He's not contradicting himself. Going back to a gold standard would indeed be the best thing, but stopping the money printing would be the next best thing and would bring many benefits to the Japanese economy. It's like trying to help an alcoholic. Sure the best thing is for them to stop drinking, but if you can't do that, at least get him to drink beer instead of everclear straight from the bottle.
Correct. So why should some people be sold into slavery - which is a pillar of your ideals - when they have finite time to live?
Please explain how wanting a monetary system that does not steal the wages and savings of the people via inflation is "selling people into slavery". Such a statement is a blatant non sequitor. You don't even attempt to answer the point he is making, you instead build a rickety strawman to poke at by ripping a sentence out of context. Which is kind of stupid because people can see the statement in context right above your post.
I have a story I doubt people will be able to beat.
An inmate escaped from one of the small jails we serve and the jailers needed me to give them instructions over the phone on how to listen to the inmate phone calls. (Which is kind of insulting because the interface is web based and simple enough that a 12 year old can figure it out.) Anyway, here is an inmate who was planning to break out of jail COMPLETELY and OPENLY talking about the escape plans over the phone with their accomplice. A phone which has an instruction card above it with "ALL CALLS ARE RECORDED" printed in bold letters. No code, no effort to disguise what they were planning, the whole bit from A-to-Z in plain English.
I never did hear if they caught them again, but I bet they probably did.
Our system offers free inmate voicemail, the public can call and leave 15 second messages for the inmates. People ask why do the inmates get voicemail? The answer is that it is a great source of intel for the investigators, people leave all sorts of stuff on the voicemail that they shouldn't, which includes calling in and playing music for the inmate 15 seconds at a time. Some people will spend two straight hours calling in over and over playing music. Good thing disk space is cheap.
Gonna have to email you about those. I've been doing some work on putting together security DVRs that use USB cameras. Problem is that running motion detect on 1920x1080 takes a lot of CPU. The single core 1.6 atom netbook I have keeping an eye on my back yard can do about 4 fps with a full HD picture, which is actually just fine for security workt, but you can't do multiple cameras. I know quite a few people who want security cameras on their lake cabins and the 320x240 garbage you get at Sam's Club don't cut it when you need to make out who's casing the cabin.
You could turn those into low cost security DVRs or we could work something out to where you'd ship them to me so I could do that, depends on the cost, but I'll have to get back to you later.
Incorrect. Agnosticism is not a religion because a person professing it is simply claiming that they don't know if god exists or not.
Atheism however IS a religion. It is a religion based on the POSITIVE belief that there is no god and then forms a belief system around this foundational belief. Just like how Christianity holds to the belief that god does exist and has revealed himself to humanity by the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth.
There is a VERY good practical reason for why Atheists deny that their religion is a religion and that is the separation of church and state. Atheists in many avenues would be thrown out on their ear if the public made the proper association. Just one example is in the issue of Darwinism. Leaving aside the issue of intelligent design, people like Eugenie Scott go around the country to places were teachers are simply showing the evidence AND the objections to Darwins theory. Even if they make NO mention of intelligent design, simply point out facts that science has discovered that we simply don't know the answer to, the Atheist Inquisition comes down upon them. The scopes trial has been turned on its head, it used to be that you couldn't teach Darwinism, now you can't teach anything BUT Darwinism and only the evidence in favor. Sorry, that's not science, that's Atheistic religious dogma. Eugenie Scott and her ilk would be throw out next to the 6 day creationist if not for the public's ignorance. (This is starting to slowly change.) Mainstream Christianity is comparable with Darwins view being true or false as we have other evidence and arguments that are not affected by it, but Darwinism being false is fatal to Atheism. (Actually, quite a bit of modern science is fatal to Atheism, but that doesn't seem to stop them any more than it stops the 6 day creationists.)
But that still don't explain about the tanks crosshair, i mean lets take out remote systems all together, no UCAVs, no remote guns, hell just a handful of F15s at 35k feet with today's missiles could scrap your entire tank corp with little to no risk to themselves, thanks to our missiles and JDAMs.
No they can't, the tactics you describe were suicide way back in the 1960's, as aircraft stupid enough to fly that high were easily picked off by SAMs. In Vietnam US aircraft were typically confined to medium altitudes. High altitude flights were easily intercepted by SA-2 SAMs and low flights were intercepted by small arms and AA gun batteries.
Aircraft flying at 35K are easily within range of mobile SAMs like the Osa 9K33 and Kub 2K12.
The only way the tactics you describe work is when you are flying against an opponent whose most advanced weapon is the RPG-7. Against a reasonably equipped foe, those F-15 pilots are going to get very constipated very quickly.
So I still don't get the "why?" when it comes to the tank. It sucks a shitload of gas, heavy as hell so hard to drag across the planet, i just don't see why you can't just mount a 105mm main gun to the top of an APC and call it a day.
First problem is Newton's second law of motion. A M68A1 105mm cannon has about 4.2 million foot pounds of muzzle energy. For a graphic demonstration, have a 5 year old fire a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with 3" shells. About the lightest you can get a vehicle that can mount a full powre 105mm or equivalent is about 20 tons. The Stryker can only fire half power shells.
Second problem. A tank needs to be able to take incoming fire and survive to return fire. Light tanks like the M8 Buford have their uses, as they sacrifice protection for mobility, thus they can go places that heavier tanks cannot. However, a 50 ton T-90 still has VERY good mobility and, with the heavy ERA it can mount, there is only a very limited number of weapons that can pose a serious threat to them.
