At some point, you don't need the stealth, because by the time anyone realizes you're coming and gets some sort of weapon 100k ft into the air, you'll probably have already landed.
The thing about high speed is that you don't turn very quickly. So when a radar site sees you, they notify the SAM battery 400 miles downrange of your track, and the missiles are on the way up to meet you when you get there.
And the missiles are fast enough now to catch you, too.
This is why the SR-71 was retired from reconnaissance missions. When the Soviets developed and fielded hypersonic SAMs (hypersonic == 5 times the speed of sound), they suddenly had missiles fast enough to catch up to an SR-71 from behind. Before that, the SR-71 pilots would barely even notice that they'd been fired upon, because the missiles couldn't catch them. And when they did notice, they laughed, because they knew the missiles were ineffective.
The US had enough of a problem when the U-2 was shot down... they didn't want an SR-71 shot down also.
Stealth matters.
Other than that... correct, the article is pretty sensational.
Anyone remember the Aurora aircraft that was talked about when the SR-71 was retired? I remember comments then that "The Air Force would never retire an aircraft unless they had a replacement already available" and other statements like that. Haven't heard anything about that in the last 5 years. Maybe we will in another 25 years, assuming it exists at all, when it gets declassified.
Astonishing -- even people with very low Slashdot IDs don't bother to RTFA.
Actually, I did RTFA. I learned a few things, too.:) The part about percentage of energy absorbed in various wavelengths by various greenhouse gases was interesting, in the section about CO2 not being the most important greenhouse gas. I'd heard that complaint, but not the response before.
Unfortunately...
Most of what I read was one form or another of "it's complicated and there isn't enough evidence but we believe it" when talking about things that support Anthropomorphic Climate Change, and "it's complicated but there isn't enough evidence so we don't believe it" when talking about things that don't support human-caused climate change.
It was rather sad.
That 800 year lag, incidentally... They don't know where it comes from exactly. In general, sure, you can hand-wave an explanation about it. Quoting from the article: What seems to have happened at the end of the recent ice ages is that some factor - most probably orbital changes - caused a rise in temperature. This led to an increase in CO2 followed by The source of this extra carbon was the oceans, but why did they release CO2 as the planet began to warm? Many factors played a role and the details are still far from clear.
That's a sciency way of saying "we don't know." Which is what I said before.
The neat thing with me arguing about this is that I don't really object to a lot of the things reasonable people want to do about this, and I actually support a lot of them. Stop building coal power plants, build nuclear power plants instead. Sharply reduce gasoline use in vehicles, use electricity from those nukes to power electric cars for the 80% of people that only need a car to go 100 miles or less in a day. Use some real science to figure out how to do sustainable agriculture and fishing. (We in the US are doing horrible things to our farmland. All countries everywhere in the world are doing awful things to global fish stocks. I like eating fish... and I want to still be able to eat fish 30 years from now.)
These things make sense. But it makes sense on environmental stewardship and sustainable development grounds, much more than it does as a response to some scary global disaster that you can't back up with real defensible data.
Why are politicians taxing cars and gasoline while funding searches for MORE OIL? Seriously, if politicians wanted to fight global warming instead of just getting more money from the good hearted sheep they govern, they could just allow less oil and gas to be extracted from the ground, couldn't they?
This one has an easy economics answer. Well, it does if you ignore the bribed politicians angle.
Fund oil searches all you want. If really doesn't matter.
Raise CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) requirements by 100%. And enforce it. Let the manufacturers figure out what they need to do to meet those requirements. Mostly, I suspect, it will mean they raise the price of low-mpg vehicles (trucks and suvs, which need to be included in CAFE) until they are at a point that only the "correct" number are sold in relation to more efficient small cars such that they meet the CAFE requirements. If an auto company misses the mark, the federal government fines them by a few billion dollars for each missed MPG. Not a tax, which you can get out of by writing off an equivalent loss on your tax filings. A fine.
You'll have highly efficient cars in the US in 5 years, if you do that.
You'll also have some very upset voters. Oops.
You can guide people towards the cars you want them to drive, simply by making the "evil" choice too expensive for the bottom 95% of the market.
There's too much advocacy, and too many people (sometimes including myself) going "LA LA LA LA LA" loudly with their fingers in their ears, to have an honest discussion that includes the phrase "we don't know".
Because we don't.
Humans might be affecting things this time.
But no one knows what caused any climate change that occurred in the past. Not one.
We can point to stuff that correlates to *continuing* climate change in the past. Once climate change starts, you can point to some thing that seems to track with it well. This seems to be where CO2 sits mostly. That silly 800 year lag before CO2 starts tracking temperature.
But we don't have any idea what event or combination of events was the initial cause of any climate change event in the past.
And given that, I find myself not believing humans caused this one without extraordinary proof.
Of course, the cool thing with this argument (and the part of it that sounds like pseudoscience by the GP's definition) is that we probably will never know what event(s) caused climate change in the past, due to transient effects being lost from the historical record. So by this argument, I may be unconvinceable. That's an annoying thought.
If I have spent my own time trying to figure out the tabs/sheet music of a song, why shouldn't I share it with millions of others who may want that song's tabs?
I bought this audiobook, and wanted a written version of it, so I listened to it a bunch of times, and transcribed everything that was said in there. I spent my own time making this transcript, why shouldn't I share it with whoever wants it?
Doesn't make quite as much sense that way, does it? But it's a pretty close equivalent. The (significant) difference here is that the transcript of an audiobook can be read and enjoyed directly, where guitar tabs have to be played to be enjoyed, and tabs have some educational use for learning how to play a guitar.
But you can still see how silly the argument is.
Killing online free guitar tabs is bad. I agree with that. The company that is doing this is not doing something that is good for society. Copyrights are *way* out of balance with where they should be, to "benefit the useful arts and sciences". (Obvious US perspective, yes.)
But your argument is still silly.
This is the same argument that companies (I'm talking about you, Lexis/Nexis) tried to use to get databases and straight compilations of facts copyrighted. "Sweat of the brow" was the legal term, I think. If you are interested, look for WIPO treaty proposals in the late 1990s. It was a bad argument then by companies, and it is a bad argument now by you.
Yes it is. And in real life, you have all sorts of context information to clue in on. Plus, you most likely saw the situation developing, and know who is involved in what.
