(a) The spouse grabs the gun and confronts you: Case (b) You shoot your spouse: outcome bad. In both cases, it's a better outcome if the gun doesn't fire.
Sucks to be the woman who gets beaten to death. But hey, at least she wasn't a victim of gun violence!
Read Kill Chain [amazon.com] if you want to see how giving trained troops weapons increases the chance they'll be used (and misused). It doesn't just increase the chance, it virtually guarantees that they'll be used. It's like giving a little kid a hammers and telling them, "Now, don't hit anything with it!"
A book about drones? I find it marginally fascinating that someone felt the need to write an entire book on why a precision-strike weapon which exposes no friendly forces to danger and can directly assassinate enemy chain-of-command elements became 1. popular and 2. prone to being overused. It would require a complete ignorance of the political problems that influence warmaking decisions to not understand it. Drones are "clean." Drones are quick. Drones are easy. Drones are precise. Drones can loiter and wait for hours for the right moment to strike to minimize collateral casualties. (And you can royally fuck up all those advantages by being too quick on the trigger, as we have learned to our chagrin.)
"Clean, easy and low collateral casualties" are three traits that have never, ever, ever been associated with nuclear weapons. There is an institutional bias towards viewing nuclear weapons as a tactical battlefield solution - especially dual-purpose weapons like the B-61 bomb, which can very well be assigned to more valuable strategic targets. In the modern era of reduced nuclear armories, nukes are more valuable than ever. Even from a cold-hearted and dispassionate viewpoint, it just doesn't make doctrinal sense.
Yes, but the fact is that they aren't bombing THEIR civilians, they're bombing the "bad guys" and who the fuck cares if a few million of their civilians burn in the process? They'll count it as a win, and the term they use for it is "mowing the grass".
You really, honestly believe that - in today's world, in 2016, in a world where the specter of global thermonuclear war is but a shadow of its former self - that there is anyone in the military who'd accept "a few million" casualties as a small price to pay to put the specter of a larger nuclear war permanently out of the picture? I suggest you update your stereotypes, sir.
You mean cherrypicked samples given the "spotlight" treatment and used to imply a much greater "harassment problem" than has been statistically proven to exist? To say nothing of my comment having nothing to do with OP, and rather everything to do with the poster's reply to the other person's personal observation based on "thirty years in tech."
Yes, necessarily. Show me a weapon that's been built but never used and I'll show you a weapon that some General or battlefield yo-yo is itching to use.
Ah, yes, the old "General Ripper" fallacy. Everyone in the military is just a knuckle-dragging ape who thinks with the wrong head and is looking to shove other nations into the lockers during passing time every chance they get. I'm tired of hearing such juvenile reductions of career military officers and fail to see why anyone should take them as serious arguments.
And thus, they won't fucking be used as air-burst weapons.
You are aware that modern-day nuclear testing is carried out underground for a reason, right?
Any use of nukes is going to fuck shit up, and once we start using them then other nuclear powers will see that as an excuse to unlimber their nukes. "Well the US blew one up in Whatchamacallitstan, so why can't we set off one in Whoositville?"
This is my point. The addition of precision guidance to existing nuclear weapons is simply to increase their effectiveness in their existing role - not to give them new ones. Nukes are expensive to maintain, cause serious and lasting problems for the employing forces once they move to occupy the struck area and are generally just a bitch to use. It's hard to call anything "tactical" when at the very least it can wipe a few companies off the map in a single hit. Once you freely employ tactical nukes to degrade an enemies conventional defenses, all they have left is, well, their own tactical nukes (which then erode your own conventional forces) and then you're both left with just your strategic nuclear weapons, which exist purely to ensure the survival of your state in the event of a complete destruction of your conventional forces. This is precisely why tactical nukes in the cold war always existed as a kind of retroactive thing - only to be used when the strategic weapons were in the air anyways. As you so accurately observed, a nuke is a fucking nuke - a JDAM kit doens't change that, and I highly doubt there's anyone in the upper echelons of the US Military stupid enough to think it does.
Except that politicians and Generals really don't give a flying fuck about civilian casualties...in most cases they come under the heading of "collateral damage" and we all know that shit happens in war, right?
They sure do give a fuck if its THEIR civilians - their entire job is to protect those people. And that gets kind of hard if you instigate a nuclear exchange. For instance, take this analysis (by an anti-nuke group) of the likely targeting priorities in America's current nuclear attack plan against Russia: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/wa... You will note how in a strict counter-force attack (only targeting enemy offensive nuclear weapons) the civilian casualties still number in the millions due to fallout. You will also note the limitations on just how many of those weapons they can locate and destroy - the road-mobile missiles are written off as impossible to fully engage. Even with a theoretically fully functional National Missile Defense system, the chances of the United States emerging from a nuclear war without taking a single strike are ludicrous, and even a single strike will result in at least a million people dead or dying (note that the Russian nuclear strategy is typically a counter-value one, i.e. targeting cities exclusively. There is no possible pre-emptive strike on Russia that won't inflict casualties serious enough to warrant an angry and vengeful counter-value strike.)