I mean other than the battle of 86 easting (IIRC, not sure the exact title) most of our tanks were doing jobs that frankly a modern APC could handle just as well. Slap some reactive armor on the front, give something like the Stryker or Bradley a regular cannon as opposed to a RWS and Bob's your uncle.
Neither of those vehicles can mount the heavy ERA necessary nor can they mount a cannon. Not to mention we were fighting an opponent with equipment decades obsolete and even their "best" training was sub-standard. Their ammunition was also garbage and their C&C was effectively destroyed.
Hell between the cannon, the TOWs, and a 20mm gatling you've got pretty much every major role of a ground vehicle covered and according to the "great tank battles" video on 86 easting there were several times where a Bradley with TOWs just slaughtered the MBTs of the Iraqi republican guard, the only real problems they had were the limited number of TOWs that could be loaded.
As I pointed out before, those vehicles can't mount a tank cannon (howitzers can be, though they are not that great for AT work.)
The TOW is EXTREMELY limited and quickly becoming obsolete. The biggest problem is that it cannot be fired on the move. Countermeasures like Shtora automatically jam the guidance system of a TOW, rendering them useless. It takes 20 seconds for the TOW to reach max range, so the firing vehicle could take up to three shells from a T-series before the missile hits. (Or it could just pop smoke.)
Shtora also jams laser rangefinders and laser target designators. It also locates the source of the laser within a few degrees, so the guy with the designator better hope his kevlar is proofed against 125mm HE-FRAG.
20mm Gatling? That's about 700 pounds just for the gun and feed system, not to mention the mount. Most APC heavy up armor kits protect against
(I was going to respond to a bunch of posts, but Slashdot decided to go down for me last night, so I'll just have to go with yours for now.)
A series of honest questions, to which I will attempt to provide honest answers.
This is why I don't understand why all the superpowers keep building tanks as opposed to just building armored troop carriers with a big remote gun like the Bushmaster or like the 105mm on the Stryker, because with the astounding accuracy of missiles you can take a Vietnam era Cobra and just wipe out all the tanks with little to no risk to your troops. heck with UAVs you can bring the risk down to zero as the most they can do is waste a drone while you waste their tanks.
First, you are assuming that UAVs like the Predator can operate against a modern army. They can't. Even Saddam's military in 2003 blew them out of the sky with little difficulty They have neither the aggressive flying ability, sacrificed for endurance, nor the response times to avoid hostile fire.
Not to mention that they are expensive. A Predator drone costs $4 million, carries 2 hellfire missiles, and can reach the breathtaking speed of 135 mph, and on a good day can reach 25,000', A Reaper Drone costs $36 million each, though it has significantly better performance. Unfortunately, that is enough to buy you a tricked out MIG-29, and have money left over, that can destroy half a dozen or more UAVs on one flight. So you'll have to escort those drones......with manned fighters, defeating the whole purpose of the UAV in the first place.
Then you get boondoggles like the Global Hawk. $104 million each and costs more to buy an operate than ann SR-71 (Adjusted for currency debasement.).............I don't think I need to go beyond that. The purpose of a drone is to be cheap and expendable.
You then have to factor in jamming. Jam the signal for a minute, fire at the drone, and there's nothing the pilots on the ground can do about it. Heck, you don't even have to jam it given their limited maneuverability.
In a war against a competent and reasonably modern military, those drones will have little use as far as combat operations. They are too expensive and lack the survivability that would make them useful for anything other than bombing people that can't shoot back at them.
The problem with RWS on ground vehicles, and why nobody uses them for anything other than MGs on APCs, other than the US military of course, is that they have no degraded mode. When, not if, the RWS breaks, you are a sitting duck, unable to shoot back. Every Russian T-series tank with an autoloader can have malfunctions cleared and even be reloaded manually while under armor. Same with the M8 Buford, the breech and autoloader are accessible from under armor in the event of a malfunction. the lack of, or failure of, a degraded mode usually results in instant disqualification from a competition.
The 105mm RWS on the Stryker is horrifically unreliable and when it jams you have to have some poor soul standing on top of it to clear the autoloader. How more soilders don't get killed while doing that I have no idea.
You don't HAVE to have a remote gun, just mount a one-man "Sharpshooter" turret on your M113 and call it a day. You can mount an ASP-30 autocannon, most mount a 25mm, with a 7.62mm coax with both weapons accessible while under armor and it has 2 plane stabilization. The turret can be manually traversed and elevated if power fails.
As for a 1970's Cobra, it will be blown out of the sky by a Tunguska, Shilka, Osa, etc. (Not counting small arms and autocannons from BMPs or other APCs.) Iraqi tank crews neutralized the Iranian Cobras by adopting appropriate tactics. The Cobra of that era had to hover to fire a TOW. So, rather than shooting at every Cobra they saw, they held fire until one started to hover in preparation to fire a TOW. Once those tactics were adopted, Iranian Cobras were largely ineffective against Iraqi armor. Hellfire? IR smoke gr
Actually the Iraqi SCUDs broke up because the Iraqi engineers lightened the missiles in order to increase the range.
A Soviet SCUD-B had a range of about 190 miles and a 1700 pound warhead.
An Iraqi Al Hussein had a range of 400 miles and a 1100 pound warhead
The breakup on reentry didn't hurt accuracy all that much, since a SCUD-B has no terminal guidance anyway and it made it hell to try to hit because you had a long stream of wreckage acting as chaff and hiding the warhead.
