So why not put these programs on the slow track for a little while and spend a Billion developing some really good deep space propulsion systems?
Because they really aren't needed for the forseeable future. Though they're really popular among the space fanboy set, they're actually solutions in search of a problem.
Anyway, if you can get a propulsion system that's 10x more efficient than our current chemical rockets you could send much more massive payloads quicker! This would substantially reduce the launch cost since it would "only" cost 10s of thousands of dollars to send a kg instead of 100s of thousands to the outer planets. This in turn would allow designers much more flexibilty to reduce cost/increase perfornance since they wouldn't be under such pressure to reduce weight.
Completely wrong on all three counts. For the first count: These deep space propulsion systems do not replace current chemical rockets which will still be used to boost the probes from the surface. For the second count: Since we'll still be using the same chemical rockets to boost the probe and propulsion system to orbit, launch costs remain the same. For the third count: Since we're still using the same chemical rockets, we're limited to the same payload mass - which means the pressure to reduce weight remains in place. (And in some ways it actually gets worse because every pound occupied by propulsion system is a pound taken from that available for other uses - like instruments.)
And by reducing or eliminating the need for time-consuming gravitational assists (6 years to Mercury!)
You'll never reduce the need for flybys - because until we're able to get to the planets as easily as we get to the local convenience store, you'll never significantly reduce the desire to maximize the bang-per-pound. No vehicle of land, sea, air, or space is immune to that. Not to mention that short of SF style propulsion, it's always going to be hard to get to Mercury. (One of the quirks of orbital mechanics is that it's harder to go 'down' towards the Sun than 'up' and away.)
The distance to the outer planets is great enough that it makes me think of some science fiction stories (like Arthur C. Clarke's "The Songs of Distant Earth"), where newly developed technology could allow spacecraft launched later to overtake the earlier more primitive ships.
That's a nice fantasy, but that's all it is. Unless you're talking significant increases in speed - older ships are unlikely to be overtaken by newer. (It's a stern chase, and the one that leaves sooner rapidly builds a significant lead.)
it would likewise reduce support costs as well as increase science return (instruments won't be decades obsolete on arrival).
It won't reduce support costs as much as you think - it's pretty much standard procedure to probes to only have a skeleton crew during cruise phase. Nor will it increase science notably... The problem isn't that the instruments are obsolescent (not obsolete) on arrival, it's that you really can't start designing new instruments until you have the data from the previous set to tell you what you need to look for with the next.
For some of these reasons, I support Obama's focus on developing new technologies before trying for the Moon (again) or Mars. We know we can do it, the question is can we do it affordably enough to SUSTAIN a manned presence?
We'll never learn how to do it affordably sitting on the ground 'developing the technology'. That path to disaster results in their always being another 'more affordable' technology/design/system waiting on the horizon. So we wait some more while it is developed, and in the meantime another new technology starts to be visible on the horizon... Lathe
Why do we have *any* nukes pointed at Moscow? Russia is not our enemy.
My understanding is that our (US) nukes are not 'pointed' anywhere anymore. They're loaded with training targeting (I.E. the middle of the ocean) and will require retargeting (which takes time) before launching in anger. (Disclaimer: Former SSBN missile fire control tech, so I can vouch this is possible.)
Who else then? There are no nation states with motivation to nuke the US that have the means to do so. Who are these missiles supposed to deter?
There's an old military bromide that you judge another force not by it's intentions - but by it's capabilities. And there are four nations with the capability to nuke the US: Britain (almost certainly an ally for the foreseeable future), France (Probably not a full ally but likely not a danger), Russia (still tottering on the fence but moving closer to being an ally), and China (who would dearly like to use their nukes to deter the US and rest of the West from intervening in their ambitions). There are also two nations with nukes who need to be kept an eye on: India and Pakistan. Then there is North Korea. Then there is also Iran.
