Beijing.
There is this account of a Russian attack sub tailing a U.S. super carrier, and the captain of the carrier ordering increasing amounts of speed to see if the sub could keep up. There was a certain sobering factor that the sub was able to match whatever speed the carrier could reach. Above a certain speed, the sub was going so fast and making so much noise that there was no longer any sub stealth involved, but there was a command decision about whether to go even faster to see if the sub could keep up. On one hand, the sub is giving up intel about how fast it can go, but the carrier is giving up intel on its speed, and the account was that the captain of the carrier gave up on attempting to outrun the sub to not reveal what the carrier could do.
Yes, it's a poker match, played with information as chips, as the two sides see who will be the first to say 'uncle' (probably due to equipment problems). I'll venture that the concern from the US side was not so much the carrier as her escorts. Even with an airwing embarked, the Kittyhawk (the remaining non-nuclear powered US carrier) is simply an impressive piece of engineering.
For all I punted on a full active career in the US Navy (personal reasons), I still have a "moment" when I come out of the Norfolk VA tunnel, look South to the carrier piers, and see two or three of those ladies moored. Mahan would nod in approval. Conversely, the decline of the United States in world historical importance will likely be proportional to the state of her Navy, if you'll permit a blatantly partisan observation.
As a Naval Reserve squid, I'd like to gently refute this.
The decline of the US Navy is related to the lack of any nation that can go toe-to-toe with the US in a blue-water fight. Which is a Good Thing: engagements like Leyte Gulf ain't cheap. If the US has deterred opposing Navies from even showing up, then the job has been done.
The Soviet Navy has, happily, rusted away at the pier for the most part.
The Chinese Navy, while up-and-coming, hasn't really got the blue-water muscle.
By the time it surfaced the 160ft Song Class diesel-electric attack submarine is understood to have sailed within viable range for launching torpedoes or missiles at the carrier.
[snip]
Its 13 Song Class submarines are extremely quiet and difficult to detect when running on electric motors.
Commodore Stephen Saunders, editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, and a former Royal Navy anti-submarine specialist, said the U.S. had paid relatively little attention to this form of warfare since the end of the Cold War.
For comparison, the US SSN-688 (Los Angeles class) is over twice as long and has ~three times the displacement.
Electric motors are indeed quiet. No mention on Wikipedia of any bottoming capability, an even more scary possiblity.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia page notes that this incident occured in October 2006 "in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan", at a range of 5 nautical miles (less than half the distance to the horizon) off Okinawa. One wonders if the Kittyhawk was conducting flight ops (the tone of the article would seem to indicate no).
If you've been on one of her escorts and had to be plane guard for an aircraft carrier, you know her for a fickle wench out chasing a breeze. If the submarine commander wasn't really comfortable with his knowledge of the sea bottom, that surfacing could have had everything to do with fearing for his life. Trading paint with 84,000 tons of US diplomacy underway going full-tilt-boogy is not going to be a career enhancer.
Not that this wipes the egg off the face of whoever was in charge of the escort screen, if the Chinese presence was indeed the surprise that the article touts it as.
Using Java doesn't cause lock you into a single language.
No, but the hardware platform might mean that you really don't want to get too weird running other stuff.
a) you have smaller chip/ram/drive resources, and
b) you don't have the user-tolerance for 'breakage' that you do on the desktop.
relatively homogeneous population the size of New York City
A glance at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sw.html#People
shows for Sweden:
Population: 9,031,088 (July 2007 est.)
Ethnic groups: indigenous population: Swedes with Finnish and Sami minorities; foreign-born or first-generation immigrants: Finns, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks, Turks
And for these United States:
Population: 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.)
Ethnic groups: white 81.7%, black 12.9%, Asian 4.2%, Amerindian and Alaska native 1%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.2% (2003 est.)
note: a separate listing for Hispanic is not included because the US Census Bureau considers Hispanic to mean a person of Latin American descent (including persons of Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican origin) living in the US who may be of any race or ethnic group (white, black, Asian, etc.)
So, the US has Sweden beat for population by a factor of 30. Sweden is broken down into "Swedes with Finnish and Sami minorities", whereas the US is listed as 81.7% white.