One good place to watch is "BlacktailDefense" on YouTube. he's not 100% right on everything, nobody is always right, and goes a little loony tunes on the Depleted Uranium = RADIATION OMG.
One good series is "The Secret History of Artillery in the Vietnam War" which shows how the US has and continues to have a serious inferiority in artillery and an over reliance on air power.
He has LONG series on the M1 Abrams, the M2 Bradly, and the Stryker series of vehicles. Again, he's not spot on with everything, but he's pretty good. Some people accuse him of being a Mike Sparks Alt, but Sparks has a very abrasive/distinct personality when writing online. If you don't agree with him 100% then you're an idiot and he tells you. It is quite exasperating, a lot of his ideas seem worth looking into, but he has to have everything be some grand plan rather than separate building blocks people can use to fit the situation.
No, it will be similar, you are going to have a currency/economic crisis when the bond bubble bursts and probably a largely peaceful partial breakup. The federal military is not gonna march very far when they aren't paid any more than the soviet military did. When Washington has no more money to give there's no more reason for the state governments to listen to them.
But heck, even without AP ammo, if one were to put a.50BMG round through both the side-doors, passing through without actually striking anything, the shockwave alone from the.50BMG round would likely kill or incapacitate anyone within a few feet of the rounds' path.
OK seriously, stop posting urban legends. There is no super deadly shockwave that comes off a 50 BMG round. It's a supersonic round and like anything supersonic it will produce a sonic boom sure, but the worst the sonic crack is gonna do is maybe make your ears ring if it passes close enough, as the noise level is around 120-140db.
There is a difference between pacifism and non-interventionism.
As has been pointed out by the AC, Guess who has been going around slapping other people's cheeks and giving pretty bad excuses for doing so? Are you SERIOUSLY surprised when those people start slapping back after getting slapped for 40 years? The US government continually operates on the idea that, "The best defense is a good offense." That may work for sports, but it's a lousy military strategy and national defense policy.
We need to stop interfering in their affairs, let them govern themselves and within a generation they will be back killing each other as they were before we intervened. Anyone that bothers to come around the world to attack us will be little more than a lethal nuisance that is easily dealt with by law enforcement.
Until it gets captured, reprogrammed and sent back.
Anyone remember the Terminator Series? That was a big thing for the resistance, capturing Skynet weapons intact, or rebuilding one working one from multiple broken ones, and reprogramming them to aid in attacking Skynet.
Or perhaps you could just stop bombing good Samaritans and rescue workers. Stop blaming the victim for doing what any non-sociopath would do, help a fellow human in need.
The other elephant in the room is that this strategy very often bites you in the ass very badly. The vast majority of corporations, like the one I work for, doesn't do such stupid things because the boss/owner is in the business for the long term.
One of our competitors dropped a lot of smaller facilities in one state they serviced because they weren't making the return they wanted. We snatched up as many of those contracts as we could. How did that bite our competitor you may ask? Because now we had a sizable market share in that state. Sure it was with the small facilities, but looking at a map it looked impressive. Soon word spread to the larger facilities about our services. When the contracts came up for renewal at the larger facilities, we had credibility, a good reputation to back us up, and a map showing the sizable coverage area we had. Our competition started to lose some of the larger, much more profitable facilities because they didn't maintain their less profitable ones.
In the past, people made money off company stock through dividends. Under a gold standard, inflationary credit expansion was difficult and limited, any artificial credit expansion was cut short by people demanding payment in gold and the resulting recessions, required to clean up the errors made during the artificial boom, were relatively mild. The only way to make money was by long term investment in plant and equipment, to increase production and lower costs, and then pay out the company profits in dividends to shareholders.
Today, under a government monopoly of fiat currency, the best way to "make" money is to get cheap credit from the central bank, or the large banks who have special favor with the central bank, and slosh it back and forth in the market. Whoever gets the new fiat money first benefits because they get to buy before that inflation has trickled into the economy and caused all prices to rise. That "sloshing" is why we see some prices rise more than others and at different times.
Of course, sloshing around printed fiat currency doesn't make society more wealthy, It makes a select few richer by stealing the existing wealth from the poor and middle class via inflation.
Hell one of the Apple fanbois tried giving up ALL X86 for a month, just one month, and using nothing but his iPad and his iPhone...what happened? he gave up after a week and a half because it was hobbling him too damned much.
Do you have a link to that story? Sounds like an interesting read but my efforts at searching for it have failed.
That reminds me, I've been meaning to fire up my copy of Battelfield 1942 and load up the DC final mod again. Ah those days were fun. BF2 and BF3 have totally failed to recreate what made those mods fun.
In 1942 your engineers and medics were vital, even though there was no extra scoring for repairing or healing. Now you just sit in a corner for 30 seconds and suck your thumb.
Nothing as exciting as trying to defend a flag with me as anti-armor against a single T-72. We both are in the flag area, the flag is white, neither side can spawn there. I have to use my knowledge of the map and the radius of the flag cap area to stay alive and land enough hits to hill his tank,if I'm lucky, run up to the back and put landmines on the back so he can't move. You spend 5 minutes fighting a single tank and yet it was neither tedious or boring.
