IT is considered a "support function", making it difficult from people from that department to break into the top offices.
It's why you only see fighter pilots at the top of the Air Force and past carrier skippers at the top of the Navy, etc. You could be a great transport pilot, sub driver or the logistics guy that ran the Berlin Airlift, but you'll never make it to the top.
The problem with this theory is that it fails to accord with the facts. The current CNO for example has never commanded a carrier. In fact, examining the roster of CNO's indicates that carrier command experience is, at best, a slight majority. (Many have commanded carrier battle groups - but that is not the same as commanding a carrier.) Many of them have either extensive service in the small boys or submarines as well.
In fact carrier commanders are rare in the upper echelons of the Navy since the pilot->air command->sea (ship) command->nuke->carrier command track leaves little time for the extras (like staff duty and joint duty) that is typically expected of upper echelon commanders and staff.
A review of the roster of USAF Chiefs of Staff does show that many of them are former fighter pilots - but also that they have collectively and individually extensive command and staff experience *other* than just with the fighter squadrons.
I realize that I used several words with more than two syllables, for which I apologize.
No, the problem isn't word you used. It's the fact that their is neither logic, nor rational thought lies behind them. You mouth kneejerk buzzwords with no demonstrated understanding of their meaning or the issues behind them. You are so confident of your illusory black and white world that you don't realize the utter disconnect between it and the real one.
Fascinating - your answer contains nothing but handwaving and buzzwords, with a ladle of kneejerk assumptions poured over them. And it totally fails to answer my question.
You cut this out and store it - because it is a response needed in pretty much every parental monitoring story posted to Slashdot.
I agree with you, its ignorant nonsense to trot out the meme the grandparent did - without considering whether such a tool is a useful part of being a parent.
What I can't quite understand is why no one has thought of parenting as being the best way to protect your children online. I realize it's revolutionary and scary, but hey, we could give it a try, couldn't we?
And how, *precisely* is a tool like this not parenting?
Even if you took the basic ingredients of Pop-Tarts from the shelves of an organic grocery store and made your own Pop-Tarts - you'd *still* suffer from a wide variety of vitamin deficiencies. The same is true of many singular foods (whether they have a singular ingredient or are a composite), regardless of whether they come from $MEGA_STORE or $HEALTHFOOD_STORE.
The problem is that a lot of food looks like Pop-Tarts. Look at the ingredients list of packaged food. It's nearly all the same. It's crap-food with the same crap-ingredients: refined flour, high fructose corn syrup, and partially hydrogenated oil. This is not healthy, wholesome food.
Repeating FUD doesn't change it's nature. 'Healthy' and 'wholesome' are buzzwords, not useful descriptors of food attributes.
You can buy wholesome foods at $MEGA_STORE. It's just that 90% of $MEGA_STORE is crap food.
When you use fuzzy buzz words like 'wholesome' and 'crap' - yah, you can claim anything you want simply by adjusting the definitions.
I visited Iceland a couple years ago, and I became sold on geothermal. I mean, Iceland is a small country, but they have fairly high power needs per capita because of the cold climate, and they run almost entirely off geothermal, as I understand it. This isn't some apologetic green technology that is decades or more from delivering affordable massive power, like solar, wind, etc. No, this is the real thing: a geothermal plant puts out power at nuclear reactor levels. And these things are clean.
Do keep in mind that Iceland is geologically unique. It can run almost entirely off of geothermal because a) it's population is small, and b) geothermal sources are widely and readily available.
Of course that's what I got from your comment - because that's what you said.
My point was, wikipedia works well enough for most folks, if you want to experiment, do it elsewhere. If people find your experiment more useful than wikipedia, they will use it.
In other words - your only criteria is popularity.That is disturbing.
I find it fascinating, and disturbing, that you obviously think your own measures of value are more important than the ones being applied by the millions of people using wikipedia.
That first assumes that people are applying to Wikipedia any criteria beyond the shallow ones (it's available and it's popular) that you do. If you find advocating accuracy, completeness, and coherency disturbing - that tells of a fault in you.
Personally I think we can all do our bit and stop linking to Wikipedia so much, because Google is starting to give the impression that Wikipedia is the fount of all knowledge - to the detriment of pages which contain better information but which don't happen to have WP's massive net presence.