And, as another reply in here already says, most people with brains aren't out searching for the bad guy. They are finding a safe place to hole up, protecting their friends in the room with them, and waiting for (A) the bad guy to poke his head in and do something obvious to mark himself as the bad guy or (B) the cops to show up and make the front-page mistakes. Most people with a CCW are not hero types, they just want to defend themselves and the people they care about.
Besides, from a purely real-world data point of view, legal CCWs have way fewer (any way you judge it, # of incedents, % of incidents, per capita, any way you measure it) numbers of shooting the wrong guy, than the police do. There's an important reason for this. The legal CCW sees the situation develop from the beginning, and has a clear view of who the bad guy is. The cops, almost by definition, get called into the middle of something bad, can't always clearly identify the bad guy, and shoot random dangerous-looking people. Okay, that's slightly biased, but the data backs up the bias. (Look up studies and books by Lott.)
The CCW citizen is generally only going to shoot when s/he knows what's going on. Most of us are very aware of the fact that shooting the wrong person is very very bad, and has extreme personal consequences. When the cops shoot the wrong person... the department handles it, and shields the cop from his mistake. Partly this is because the job makes the cops more mistake prone. Partly this is just a Blue Wall effect.
The cops aren't bad. But you honestly are safer with reasonable law-abiding citizens exercising their right to CCW in public places.
If you have a permit then I'm not sure that a sign at a business trumps your legal right to carry in that location.
I'm a Florida resident, but I'm going to answer concerning Texas state law instead, simply because I vaguely remember it. (Doesn't that inspire confidence in my reply...) This was correct as of 1997, so check you local state statutes before depending on this.
Texas state law allows a private business, yes, that includes a convenience store, a restaurant or any other business, to post a sign stating that concealed carry is not allowed on the premises. The sign has certain requirements for size of letters, that basically makes for a poster that is pretty close to 20" tall by about 30" wide. The specific statement, and specific wording, with specific letter sizing, required by state law, makes for a rather large sign that must be prominently displayed.
No one ever posts such a sign.
But it is allowed in state law.
This is a private property issue, and businesses that operate on private property get to set their own rules. No, they can't frisk you to verify that you are complying with the rules, and part of the point of a CCW is that the weapon is concealed, so if you are doing it right, they'll never know. But legally they are allowed to restrict your right to carry a concealed weapon on their own private property. If you don't like their rules, don't go there.
Like so many other things, a CCW license is a limitation on the state from preventing you exercising your rights, not on other private people/businesses from limiting your rights.
I'd like to say first that I live right down the coast from you in the Florida Panhandle. I'm at least vaguely familiar with Gulf oil extraction, and "local" refineries, though they are in Louisiana and Texas, and not in Florida. And I had a tornado spawned from a hurricane go about 5 miles from my house a few years ago, which is as close as I want to get to direct interaction with a hurricane. A co-worker had that tornado go through his back yard. Eek.
Pretending that gives me some right to comment here, I'll continue while ignoring the fact that I am not in any way trained in coastal ecology, mitigation, or restoration.:)
From what I've seen and read on the subject, the coast line that has eroded has done so in large part because of the levies and the canals/channels. The levies prevent the Mississippi from washing over its banks every year, and spreading mud and other vegetable crap all over the coastal swamp area. This feeds the swamps, and keeps things healthy. It also puts a fresh layer of soil on top of things, to make up for the fact that the entire southern half of the state is sinking. (That's an exaggeration, but not much of one, I think.)
The channels/canals cut into the swamp for easier shipping/pipeline access are another problem. They let seawater directly into the deeper areas of the swamps, and that kills trees and other plants that are not able to handle the salt concentrations. Dead swamp does not block or absorb hurricane storm surge.
Coastal erosion is just a fact of life, but it is made worse by preventing the Mississippi from flooding and depositing new soil. I'm also upset about preventing the Mississippi from flooding its banks because that means that it drops all that crap into the Gulf, and not into the swamp. This makes for some seriously large algae blooms that consume all the oxygen in the "local" Gulf waters, and makes a seasonal dead zone in the Gulf. (This is also partly the fault of corn-belt farmers that dump too much fertilizer on their farmland.) I like fish, and I like scuba diving... so I don't like dead zones out there.
I'm aware of the economic impact that New Orleans has on the country. It is a major shipping point for a lot of US midsection farming and manufacturing. It is a major receiving point for foreign oil.
I'm aware New Orleans is a very old city. I just visited St Augustine recently, the nation's oldest city, and a really nice tourist trap in Florida. I appreciate history.
However, New Orleans is BELOW SEA LEVEL. It should not be a major population center. It should especially not be a major population center with the level of corruption and mismanagement that it has.
You do have a very valid point with the NIMBY problem with refineries. The country has the same problem with building electrical power generation plants.
But I'm still not seeing how moving almost a million people back there is a really good idea.
Both of you, really. Or, at least, you are talking about different things, and your comments about each other's topics are incorrect because you are not talking about the same things.
Military systems are often decades behind commercial products.
There is a reason for this. Logistics. Supply. Lifecycle support. The military buys systems and uses them for 20, 30, or more years. The US Air Force is flying B-52 bombers built in the 1950s, and plans to keep flying them into the 2030s. Well, the airframes, at least. Most of the guts, plus engines, will be replaced several times over that time frame, but the point is still valid.
The F-22 that the Air Force is starting to have delivery of, started its R&D cycle in the mid 1980s. It is now the most advanced military aircraft in the world. (And the most expensive.) The US Air Force will probably still be flying the F-22 in the 2040s.
The military buys for the long term. You don't go from the lab straight to 30-year-useful-life product.
The reason you see new concepts moving from government labs to commercial exploitation is because that's easier than military exploitation.
That's not the job of government. The government is not supposed to compete with the private sector in making and selling products. The government funds/performs basic research, until it gets to the development stage. Then it transfers that development effort to the private sector, and possibly partially funds the development effort. (A lot of drug research works this way. Basic research by the government, product development by Big Pharma.) This is actually good (much as I complain about Big Pharma), because in general the government is not efficient or responsive at making products.
funding of short term research
Oxymoron. Short term research is not research, it is development. More specifically, it is called product development. Research is basic and long term. See my above paragraph.
by commercial interests is many times that of the military domain
which is as it is supposed to be. The military funds product development of products directly of interest to the military. That is a small subset of the economy, and so is a small subset of total product development efforts and funding.