Limited ammo on vehicles also significantly influenced game-play. In El Alamein, the ammo crates in the north and south flags were placed so that you had to withdraw from your firing position to reload. The South Flag was especially a bugger. It was high on a mountain, so if you were defending you had a great height advantage and the enemy tanks did not have enough gun elevation to return fire, but with only 40 rounds, bullet drop and travel time, you had to be careful with your shots. A good strategy was to send a dune buggy in front of the tanks. They were fast and hard to hit, you could climb up the backside of the mountain and turn the flag white, while the tank tried to flush out the buggy guy it gave the tanks time to advance and climb the mountain.
Of course I'd coordinate with the tank at the flag and hover behind the mountain in a cannon armed helicopter and wait for the buggy to some around the mountain. *Oh hai!!!* *BOOM* The helicopter controls in DC were very unforgiving, but if you learned them there was very little you could not do with the helicopter.
You're welcome, I'll check out Jaksta and see what that does. Been plenty of videos I've been unable to download that have disappeared later on, so such a tool could be handy.
It requires a manual install, but that is it. You click on the download button and select from the drop-down which quality/format you want and it automatically puts the video title as the file name, after adjusting for characters that can't be in file names of course, and then saves it to wherever you have the browser setup to download files to.
I don't see how it could be any simpler, other than an option to automatically download one select format/resolution. Hope it works for what you need.
I have yet to find a replacement for the FF "download as MP4 or FLV" YouTube plugin
I have found one that works great in Comodo, but I only have it on my home PC. I'll tell you what it is called and where to get it when I get home. It might require a manual install, but other than that it's effectively bulletproof as far as I have found.
Why is the upgradeability your concern? You state that you use used stuff from work, so in a few years there will be better used stuff.
Ah, very valid question. The answer is that the stuff I can get is at least 4-5 years old. The problem is that we are still mostly deploying Socket 775 boards. (We stocked up and because the older boards have features we need that are hard to find on newer boards. We still have plenty of systems that require ISA slots) So in 4 years all I will be able to get are.......Socket 775 boards. I MIGHT be able to get a few Socket 1155 boards, but they will be scarce and far between. The only improvement will be DDR3.
I think you are doing things you shouldn't be doing. If I understand it correctly, you are somehow creating RAM disks, and moving all data there upon boot in order to speed up access times, correct? It's the ancient way of doing it from the days yonder where operating systems didn't know about caching.
Well it feels a lot more responsive to me and it's not my main system anyway. You're probably right that the caching will eventually learn the usage patterns, making the ram disk unnecessary, but hey, I had 16 gb to play around with so I figured why not. I'll probably eventually try swapping the ram disk with an actual disk partition and see how the caching compares.
Lets address the points you make. I fully believe your intentions to be good, but you are simply operating on incorrect or outdated information.
what we got was polluted rivers,
This was the result of government refusing to enforce private property rights under the auspice of "the public good". What was the public good? Industrializing. Politicians didn't want to "fall behind" countries like the UK and in the US during the early 18th century, people were frequently getting injunctions issued against factories over both air and water pollution. Both of those things were considered forms of trespassing onto another property, no different than if I dumped my garbage on your property. Once the government stopped issuing injunctions for pollution you then got the environmental disasters we see. It was a failure of government in one of its most fundamental roles that was the cause of that problem.
You are probably referring primarily to the Homestead strike, but you are omitting a few important details.
1. The strikers had seized the factory, which did not belong to them. In other words, the strikers were guilty of felony theft.
2. The labor contract had expired, management had negotiated a new contract with all workers except the members of one union, representing ~800 workers. Yet when the strike began, all workers went on strike despite the vast majority having agreed to the new contract.
3. Local law enforcement had proven itself unwilling and/or unable to maintain law and order in these events. Thus the company had to rely on private security firms to protect the property of the shareholders.
4.The job of the Pinkerton guards was simply to secure the factory from the strikers and prevent damage to company property.
5. Most sources agree that it was the strikers who fired the first shots and it was the Pinkertons who suffered the first wounded and killed.
6. The strikers employed the time honored tactic of using women and children as human shields and to beat and brutalize replacement workers whose only crime was accepting terms of employment that the striking workers had rejected.
I'm sorry, but if you're stealing stuff that doesn't belong to you and you refuse to give it up when asked and actively resist giving it up, you should not be surprised when you get shot.
Do you say that Microsoft, Toyota, or Pepsi have"private armies" because they have their own security at their large facilities? If these really are "private armies" I miss the part in the history books where Carnegie Steel Company launched a military offensive against Bethlehem Steel and other competitors. What you call "private armies" were nothing more than hired security personnel.
Now maybe you LIKE the idea of the air being as nasty as China, of having rivers catch fire like they did in the 70s,
As I pointed out above, that's a problem caused by the government not enforcing private property rights. Note that some of the worst polluters in China are the state owned industries.
or having corporate masters own you through a company store
That was a temporary problem caused by the lack of affordable transportation for the working class. Their shopping options were limited to what was within walking distance and they also had to be within walking distance to the factory. This was solved in part by the mass produced safety bicycle and later on solved completely by the mass produced automobile.
I'd go socialism, at least countries like Iceland seem to be making a civilized go of it.
If anything they have been the most free market, when the crisis hit they let the banks go bust. Iceland is not a Socialist country, its is
You mean how new owners buy up the assets and company name in bankruptcy court and put the assets and company name back to use? Yea I can see how it might "appear" how the company carry's on after it goes bust in the same way I could carry on after my death by giving one of my offspring my exact name.
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Correct. So why should some people be sold into slavery - which is a pillar of your ideals - when they have finite time to live?