Frankly, I don't see many Wikipedia links in my wanderings about the web.
I suspect Wikipedia's high rankings come not only from external links - but because it is essentially *designed* (by accident) to spam Google. It's a large site, filled with well designed links and keywords by the metric buttloads *and* its rapidly changed and 'updated'. On top of that - each and every mirror of the Wikipedia (themselves large sites, filled with well designed links and keywords by the metric buttloads) *also* link right back to the original Wikipedia article.
Just as blogs did a few years back - Wikpedia has shot to the top of Google rankings not from intrinsic merit, but because it does all the things Google looks for when ranking a website.
Will Wikipedia face the same fate of the Open Directory Project -- where marketeers have spammed the site to render it useless.
DMOZ crashed and burned because of the heavy weight of internal bureaucracy and cliques. In fact, you can see some of the history being repeated on Wikipedia.
An experts only publication would not be a bad idea. Why don't you start one up and tell me when you get say 1/1,000 the number of articles wikipedia has, or 1/10,000 the readers. But don't do it to wikipedia, start your own. Wikipedia already has a system that works well enough. Sorry if you don't like it, but in this free market of ideas, enough people find it useful, as is, to make it one of the most popular sites on the Internet.
I find it fascinating, and disturbing, that the only measures of value you apply are article count and number of readers.
Read the wiki article you link to. The tragedy of the commons only applies to unmanaged resources. Wikipedia is a communally managed resource, so the analogy is less than apt.
No, his analogy is incorrect because Wikipedia isn't communally. As this incident demonstrates - Jimbo is at the top of the heap, and his wishes are law even when they are in opposition to the desires of the community. Underneath him, are variety of folks with a variety of powers including banning, deleting articles (and their history) irretrievably, etc... And these folks are not answerable to anyone save their peers.
" If someone has a better idea for solving Wikipedia's spam problem, then by all means let's hear it."
Supposedly - Wikipedia already *has* a cast iron defense against spammers. Supposedly - Wikipedia articles are defended by hordes of users ready to correct errors and vandalism within seconds or minutes of it happening.
This is a tacit admission that Wikipedia's immune system is failing. Wikipedia is no longer able to defend itself.
It's also fascinating that the community (supposedly part of the heart and soul of the Wikipedia) can be overridden by dictate.
As a practicing physician you should know better. 90% of the 'food' on the shelfs of your local grocer is equivalent to cardboard when it comes to nutritional value.
To put it simply - No. That's FUD spread by a variety of sources with their own agendas to promote.
It's all been injected with just enough vitamin content to be called a food when really it's nothing but sugars and starches and a little bit of cotton seed oil (which is toxic if unprocessed) to hold it all together.
In the first place sugars and starches are nutritional content - if all you ate was vitamin pills, you'd die of starvation. Furthermore, if it has vitamins added, then it doesn't have the 'nutrional value of cardboard'. (You can't have it both ways, either it has nutritional content - or it doesn't. The source of that content, when present, is a different issue entirely.)
Perfect example is Pop-Tarts. You'd die of a wide variety of vitamin deficiencies if all you eat are Pop-Tarts...
You are completely correct, it is a perfect example - of the high FUD content of your posting.
Even if you took the basic ingredients of Pop-Tarts from the shelves of an organic grocery store and made your own Pop-Tarts - you'd *still* suffer from a wide variety of vitamin deficiencies. The same is true of many singular foods (whether they have a singular ingredient or are a composite), regardless of whether they come from $MEGA_STORE or $HEALTHFOOD_STORE.
Ok, so it is just a matter of doing the math - at any particular range a shell will be able to correct for some amount of azimuth error.
Precisely so. You can also correct for some degree of range error.
Just the same I agree that 40 degrees seems a bit high. I did see the episode in question, but I'm guessing the error was only 10-20 degrees. They did mention that the off-angle capability might be useful for attacking targets that are shielded by terrain/obstacles along a ballistic trajectory, and unless the obstacle is a telephone pole I imagine that means they need more than a few degrees.
I'm trying to picture various geometries where this might be useful - and I can't really come up with any. (But then my knowledge is in raw ballistics, not artillery tactics.) I'm not entirely sure this isn't a case of a solution in search of a problem.