What used to be better was long term research
Agreed, government funding of basic research as a percentage of total government budget used to be higher, but it isn't gone, and it really isn't shrinking that fast. The major problem is that politicians are becoming a lot more like CEOs, and want to see something come out of the research efforts. Now. (Or, more specifically, during their term in office.) Not 30 years from now. They are trying to run research projects like they are development efforts, and are frustrating a lot of scientists and screwing up a lot of research efforts.
to fund the wars we've been having
Off topic rant.
The war in Afghanistan took a few months, and cost $25 billion dollars. It was a military victory. The war in Iraq took 3 weeks and cost less than $60 billion dollars. It was a military victory. (Warning, both dollar values pulled out of my a$$.) Past the first few months in Afghanistan, and the first month in Iraq, we've had police actions. Stupid. Costly. Unwinnable. Install a puppet dictator, and get the hell out. Dammit, I used to be a good Republican.
But even so, they haven't cost that much in terms of the entire government budget. All of DOD including the fake "emergency" funding is less that is spent on entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, etc). Though it is getting close to crossing that line. Scary. (After 4 years there, it is not an emergency any more. It is planned spending.)
We have gotten some wins in congress, which will finally get us some long term money by finally getting more $$ for oil leases offshore, but, that won't start coming in for a few years (I hope to God it goes to coastal restoration, the first line of defense against a hurricane).
Bzzt. Sorry, thanks for playing.
A couple posts up you talked about the levies, which are still being screwed up by the Corps of Engineers, and which you want rebuilt.
Sorry, but you can either pick rebuilt levies, or coastal restoration.
There's a lot of truth to that. Engineers used to design things with a fudge factor built in. Round things up to the next highest thickness part, and stuff like that, for a couple of reasons. Increased durability was one of them. Another was inexact manufacturing processes. Another was just not knowing exactly how thick something needed to be to last "the life of the product" whatever that was supposed to be. Computers affected 2 out of 3 of those reasons.
There is one other reason specific to Maytag. The company has been bought and sold 4 times in the last 15 years. That has an affect on product quality.
I was really disappointed in this. My parents also had a Maytag washer and dryer that they got around 1970. The dryer lasted 31 years, the washer 34 years. I bought a Maytag washer, dryer, and refrigerator when I bought my house 5 years ago. They are all three still going fine right now, but I'll be happy if they make it 15 years. I won't be too surprised if I have to replace them after only 10 years.
Disappointed, but not surprised.
As to the theory that people want to replace them every few years so it isn't worth building the product to last 30 years... what compelling new features get added to a washer or a dryer?
Saying it is "Vista compatible" is misleading and should have been advertised "Vista Version X compatible".
Don't we hate car analogies here?
Here's one anyway...
A lot of car commercials will show a spiffy car driving around doing stuff, and at the end say something like "Base model starts at $18,685, equipped as shown at $25,728".
That little bit at the end seems to be what people are complaining about with Microsoft's actions.
I haven't seen the ads, so I can't comment on what they really say, but there might be some room for complaint just from that perspective. Fraud? No. Misleading? Possibly. I don't know.
Selling something as "Vista capable" with no plans to supply Vista drivers does seem scummy, though.
This is not the same situation as buying a CD from a store in a different country, because that is a trade, which is unrestricted between nations in the EU. Purchasing a download is creating a copy of a file (on your own computer), and therefore local copyright laws come into force.
I have to scratch my head at this.
To use your specific example, if a German buys a song on the French site for 300, he is really buying a song protected by German copyright, making a copy in Germany, and charging to a German credit card. There is nothing French in the transaction. The server location could be anywhere, and only the appearance of the web site is French.
If a German buys a music CD in France, and takes the CD home to Germany... what copyright laws govern that CD? French copyright laws while in France, and Germany copyright law while in Germany? Or always French copyright law, since that is where the purchase occurred? Or is it always German copyright law, since the German is still a German citizen at the time of the purchase? If the CD is purchased specifically to take it home to Germany, does this change the situation any?
I am honestly curious about this. I am a US citizen, and my country has a split attitude that I am bound by US law no matter where in the world I am for some laws, but not for other laws. Stupid, but true. I don't know how this works for EU countries.
Is this a "Ahhhh!!!! Computers/internet make it all different!!" idiocy? Or is there more to it than that?
This would seem most analogous to a music CD importer that has to comply with different import/licensing laws in different EU countries, for CDs all produced outside the EU. Would that be legal?
Most "international" words are quite easy to translate, just replace every c in English with a k for German.
I assume you have heard this joke before, but just in case you haven't, I'm going to paste it in here. I think I first saw it almost 15 years ago, and I doubt it was new then...
The European Commission have just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the EU, rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a five year phase in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like "fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the 4th year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer kombinations of leters. After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a realy sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi to understand each ozer
ZE DREAM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!
all credit to... (http://egea.geog.uu.nl/viewthread.php?tid=1448)
Why was the fact that they creating an incredibly precise weapon immediately regarded as evil? In WWII, whole cities were firebombed in the hopes of maybe hitting the actual infrastructure target, as well as some psychological effect. In the current age of the smart bomb, such wholesale and inefficient use of ordnance is considered irresponsible and immoral.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but putting a slightly different emphasis on things.
We like precision guided munitions because they decrease civilian casualties, and otherwise make us look less bad on CNN. This is very true.
But there is a secondary effect there. We keep talking about precision munitions as if they are targeted purely at property. We aren't killing people with fewer innocent bystander deaths, we are taking out that factory with fewer innocent bystander deaths.
Because, of course, there are no evil people in the world, only evil real estate.
Put that way, it is obviously idiotic, but that doesn't stop people from acting like it's a defensible position.
Why doesn't anyone acknowledge that it takes more energy to produce a solar cell than it will EVER produce in it's lifetime?
I used to have this objection. Then, quietly, in the mid 1990s, photovoltaics (solar cells) passed that point, and reached an efficiency level where they can actually return more energy than was required in their construction. See the wiki entry.
Though, I do admit, that link does say that there is disagreement about this, due to waste, inefficiencies, and other real-world issues.