I have never understood the insistence of anti-nuke activists that this weapon or that system will somehow make nuclear war more appealing to the military high command. Even if the score is light by nuclear war standards, it's still catastrophic by normal ones - a
The vast majority of casualties from nukes are caused by radioactive fallout. "Fallout" is irradiated materiel blown up from the initial blast - for the most part, dirt and dust - that then spreads in prevailing winds and poisons the land and anyone who comes into contact with it. Thus, an air-burst attack over 100 meters high releases almost no fallout. Unfortunately the most important targets (such as missile silos) are heavily hardened and require ground-level detonations to destroy. Many analysis which consider a strict counter-force attack (only attacking military targets and avoiding population centers, which was always US doctrine) results in heavy civilian casualties simply due to the massive fallout released by the ground-level detonations.
Precision nuclear weapons of smaller yield - especially when combined with conventional bunker-busting technology - allow for much reduced fallout in these scenarios (by setting off the explosion many meters underground,) sparing millions of civilian lives.
The idea that these weapons somehow make nuclear war more "attractive" to policymakers is absolute fucking rubbish. Show me a politician who thinks millions - or even hundreds of thousands - of casualties is "attractive" and I'll show you a damn strawman. As you observe, even a very accurate, limited-yield nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. Precision guidance doesn't change their role, or the strategic consequences of their use. They pose no greater threat as counter-force weapons than weapons in the Cold War did - we simply compensated for lower accuracy with bigger warheads. The military consequences were nearly identical; and so too their impact on the balance of nuclear power. These new weapons can ensure far fewer civilian casualties if that dreaded day ever does come - fewer civilian casualties for our *enemies,* not for us, and OUR civilian casualties will be the guiding line in whether or not to loose them. Fewer civilian casulties in the worst-case scenario is a good thing, and claims to the contrary are simply asinine.
That said, the US may forced into this whether they want to or not, given that Russia's been developing - and has started deploying - tactical nuclear delivery systems. They've really been waving around their "nuclear card" a lot lately - my favorite was when they "accidentally" let a news camera capture a picture of design plans for a submarine-based cobalt bomb doomsday device among papers an officer was carrying.
Indeed. Russia has been aggressively threatening to use tactical nukes in retaliation for any attacks its (very weak) conventional forces cannot repel, and have been for some time: http://www.wsj.com/articles/as... The development of a new generation of precision tactical nuclear weapons is a direct response to these threats.
And what is this thing going to do about a cruise missile if it does see one? Maybe it is supposed to be connected to some kind of air defense, but the only way one of those is going to be shot down is if it is detected over the horizon.
You might note that the horizon distance is highly dependent on the height of the observer over the spherical planet. That's the whole point of putting the sensors on blimps. Once detected, engagement can be managed with a variety of weapons systems; most likely by fighter planes on short notice standby.
The "War Nerd" is a persona created by literature doctorate/professor John Dolan, who's thesis was analysis of Maquis De Sade's writing (the legendary smut writer who's name gave us the modern English word 'sadism'.) What John Dolan knows about military weapons systems could fit in a thimble with room left over for his brain. That's the entire reason he needs the persona; he couldn't talk about military weapon systems and be taken seriously otherwise.
The blimps are deployed to protect Washington, D.C. against the Nuclear cruise missile armed Russian submarines that Putin has redeployed near the US coast - presumably as a stop-gap measure till they can build and test a new generation of ballistic missile submarines (the first of which was launched recently.) The system is designed to detect cruise missiles coming in at supersonic or high subsonic velocities; weapons with very unique and well-known sensor signatures. A system that picks up one asshole riding an autogyro will also pick up bird flocks, ultra-lights and other things, and generate so many false positives that it will be useless. Filtering out extraneous data is a crucial component of any early warning system. Leave it to a journalist to criticize a crash-program implemented to counter a real and present danger for doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
Information gets conserved in all experiments we do outside black holes, so we kind of assume this must be some cosmic requirement (why?), and for some reason which is never properly explained we just can't accept that black holes would destroy information. Because... well, why exactly? Why is it such a problem that information would simply disappear in a black hole?