"They traditionally have been very conservative in their adoption of new technologies and new tools"
That's an exceptionally ironic statement to make about an organization responsible for space exploration.
It's only ironic if your only contact with space science and technology is via NASA PR. In reality, NASA *is* highly conservative - 'new' technologies only fly after extensive qualification and testing. (By which point they aren't really 'new'.) NASA qualifies new materials for use in space flight extremely rarely. They do a great deal of research - but much less of it flies than their marketing dept would have you believe.
Nor is this really a new thing. The managers of the Apollo program only considered two technologies 'risky and untried' - 1) pressurization of the fuel and oxidizer tanks on the CSM and the LM directly, rather than using bladders as had previously been the gold standard, and 2) the heatshield on the CM.
Witness the current excitement over the iPhone -- it's one step closer to actually doing something really useful with all the processing power of the phone in your pocket, and people are going wild over it.
The fact that iPhone is hawt and k3wl and sleek and from Apple accounts for a large part of its popularity. It could be just a cellphone equivalent to other 'normal' phones on the market, and the buzz would be only slightly muted.
The "open" phones will be the competition that helps make the next generation of cellphones truly useful
My cellphone has been truly useful for years now - it makes phone calls and it recieves phone calls.
You make the mistake of lumping me in with the Slashbots who want to hold parents accountable but don't think they have the right to exercise control over their child's life.
No, I replied to you out of the convience of your posts position in the thread.
MySpace should not be responsible for behavior that parents allow to happen.
When you actually have kids - you'll learn that things happen even when you don't 'allow' them to. You'll also learn the places and organizations that provide attractive yet potentially dangerous enviroments (like MySpace, or an unfenced pool) *ARE* responsible for their actions.
... that after years of reading Slashdot, the trends in thought of Slashdot posters and moderators collectively are precisely what is stated. Only a drooling idiot confuses the trends of a collective society with a hivemind.
Slashdot has no standards, it's the standards of the individual posters that are represented. I doubt the mentioned comments were by the same people.
It's the collective standards of the posters and moderators at issue - and after years of reading Slashdot, the trend is plainly visible. Slashdot collectively insists that parents are responsible when something happens - but are equally adamant that monitoring tools that would aid the parents in discharging their responsibilities are henious crimes against the childrens 'rights'. These two positions are mutually incompatible.
You failed to do my job for me by protecting my child from my own inability to monitor their activity and teach them how to make good decisions.
Once again - Slashdot displays it's hypocrisy and double standards.
Whenever parental monitoring is proposed - all the highly moderated comments are the ones crying about how parents shouldn't be Big Brother, tracking their physical locations and online activities is unethical and shows a lack of trust in the child, etc... etc... But when a child becomes a victim - all of the sudden the parents are villified because they didn't do those things.
Take a paper airplane. Fold the trailing edge of both wings slightly (either up or down is fine, as long as both wings are folded in the same direction). Launch airplane. Gasp in amazement while your model of physics is obliterated as the plane repeatedly makes 180 degree course changes.
Actually, what I'll do is gasp in amazement at your utter ignorance. If you actually *do* that to a model airplane - what it will do is loop (when it doesn't stall or nosedive). If you launch it away from you, it won't fly back at, and past you. It doesn't make a course change in any useful sense of the word.
The principles that govern the plane's flight are no different than those that apply to a guided mortar shell.
Here is a clue for you: A mortar shell is in ballistic flight - the paper airplane is in aerodynamic flight. The two regimes have nothing in common. (You can put the shell under aerodynamic control - something like that is done for MARVs. But your ability to make corrections is extremely limited.)
Another illustrative example: Imagine the barrel of the howitzer is depressed 0.01 arcseconds from vertical (let's assume the howitzer is capable of doing this). It should now be fairly obvious that a guided shell would be able to make a 180 degree course correction.
Sure, under those unique (and not very useful from a military point of view) circumstances you can make 180 degree course change - because the total magnitude of the change is vanishingly small, as virtually all of your energy is in the vertical. This however is *not* true of a howitzer laid to any useful angle - which has a substantive horizontal component.
Again, your original assertion is not based on the law of phyics, but rather poor assumptions about the range of the target and other factors.