Please explain how wanting a monetary system that does not steal the wages and savings of the people via inflation is "selling people into slavery". Such a statement is a blatant non sequitor. You don't even attempt to answer the point he is making, you instead build a rickety strawman to poke at by ripping a sentence out of context. Which is kind of stupid because people can see the statement in context right above your post.
I have a story I doubt people will be able to beat.
An inmate escaped from one of the small jails we serve and the jailers needed me to give them instructions over the phone on how to listen to the inmate phone calls. (Which is kind of insulting because the interface is web based and simple enough that a 12 year old can figure it out.) Anyway, here is an inmate who was planning to break out of jail COMPLETELY and OPENLY talking about the escape plans over the phone with their accomplice. A phone which has an instruction card above it with "ALL CALLS ARE RECORDED" printed in bold letters. No code, no effort to disguise what they were planning, the whole bit from A-to-Z in plain English.
I never did hear if they caught them again, but I bet they probably did.
Our system offers free inmate voicemail, the public can call and leave 15 second messages for the inmates. People ask why do the inmates get voicemail? The answer is that it is a great source of intel for the investigators, people leave all sorts of stuff on the voicemail that they shouldn't, which includes calling in and playing music for the inmate 15 seconds at a time. Some people will spend two straight hours calling in over and over playing music. Good thing disk space is cheap.
Gonna have to email you about those. I've been doing some work on putting together security DVRs that use USB cameras. Problem is that running motion detect on 1920x1080 takes a lot of CPU. The single core 1.6 atom netbook I have keeping an eye on my back yard can do about 4 fps with a full HD picture, which is actually just fine for security workt, but you can't do multiple cameras. I know quite a few people who want security cameras on their lake cabins and the 320x240 garbage you get at Sam's Club don't cut it when you need to make out who's casing the cabin.
You could turn those into low cost security DVRs or we could work something out to where you'd ship them to me so I could do that, depends on the cost, but I'll have to get back to you later.
So you are advocating a monopoly in order to prevent a monopoly?
Remember "bridges to nowhere"? All that will do is get you "fiber optic to nowhere".
Incorrect. Agnosticism is not a religion because a person professing it is simply claiming that they don't know if god exists or not.
Atheism however IS a religion. It is a religion based on the POSITIVE belief that there is no god and then forms a belief system around this foundational belief. Just like how Christianity holds to the belief that god does exist and has revealed himself to humanity by the historical figure Jesus of Nazareth.
There is a VERY good practical reason for why Atheists deny that their religion is a religion and that is the separation of church and state. Atheists in many avenues would be thrown out on their ear if the public made the proper association. Just one example is in the issue of Darwinism. Leaving aside the issue of intelligent design, people like Eugenie Scott go around the country to places were teachers are simply showing the evidence AND the objections to Darwins theory. Even if they make NO mention of intelligent design, simply point out facts that science has discovered that we simply don't know the answer to, the Atheist Inquisition comes down upon them. The scopes trial has been turned on its head, it used to be that you couldn't teach Darwinism, now you can't teach anything BUT Darwinism and only the evidence in favor. Sorry, that's not science, that's Atheistic religious dogma. Eugenie Scott and her ilk would be throw out next to the 6 day creationist if not for the public's ignorance. (This is starting to slowly change.) Mainstream Christianity is comparable with Darwins view being true or false as we have other evidence and arguments that are not affected by it, but Darwinism being false is fatal to Atheism. (Actually, quite a bit of modern science is fatal to Atheism, but that doesn't seem to stop them any more than it stops the 6 day creationists.)
But that still don't explain about the tanks crosshair, i mean lets take out remote systems all together, no UCAVs, no remote guns, hell just a handful of F15s at 35k feet with today's missiles could scrap your entire tank corp with little to no risk to themselves, thanks to our missiles and JDAMs.
No they can't, the tactics you describe were suicide way back in the 1960's, as aircraft stupid enough to fly that high were easily picked off by SAMs. In Vietnam US aircraft were typically confined to medium altitudes. High altitude flights were easily intercepted by SA-2 SAMs and low flights were intercepted by small arms and AA gun batteries.
Aircraft flying at 35K are easily within range of mobile SAMs like the Osa 9K33 and Kub 2K12.
The only way the tactics you describe work is when you are flying against an opponent whose most advanced weapon is the RPG-7. Against a reasonably equipped foe, those F-15 pilots are going to get very constipated very quickly.
So I still don't get the "why?" when it comes to the tank. It sucks a shitload of gas, heavy as hell so hard to drag across the planet, i just don't see why you can't just mount a 105mm main gun to the top of an APC and call it a day.
First problem is Newton's second law of motion. A M68A1 105mm cannon has about 4.2 million foot pounds of muzzle energy. For a graphic demonstration, have a 5 year old fire a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with 3" shells. About the lightest you can get a vehicle that can mount a full powre 105mm or equivalent is about 20 tons. The Stryker can only fire half power shells.
Second problem. A tank needs to be able to take incoming fire and survive to return fire. Light tanks like the M8 Buford have their uses, as they sacrifice protection for mobility, thus they can go places that heavier tanks cannot. However, a 50 ton T-90 still has VERY good mobility and, with the heavy ERA it can mount, there is only a very limited number of weapons that can pose a serious threat to them.
I mean other than the battle of 86 easting (IIRC, not sure the exact title) most of our tanks were doing jobs that frankly a modern APC could handle just as well. Slap some reactive armor on the front, give something like the Stryker or Bradley a regular cannon as opposed to a RWS and Bob's your uncle.