I'm no physicist, so I don't fully grasp the concept of "information" and all its intangibles myself, but just from the description given in the article:
n the Universe as we understand it, there are certain properties of matter and energy that contain information. A particle like a proton or an electron contains not only a mass, an electric charge and a spin, but also other quantum properties like baryon number, lepton number, weak hypercharge, color charge, and quantum entanglements connecting one particle to another.
- I can discern that "information" is intrinsically linked to matter and energy. I also remember from high school science that energy cannot be destroyed; it can only change states, and that mass is technically just energy in a specific form (such as gasoline in your car, the burning of which the engine converts into kinetic energy to move the vehicle down the road.) Now just what these "numbers" or "charges" are I don't know and don't care, but I also know the periodic table of the elements has a bunch of numbers like that which list their (miniscule) weight, number of orbiting electrons, and other shit like that. In other words it's a complete description of what state the energy is currently in using science geek numbers. I also remember from high school science that velocity isn't just how fast something is going, but how fast it's going and in what direction? So I can naturally work out that this must be the same kind of thing, just using crazy-ass quantum stuff I don't understand.
Now scientists are screaming because the real-world metadata is missing and they don't know where it went. Who cares? Well, I know that mass/energy can't be destroyed, only transferred. That's something everyone knows and it's pretty dang intuitive. But since the scientists can't find the information on what happens to the mass/energy in the black hole, they're flipping their wigs... and I can understand. Mass/energy is changing form when that black hole vacuums it up and utterly rips it apart down to the subatomic whatever - big surprise there. But where the hell did it go?
Now the article states that all the information goes into the black hole - duh, obviously - but the black hole itself doesn't change one bit, and that's where you SHOULD find the information encoded. To borrow the earlier analogy, when heat energy goes into an ice sculpture, it melts into a puddle. The ice sculpture and the puddle are still the same mass and all, but their states; their "information" sure as hell isn't the same, and you can see it easily. But, as the article says, "as far as we can tell, black holes are completely described by only three properties: their mass (governed by the total amount of matter and energy that went into them), their electric charge, and their angular momentum." And that's strange, because energy cannot be destroyed, so if energy is leaving source A and entering recipient B, you expect to see B changing somehow. The mass/energy entering the black hole and not coming out isn't surprising. You knock a golf ball into the hole, and you can't see it anymore. Big frikkin surprise. But if you knock sixty golf balls into that same hole, and they keep going in without overflowing - well, the damn thing must be shredding them like the monster noise in your sink to fit them all in. Stands to reason; if the matter changes state it can fit just fine. But if that's what's going on, why can't you hear the damned monster noise? It's spooky.
Or another analogy from an unsophisticated layman like myself. An F-18 drops a G
So you want the US to go full imperialist? It's an idea; solve the Mexican illegal immigrant problem by annexing Mexico. Send in a team of special prosecutors (perhaps ex-US Attorneys headed by Christie) to bring the corruption down to New Jersey levels, then admit the Mexican States to the US.
Woah, woah, slow down there pal. Do you really want another California?
These are blue-collar, hard-working, decent people who have come here to escape ruthless violence
It sure would be nice to separate the honest hard-working blue-collar folks who come into the country seeking a better life from the drug runners and gangsters who caused the "ruthless violence" you speak of, and are doing their damnedest to export it across the Rio Grande - more than they already do, that is, firing.50 caliber machine guns across the river at the DEA. Immigration is about accountability - how are we supposed to send the thieves and thugs packing if we can't even keep track of who is who? Trump is making a damn good point - we can track a UPS package from store to doorstep with childish ease, but the much more serious issue of keeping track of noncitizens in our country is in a hopeless shambles.
In fact, Mexican workers that are paid "under-the-table" (as in they don't have anything taxes taken out of their paycheck) are relatively rare.
I'd love to know how their taxes are being reported to the IRS without their non-legal status being noticed - simple complacency? Does the IRS not care as long as they get their cut? But aside from that nobody should be personally insulted if they ARE paid under the table; the only reason most businesses hire such people is that they can get away with paying them less than minimum wage. The fear of deportation after any law enforcement contact cements their status as nonpersons that can be abused and exploited at will.
If our immigration system was better structured and more efficient, these things wouldn't be a problem. People wouldn't have to overstay their visas illegally to stay in the United States; the path to citizenship would be clear-cut, and we could afford to stop summary deportations because we'd know damn well who was on the straight and narrow and who wasn't. The biggest victims of our fucked-up immigration system are the immigrants themselves.
When they say shoot back maybe they're talking about a serious anti aircraft missile... okay. But why are you doing close support in that kind of environment in the first place? US doctrine says you get air superiority before you advance your ground forces. Which includes pacifying ground based AA.