ROTLMAO. I await your demonstration that my assumptions (based on the laws of physics as well as years of studying ballistics) are in fact poor or unfounded. The message to which I am replying does not do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with this theory is that it fails to accord with the facts. The current CNO for example has never commanded a carrier. In fact, examining the roster of CNO's indicates that carrier command experience is, at best, a slight majority. (Many have commanded carrier battle groups - but that is not the same as commanding a carrier.) Many of them have either extensive service in the small boys or submarines as well.
In fact carrier commanders are rare in the upper echelons of the Navy since the pilot->air command->sea (ship) command->nuke->carrier command track leaves little time for the extras (like staff duty and joint duty) that is typically expected of upper echelon commanders and staff.
A review of the roster of USAF Chiefs of Staff does show that many of them are former fighter pilots - but also that they have collectively and individually extensive command and staff experience *other* than just with the fighter squadrons.
No, the problem isn't word you used. It's the fact that their is neither logic, nor rational thought lies behind them. You mouth kneejerk buzzwords with no demonstrated understanding of their meaning or the issues behind them. You are so confident of your illusory black and white world that you don't realize the utter disconnect between it and the real one.
Fascinating - your answer contains nothing but handwaving and buzzwords, with a ladle of kneejerk assumptions poured over them. And it totally fails to answer my question.
Thank you for playing.
Yes, it is FUD. And you just compound your error by piling on more buzzwords and throwing more FUD around.
This is where I end the conversation - you just keep piling the buzzwords and FUD and stereotypes on, believing it makes you seem informed.
It doesn't. It makes you look like a raving idiot.
You cut this out and store it - because it is a response needed in pretty much every parental monitoring story posted to Slashdot.
I agree with you, its ignorant nonsense to trot out the meme the grandparent did - without considering whether such a tool is a useful part of being a parent.
And how, *precisely* is a tool like this not parenting?
Repeating FUD doesn't change it's nature. 'Healthy' and 'wholesome' are buzzwords, not useful descriptors of food attributes.
When you use fuzzy buzz words like 'wholesome' and 'crap' - yah, you can claim anything you want simply by adjusting the definitions.
Do keep in mind that Iceland is geologically unique. It can run almost entirely off of geothermal because a) it's population is small, and b) geothermal sources are widely and readily available.
ROTFLMAO. Working down in the trenches is no more management on Wikipedia than it would be at Microsoft.
Facts aren't 'bitter', they are facts.
Of course that's what I got from your comment - because that's what you said.
In other words - your only criteria is popularity.That is disturbing.
That first assumes that people are applying to Wikipedia any criteria beyond the shallow ones (it's available and it's popular) that you do. If you find advocating accuracy, completeness, and coherency disturbing - that tells of a fault in you.
Frankly, I don't see many Wikipedia links in my wanderings about the web.
I suspect Wikipedia's high rankings come not only from external links - but because it is essentially *designed* (by accident) to spam Google. It's a large site, filled with well designed links and keywords by the metric buttloads *and* its rapidly changed and 'updated'. On top of that - each and every mirror of the Wikipedia (themselves large sites, filled with well designed links and keywords by the metric buttloads) *also* link right back to the original Wikipedia article.
Just as blogs did a few years back - Wikpedia has shot to the top of Google rankings not from intrinsic merit, but because it does all the things Google looks for when ranking a website.
DMOZ crashed and burned because of the heavy weight of internal bureaucracy and cliques. In fact, you can see some of the history being repeated on Wikipedia.
I find it fascinating, and disturbing, that the only measures of value you apply are article count and number of readers.
No, his analogy is incorrect because Wikipedia isn't communally. As this incident demonstrates - Jimbo is at the top of the heap, and his wishes are law even when they are in opposition to the desires of the community. Underneath him, are variety of folks with a variety of powers including banning, deleting articles (and their history) irretrievably, etc... And these folks are not answerable to anyone save their peers.
Supposedly - Wikipedia already *has* a cast iron defense against spammers. Supposedly - Wikipedia articles are defended by hordes of users ready to correct errors and vandalism within seconds or minutes of it happening.
This is a tacit admission that Wikipedia's immune system is failing. Wikipedia is no longer able to defend itself.