You also forget the US's "nuclear umbrella" doesn't just cover the US - it also covers, well... pretty much all of our allied and friendly nations.
Yes. I was simplifying for the matters of convenience; you've got a fellow bibliophile here:)
Well, hardcore book history geeks aren't as common as other types here on Slashdot. They're pretty rare everywhere, all things considered.:)
Should probably correct your timescale on the effects of the computer revolutionâ"it's been 67 years since Colossus now. 20 years is more the timeframe for the world wide web.
Yeah, it's been 67 years since Colossus, almost thirty since the original IBM PC. But, as with books, it took a while and for a few other things to happen for the turning wheel to accelerate and the motion to become measurable and visible.
That assumes, probably wrongly, that you can quantify what's going on. Is that opposing quarterback's limp important, a fake, how serious is it (numerically)?
And even if you do accurately quantify the quarterback's limp - how do you quantify what the receiver or blockers know about the limp and adjusting their field strategy and positioning accordingly? One variable begats another, even more difficult to quantify.
Even if a computer is good at predicting one particular game, (say the superbowl) that would be based on the data from the whole of the rest of the season to assess how good the players are.
But one of the things they've discovered in baseball (which has an order of magnitude more data to base predictions on) is that you can't reliably and accurately predict the outcome of one game even with an entire season's worth of data to draw on. You can more-or-less accurately predict the overall trend but not the single game or single series results.
Piracy is when a syphilitic sailor plunders legitimate commerce in a region of the sea, terrorizing and looting ships, murdering their captains, and taking wenches and boys prisoner.
That's one definition of piracy. But, unsurprising to anyone with a reasonable command of the English language, some words have more than one meaning.
This stuff is white-collar IP infringement, and calling it piracy is just demonizing it to make political inroads into putting more public resources towards stopping what is, in most cases, barely a misdemeanor.
No, piracy has been used in this sense (stealing IP) for centuries. The people trying to redefine it for their own ends aren't the MPAA, RIAAA etc... The people trying to redefine it for their own political ends are those on the opposing side.
Your entire post is based on the assumption that everyone spends - no, must spend - every single penny they earn or they'll be on the street.
No, my post is predicated on the fact that people who have less money to spend will (surprise!) have less money to spend and thus (surprise!) will spend less money. It's also predicated on the fact that a large proportion of most people's income goes to the basics - housing, food, clothing, education, transportation. So when a large proportion loses their discretionary income, and small proportion still doesn't have any... well, you do the math. Try this thought experiment: 100 million people lose the ability to vacation at Disneyworld, while 20 million people who couldn't afford to still can't afford to - what happens to the employees at Disneyworld? (And the hotels and restaurants and auto rental places and airlines who depended on the income of people visiting Disneyland.)
That assumption may well be true - but if it is, then I'd suggest that's the problem right there; people are living beyond their means with no buffer or contingency at all.
Even if they do have a buffer or contingency, I doubt it is commonly as high as 20%. You also seem to forget that having a buffer or contingency is predicated on the belief that the circumstance that causes one to dip into it is temporary, while the situation the OP describes is meant to be permanent.
OK, I follow the math now... what can I say but "it's Monday".:)
But my basic point still remains sound regardless of the precise value of 'n'. To give substandard wages to a fairly small percentage of people you have to reduce the wages of a much larger percentage to substandard - hilarity will not ensue. If you could enforce employment (a cure worse than the disease IMO), it would all sort itself out in a decade or two... but it wouldn't be pretty.
No, my math is spot on - reducing the workweek for existing employees from 40 hours to 32 hours is a reduction of 20%. So if you increase your workforce by 20% to make up that lack (as specified by the OP), they get 20% of the original hours - which is eight hours.
Nor is it always realistically possible. They've found that out with the program here to retrain displaced loggers... These are mostly blue collar types with a high school education at best. They don't have the background to become programmers or engineers or the like, and the other manual trades are either having their own problems with oversupply of workers or already have enough inexperienced guys willing to work for inexperienced guy wages that they have no need for inexperienced guys who need experienced guy wages to make up for what they've lost.