If we're really being honest, many people who claim they pirate to "try" software are full of it - ever hear of a demo? Demo's are a section of the game or an otherwise limited version that the distributors actually want you to try out legally, and base your purchase decision upon.
I have a problem with demos. You aren't really supporting what I'm complaining about, but I'm going to complain anyway.
My major problem with demos is that, by their very nature, they *require* a clean uninstall procedure. I have yet to see one that has one, though. Most least cruft lying around all over. Some through simple incompetence (which inspires such confidence in the full version...) and some on purpose. After all, for a timed demo, they have to leave something behind to say "you installed this once already, you can't uninstall/reinstall and reset your timer".
For software that is explicitly try-before-you-buy there has to be a clean way to choose not to buy, within the rules of the game.
This is a generic problem with a lot of Windows software, I admit, and not just with demos. But it is more obvious with demos, because you are supposed to try them out and them get rid of them after some (usually short) time period.
Now, admittedly, this doesn't make any sense for the "I'll pirate it instead" argument, because if you pirate it, you still have the program installed and its crap all over your drive. And the full version is unlikely to have a better uninstaller than the demo version. But it does make the demo option less tolerable.
Yes, but the first half of that quote is simple truth.
"Before this century is over, billions of us will die..." predicted James Lovelock
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't really think that the average lifespan is going to jump to over 100 years in the next 10 years.
And it would have to for that statement to not be true.
There are 6 billion people on the planet right now. With average lifespans around 80 years, it's a pretty safe bet that at least 4 billion of them will die by the end of this century, 93(94?) years from now. (Can we avoid the argument about when a century ends?)
At least 4 billion people will die in the next 90 years. That seems a safe and believable statement.
Now, admittedly, what this fruitcake meant was that the earth's population would decline by billions. That's a very different statement. Which is just another facet of this problem... these idiots don't understand English any better than they understand Science.
Like so many other problems with cars, this is one that's directly the responsibility of the idiot behind the wheel. Competent drivers don't distract themselves while they're driving, and the source of the problem is that we insist on giving drivers' licenses to people who are not only not competent, but whose only qualification for driving is the ability to fog a mirror.
What's the saying? 90% of people think they are above average.
Most people that do this kind of behavior (and that includes me) think they are perfectly capable of doing this somewhat mostly safely. The more honest among us will usually admit privately that we are lying to ourselves, but probably would not admit this in public. From watching myself behind the wheel, I'm more concerned with driving while tired than with driving while talking on the cellphone. Admittedly, I don't text on the cellphone very much at all, though more in the last 3 months than the previous 6 years. And even there, I have certainly noticed that I don't notice things as well while talking on the cellphone. I've "lost" 50 miles of interstate driving before, from an interesting conversation with a friend while driving.
Getting people to recognize their limitations is very very hard.
If drivers' licenses actually signified some level of competence
No, a drivers' license signifies that your state recognizes that, outside of dense metro areas, driving in an automobile is a requirement of living and working in the United States. That's just about all it signifies now.
But I thought lawyers were taught good argument techniques, and that ad hominem attacks aren't part of making a good argument.
I would modify that slightly. I suspect lawyers are taught effective argument techniques. Sometimes, ad hominem attacks are effective. This may be one of those times. I wouldn't know, I didn't read the article.:)
Remember, the joke is that juries are composed of 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty. There may be a large difference between a good argument technique, and an effective argument technique. The fact that most lawyers never see the inside of a courtroom is of course beside the point.
Sorry, I don't give thanks to the government for non-incidents. I'll thank the FAA every time I take my shoes off or have to throw out a perfectly good bottle of water to board. If airplanes started to crash the problem would be corrected without government intervention because the airline business would pick up the slack. They have other reasons besides mandated regulation to keep air travel safe. If they didn't, people would be scared to fly and the business would fail.
Who pays for air traffic control? Right now, that is paid for by the traveling public, through taxes levied on airline tickets, paid to the FAA. If you wanted to privatize it, sure, that would work well. (That was sarcasm you just missed.)
Or do you think that we'd be better off with ATC run by a private company. And, of course, they only route traffic that has paid up. Hope there isn't a problem with your license negotiation when you get handed off from one ATC controller to another and they refuse to tell you where to fly for the next leg, or from the ATC company that runs the southeast to the one that runs the northeast. Or maybe ATC company 1 and ATC company 2 on the west coast both route planes through the same bit of air at the same time. Because, hey, competition is good, right?
Or maybe we've fixed all those problems... but once the system is paid for, why should a new airline pay to use it? The service is already there. And what are they going to do, not let you fly? (Yes, I'm assuming that the company running the ATC does not control every airport also. Because private airports are good too, right?) Once you're in the air, the ATC really has to provide the service, just to keep the paid-up airlines safe. So then you have more companies that don't pay, because, hey, they'll get routed by ATC anyway, for the sake of the paying customers. And then no one pays, and ATC goes out of business, and you have planes running into each other in midair. Yes, it's a big sky, but not that big.
Some services require a monopoly. Some monopolies require the power of government to levy fees. Any monopoly service paid for using the power of government to levy fees may as well be supplied by the government, because a private company running the same service will get the same level of mismanagement as government very quickly. For an example of this, look at AT&T in the 1960s and 1970s, or any local monopoly cable company with no competition.
Learn some history. You'll be able to argue more effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point, you don't need the stealth, because by the time anyone realizes you're coming and gets some sort of weapon 100k ft into the air, you'll probably have already landed.
The thing about high speed is that you don't turn very quickly. So when a radar site sees you, they notify the SAM battery 400 miles downrange of your track, and the missiles are on the way up to meet you when you get there.
And the missiles are fast enough now to catch you, too.
This is why the SR-71 was retired from reconnaissance missions. When the Soviets developed and fielded hypersonic SAMs (hypersonic == 5 times the speed of sound), they suddenly had missiles fast enough to catch up to an SR-71 from behind. Before that, the SR-71 pilots would barely even notice that they'd been fired upon, because the missiles couldn't catch them. And when they did notice, they laughed, because they knew the missiles were ineffective.
The US had enough of a problem when the U-2 was shot down... they didn't want an SR-71 shot down also.
Stealth matters.
Other than that... correct, the article is pretty sensational.