Exactly. Something people often ignore is the difference between a STRIKE fighter and a dedicated CAS aircraft. The F-35 is going to make a superb strike fighter; especially its ability to fly into the teeth of enemy air defense networks. But one thing we've learned in wars like Desert Storm is that the short-ranged, low-level stuff - SA-9, SA-13s and various Self Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns (SPAAGs) just can't be wiped out en-masse like the big long range SAM sites can. They're quick, mobile and just too easy to hide, so any aircraft going in low will have to expect to take fire from them. The A-10 is armored to hell and gone in expectation of this. The F-35 will fly well above their engagement ceiling. Whether or not it can still find targets successfully is the big question.
Why not give it that new sensor package and helmet at well?
It already does. The F-35 basically comes with the Sniper FLIR pod built into the plane; this same pod has been used as an external mount on many other aircraft - including the A-10. As for the helmet, the A-10 doesn't really need it; that helmet is more about 360 degree visibility for dog-fighting.
My issue with the F35 is that its trying to be everything to everyone and generally succeeds so far as I can tell at nothing. That's bullshit.
That's because you've been listening to too many morons who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. The "Fighter Mafia" guys who created the A-10 and the F-16 have been spewing shit at every aircraft built since their Precious Gift To Fighter Pilots was made; complaining that the new planes are "too big" and will be "spotted too easily," as if the Mark 1 eyeball is the primary early-detection sensor in modern air combat. Next time Sprey opens his mouth I hope someone shouts "GET BACK TO YOUR PORCH, GRANDPA!"
The plane does fucking plenty. Like the F-22 before it, it's got this nifty "supercruise" feature; suffice to say this thing can thunder along at supersonic without using afterburners. Most fighter planes spend most of their time at high subsonic speeds, which is their most fuel-efficient cruising speed. Going to 100% power (military) will push them over the sound barrier - a bit. But to really hit their maximum speeds; to push towards 1.7 or 2 or even 2.5 knots, they've got to lay on the afterburner - and that DEVOURS fuel like nobody's business. Two hours of fuel at cruising speed is gone in twenty minutes with afterburner on; since fuel is being injected directly into the exhaust chamber - instead of a jet engine, the afterburner basically turns it into a rocket. The F-22 and F-35, on the other hand, can blast along at those speeds all damn day. Much like the Concorde or the SR-71, those planes and their engines are designed to fly supersonic as a matter of route, with sane fuel consumption enabled by normal engine operation. This not only gives them incredible range, but they reach targets a hell of a lot faster. The F-18, as good a plane as it is, has terribly limited range; the F-35 nearly doubles that - and the F-35 can carry nearly double the damn payload, depending on configuration, twice the distance as the F-18. As for dog-fighting - note the wing shape similarities between the F-22 and the F-35. Then account for the vectored-thrust nozzles that let you continue to "point" the nose even after your wings are no longer generating lift (i.e. a stall, falling out of the sky.) Traditionally, good-turning planes are defined by big wings that let them turn very tightly before the wings no longer generate lift and they fall out of the sky. The F-22 and F-35 don't need that - they can damn near turn around on a dime
1. Chrome uses your machine resources to the fullest to make things faster. That's good - I bought a lot of RAM, I want it to be used. Unfortunately, it also means Chrome uses a lot of machine resources - like, a LOT.
2. They've had the same moronic tabbing scheme for *YEARS.* Firefox got rid of the "every tab link gets smaller as more are crammed in" after version 2.0, for chrissakes.
For someone like me who likes to have a LOT of tabs open, Chrome is simply unusable. If not for that, I'd be using it now - Firefox's constant stability issues are inexcusable, and even Pale Moon has issues.
Your insistent assertion that the majority opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller was shockingly arbitrary is an opinion I find hard to lend credence to, given that the majority opinion was quite throughly documented, supported, and defended. Would you care to elaborate on your opinion? Or are you simply bitching because the decision of a majority of legal experts disagreed with your personal bias?
Slashdot Mirror
(a) The spouse grabs the gun and confronts you: Case (b) You shoot your spouse: outcome bad. In both cases, it's a better outcome if the gun doesn't fire.
Sucks to be the woman who gets beaten to death. But hey, at least she wasn't a victim of gun violence!
They are still proudly marketing their products to kindergartners.
The day I see a kindergardner filling out purchase paperwork at the gn counter at Cabellas, maybe I'll give a shit.
How the hell do people like you learn to read?
Read Kill Chain [amazon.com] if you want to see how giving trained troops weapons increases the chance they'll be used (and misused). It doesn't just increase the chance, it virtually guarantees that they'll be used. It's like giving a little kid a hammers and telling them, "Now, don't hit anything with it!"