Neither of those vehicles can mount the heavy ERA necessary nor can they mount a cannon. Not to mention we were fighting an opponent with equipment decades obsolete and even their "best" training was sub-standard. Their ammunition was also garbage and their C&C was effectively destroyed.
Hell between the cannon, the TOWs, and a 20mm gatling you've got pretty much every major role of a ground vehicle covered and according to the "great tank battles" video on 86 easting there were several times where a Bradley with TOWs just slaughtered the MBTs of the Iraqi republican guard, the only real problems they had were the limited number of TOWs that could be loaded.
As I pointed out before, those vehicles can't mount a tank cannon (howitzers can be, though they are not that great for AT work.)
The TOW is EXTREMELY limited and quickly becoming obsolete. The biggest problem is that it cannot be fired on the move. Countermeasures like Shtora automatically jam the guidance system of a TOW, rendering them useless. It takes 20 seconds for the TOW to reach max range, so the firing vehicle could take up to three shells from a T-series before the missile hits. (Or it could just pop smoke.)
Shtora also jams laser rangefinders and laser target designators. It also locates the source of the laser within a few degrees, so the guy with the designator better hope his kevlar is proofed against 125mm HE-FRAG.
20mm Gatling? That's about 700 pounds just for the gun and feed system, not to mention the mount. Most APC heavy up armor kits protect against
A series of honest questions, to which I will attempt to provide honest answers.
This is why I don't understand why all the superpowers keep building tanks as opposed to just building armored troop carriers with a big remote gun like the Bushmaster or like the 105mm on the Stryker, because with the astounding accuracy of missiles you can take a Vietnam era Cobra and just wipe out all the tanks with little to no risk to your troops. heck with UAVs you can bring the risk down to zero as the most they can do is waste a drone while you waste their tanks.
First, you are assuming that UAVs like the Predator can operate against a modern army. They can't. Even Saddam's military in 2003 blew them out of the sky with little difficulty They have neither the aggressive flying ability, sacrificed for endurance, nor the response times to avoid hostile fire.
Not to mention that they are expensive. A Predator drone costs $4 million, carries 2 hellfire missiles, and can reach the breathtaking speed of 135 mph, and on a good day can reach 25,000', A Reaper Drone costs $36 million each, though it has significantly better performance. Unfortunately, that is enough to buy you a tricked out MIG-29, and have money left over, that can destroy half a dozen or more UAVs on one flight. So you'll have to escort those drones......with manned fighters, defeating the whole purpose of the UAV in the first place.
Then you get boondoggles like the Global Hawk. $104 million each and costs more to buy an operate than ann SR-71 (Adjusted for currency debasement.).............I don't think I need to go beyond that. The purpose of a drone is to be cheap and expendable.
You then have to factor in jamming. Jam the signal for a minute, fire at the drone, and there's nothing the pilots on the ground can do about it. Heck, you don't even have to jam it given their limited maneuverability.
In a war against a competent and reasonably modern military, those drones will have little use as far as combat operations. They are too expensive and lack the survivability that would make them useful for anything other than bombing people that can't shoot back at them.
The problem with RWS on ground vehicles, and why nobody uses them for anything other than MGs on APCs, other than the US military of course, is that they have no degraded mode. When, not if, the RWS breaks, you are a sitting duck, unable to shoot back. Every Russian T-series tank with an autoloader can have malfunctions cleared and even be reloaded manually while under armor. Same with the M8 Buford, the breech and autoloader are accessible from under armor in the event of a malfunction. the lack of, or failure of, a degraded mode usually results in instant disqualification from a competition.
The 105mm RWS on the Stryker is horrifically unreliable and when it jams you have to have some poor soul standing on top of it to clear the autoloader. How more soilders don't get killed while doing that I have no idea.
You don't HAVE to have a remote gun, just mount a one-man "Sharpshooter" turret on your M113 and call it a day. You can mount an ASP-30 autocannon, most mount a 25mm, with a 7.62mm coax with both weapons accessible while under armor and it has 2 plane stabilization. The turret can be manually traversed and elevated if power fails.
As for a 1970's Cobra, it will be blown out of the sky by a Tunguska, Shilka, Osa, etc. (Not counting small arms and autocannons from BMPs or other APCs.) Iraqi tank crews neutralized the Iranian Cobras by adopting appropriate tactics. The Cobra of that era had to hover to fire a TOW. So, rather than shooting at every Cobra they saw, they held fire until one started to hover in preparation to fire a TOW. Once those tactics were adopted, Iranian Cobras were largely ineffective against Iraqi armor. Hellfire? IR smoke gr
Actually the Iraqi SCUDs broke up because the Iraqi engineers lightened the missiles in order to increase the range.
A Soviet SCUD-B had a range of about 190 miles and a 1700 pound warhead.
An Iraqi Al Hussein had a range of 400 miles and a 1100 pound warhead
The breakup on reentry didn't hurt accuracy all that much, since a SCUD-B has no terminal guidance anyway and it made it hell to try to hit because you had a long stream of wreckage acting as chaff and hiding the warhead.
One good place to watch is "BlacktailDefense" on YouTube. he's not 100% right on everything, nobody is always right, and goes a little loony tunes on the Depleted Uranium = RADIATION OMG.