You can as reasonably compare Firefox and Lynx: both are 'web browsers', no?
This is why I take umbrage at these people that want to just slap a Swedish health-care system on the US. They either haven't thought the concept through in detail, or they stand to make large stacks of cash off the ensuing ruckus.
While many liberals want the government to make healthcare *available* to all, I'm not aware of any that want it to start making decisions about patient care.
It would be better to let those under European-style regimes weigh in. The assertion here that policies driving availability are somehow decoupled from decisions about patient care seems...optimistic.
Point taken.
One bit of feedback I'll offer to your Scandinavian anecdote is the same rebuttal I offer my Swedish friend:
Comparing the situation in a country with a relatively homogeneous population the size of New York City to the USA might be unfair.
In other words, one wonders whether any of those countries would fare so well if you jacked their population up an order of magnitude, and gave it the cultural mish-mash that is the USA. Additionally, and this is a serious question about the foot vote: in which direction, North America or Scandinavia, is there greater human migration? For relatively prosperous countries like your Finland and Norway, I would expect the numbers are small and roughly equivalent. For all the purported superiority of these systems, we don't see a stampede towards the old country.
No, Smitty, don't get sucked into that Ronald Reagan BS that government is incapable of doing anything right. Just because Reagan's party has spent decades doing their level best to destroy government so his statement can be true doesn't mean there's anything about government that is inherently ineffective or negative.
Working as I do within the realm of DoD acquisition, let me tell you that, while your statement may have merit north of the Potomac River, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is a full-on zoo.
The USA is rich. We have 50 good-sized states to tinker with the possibilities, and let people choose the place that best scratches their itch. Notwithstanding economies of scale, remind me again why we want a one-size-goobers-all solution? If absolute power corrupts absolutely, why concentrate it?
Why are you trying to equate the debate with a "liberal" (in the US sense) desire for social control?
The reason is that the "liberal" (in the US sense) desires seem to argue for social control in some areas (health) and against it in others (Government-managed spying). The cleaner argument, IMHO, is the more libertarian one: curtail the Federal interest in the individual.
Most of Europe has had extensive social programs in place for decades without feeling the need for this fascist level of control over people's lives. Do you not think it possible that the two subjects are independent?
When my father-in-law retires in a year or two, the German nanny-state precludes him from doing something obvious like opening up a bicycle repair shop or computer maintenance business (two areas where he could do modest business). He is by law capped at an absurdly low level of income, once he goes into retirement.
If that is their law, fine. It just strikes me as bizarre to regulate small business in that manner.
And you wonder (maybe you don't) why the US consistently rebukes efforts to set up new bodies exercising international sovereignty, for example, the UN Law of the Sea Convention.
What gives you that idea? As long as the hospitals (etc) abide to patient confidentiality, and the government pays for these hospitals (etc) to operate, there's no issue.
As you say. Allow me to admire your confidence, sir.
Maybe we can invite a Brit to weigh in on whether or not it's irony, but what fascinates me is that many of the same people who cry the loudest about the Bush Administration's actions are also the ones going on about the need for social welfare programs and universal health care.
Look: either the government pervades your life, or it does not.
The debate is healthy, though. Perhaps it will lead to clearer rules of engagement on security and privacy. If you're tasked with ensuring security, you really want clear ROE, so that the next time Mr. Extremist makes history, you can say: "Well, that sucked, but that was the way the public wanted to manage the probabilities."
There is some room for debate on the meaning of "taking care of citizens" in terms of acute and chronic problems.
We can all agree (even some serious libertarians, I think) that in the acute case of a natural disaster, we like a government that is equipped to take care of pressing needs.
It's those chronic concerns, where the concept of "victim" occasionally becomes ambiguous, that a bring about the bulk of the debate.
Slashdot Mirror
Great for Sweden! There is simply no doubt that the real point is to have a system that everyone is comfortable with.
The point that I'm getting at in this thread is that one cannot expect to transfer something that works within one harmonious population into another, significantly larger one with the same good results.