A book about drones? I find it marginally fascinating that someone felt the need to write an entire book on why a precision-strike weapon which exposes no friendly forces to danger and can directly assassinate enemy chain-of-command elements became 1. popular and 2. prone to being overused. It would require a complete ignorance of the political problems that influence warmaking decisions to not understand it. Drones are "clean." Drones are quick. Drones are easy. Drones are precise. Drones can loiter and wait for hours for the right moment to strike to minimize collateral casualties. (And you can royally fuck up all those advantages by being too quick on the trigger, as we have learned to our chagrin.)
"Clean, easy and low collateral casualties" are three traits that have never, ever, ever been associated with nuclear weapons. There is an institutional bias towards viewing nuclear weapons as a tactical battlefield solution - especially dual-purpose weapons like the B-61 bomb, which can very well be assigned to more valuable strategic targets. In the modern era of reduced nuclear armories, nukes are more valuable than ever. Even from a cold-hearted and dispassionate viewpoint, it just doesn't make doctrinal sense.
Yes, but the fact is that they aren't bombing THEIR civilians, they're bombing the "bad guys" and who the fuck cares if a few million of their civilians burn in the process? They'll count it as a win, and the term they use for it is "mowing the grass".
You really, honestly believe that - in today's world, in 2016, in a world where the specter of global thermonuclear war is but a shadow of its former self - that there is anyone in the military who'd accept "a few million" casualties as a small price to pay to put the specter of a larger nuclear war permanently out of the picture? I suggest you update your stereotypes, sir.
The OP
You mean cherrypicked samples given the "spotlight" treatment and used to imply a much greater "harassment problem" than has been statistically proven to exist? To say nothing of my comment having nothing to do with OP, and rather everything to do with the poster's reply to the other person's personal observation based on "thirty years in tech."
Yes, necessarily. Show me a weapon that's been built but never used and I'll show you a weapon that some General or battlefield yo-yo is itching to use.
Ah, yes, the old "General Ripper" fallacy. Everyone in the military is just a knuckle-dragging ape who thinks with the wrong head and is looking to shove other nations into the lockers during passing time every chance they get. I'm tired of hearing such juvenile reductions of career military officers and fail to see why anyone should take them as serious arguments.
And thus, they won't fucking be used as air-burst weapons.
You are aware that modern-day nuclear testing is carried out underground for a reason, right?
Any use of nukes is going to fuck shit up, and once we start using them then other nuclear powers will see that as an excuse to unlimber their nukes. "Well the US blew one up in Whatchamacallitstan, so why can't we set off one in Whoositville?"
This is my point. The addition of precision guidance to existing nuclear weapons is simply to increase their effectiveness in their existing role - not to give them new ones. Nukes are expensive to maintain, cause serious and lasting problems for the employing forces once they move to occupy the struck area and are generally just a bitch to use. It's hard to call anything "tactical" when at the very least it can wipe a few companies off the map in a single hit. Once you freely employ tactical nukes to degrade an enemies conventional defenses, all they have left is, well, their own tactical nukes (which then erode your own conventional forces) and then you're both left with just your strategic nuclear weapons, which exist purely to ensure the survival of your state in the event of a complete destruction of your conventional forces. This is precisely why tactical nukes in the cold war always existed as a kind of retroactive thing - only to be used when the strategic weapons were in the air anyways. As you so accurately observed, a nuke is a fucking nuke - a JDAM kit doens't change that, and I highly doubt there's anyone in the upper echelons of the US Military stupid enough to think it does.
Except that politicians and Generals really don't give a flying fuck about civilian casualties...in most cases they come under the heading of "collateral damage" and we all know that shit happens in war, right?
They sure do give a fuck if its THEIR civilians - their entire job is to protect those people. And that gets kind of hard if you instigate a nuclear exchange. For instance, take this analysis (by an anti-nuke group) of the likely targeting priorities in America's current nuclear attack plan against Russia: http://www.nrdc.org/nuclear/wa... You will note how in a strict counter-force attack (only targeting enemy offensive nuclear weapons) the civilian casualties still number in the millions due to fallout. You will also note the limitations on just how many of those weapons they can locate and destroy - the road-mobile missiles are written off as impossible to fully engage. Even with a theoretically fully functional National Missile Defense system, the chances of the United States emerging from a nuclear war without taking a single strike are ludicrous, and even a single strike will result in at least a million people dead or dying (note that the Russian nuclear strategy is typically a counter-value one, i.e. targeting cities exclusively. There is no possible pre-emptive strike on Russia that won't inflict casualties serious enough to warrant an angry and vengeful counter-value strike.)