One good series is "The Secret History of Artillery in the Vietnam War" which shows how the US has and continues to have a serious inferiority in artillery and an over reliance on air power.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94ehxKHhUBc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ3lyhJbyUA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igxFBObUZ-4
He also has a series on the Sargent York fiasco.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TanFPsRaeto
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNBswoOal7w
He has LONG series on the M1 Abrams, the M2 Bradly, and the Stryker series of vehicles. Again, he's not spot on with everything, but he's pretty good. Some people accuse him of being a Mike Sparks Alt, but Sparks has a very abrasive/distinct personality when writing online. If you don't agree with him 100% then you're an idiot and he tells you. It is quite exasperating, a lot of his ideas seem worth looking into, but he has to have everything be some grand plan rather than separate building blocks people can use to fit the situation.
No, it will be similar, you are going to have a currency/economic crisis when the bond bubble bursts and probably a largely peaceful partial breakup. The federal military is not gonna march very far when they aren't paid any more than the soviet military did. When Washington has no more money to give there's no more reason for the state governments to listen to them.
But heck, even without AP ammo, if one were to put a .50BMG round through both the side-doors, passing through without actually striking anything, the shockwave alone from the .50BMG round would likely kill or incapacitate anyone within a few feet of the rounds' path.
OK seriously, stop posting urban legends. There is no super deadly shockwave that comes off a 50 BMG round. It's a supersonic round and like anything supersonic it will produce a sonic boom sure, but the worst the sonic crack is gonna do is maybe make your ears ring if it passes close enough, as the noise level is around 120-140db.
That didn't happen at the end of the Soviet Union and I doubt it would happen here. Intermittent use, perhaps, but I doubt widespread use.
Hey, look everyone, an Atheist who happens to be projecting onto others.
There is a difference between pacifism and non-interventionism.
As has been pointed out by the AC, Guess who has been going around slapping other people's cheeks and giving pretty bad excuses for doing so? Are you SERIOUSLY surprised when those people start slapping back after getting slapped for 40 years? The US government continually operates on the idea that, "The best defense is a good offense." That may work for sports, but it's a lousy military strategy and national defense policy.
We need to stop interfering in their affairs, let them govern themselves and within a generation they will be back killing each other as they were before we intervened. Anyone that bothers to come around the world to attack us will be little more than a lethal nuisance that is easily dealt with by law enforcement.
Until it gets captured, reprogrammed and sent back.
Anyone remember the Terminator Series? That was a big thing for the resistance, capturing Skynet weapons intact, or rebuilding one working one from multiple broken ones, and reprogramming them to aid in attacking Skynet.
Or perhaps you could just stop bombing good Samaritans and rescue workers. Stop blaming the victim for doing what any non-sociopath would do, help a fellow human in need.
The other elephant in the room is that this strategy very often bites you in the ass very badly. The vast majority of corporations, like the one I work for, doesn't do such stupid things because the boss/owner is in the business for the long term.
One of our competitors dropped a lot of smaller facilities in one state they serviced because they weren't making the return they wanted. We snatched up as many of those contracts as we could. How did that bite our competitor you may ask? Because now we had a sizable market share in that state. Sure it was with the small facilities, but looking at a map it looked impressive. Soon word spread to the larger facilities about our services. When the contracts came up for renewal at the larger facilities, we had credibility, a good reputation to back us up, and a map showing the sizable coverage area we had. Our competition started to lose some of the larger, much more profitable facilities because they didn't maintain their less profitable ones.
In the past, people made money off company stock through dividends. Under a gold standard, inflationary credit expansion was difficult and limited, any artificial credit expansion was cut short by people demanding payment in gold and the resulting recessions, required to clean up the errors made during the artificial boom, were relatively mild. The only way to make money was by long term investment in plant and equipment, to increase production and lower costs, and then pay out the company profits in dividends to shareholders.
Today, under a government monopoly of fiat currency, the best way to "make" money is to get cheap credit from the central bank, or the large banks who have special favor with the central bank, and slosh it back and forth in the market. Whoever gets the new fiat money first benefits because they get to buy before that inflation has trickled into the economy and caused all prices to rise. That "sloshing" is why we see some prices rise more than others and at different times.
Of course, sloshing around printed fiat currency doesn't make society more wealthy, It makes a select few richer by stealing the existing wealth from the poor and middle class via inflation.
Well I'll take that and try to search again tonight sometime. I'll post a link if I find it.
Hell one of the Apple fanbois tried giving up ALL X86 for a month, just one month, and using nothing but his iPad and his iPhone...what happened? he gave up after a week and a half because it was hobbling him too damned much.
Do you have a link to that story? Sounds like an interesting read but my efforts at searching for it have failed.
That reminds me, I've been meaning to fire up my copy of Battelfield 1942 and load up the DC final mod again. Ah those days were fun. BF2 and BF3 have totally failed to recreate what made those mods fun.
In 1942 your engineers and medics were vital, even though there was no extra scoring for repairing or healing. Now you just sit in a corner for 30 seconds and suck your thumb.
Nothing as exciting as trying to defend a flag with me as anti-armor against a single T-72. We both are in the flag area, the flag is white, neither side can spawn there. I have to use my knowledge of the map and the radius of the flag cap area to stay alive and land enough hits to hill his tank,if I'm lucky, run up to the back and put landmines on the back so he can't move. You spend 5 minutes fighting a single tank and yet it was neither tedious or boring.