Anyone remember the Aurora aircraft that was talked about when the SR-71 was retired? I remember comments then that "The Air Force would never retire an aircraft unless they had a replacement already available" and other statements like that. Haven't heard anything about that in the last 5 years. Maybe we will in another 25 years, assuming it exists at all, when it gets declassified.
Astonishing -- even people with very low Slashdot IDs don't bother to RTFA.
:) The part about percentage of energy absorbed in various wavelengths by various greenhouse gases was interesting, in the section about CO2 not being the most important greenhouse gas. I'd heard that complaint, but not the response before.
Actually, I did RTFA. I learned a few things, too.
Unfortunately...
Most of what I read was one form or another of "it's complicated and there isn't enough evidence but we believe it" when talking about things that support Anthropomorphic Climate Change, and "it's complicated but there isn't enough evidence so we don't believe it" when talking about things that don't support human-caused climate change.
It was rather sad.
That 800 year lag, incidentally... They don't know where it comes from exactly. In general, sure, you can hand-wave an explanation about it. Quoting from the article:
What seems to have happened at the end of the recent ice ages is that some factor - most probably orbital changes - caused a rise in temperature. This led to an increase in CO2
followed by
The source of this extra carbon was the oceans, but why did they release CO2 as the planet began to warm? Many factors played a role and the details are still far from clear.
That's a sciency way of saying "we don't know." Which is what I said before.
The neat thing with me arguing about this is that I don't really object to a lot of the things reasonable people want to do about this, and I actually support a lot of them. Stop building coal power plants, build nuclear power plants instead. Sharply reduce gasoline use in vehicles, use electricity from those nukes to power electric cars for the 80% of people that only need a car to go 100 miles or less in a day. Use some real science to figure out how to do sustainable agriculture and fishing. (We in the US are doing horrible things to our farmland. All countries everywhere in the world are doing awful things to global fish stocks. I like eating fish... and I want to still be able to eat fish 30 years from now.)
These things make sense. But it makes sense on environmental stewardship and sustainable development grounds, much more than it does as a response to some scary global disaster that you can't back up with real defensible data.
Why are politicians taxing cars and gasoline while funding searches for MORE OIL? Seriously, if politicians wanted to fight global warming instead of just getting more money from the good hearted sheep they govern, they could just allow less oil and gas to be extracted from the ground, couldn't they?
This one has an easy economics answer. Well, it does if you ignore the bribed politicians angle.
Fund oil searches all you want. If really doesn't matter.
Raise CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) requirements by 100%. And enforce it. Let the manufacturers figure out what they need to do to meet those requirements. Mostly, I suspect, it will mean they raise the price of low-mpg vehicles (trucks and suvs, which need to be included in CAFE) until they are at a point that only the "correct" number are sold in relation to more efficient small cars such that they meet the CAFE requirements. If an auto company misses the mark, the federal government fines them by a few billion dollars for each missed MPG. Not a tax, which you can get out of by writing off an equivalent loss on your tax filings. A fine.
You'll have highly efficient cars in the US in 5 years, if you do that.
You'll also have some very upset voters. Oops.
You can guide people towards the cars you want them to drive, simply by making the "evil" choice too expensive for the bottom 95% of the market.
Yeah, I noticed that too.
There's too much advocacy, and too many people (sometimes including myself) going "LA LA LA LA LA" loudly with their fingers in their ears, to have an honest discussion that includes the phrase "we don't know".
Because we don't.
Humans might be affecting things this time.
But no one knows what caused any climate change that occurred in the past. Not one.
We can point to stuff that correlates to *continuing* climate change in the past. Once climate change starts, you can point to some thing that seems to track with it well. This seems to be where CO2 sits mostly. That silly 800 year lag before CO2 starts tracking temperature.
But we don't have any idea what event or combination of events was the initial cause of any climate change event in the past.
And given that, I find myself not believing humans caused this one without extraordinary proof.
Of course, the cool thing with this argument (and the part of it that sounds like pseudoscience by the GP's definition) is that we probably will never know what event(s) caused climate change in the past, due to transient effects being lost from the historical record. So by this argument, I may be unconvinceable. That's an annoying thought.
If I have spent my own time trying to figure out the tabs/sheet music of a song, why shouldn't I share it with millions of others who may want that song's tabs?
I bought this audiobook, and wanted a written version of it, so I listened to it a bunch of times, and transcribed everything that was said in there. I spent my own time making this transcript, why shouldn't I share it with whoever wants it?
Doesn't make quite as much sense that way, does it? But it's a pretty close equivalent. The (significant) difference here is that the transcript of an audiobook can be read and enjoyed directly, where guitar tabs have to be played to be enjoyed, and tabs have some educational use for learning how to play a guitar.
But you can still see how silly the argument is.
Killing online free guitar tabs is bad. I agree with that. The company that is doing this is not doing something that is good for society. Copyrights are *way* out of balance with where they should be, to "benefit the useful arts and sciences". (Obvious US perspective, yes.)
But your argument is still silly.
This is the same argument that companies (I'm talking about you, Lexis/Nexis) tried to use to get databases and straight compilations of facts copyrighted. "Sweat of the brow" was the legal term, I think. If you are interested, look for WIPO treaty proposals in the late 1990s. It was a bad argument then by companies, and it is a bad argument now by you.
There are better reasons to fight this.
This is real life, not a video game.
Yes it is. And in real life, you have all sorts of context information to clue in on. Plus, you most likely saw the situation developing, and know who is involved in what.
And, as another reply in here already says, most people with brains aren't out searching for the bad guy. They are finding a safe place to hole up, protecting their friends in the room with them, and waiting for (A) the bad guy to poke his head in and do something obvious to mark himself as the bad guy or (B) the cops to show up and make the front-page mistakes. Most people with a CCW are not hero types, they just want to defend themselves and the people they care about.
Besides, from a purely real-world data point of view, legal CCWs have way fewer (any way you judge it, # of incedents, % of incidents, per capita, any way you measure it) numbers of shooting the wrong guy, than the police do. There's an important reason for this. The legal CCW sees the situation develop from the beginning, and has a clear view of who the bad guy is. The cops, almost by definition, get called into the middle of something bad, can't always clearly identify the bad guy, and shoot random dangerous-looking people. Okay, that's slightly biased, but the data backs up the bias. (Look up studies and books by Lott.)