It's also fascinating that the community (supposedly part of the heart and soul of the Wikipedia) can be overridden by dictate.
To put it simply - No. That's FUD spread by a variety of sources with their own agendas to promote.
In the first place sugars and starches are nutritional content - if all you ate was vitamin pills, you'd die of starvation. Furthermore, if it has vitamins added, then it doesn't have the 'nutrional value of cardboard'. (You can't have it both ways, either it has nutritional content - or it doesn't. The source of that content, when present, is a different issue entirely.)
You are completely correct, it is a perfect example - of the high FUD content of your posting.
Even if you took the basic ingredients of Pop-Tarts from the shelves of an organic grocery store and made your own Pop-Tarts - you'd *still* suffer from a wide variety of vitamin deficiencies. The same is true of many singular foods (whether they have a singular ingredient or are a composite), regardless of whether they come from $MEGA_STORE or $HEALTHFOOD_STORE.
Precisely so. You can also correct for some degree of range error.
I'm trying to picture various geometries where this might be useful - and I can't really come up with any. (But then my knowledge is in raw ballistics, not artillery tactics.) I'm not entirely sure this isn't a case of a solution in search of a problem.
It's only ironic if your only contact with space science and technology is via NASA PR. In reality, NASA *is* highly conservative - 'new' technologies only fly after extensive qualification and testing. (By which point they aren't really 'new'.) NASA qualifies new materials for use in space flight extremely rarely. They do a great deal of research - but much less of it flies than their marketing dept would have you believe.
Nor is this really a new thing. The managers of the Apollo program only considered two technologies 'risky and untried' - 1) pressurization of the fuel and oxidizer tanks on the CSM and the LM directly, rather than using bladders as had previously been the gold standard, and 2) the heatshield on the CM.
The entire slashdot/techie/FLOSS crowd could boycott this phone to a man - and never be missed.
The fact that iPhone is hawt and k3wl and sleek and from Apple accounts for a large part of its popularity. It could be just a cellphone equivalent to other 'normal' phones on the market, and the buzz would be only slightly muted.
My cellphone has been truly useful for years now - it makes phone calls and it recieves phone calls.
No, I replied to you out of the convience of your posts position in the thread.
When you actually have kids - you'll learn that things happen even when you don't 'allow' them to. You'll also learn the places and organizations that provide attractive yet potentially dangerous enviroments (like MySpace, or an unfenced pool) *ARE* responsible for their actions.
... that after years of reading Slashdot, the trends in thought of Slashdot posters and moderators collectively are precisely what is stated. Only a drooling idiot confuses the trends of a collective society with a hivemind.
It's the collective standards of the posters and moderators at issue - and after years of reading Slashdot, the trend is plainly visible. Slashdot collectively insists that parents are responsible when something happens - but are equally adamant that monitoring tools that would aid the parents in discharging their responsibilities are henious crimes against the childrens 'rights'. These two positions are mutually incompatible.
Once again - Slashdot displays it's hypocrisy and double standards.
Whenever parental monitoring is proposed - all the highly moderated comments are the ones crying about how parents shouldn't be Big Brother, tracking their physical locations and online activities is unethical and shows a lack of trust in the child, etc... etc... But when a child becomes a victim - all of the sudden the parents are villified because they didn't do those things.
Actually, what I'll do is gasp in amazement at your utter ignorance. If you actually *do* that to a model airplane - what it will do is loop (when it doesn't stall or nosedive). If you launch it away from you, it won't fly back at, and past you. It doesn't make a course change in any useful sense of the word.
Here is a clue for you: A mortar shell is in ballistic flight - the paper airplane is in aerodynamic flight. The two regimes have nothing in common. (You can put the shell under aerodynamic control - something like that is done for MARVs. But your ability to make corrections is extremely limited.)
Sure, under those unique (and not very useful from a military point of view) circumstances you can make 180 degree course change - because the total magnitude of the change is vanishingly small, as virtually all of your energy is in the vertical. This however is *not* true of a howitzer laid to any useful angle - which has a substantive horizontal component.
ROTLMAO. I await your demonstration that my assumptions (based on the laws of physics as well as years of studying ballistics) are in fact poor or unfounded. The message to which I am replying does not do so.