Limited ammo on vehicles also significantly influenced game-play. In El Alamein, the ammo crates in the north and south flags were placed so that you had to withdraw from your firing position to reload. The South Flag was especially a bugger. It was high on a mountain, so if you were defending you had a great height advantage and the enemy tanks did not have enough gun elevation to return fire, but with only 40 rounds, bullet drop and travel time, you had to be careful with your shots. A good strategy was to send a dune buggy in front of the tanks. They were fast and hard to hit, you could climb up the backside of the mountain and turn the flag white, while the tank tried to flush out the buggy guy it gave the tanks time to advance and climb the mountain.
Of course I'd coordinate with the tank at the flag and hover behind the mountain in a cannon armed helicopter and wait for the buggy to some around the mountain. *Oh hai!!!* *BOOM* The helicopter controls in DC were very unforgiving, but if you learned them there was very little you could not do with the helicopter.
You're welcome, I'll check out Jaksta and see what that does. Been plenty of videos I've been unable to download that have disappeared later on, so such a tool could be handy.
OK, here it is, Ultimate YouTube Downloader for Chrome.
http://www.chromeextensions.org/utilities/ultimate-youtube-downloader/
It requires a manual install, but that is it. You click on the download button and select from the drop-down which quality/format you want and it automatically puts the video title as the file name, after adjusting for characters that can't be in file names of course, and then saves it to wherever you have the browser setup to download files to.
I don't see how it could be any simpler, other than an option to automatically download one select format/resolution. Hope it works for what you need.
I have yet to find a replacement for the FF "download as MP4 or FLV" YouTube plugin
I have found one that works great in Comodo, but I only have it on my home PC. I'll tell you what it is called and where to get it when I get home. It might require a manual install, but other than that it's effectively bulletproof as far as I have found.
Why is the upgradeability your concern? You state that you use used stuff from work, so in a few years there will be better used stuff.
Ah, very valid question. The answer is that the stuff I can get is at least 4-5 years old. The problem is that we are still mostly deploying Socket 775 boards. (We stocked up and because the older boards have features we need that are hard to find on newer boards. We still have plenty of systems that require ISA slots) So in 4 years all I will be able to get are.......Socket 775 boards. I MIGHT be able to get a few Socket 1155 boards, but they will be scarce and far between. The only improvement will be DDR3.
I think you are doing things you shouldn't be doing. If I understand it correctly, you are somehow creating RAM disks, and moving all data there upon boot in order to speed up access times, correct? It's the ancient way of doing it from the days yonder where operating systems didn't know about caching.
Well it feels a lot more responsive to me and it's not my main system anyway. You're probably right that the caching will eventually learn the usage patterns, making the ram disk unnecessary, but hey, I had 16 gb to play around with so I figured why not. I'll probably eventually try swapping the ram disk with an actual disk partition and see how the caching compares.
what we got was polluted rivers,
This was the result of government refusing to enforce private property rights under the auspice of "the public good". What was the public good? Industrializing. Politicians didn't want to "fall behind" countries like the UK and in the US during the early 18th century, people were frequently getting injunctions issued against factories over both air and water pollution. Both of those things were considered forms of trespassing onto another property, no different than if I dumped my garbage on your property. Once the government stopped issuing injunctions for pollution you then got the environmental disasters we see. It was a failure of government in one of its most fundamental roles that was the cause of that problem.
http://mises.org/daily/5978/The-Libertarian-Manifesto-on-Pollution
strikers executed by private armies
You are probably referring primarily to the Homestead strike, but you are omitting a few important details.
1. The strikers had seized the factory, which did not belong to them. In other words, the strikers were guilty of felony theft.
2. The labor contract had expired, management had negotiated a new contract with all workers except the members of one union, representing ~800 workers. Yet when the strike began, all workers went on strike despite the vast majority having agreed to the new contract.
3. Local law enforcement had proven itself unwilling and/or unable to maintain law and order in these events. Thus the company had to rely on private security firms to protect the property of the shareholders.
4.The job of the Pinkerton guards was simply to secure the factory from the strikers and prevent damage to company property.
5. Most sources agree that it was the strikers who fired the first shots and it was the Pinkertons who suffered the first wounded and killed.
6. The strikers employed the time honored tactic of using women and children as human shields and to beat and brutalize replacement workers whose only crime was accepting terms of employment that the striking workers had rejected.
I'm sorry, but if you're stealing stuff that doesn't belong to you and you refuse to give it up when asked and actively resist giving it up, you should not be surprised when you get shot.
Do you say that Microsoft, Toyota, or Pepsi have"private armies" because they have their own security at their large facilities? If these really are "private armies" I miss the part in the history books where Carnegie Steel Company launched a military offensive against Bethlehem Steel and other competitors. What you call "private armies" were nothing more than hired security personnel.
Now maybe you LIKE the idea of the air being as nasty as China, of having rivers catch fire like they did in the 70s,
As I pointed out above, that's a problem caused by the government not enforcing private property rights. Note that some of the worst polluters in China are the state owned industries.
or having corporate masters own you through a company store
That was a temporary problem caused by the lack of affordable transportation for the working class. Their shopping options were limited to what was within walking distance and they also had to be within walking distance to the factory. This was solved in part by the mass produced safety bicycle and later on solved completely by the mass produced automobile.
I'd go socialism, at least countries like Iceland seem to be making a civilized go of it.
If anything they have been the most free market, when the crisis hit they let the banks go bust. Iceland is not a Socialist country, its is
You mean how new owners buy up the assets and company name in bankruptcy court and put the assets and company name back to use? Yea I can see how it might "appear" how the company carry's on after it goes bust in the same way I could carry on after my death by giving one of my offspring my exact name.