Case in point to your Southeast: why did perestroika and glastnost (apparently) fail within Russia to bring about a western-style political and economic system? Maybe such did occur, and the media have distorted the situation. Could Garry Kasparov actually win the election, and carry Swedish-style reform there?
No, because I was quoting the CIA World Factbook verbatim.
Motive in the grave,
Keep world balance in place?
Can't his name save.
Treachery on his face.
God have mercy on the knave,
And lather this disgrace:
Burma Shave
It's really all about advertising, isn't it? Until the need for imroved ASW focus is advertised by some uspeakable, history-making disaster, ASW is not going to sort very high on the priority list, alas.
The 'unimportant' things simply require human sacrifice to get noticed.
The bad news is that, for a battlegroup trying to do flight operations and anti-submarine warfare simultaneously works about as well as playing bass and drums at the same time in the band.
You omitted lack of funding. It's really all about the frogskins.
- The opposing navy
- The opposing government
- The friendly navy
- The friendly government
You'd need to do a full http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory treatment of each combination to wring out a full analysis of whether the Chinese 'won' or 'lost' in the encounter.Looking historically, most assessments of opposing capabilities end up inflated. Consider the US assessments of Iraq, or of Soviet Capabilities. That's all well and good: you've got the hindsight working for you. Alas, we live in the present tense. Do you really want to low-ball your investments in, say, sonar development, just because you "guess" that the Chinese "really" wouldn't pickle off a round at one of your aircraft carriers?
Subsurface warfare preparation is really like studying for final exams in an unloved course. It really gets in the way of partying, which is why an event like this surfacing tends to be accompanied by a chorus of sphincters slamming shut like water-tight doors as the ships in the battlegroup go to general quarters.
Thus, my cynical guess is that the real audiences for this sort of article are the governments. In the US case, the subsurface Navy is more wallpaper than usual, based upon the previously mentioned lack of blue-water opponents, the (appropriate) mind-share commanded by Iraq, and the overall "un-shiny-ness" of subsurface warfare.
My knowledge of the Chinese is essentially 0. Can't hazard a guess as to how the event plays in Beijing. Yes, it's a poker match, played with information as chips, as the two sides see who will be the first to say 'uncle' (probably due to equipment problems). I'll venture that the concern from the US side was not so much the carrier as her escorts. Even with an airwing embarked, the Kittyhawk (the remaining non-nuclear powered US carrier) is simply an impressive piece of engineering.
For all I punted on a full active career in the US Navy (personal reasons), I still have a "moment" when I come out of the Norfolk VA tunnel, look South to the carrier piers, and see two or three of those ladies moored. Mahan would nod in approval. Conversely, the decline of the United States in world historical importance will likely be proportional to the state of her Navy, if you'll permit a blatantly partisan observation.
The decline of the US Navy is related to the lack of any nation that can go toe-to-toe with the US in a blue-water fight. Which is a Good Thing: engagements like Leyte Gulf ain't cheap. If the US has deterred opposing Navies from even showing up, then the job has been done.
The Soviet Navy has, happily, rusted away at the pier for the most part.
The Chinese Navy, while up-and-coming, hasn't really got the blue-water muscle. For comparison, the US SSN-688 (Los Angeles class) is over twice as long and has ~three times the displacement.
Electric motors are indeed quiet. No mention on Wikipedia of any bottoming capability, an even more scary possiblity.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia page notes that this incident occured in October 2006 "in the ocean between southern Japan and Taiwan", at a range of 5 nautical miles (less than half the distance to the horizon) off Okinawa. One wonders if the Kittyhawk was conducting flight ops (the tone of the article would seem to indicate no).
If you've been on one of her escorts and had to be plane guard for an aircraft carrier, you know her for a fickle wench out chasing a breeze. If the submarine commander wasn't really comfortable with his knowledge of the sea bottom, that surfacing could have had everything to do with fearing for his life. Trading paint with 84,000 tons of US diplomacy underway going full-tilt-boogy is not going to be a career enhancer.
Not that this wipes the egg off the face of whoever was in charge of the escort screen, if the Chinese presence was indeed the surprise that the article touts it as.