The CCW citizen is generally only going to shoot when s/he knows what's going on. Most of us are very aware of the fact that shooting the wrong person is very very bad, and has extreme personal consequences. When the cops shoot the wrong person... the department handles it, and shields the cop from his mistake. Partly this is because the job makes the cops more mistake prone. Partly this is just a Blue Wall effect.
The cops aren't bad. But you honestly are safer with reasonable law-abiding citizens exercising their right to CCW in public places.
If you have a permit then I'm not sure that a sign at a business trumps your legal right to carry in that location.
I'm a Florida resident, but I'm going to answer concerning Texas state law instead, simply because I vaguely remember it. (Doesn't that inspire confidence in my reply...) This was correct as of 1997, so check you local state statutes before depending on this.
Texas state law allows a private business, yes, that includes a convenience store, a restaurant or any other business, to post a sign stating that concealed carry is not allowed on the premises. The sign has certain requirements for size of letters, that basically makes for a poster that is pretty close to 20" tall by about 30" wide. The specific statement, and specific wording, with specific letter sizing, required by state law, makes for a rather large sign that must be prominently displayed.
No one ever posts such a sign.
But it is allowed in state law.
This is a private property issue, and businesses that operate on private property get to set their own rules. No, they can't frisk you to verify that you are complying with the rules, and part of the point of a CCW is that the weapon is concealed, so if you are doing it right, they'll never know. But legally they are allowed to restrict your right to carry a concealed weapon on their own private property. If you don't like their rules, don't go there.
Like so many other things, a CCW license is a limitation on the state from preventing you exercising your rights, not on other private people/businesses from limiting your rights.
I'd like to say first that I live right down the coast from you in the Florida Panhandle. I'm at least vaguely familiar with Gulf oil extraction, and "local" refineries, though they are in Louisiana and Texas, and not in Florida. And I had a tornado spawned from a hurricane go about 5 miles from my house a few years ago, which is as close as I want to get to direct interaction with a hurricane. A co-worker had that tornado go through his back yard. Eek.
:)
Pretending that gives me some right to comment here, I'll continue while ignoring the fact that I am not in any way trained in coastal ecology, mitigation, or restoration.
From what I've seen and read on the subject, the coast line that has eroded has done so in large part because of the levies and the canals/channels. The levies prevent the Mississippi from washing over its banks every year, and spreading mud and other vegetable crap all over the coastal swamp area. This feeds the swamps, and keeps things healthy. It also puts a fresh layer of soil on top of things, to make up for the fact that the entire southern half of the state is sinking. (That's an exaggeration, but not much of one, I think.)
The channels/canals cut into the swamp for easier shipping/pipeline access are another problem. They let seawater directly into the deeper areas of the swamps, and that kills trees and other plants that are not able to handle the salt concentrations. Dead swamp does not block or absorb hurricane storm surge.
Coastal erosion is just a fact of life, but it is made worse by preventing the Mississippi from flooding and depositing new soil. I'm also upset about preventing the Mississippi from flooding its banks because that means that it drops all that crap into the Gulf, and not into the swamp. This makes for some seriously large algae blooms that consume all the oxygen in the "local" Gulf waters, and makes a seasonal dead zone in the Gulf. (This is also partly the fault of corn-belt farmers that dump too much fertilizer on their farmland.) I like fish, and I like scuba diving... so I don't like dead zones out there.
I'm aware of the economic impact that New Orleans has on the country. It is a major shipping point for a lot of US midsection farming and manufacturing. It is a major receiving point for foreign oil.
I'm aware New Orleans is a very old city. I just visited St Augustine recently, the nation's oldest city, and a really nice tourist trap in Florida. I appreciate history.
However, New Orleans is BELOW SEA LEVEL. It should not be a major population center. It should especially not be a major population center with the level of corruption and mismanagement that it has.
You do have a very valid point with the NIMBY problem with refineries. The country has the same problem with building electrical power generation plants.
But I'm still not seeing how moving almost a million people back there is a really good idea.
Boy are you ever wrong.
Both of you, really. Or, at least, you are talking about different things, and your comments about each other's topics are incorrect because you are not talking about the same things.
Military systems are often decades behind commercial products.
There is a reason for this. Logistics. Supply. Lifecycle support. The military buys systems and uses them for 20, 30, or more years. The US Air Force is flying B-52 bombers built in the 1950s, and plans to keep flying them into the 2030s. Well, the airframes, at least. Most of the guts, plus engines, will be replaced several times over that time frame, but the point is still valid.
The F-22 that the Air Force is starting to have delivery of, started its R&D cycle in the mid 1980s. It is now the most advanced military aircraft in the world. (And the most expensive.) The US Air Force will probably still be flying the F-22 in the 2040s.
The military buys for the long term. You don't go from the lab straight to 30-year-useful-life product.
The reason you see new concepts moving from government labs to commercial exploitation is because that's easier than military exploitation.
That's not the job of government. The government is not supposed to compete with the private sector in making and selling products. The government funds/performs basic research, until it gets to the development stage. Then it transfers that development effort to the private sector, and possibly partially funds the development effort. (A lot of drug research works this way. Basic research by the government, product development by Big Pharma.) This is actually good (much as I complain about Big Pharma), because in general the government is not efficient or responsive at making products.
funding of short term research
Oxymoron. Short term research is not research, it is development. More specifically, it is called product development. Research is basic and long term. See my above paragraph.
by commercial interests is many times that of the military domain
which is as it is supposed to be. The military funds product development of products directly of interest to the military. That is a small subset of the economy, and so is a small subset of total product development efforts and funding.
What used to be better was long term research
Agreed, government funding of basic research as a percentage of total government budget used to be higher, but it isn't gone, and it really isn't shrinking that fast. The major problem is that politicians are becoming a lot more like CEOs, and want to see something come out of the research efforts. Now. (Or, more specifically, during their term in office.) Not 30 years from now. They are trying to run research projects like they are development efforts, and are frustrating a lot of scientists and screwing up a lot of research efforts.
to fund the wars we've been having
Off topic rant.
The war in Afghanistan took a few months, and cost $25 billion dollars. It was a military victory. The war in Iraq took 3 weeks and cost less than $60 billion dollars. It was a military victory. (Warning, both dollar values pulled out of my a$$.) Past the first few months in Afghanistan, and the first month in Iraq, we've had police actions. Stupid. Costly. Unwinnable. Install a puppet dictator, and get the hell out. Dammit, I used to be a good Republican.