Mr Bucket may have been lucky that Charlie inherited a chocolate factory which kept them in porridge and beans while he retrained - but that doesn't speak well for the other 199 lid screwers similarly displaced.
Mr. Bucket had a job at the toothpaste factory screwing lids onto tubes of toothpaste. A shitty job. One day, they bought a robot that did the same thing, only betterfastercheaper and so Mr. Bucket got the sack. So what did he do? He learned how to fix the machine, and thus got a job fixing the machine that paid better.
That's a nice story - but it doesn't tell the whole story. What happened to the *other* 199 lid screwers?
There... there weren't really millions of scribes at any given time. More like tens of thousands, tops. There simply wasn't much demand for books when they were so labour-intensive to make. One thing that's fantastic about truly "disruptive" technologies is that the world becomes vastly more accessible once they're commonplace, and the artisans have moved on or died off.
But the disruptive technology in the case of books wasn't the invention of the printing press - while books were no longer astronomically expensive after Gutenberg, they were still exceedingly expensive.
It took another disruptive technology to make them relatively less expensive - steam. Steam powered paper mills that could process wood pulp by the ton rather than water powered stamping mills that processed linen and rags by the pound, and steam powered printing presses that rattle off tens of pages a minute. But they didn't actually become cheap without yet more disruptions: Automatic cutters and folders to transform the sheets into signatures... Automatic sewing machines to form the signatures into blocks... And then the penultimate disruption, the replacing of the binding process (which required skilled labor) with the casing process* (which could be done by unskilled labor and ultimately by machine).
There's also a whole host of allied changes that are less visible... Automatic looms so that books could be covered with cheap cloth rather than expensive leather. Man made adhesives that were not only cheaper than natural glues, but that could be applied by less skilled labor and ultimately by machine. Synthetic inks that could be produced by the ton... Etc..., etc...
</book history pedant>
And that's the key to understanding why we could undergo such extensive changes in the past without the huge upheavals we're facing today - most of those changes took place over roughly a century (from the late 1700's to the late 1800's/early 1900's). On the other hand, computers have wrought a similar level of change in barely twenty years.
* A modern hardback book, like what you'd get at your local bricks 'n mortar or order online, is cased rather than bound. Though they look superficially the same, they're structurally very different.
Just reducing 5 work day week to 4 days could increase employment by 25%
Actually, the increase is 20% - and it's going to be accompanied by a similar reduction in income for the individual.
That is huge.
Indeed - a sudden and significant pay cut across virtually the entire pre-existing workforce is going to be huge. You think bankruptcies and foreclosures are a problem now? They're light comedy compared to what's going to happen under your scheme. The 20% of additional workers now working an eight hour week to make up the day you've cut won't be much help - they'll be unable to pay for even the basics.
IIRC, Society actually went throught similar changes - saturday used to be work day too and 40 hour work week is considerably shorter than what was usual for factory workers 150 years ago.
You don't recall correctly. What happened was production per worker steadily increased - decreasing the demand for employees.
I'm old enough to remember the sci-fi promise that more and more automation would allow humans more leisure time without sacrificing the necessities and comforts they were accustomed to. But that hasn't really come to pass, even with machines taking over human jobs. Instead. fewer people have work, many who still have work feel compelled to work more (so it looks harder) to keep their jobs, more people don't have jobs, and the ownership class has more and more in relation to the rest of us.
So how did that happen?
What happened is a bunch of guys who didn't understand economics wrote some stories. A bunch of journalists and script writers who didn't understand economics either hyped those stories. And then a bunch of idiots equally innocent of economics decided they'd been "promised" something and are now acting like spoiled five year olds because they didn't get their ice cream - blaming reality for failing to live up to overhyped fiction.