I have never understood the insistence of anti-nuke activists that this weapon or that system will somehow make nuclear war more appealing to the military high command. Even if the score is light by nuclear war standards, it's still catastrophic by normal ones - a
Not necessarily.
The vast majority of casualties from nukes are caused by radioactive fallout. "Fallout" is irradiated materiel blown up from the initial blast - for the most part, dirt and dust - that then spreads in prevailing winds and poisons the land and anyone who comes into contact with it. Thus, an air-burst attack over 100 meters high releases almost no fallout. Unfortunately the most important targets (such as missile silos) are heavily hardened and require ground-level detonations to destroy. Many analysis which consider a strict counter-force attack (only attacking military targets and avoiding population centers, which was always US doctrine) results in heavy civilian casualties simply due to the massive fallout released by the ground-level detonations.
Precision nuclear weapons of smaller yield - especially when combined with conventional bunker-busting technology - allow for much reduced fallout in these scenarios (by setting off the explosion many meters underground,) sparing millions of civilian lives.
The idea that these weapons somehow make nuclear war more "attractive" to policymakers is absolute fucking rubbish. Show me a politician who thinks millions - or even hundreds of thousands - of casualties is "attractive" and I'll show you a damn strawman. As you observe, even a very accurate, limited-yield nuclear weapon is a nuclear weapon. Precision guidance doesn't change their role, or the strategic consequences of their use. They pose no greater threat as counter-force weapons than weapons in the Cold War did - we simply compensated for lower accuracy with bigger warheads. The military consequences were nearly identical; and so too their impact on the balance of nuclear power. These new weapons can ensure far fewer civilian casualties if that dreaded day ever does come - fewer civilian casualties for our *enemies,* not for us, and OUR civilian casualties will be the guiding line in whether or not to loose them. Fewer civilian casulties in the worst-case scenario is a good thing, and claims to the contrary are simply asinine.
That said, the US may forced into this whether they want to or not, given that Russia's been developing - and has started deploying - tactical nuclear delivery systems. They've really been waving around their "nuclear card" a lot lately - my favorite was when they "accidentally" let a news camera capture a picture of design plans for a submarine-based cobalt bomb doomsday device among papers an officer was carrying.
Indeed. Russia has been aggressively threatening to use tactical nukes in retaliation for any attacks its (very weak) conventional forces cannot repel, and have been for some time: http://www.wsj.com/articles/as... The development of a new generation of precision tactical nuclear weapons is a direct response to these threats.
Russia wanted a new Cold War - it shall have it.
But, to my ears, you describe a male-dominated workforce that has circled the wagons and s profoundly hostile and suspicious of women.
So lack of evidence is, itself, evidence. Heads I win, tails you lose.
Fuck off.
I see the "Evil Jewish Conspiracy" brand of anti-Semetic shitposting is alive and well on /.
"This billion dollar system couldn't detect a non-threat, we should get rid of it."
A deal with no method of enforcement or verification, relying entirely on Iran's stellar promises and clean hands.
Get bent.
And what is this thing going to do about a cruise missile if it does see one? Maybe it is supposed to be connected to some kind of air defense, but the only way one of those is going to be shot down is if it is detected over the horizon.
You might note that the horizon distance is highly dependent on the height of the observer over the spherical planet. That's the whole point of putting the sensors on blimps. Once detected, engagement can be managed with a variety of weapons systems; most likely by fighter planes on short notice standby.
The "War Nerd" is a persona created by literature doctorate/professor John Dolan, who's thesis was analysis of Maquis De Sade's writing (the legendary smut writer who's name gave us the modern English word 'sadism'.) What John Dolan knows about military weapons systems could fit in a thimble with room left over for his brain. That's the entire reason he needs the persona; he couldn't talk about military weapon systems and be taken seriously otherwise.
The blimps are deployed to protect Washington, D.C. against the Nuclear cruise missile armed Russian submarines that Putin has redeployed near the US coast - presumably as a stop-gap measure till they can build and test a new generation of ballistic missile submarines (the first of which was launched recently.) The system is designed to detect cruise missiles coming in at supersonic or high subsonic velocities; weapons with very unique and well-known sensor signatures. A system that picks up one asshole riding an autogyro will also pick up bird flocks, ultra-lights and other things, and generate so many false positives that it will be useless. Filtering out extraneous data is a crucial component of any early warning system. Leave it to a journalist to criticize a crash-program implemented to counter a real and present danger for doing exactly what it's supposed to do.
I have never wished for mod points more ardently than I do now. My laughter woke up half the house.
I think the study's methodology is highly suspect.
Considering the Asian Brown Cloud, that is a wonderfully dry piece of understatement.