But even so, they haven't cost that much in terms of the entire government budget. All of DOD including the fake "emergency" funding is less that is spent on entitlement programs (Social Security, Medicare, etc). Though it is getting close to crossing that line. Scary. (After 4 years there, it is not an emergency any more. It is planned spending.)
Wow, I'm getting cynical lately.
We have gotten some wins in congress, which will finally get us some long term money by finally getting more $$ for oil leases offshore, but, that won't start coming in for a few years (I hope to God it goes to coastal restoration, the first line of defense against a hurricane).
Bzzt. Sorry, thanks for playing.
A couple posts up you talked about the levies, which are still being screwed up by the Corps of Engineers, and which you want rebuilt.
Sorry, but you can either pick rebuilt levies, or coastal restoration.
The two are mutually exclusive.
Pick either one, but not both.
That's a major part of this problem.
Blame it on computers.
There's a lot of truth to that. Engineers used to design things with a fudge factor built in. Round things up to the next highest thickness part, and stuff like that, for a couple of reasons. Increased durability was one of them. Another was inexact manufacturing processes. Another was just not knowing exactly how thick something needed to be to last "the life of the product" whatever that was supposed to be. Computers affected 2 out of 3 of those reasons.
There is one other reason specific to Maytag. The company has been bought and sold 4 times in the last 15 years. That has an affect on product quality.
I was really disappointed in this. My parents also had a Maytag washer and dryer that they got around 1970. The dryer lasted 31 years, the washer 34 years. I bought a Maytag washer, dryer, and refrigerator when I bought my house 5 years ago. They are all three still going fine right now, but I'll be happy if they make it 15 years. I won't be too surprised if I have to replace them after only 10 years.
Disappointed, but not surprised.
As to the theory that people want to replace them every few years so it isn't worth building the product to last 30 years... what compelling new features get added to a washer or a dryer?
I'll stick it on my calendar for... when am I free? Ahh, okay, how about June 17th, 2208? Hope I don't forget.
Sorry, it's a busy millennium.
Saying it is "Vista compatible" is misleading and should have been advertised "Vista Version X compatible".
Don't we hate car analogies here?
Here's one anyway...
A lot of car commercials will show a spiffy car driving around doing stuff, and at the end say something like "Base model starts at $18,685, equipped as shown at $25,728".
That little bit at the end seems to be what people are complaining about with Microsoft's actions.
I haven't seen the ads, so I can't comment on what they really say, but there might be some room for complaint just from that perspective. Fraud? No. Misleading? Possibly. I don't know.
Selling something as "Vista capable" with no plans to supply Vista drivers does seem scummy, though.
This is not the same situation as buying a CD from a store in a different country, because that is a trade, which is unrestricted between nations in the EU. Purchasing a download is creating a copy of a file (on your own computer), and therefore local copyright laws come into force.
I have to scratch my head at this.
To use your specific example, if a German buys a song on the French site for 300, he is really buying a song protected by German copyright, making a copy in Germany, and charging to a German credit card. There is nothing French in the transaction. The server location could be anywhere, and only the appearance of the web site is French.
If a German buys a music CD in France, and takes the CD home to Germany... what copyright laws govern that CD? French copyright laws while in France, and Germany copyright law while in Germany? Or always French copyright law, since that is where the purchase occurred? Or is it always German copyright law, since the German is still a German citizen at the time of the purchase? If the CD is purchased specifically to take it home to Germany, does this change the situation any?
I am honestly curious about this. I am a US citizen, and my country has a split attitude that I am bound by US law no matter where in the world I am for some laws, but not for other laws. Stupid, but true. I don't know how this works for EU countries.
Is this a "Ahhhh!!!! Computers/internet make it all different!!" idiocy? Or is there more to it than that?
This would seem most analogous to a music CD importer that has to comply with different import/licensing laws in different EU countries, for CDs all produced outside the EU. Would that be legal?
Most "international" words are quite easy to translate, just replace every c in English with a k for German.
t -25152.html and was found with a simple Google search. Google sometimes scares me.
I assume you have heard this joke before, but just in case you haven't, I'm going to paste it in here. I think I first saw it almost 15 years ago, and I doubt it was new then...
This particular version came from http://www.twcenter.net/forums/archive/index.php/
===
Five year phase-in plan for "EuroEnglish"
The European Commission have just announced an agreement whereby
English will be the official language of the EU, rather than German, which
was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, Her Majesty's
government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and
has accepted a five year phase in plan that would be known as "EuroEnglish".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will
make the sivil servants jump for joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour
of the "k". This should klear up konfusion and keyboards kan have 1 less
letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year, when the
troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like
"fotograf" 20% shorter.
In the third year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be
expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkorage the removal of double letters, which have always
ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horible mes of
the silent "e"s in the language is disgraseful, and they should go away.
By the 4th year, peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th"
with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz year, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords
kontaining "ou" and similar changes vud of kors be aplid to ozer
kombinations of leters. After zis fifz year, ve vil hav a realy sensibl
riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubls or difikultis and evrivun vil find it
ezi to understand each ozer
ZE DREAM VIL FINALI KUM TRU!
all credit to... (http://egea.geog.uu.nl/viewthread.php?tid=1448)
Why was the fact that they creating an incredibly precise weapon immediately regarded as evil? In WWII, whole cities were firebombed in the hopes of maybe hitting the actual infrastructure target, as well as some psychological effect. In the current age of the smart bomb, such wholesale and inefficient use of ordnance is considered irresponsible and immoral.
I'm not really disagreeing with you, but putting a slightly different emphasis on things.
We like precision guided munitions because they decrease civilian casualties, and otherwise make us look less bad on CNN. This is very true.
But there is a secondary effect there. We keep talking about precision munitions as if they are targeted purely at property. We aren't killing people with fewer innocent bystander deaths, we are taking out that factory with fewer innocent bystander deaths.
Because, of course, there are no evil people in the world, only evil real estate.
Put that way, it is obviously idiotic, but that doesn't stop people from acting like it's a defensible position.
I'm responding to an AC, how sad...