Grow up and get over yourself. Nobody 'promised' you a jet pack, a flying car, or a twenty hour work week. That's a near religious belief you've created out of thin air.
The original paper is published in an open access journal and the authors have covered the issues you mention. Their citations 2-8 are other papers which discuss the possibility of using caves like this for human habitation.
Since the guys they cite haven't been in the caves/tunnels or examined their structure either - so what? Citations are only useful when they provide evidence, but when they're nothing but more speculation... they're pretty much meaningless.
Apple is Evil as per the dictionary. Thank you, please drive through.
Ask the millions of people who have bought Apple products in the last few years if they feel harmed in any way.
You could substitute 'Microsoft' for 'Apple', ask the same question - and get the same answer. Nor do cigarette smokers consider the tobacco companies 'evil', nor do soda drinkers, etc...
Yeah, I'm quite aware of the A-12, YF-12A and several others in that line, though they are most commonly all referred to at SR's.
Um, no they aren't most commonly referred to as SR's. Well, not by anyone knowledgeable anyhow.
The A-12 were more of a prototype/test bed.
ROTFLMAO. The A-12 was a CIA photo reconnaissance aircraft. You can call it what you want, but it's just more backpedaling on your part to avoid dealing the with the fact that you're not only wrong, but clueless as well.
The real secret was the YF-12A variant that was armed with GAR-9/AIM-47a missiles.
No, the YF-12A wasn't secret at all. It was publicly announced less than six months after it's first flight.
You really have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
Get your shit right if you're going to try to tell me about reality.
ROTFLMAO. Three sentences, three mistakes, and you're telling *me* to get my shit together?
The amount of disparaging and dismissive comments made here, along with the generally tepid response in the West to the Libyan revolution(as well as the Arab revolutions in general) makes me feel that the West in general has no interest in democracy or freedom.
General elections in Tunisia have been essentially suspended indefinitely. Egypt is in the hands of a military junta whose leader is a known supporter of the status quo ante. Libya hangs in the balance and anything could happen yet.
What democracy and freedom are you referring to exactly?
I know that most net denizen's are eager to twit "M1SS!0N ACC0MPL!S3D !1!1" so they can move on to their next shiny - but don't confuse the short attention span of the 'net with the real world.
Have we entered the age of "Meh, Freedom"?
No, we've entered an age of "being damn tired of dammed-if-we-do, dammed-if-we-don't" as so aptly explained by another commenter here.
You've never been a diplomat so you don't really know what Qadaffi has been up to
You don't need to be a diplomat - all you need is roughly 5th grade reading skills and 4th grade googling skills. I.E. pretty much anyone of normal intelligence and curiosity is more than capable of finding out what Qadaffi has been up to.
Now, who wouldn't accept that money?!
Anyone with a shred of ethics.
Seriously, get a grip. An MIT professor isn't some kind of all-knowing god.
Right back at you. He doesn't need to be some kind of all-knowing god - just someone with a shred of ethics, normal intelligence, and normal curiosity.
was the password on a piece of paper in the office and he just know where it was stored it?
It doesn't matter under the law. If you enter my house and remove my property from it, it's irrelevant that you found the key under the mat - you're still guilty of breaking and entering and of theft.
(And no, my key isn't under the mat, I'm smarter than that. A fellow geocacher might find it, but not an ordinary burglar.)
Usually virtually no one knew they even existed until a decade or two after they had been developed. the U2 or the SR-71 are what I think of past "secret " planes.
Which is exceptionally amusing - because neither plane you think as being secret were kept hidden much beyond five years after they were developed. The SR-71 was in fact announced by the President on national TV before it even flew for the first time.
What you're thinking of as a 'secret' airplane is in fact the A-12, for which the SR-71 was a successful cover, so sucessful that even though everyone else has known about it for decades, you remain in the dark.
I suppose that the standards of reporting have declined over the years, and sensational headlines are what sell now.