Information gets conserved in all experiments we do outside black holes, so we kind of assume this must be some cosmic requirement (why?), and for some reason which is never properly explained we just can't accept that black holes would destroy information. Because... well, why exactly? Why is it such a problem that information would simply disappear in a black hole?
I'm no physicist, so I don't fully grasp the concept of "information" and all its intangibles myself, but just from the description given in the article:
n the Universe as we understand it, there are certain properties of matter and energy that contain information. A particle like a proton or an electron contains not only a mass, an electric charge and a spin, but also other quantum properties like baryon number, lepton number, weak hypercharge, color charge, and quantum entanglements connecting one particle to another.
- I can discern that "information" is intrinsically linked to matter and energy. I also remember from high school science that energy cannot be destroyed; it can only change states, and that mass is technically just energy in a specific form (such as gasoline in your car, the burning of which the engine converts into kinetic energy to move the vehicle down the road.) Now just what these "numbers" or "charges" are I don't know and don't care, but I also know the periodic table of the elements has a bunch of numbers like that which list their (miniscule) weight, number of orbiting electrons, and other shit like that. In other words it's a complete description of what state the energy is currently in using science geek numbers. I also remember from high school science that velocity isn't just how fast something is going, but how fast it's going and in what direction? So I can naturally work out that this must be the same kind of thing, just using crazy-ass quantum stuff I don't understand.
Now scientists are screaming because the real-world metadata is missing and they don't know where it went. Who cares? Well, I know that mass/energy can't be destroyed, only transferred. That's something everyone knows and it's pretty dang intuitive. But since the scientists can't find the information on what happens to the mass/energy in the black hole, they're flipping their wigs... and I can understand. Mass/energy is changing form when that black hole vacuums it up and utterly rips it apart down to the subatomic whatever - big surprise there. But where the hell did it go?
Now the article states that all the information goes into the black hole - duh, obviously - but the black hole itself doesn't change one bit, and that's where you SHOULD find the information encoded. To borrow the earlier analogy, when heat energy goes into an ice sculpture, it melts into a puddle. The ice sculpture and the puddle are still the same mass and all, but their states; their "information" sure as hell isn't the same, and you can see it easily. But, as the article says, "as far as we can tell, black holes are completely described by only three properties: their mass (governed by the total amount of matter and energy that went into them), their electric charge, and their angular momentum." And that's strange, because energy cannot be destroyed, so if energy is leaving source A and entering recipient B, you expect to see B changing somehow. The mass/energy entering the black hole and not coming out isn't surprising. You knock a golf ball into the hole, and you can't see it anymore. Big frikkin surprise. But if you knock sixty golf balls into that same hole, and they keep going in without overflowing - well, the damn thing must be shredding them like the monster noise in your sink to fit them all in. Stands to reason; if the matter changes state it can fit just fine. But if that's what's going on, why can't you hear the damned monster noise? It's spooky.
Or another analogy from an unsophisticated layman like myself. An F-18 drops a G
So you want the US to go full imperialist? It's an idea; solve the Mexican illegal immigrant problem by annexing Mexico. Send in a team of special prosecutors (perhaps ex-US Attorneys headed by Christie) to bring the corruption down to New Jersey levels, then admit the Mexican States to the US.
Woah, woah, slow down there pal. Do you really want another California?
These are blue-collar, hard-working, decent people who have come here to escape ruthless violence
It sure would be nice to separate the honest hard-working blue-collar folks who come into the country seeking a better life from the drug runners and gangsters who caused the "ruthless violence" you speak of, and are doing their damnedest to export it across the Rio Grande - more than they already do, that is, firing .50 caliber machine guns across the river at the DEA. Immigration is about accountability - how are we supposed to send the thieves and thugs packing if we can't even keep track of who is who? Trump is making a damn good point - we can track a UPS package from store to doorstep with childish ease, but the much more serious issue of keeping track of noncitizens in our country is in a hopeless shambles.
In fact, Mexican workers that are paid "under-the-table" (as in they don't have anything taxes taken out of their paycheck) are relatively rare.
I'd love to know how their taxes are being reported to the IRS without their non-legal status being noticed - simple complacency? Does the IRS not care as long as they get their cut? But aside from that nobody should be personally insulted if they ARE paid under the table; the only reason most businesses hire such people is that they can get away with paying them less than minimum wage. The fear of deportation after any law enforcement contact cements their status as nonpersons that can be abused and exploited at will.
If our immigration system was better structured and more efficient, these things wouldn't be a problem. People wouldn't have to overstay their visas illegally to stay in the United States; the path to citizenship would be clear-cut, and we could afford to stop summary deportations because we'd know damn well who was on the straight and narrow and who wasn't. The biggest victims of our fucked-up immigration system are the immigrants themselves.