Why doesn't anyone acknowledge that it takes more energy to produce a solar cell than it will EVER produce in it's lifetime?
I used to have this objection. Then, quietly, in the mid 1990s, photovoltaics (solar cells) passed that point, and reached an efficiency level where they can actually return more energy than was required in their construction. See the wiki entry.
Though, I do admit, that link does say that there is disagreement about this, due to waste, inefficiencies, and other real-world issues.
If we're really being honest, many people who claim they pirate to "try" software are full of it - ever hear of a demo? Demo's are a section of the game or an otherwise limited version that the distributors actually want you to try out legally, and base your purchase decision upon.
I have a problem with demos. You aren't really supporting what I'm complaining about, but I'm going to complain anyway.
My major problem with demos is that, by their very nature, they *require* a clean uninstall procedure. I have yet to see one that has one, though. Most least cruft lying around all over. Some through simple incompetence (which inspires such confidence in the full version...) and some on purpose. After all, for a timed demo, they have to leave something behind to say "you installed this once already, you can't uninstall/reinstall and reset your timer".
For software that is explicitly try-before-you-buy there has to be a clean way to choose not to buy, within the rules of the game.
This is a generic problem with a lot of Windows software, I admit, and not just with demos. But it is more obvious with demos, because you are supposed to try them out and them get rid of them after some (usually short) time period.
Now, admittedly, this doesn't make any sense for the "I'll pirate it instead" argument, because if you pirate it, you still have the program installed and its crap all over your drive. And the full version is unlikely to have a better uninstaller than the demo version. But it does make the demo option less tolerable.
Yes, but the first half of that quote is simple truth.
"Before this century is over, billions of us will die..." predicted James Lovelock
Now, I don't know about you, but I don't really think that the average lifespan is going to jump to over 100 years in the next 10 years.
And it would have to for that statement to not be true.
There are 6 billion people on the planet right now. With average lifespans around 80 years, it's a pretty safe bet that at least 4 billion of them will die by the end of this century, 93(94?) years from now. (Can we avoid the argument about when a century ends?)
At least 4 billion people will die in the next 90 years. That seems a safe and believable statement.
Now, admittedly, what this fruitcake meant was that the earth's population would decline by billions. That's a very different statement. Which is just another facet of this problem... these idiots don't understand English any better than they understand Science.
It's sad, really.
i don't own emergency pants!
:)
Just remember this rule when buying emergency pants:
Emergency pants are always brown.
You already know why.
BMW's iDrive was terrible in this regard. BMW's answer was to include a disclaimer that it was unsafe to operate iDrive while driving. Really.
I have a friend that says the joke is that iDrive is only the first word of the name for that system.
The complete name?
iDrive while you work this damn computer.
I found that amusing. And sad.
Like so many other problems with cars, this is one that's directly the responsibility of the idiot behind the wheel. Competent drivers don't distract themselves while they're driving, and the source of the problem is that we insist on giving drivers' licenses to people who are not only not competent, but whose only qualification for driving is the ability to fog a mirror.
What's the saying? 90% of people think they are above average.
Most people that do this kind of behavior (and that includes me) think they are perfectly capable of doing this somewhat mostly safely. The more honest among us will usually admit privately that we are lying to ourselves, but probably would not admit this in public. From watching myself behind the wheel, I'm more concerned with driving while tired than with driving while talking on the cellphone. Admittedly, I don't text on the cellphone very much at all, though more in the last 3 months than the previous 6 years. And even there, I have certainly noticed that I don't notice things as well while talking on the cellphone. I've "lost" 50 miles of interstate driving before, from an interesting conversation with a friend while driving.
Getting people to recognize their limitations is very very hard.
If drivers' licenses actually signified some level of competence
No, a drivers' license signifies that your state recognizes that, outside of dense metro areas, driving in an automobile is a requirement of living and working in the United States. That's just about all it signifies now.
For some reason, I suddenly don't feel very safe...
But I thought lawyers were taught good argument techniques, and that ad hominem attacks aren't part of making a good argument.
:)
I would modify that slightly. I suspect lawyers are taught effective argument techniques. Sometimes, ad hominem attacks are effective. This may be one of those times. I wouldn't know, I didn't read the article.
Remember, the joke is that juries are composed of 12 people too stupid to get out of jury duty. There may be a large difference between a good argument technique, and an effective argument technique. The fact that most lawyers never see the inside of a courtroom is of course beside the point.
Sorry, I don't give thanks to the government for non-incidents. I'll thank the FAA every time I take my shoes off or have to throw out a perfectly good bottle of water to board. If airplanes started to crash the problem would be corrected without government intervention because the airline business would pick up the slack. They have other reasons besides mandated regulation to keep air travel safe. If they didn't, people would be scared to fly and the business would fail.
Who pays for air traffic control? Right now, that is paid for by the traveling public, through taxes levied on airline tickets, paid to the FAA. If you wanted to privatize it, sure, that would work well. (That was sarcasm you just missed.)
Or do you think that we'd be better off with ATC run by a private company. And, of course, they only route traffic that has paid up. Hope there isn't a problem with your license negotiation when you get handed off from one ATC controller to another and they refuse to tell you where to fly for the next leg, or from the ATC company that runs the southeast to the one that runs the northeast. Or maybe ATC company 1 and ATC company 2 on the west coast both route planes through the same bit of air at the same time. Because, hey, competition is good, right?
Or maybe we've fixed all those problems... but once the system is paid for, why should a new airline pay to use it? The service is already there. And what are they going to do, not let you fly? (Yes, I'm assuming that the company running the ATC does not control every airport also. Because private airports are good too, right?) Once you're in the air, the ATC really has to provide the service, just to keep the paid-up airlines safe. So then you have more companies that don't pay, because, hey, they'll get routed by ATC anyway, for the sake of the paying customers. And then no one pays, and ATC goes out of business, and you have planes running into each other in midair. Yes, it's a big sky, but not that big.
Some services require a monopoly. Some monopolies require the power of government to levy fees. Any monopoly service paid for using the power of government to levy fees may as well be supplied by the government, because a private company running the same service will get the same level of mismanagement as government very quickly. For an example of this, look at AT&T in the 1960s and 1970s, or any local monopoly cable company with no competition.
Learn some history. You'll be able to argue more effectively.