Nah, you've just made a number of groundless assumptions and are now blaming reality for failing to match them.
Except - you don't seem to actually know anything. All you've got is a collection of links pretty much doing nothing but repeating what we already know - internet traffic to Libya is down.
Slashdot Mirror
Because they really aren't needed for the forseeable future. Though they're really popular among the space fanboy set, they're actually solutions in search of a problem.
Completely wrong on all three counts. For the first count: These deep space propulsion systems do not replace current chemical rockets which will still be used to boost the probes from the surface. For the second count: Since we'll still be using the same chemical rockets to boost the probe and propulsion system to orbit, launch costs remain the same. For the third count: Since we're still using the same chemical rockets, we're limited to the same payload mass - which means the pressure to reduce weight remains in place. (And in some ways it actually gets worse because every pound occupied by propulsion system is a pound taken from that available for other uses - like instruments.)
You'll never reduce the need for flybys - because until we're able to get to the planets as easily as we get to the local convenience store, you'll never significantly reduce the desire to maximize the bang-per-pound. No vehicle of land, sea, air, or space is immune to that. Not to mention that short of SF style propulsion, it's always going to be hard to get to Mercury. (One of the quirks of orbital mechanics is that it's harder to go 'down' towards the Sun than 'up' and away.)
That's a nice fantasy, but that's all it is. Unless you're talking significant increases in speed - older ships are unlikely to be overtaken by newer. (It's a stern chase, and the one that leaves sooner rapidly builds a significant lead.)
It won't reduce support costs as much as you think - it's pretty much standard procedure to probes to only have a skeleton crew during cruise phase. Nor will it increase science notably... The problem isn't that the instruments are obsolescent (not obsolete) on arrival, it's that you really can't start designing new instruments until you have the data from the previous set to tell you what you need to look for with the next.
We'll never learn how to do it affordably sitting on the ground 'developing the technology'. That path to disaster results in their always being another 'more affordable' technology/design/system waiting on the horizon. So we wait some more while it is developed, and in the meantime another new technology starts to be visible on the horizon... Lathe
Do you actually pay any attention to space exploration? We've been putting out long duration orbiters over flybys for a couple of decades now.
My understanding is that our (US) nukes are not 'pointed' anywhere anymore. They're loaded with training targeting (I.E. the middle of the ocean) and will require retargeting (which takes time) before launching in anger. (Disclaimer: Former SSBN missile fire control tech, so I can vouch this is possible.)
There's an old military bromide that you judge another force not by it's intentions - but by it's capabilities. And there are four nations with the capability to nuke the US: Britain (almost certainly an ally for the foreseeable future), France (Probably not a full ally but likely not a danger), Russia (still tottering on the fence but moving closer to being an ally), and China (who would dearly like to use their nukes to deter the US and rest of the West from intervening in their ambitions). There are also two nations with nukes who need to be kept an eye on: India and Pakistan. Then there is North Korea. Then there is also Iran.
You also forget the US's "nuclear umbrella" doesn't just cover the US - it also covers, well... pretty much all of our allied and friendly nations.
Well, hardcore book history geeks aren't as common as other types here on Slashdot. They're pretty rare everywhere, all things considered. :)
Yeah, it's been 67 years since Colossus, almost thirty since the original IBM PC. But, as with books, it took a while and for a few other things to happen for the turning wheel to accelerate and the motion to become measurable and visible.
And even if you do accurately quantify the quarterback's limp - how do you quantify what the receiver or blockers know about the limp and adjusting their field strategy and positioning accordingly? One variable begats another, even more difficult to quantify.
But one of the things they've discovered in baseball (which has an order of magnitude more data to base predictions on) is that you can't reliably and accurately predict the outcome of one game even with an entire season's worth of data to draw on. You can more-or-less accurately predict the overall trend but not the single game or single series results.
That's one definition of piracy. But, unsurprising to anyone with a reasonable command of the English language, some words have more than one meaning.