When they say shoot back maybe they're talking about a serious anti aircraft missile... okay. But why are you doing close support in that kind of environment in the first place? US doctrine says you get air superiority before you advance your ground forces. Which includes pacifying ground based AA.
Exactly. Something people often ignore is the difference between a STRIKE fighter and a dedicated CAS aircraft. The F-35 is going to make a superb strike fighter; especially its ability to fly into the teeth of enemy air defense networks. But one thing we've learned in wars like Desert Storm is that the short-ranged, low-level stuff - SA-9, SA-13s and various Self Propelled Anti-Aircraft Guns (SPAAGs) just can't be wiped out en-masse like the big long range SAM sites can. They're quick, mobile and just too easy to hide, so any aircraft going in low will have to expect to take fire from them. The A-10 is armored to hell and gone in expectation of this. The F-35 will fly well above their engagement ceiling. Whether or not it can still find targets successfully is the big question.
Why not give it that new sensor package and helmet at well?
It already does. The F-35 basically comes with the Sniper FLIR pod built into the plane; this same pod has been used as an external mount on many other aircraft - including the A-10. As for the helmet, the A-10 doesn't really need it; that helmet is more about 360 degree visibility for dog-fighting.
My issue with the F35 is that its trying to be everything to everyone and generally succeeds so far as I can tell at nothing. That's bullshit.
That's because you've been listening to too many morons who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. The "Fighter Mafia" guys who created the A-10 and the F-16 have been spewing shit at every aircraft built since their Precious Gift To Fighter Pilots was made; complaining that the new planes are "too big" and will be "spotted too easily," as if the Mark 1 eyeball is the primary early-detection sensor in modern air combat. Next time Sprey opens his mouth I hope someone shouts "GET BACK TO YOUR PORCH, GRANDPA!"
The plane does fucking plenty. Like the F-22 before it, it's got this nifty "supercruise" feature; suffice to say this thing can thunder along at supersonic without using afterburners. Most fighter planes spend most of their time at high subsonic speeds, which is their most fuel-efficient cruising speed. Going to 100% power (military) will push them over the sound barrier - a bit. But to really hit their maximum speeds; to push towards 1.7 or 2 or even 2.5 knots, they've got to lay on the afterburner - and that DEVOURS fuel like nobody's business. Two hours of fuel at cruising speed is gone in twenty minutes with afterburner on; since fuel is being injected directly into the exhaust chamber - instead of a jet engine, the afterburner basically turns it into a rocket. The F-22 and F-35, on the other hand, can blast along at those speeds all damn day. Much like the Concorde or the SR-71, those planes and their engines are designed to fly supersonic as a matter of route, with sane fuel consumption enabled by normal engine operation. This not only gives them incredible range, but they reach targets a hell of a lot faster. The F-18, as good a plane as it is, has terribly limited range; the F-35 nearly doubles that - and the F-35 can carry nearly double the damn payload, depending on configuration, twice the distance as the F-18. As for dog-fighting - note the wing shape similarities between the F-22 and the F-35. Then account for the vectored-thrust nozzles that let you continue to "point" the nose even after your wings are no longer generating lift (i.e. a stall, falling out of the sky.) Traditionally, good-turning planes are defined by big wings that let them turn very tightly before the wings no longer generate lift and they fall out of the sky. The F-22 and F-35 don't need that - they can damn near turn around on a dime
and corporations?
As a matter of fact, yes.
My reason for not using Chrome is twofold:
1. Chrome uses your machine resources to the fullest to make things faster. That's good - I bought a lot of RAM, I want it to be used. Unfortunately, it also means Chrome uses a lot of machine resources - like, a LOT. 2. They've had the same moronic tabbing scheme for *YEARS.* Firefox got rid of the "every tab link gets smaller as more are crammed in" after version 2.0, for chrissakes.
For someone like me who likes to have a LOT of tabs open, Chrome is simply unusable. If not for that, I'd be using it now - Firefox's constant stability issues are inexcusable, and even Pale Moon has issues.
Former head of marketing? Well, that sure explains a lot. Wish I had mod points for you, pal, that's +1 Informative right there.
Your insistent assertion that the majority opinion in District of Columbia vs. Heller was shockingly arbitrary is an opinion I find hard to lend credence to, given that the majority opinion was quite throughly documented, supported, and defended. Would you care to elaborate on your opinion? Or are you simply bitching because the decision of a majority of legal experts disagreed with your personal bias?
I have never, ever wished for mod points more than I do now. Thank you god. I rushed to reply to this article with that exact damn comment.