Noted, but the space taken up by runtime libraries associated with basic, ruby, python, fortran, pascal, or c is greater than 0, no?
Possibly some emotional scar tissue involving a brunette hottie, a chicken suit, and a jug of hooch.
But I speculate.
Why on earth did this apparently reasonable question get tanked? Is it insufficiently technical?
a) you have smaller chip/ram/drive resources, and
b) you don't have the user-tolerance for 'breakage' that you do on the desktop.
A glance at https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/sw.html#People
shows for Sweden:
Population: 9,031,088 (July 2007 est.)
Ethnic groups: indigenous population: Swedes with Finnish and Sami minorities; foreign-born or first-generation immigrants: Finns, Yugoslavs, Danes, Norwegians, Greeks, Turks
And for these United States:
Population: 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.)
Ethnic groups: white 81.7%, black 12.9%, Asian 4.2%, Amerindian and Alaska native 1%, native Hawaiian and other Pacific islander 0.2% (2003 est.) note: a separate listing for Hispanic is not included because the US Census Bureau considers Hispanic to mean a person of Latin American descent (including persons of Cuban, Mexican, or Puerto Rican origin) living in the US who may be of any race or ethnic group (white, black, Asian, etc.)
So, the US has Sweden beat for population by a factor of 30. Sweden is broken down into "Swedes with Finnish and Sami minorities", whereas the US is listed as 81.7% white.
You can as reasonably compare Firefox and Lynx: both are 'web browsers', no?
This is why I take umbrage at these people that want to just slap a Swedish health-care system on the US. They either haven't thought the concept through in detail, or they stand to make large stacks of cash off the ensuing ruckus.
One bit of feedback I'll offer to your Scandinavian anecdote is the same rebuttal I offer my Swedish friend:
Comparing the situation in a country with a relatively homogeneous population the size of New York City to the USA might be unfair.
In other words, one wonders whether any of those countries would fare so well if you jacked their population up an order of magnitude, and gave it the cultural mish-mash that is the USA. Additionally, and this is a serious question about the foot vote: in which direction, North America or Scandinavia, is there greater human migration? For relatively prosperous countries like your Finland and Norway, I would expect the numbers are small and roughly equivalent. For all the purported superiority of these systems, we don't see a stampede towards the old country.
Working as I do within the realm of DoD acquisition, let me tell you that, while your statement may have merit north of the Potomac River, the Office of the Secretary of Defense is a full-on zoo.
The USA is rich. We have 50 good-sized states to tinker with the possibilities, and let people choose the place that best scratches their itch. Notwithstanding economies of scale, remind me again why we want a one-size-goobers-all solution? If absolute power corrupts absolutely, why concentrate it?
If that is their law, fine. It just strikes me as bizarre to regulate small business in that manner.
If I could excuse myself from this "Social Security" situation, then I might agree with you.
And you wonder (maybe you don't) why the US consistently rebukes efforts to set up new bodies exercising international sovereignty, for example, the UN Law of the Sea Convention.
Maybe we can invite a Brit to weigh in on whether or not it's irony, but what fascinates me is that many of the same people who cry the loudest about the Bush Administration's actions are also the ones going on about the need for social welfare programs and universal health care.
Look: either the government pervades your life, or it does not.
The debate is healthy, though. Perhaps it will lead to clearer rules of engagement on security and privacy. If you're tasked with ensuring security, you really want clear ROE, so that the next time Mr. Extremist makes history, you can say: "Well, that sucked, but that was the way the public wanted to manage the probabilities."
There is some room for debate on the meaning of "taking care of citizens" in terms of acute and chronic problems.
We can all agree (even some serious libertarians, I think) that in the acute case of a natural disaster, we like a government that is equipped to take care of pressing needs.
It's those chronic concerns, where the concept of "victim" occasionally becomes ambiguous, that a bring about the bulk of the debate.
If it's "wasted" words you're after, Brad pwnz Rick: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAA0ApV6TsQ.
Nope.
data-mining iceberg lettuce hovercraft eel overflow
Been watching this skeleton race a real long time now.
Them bones don' be movin'.
Mebbe some more tequilya.