No, piracy has been used in this sense (stealing IP) for centuries. The people trying to redefine it for their own ends aren't the MPAA, RIAAA etc... The people trying to redefine it for their own political ends are those on the opposing side.
No, my post is predicated on the fact that people who have less money to spend will (surprise!) have less money to spend and thus (surprise!) will spend less money. It's also predicated on the fact that a large proportion of most people's income goes to the basics - housing, food, clothing, education, transportation. So when a large proportion loses their discretionary income, and small proportion still doesn't have any... well, you do the math. Try this thought experiment: 100 million people lose the ability to vacation at Disneyworld, while 20 million people who couldn't afford to still can't afford to - what happens to the employees at Disneyworld? (And the hotels and restaurants and auto rental places and airlines who depended on the income of people visiting Disneyland.)
Even if they do have a buffer or contingency, I doubt it is commonly as high as 20%. You also seem to forget that having a buffer or contingency is predicated on the belief that the circumstance that causes one to dip into it is temporary, while the situation the OP describes is meant to be permanent.
OK, I follow the math now... what can I say but "it's Monday". :)
But my basic point still remains sound regardless of the precise value of 'n'. To give substandard wages to a fairly small percentage of people you have to reduce the wages of a much larger percentage to substandard - hilarity will not ensue. If you could enforce employment (a cure worse than the disease IMO), it would all sort itself out in a decade or two... but it wouldn't be pretty.
Which has precisely nothing to do with the original post or my reply. Get back to me when you sober up and rejoin this reality.
No, my math is spot on - reducing the workweek for existing employees from 40 hours to 32 hours is a reduction of 20%. So if you increase your workforce by 20% to make up that lack (as specified by the OP), they get 20% of the original hours - which is eight hours.
*yawn* And in other news, shortly I shall use a screwdriver to drive a screw and a wrench to tighten a nut.
I.E. this is about the ultimate in Apple fanboyism disguised as 'news'.
Nor is it always realistically possible. They've found that out with the program here to retrain displaced loggers... These are mostly blue collar types with a high school education at best. They don't have the background to become programmers or engineers or the like, and the other manual trades are either having their own problems with oversupply of workers or already have enough inexperienced guys willing to work for inexperienced guy wages that they have no need for inexperienced guys who need experienced guy wages to make up for what they've lost.
Mr Bucket may have been lucky that Charlie inherited a chocolate factory which kept them in porridge and beans while he retrained - but that doesn't speak well for the other 199 lid screwers similarly displaced.
That's a nice story - but it doesn't tell the whole story. What happened to the *other* 199 lid screwers?
But the disruptive technology in the case of books wasn't the invention of the printing press - while books were no longer astronomically expensive after Gutenberg, they were still exceedingly expensive.
It took another disruptive technology to make them relatively less expensive - steam. Steam powered paper mills that could process wood pulp by the ton rather than water powered stamping mills that processed linen and rags by the pound, and steam powered printing presses that rattle off tens of pages a minute. But they didn't actually become cheap without yet more disruptions: Automatic cutters and folders to transform the sheets into signatures... Automatic sewing machines to form the signatures into blocks... And then the penultimate disruption, the replacing of the binding process (which required skilled labor) with the casing process* (which could be done by unskilled labor and ultimately by machine).
There's also a whole host of allied changes that are less visible... Automatic looms so that books could be covered with cheap cloth rather than expensive leather. Man made adhesives that were not only cheaper than natural glues, but that could be applied by less skilled labor and ultimately by machine. Synthetic inks that could be produced by the ton... Etc..., etc...
</book history pedant>
And that's the key to understanding why we could undergo such extensive changes in the past without the huge upheavals we're facing today - most of those changes took place over roughly a century (from the late 1700's to the late 1800's/early 1900's). On the other hand, computers have wrought a similar level of change in barely twenty years.
* A modern hardback book, like what you'd get at your local bricks 'n mortar or order online, is cased rather than bound. Though they look superficially the same, they're structurally very different.
And you're competing with the hordes of other people doing the exact same thing - making it extremely difficult (at best) to make a living.
Actually, the increase is 20% - and it's going to be accompanied by a similar reduction in income for the individual.
Indeed - a sudden and significant pay cut across virtually the entire pre-existing workforce is going to be huge. You think bankruptcies and foreclosures are a problem now? They're light comedy compared to what's going to happen under your scheme. The 20% of additional workers now working an eight hour week to make up the day you've cut won't be much help - they'll be unable to pay for even the basics.
You don't recall correctly. What happened was production per worker steadily increased - decreasing the demand for employees.
What happened is a bunch of guys who didn't understand economics wrote some stories. A bunch of journalists and script writers who didn't understand economics either hyped those stories. And then a bunch of idiots equally innocent of economics decided they'd been "promised" something and are now acting like spoiled five year olds because they didn't get their ice cream - blaming reality for failing to live up to overhyped fiction.
Grow up and get over yourself. Nobody 'promised' you a jet pack, a flying car, or a twenty hour work week. That's a near religious belief you've created out of thin air.
Since the guys they cite haven't been in the caves/tunnels or examined their structure either - so what? Citations are only useful when they provide evidence, but when they're nothing but more speculation... they're pretty much meaningless.
You could substitute 'Microsoft' for 'Apple', ask the same question - and get the same answer. Nor do cigarette smokers consider the tobacco companies 'evil', nor do soda drinkers, etc...
Um, no they aren't most commonly referred to as SR's. Well, not by anyone knowledgeable anyhow.
ROTFLMAO. The A-12 was a CIA photo reconnaissance aircraft. You can call it what you want, but it's just more backpedaling on your part to avoid dealing the with the fact that you're not only wrong, but clueless as well.
No, the YF-12A wasn't secret at all. It was publicly announced less than six months after it's first flight.
You really have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
ROTFLMAO. Three sentences, three mistakes, and you're telling *me* to get my shit together?
General elections in Tunisia have been essentially suspended indefinitely. Egypt is in the hands of a military junta whose leader is a known supporter of the status quo ante. Libya hangs in the balance and anything could happen yet.
What democracy and freedom are you referring to exactly?
I know that most net denizen's are eager to twit "M1SS!0N ACC0MPL!S3D !1!1" so they can move on to their next shiny - but don't confuse the short attention span of the 'net with the real world.
No, we've entered an age of "being damn tired of dammed-if-we-do, dammed-if-we-don't" as so aptly explained by another commenter here.
You don't need to be a diplomat - all you need is roughly 5th grade reading skills and 4th grade googling skills. I.E. pretty much anyone of normal intelligence and curiosity is more than capable of finding out what Qadaffi has been up to.
Anyone with a shred of ethics.
Right back at you. He doesn't need to be some kind of all-knowing god - just someone with a shred of ethics, normal intelligence, and normal curiosity.
It doesn't matter under the law. If you enter my house and remove my property from it, it's irrelevant that you found the key under the mat - you're still guilty of breaking and entering and of theft.
(And no, my key isn't under the mat, I'm smarter than that. A fellow geocacher might find it, but not an ordinary burglar.)
Which is exceptionally amusing - because neither plane you think as being secret were kept hidden much beyond five years after they were developed. The SR-71 was in fact announced by the President on national TV before it even flew for the first time.
What you're thinking of as a 'secret' airplane is in fact the A-12, for which the SR-71 was a successful cover, so sucessful that even though everyone else has known about it for decades, you remain in the dark.
Nah, you've just made a number of groundless assumptions and are now blaming reality for failing to match them.
Except - you don't seem to actually know anything. All you've got is a collection of links pretty much doing nothing but repeating what we already know - internet traffic to Libya is down.