The Guard units really answer to the Governors and are each states' mini-armed forces, even if they are occasionally assigned to work with the federal armed forces.
That hasn't been true for years. Over the past century the Guard has increasingly been part of the regular forces and under Federal control.
It's interesting, but no, it's not particularly exciting. Pie-in-the-sky speculation isn't basic research, research (even basic research) is intended to investigate specific things - which is especially important in this multi-billion-dollar case because if you don't know what you want to look for, you can't even design the detectors to look for it.
That being said, the grandparent is as off-base as you are. Pie-in-the-sky is quite acceptable at this very early pre-preliminary stage. It gets the theoretical and experimental physicists thinking about what they might be able to research given those energies. From those thoughts and investigations comes more concrete planning and research which eventually gels into the level of detail the grandparent wants. From there, specific research proposals arise, and eventually detector plans based on solid science, research, and reasoning. That is how research, basic or applied, proceeds in an established field. Not by just throwing darts and hoping something interesting happens. Darts certainly have their place in some fields and some circumstance, but this isn't one of them.
Yes, it may be short-sighted. But we are a short-sighted species. A company's employees don't take their salary "in the long run", and their families don't eat "in the long run" either.
There's another type of sight you're missing here though... hindsight. When Netflix first hit the scene, it was anything but clear that they would survive - let alone prosper. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I find it hard to blame people for having cloudy crystal balls.
They could have killed/bought redbox and netflix easily. But the Executives at Blockbuster are still too stupid to realize that they had to change models. I guarantee they still deny they did anything wrong.
Keep in mind that at the time, it was anything but clear that Netflix would survive... let alone prosper. The same for Redbox. Hindsight is always 20/20.
To my Indian friends, can you please share with us how you guys can keep the budget so low?
The same way a subcompact car is cheaper than a sedan - it's smaller and less capable. (And in the case of MOM having a smaller suite of simpler instruments.) Building cheap is one thing, actually accomplishing it's mission is another. Despite the premature hype over "on track to be the first nation to reach Mars on it's first try", it remains to be seen if this approach will be a successful one. Let's wait and see if it works before wondering how they did it so cheap.
True. But the ones cited by the grandparent are all having their lunch eaten by Target and Wal-Mart, by the rise of the all-one supercenter retailers*, as well as by more specialized retailers (Toys R' Us, various clothing chains, etc...).. That's been a huge problem for department stores for a long time - you're competing with literally everyone. The rise of the mall specialty store over the last fifty years and the all-in-one supercenter over the last twenty have been particularly problematic. The big department stores have been coasting for decades on the strength of their brand names, but brand loyalty has decreased markedly over the last thirty-forty years, especially in Gen-X and younger.
Sears, JC Penney, et al... have a tough problem, and it's not clear that a solution exists.
*For example, here in the Pacific Northwest we have Fred Meyer, which is essentially Sears with a grocery store attached.
One of the things that cause people to curb their drinking is that morning after hangover
No. If you're an alcoholic, the hangover is just a reason to start drinking early, not a deterrent. No hangover? I'll drink to that!
He's not talking about alcoholics - he's talking about the considerably larger numbers of Joe and Jane Schmoes out for a few beers/shots on Friday night. They currently limit themselves to Friday night because Tuesday night they have to work on Wednesday... Now, if they can get tanked on Tuesday and be just fine on Wednesday, they're much more likely to be driving/dealing with kids/etc... tanked much more often.
If the same strokes of luck had happened for the Japanese instead of for the US, the balance of our entire carrier force would have been wiped out (which was what the Japanese plan was when they forced that action in the first place). Had that happened, at best it would have been years before we could have built enough replacements to make it a war again.
Less than a year actually... for every heavy carrier we had at Midway, we had four more already under construction. (The US would ultimately build 26 heavy carriers in WWII. We had more carriers in service in 1942 alone than the Japanese had during the entire war.) The ratios for cruisers, tin cans, submarines and oilers was even higher... for aircraft, unimaginably higher still. The main effect of a Japanese victory would have been for Japan to be more heavily entrenched in the Southern Pacific.
But that wouldn't have changed much in the long run.
WWII, like many wars in the industrial era, was essentially a war of attrition between two dueling economies - and in the case of US vs. Japan... Japan was screwed from day one. Their only hope was to win 'on points' (by making US victory too long or too costly), because they couldn't win long term on straight force-on-force. (The page Grim Economic Realities goes into this in some detail.) Even though it would take some years for all the effects to play out, they lost the war at Midway because they couldn't fight evenly force-on-force after that and thus couldn't force a win 'on points'.
In all 3 cases, it seems like the fire was caused by severe damage to the car from an outside source rather than a fault in the car.
In all three cases the fire was caused by an event that rarely causes a fire in a conventionally powered car. That it was an outside source is irrelevant to this, as it's a normal hazard of operating a car over the road - regardless of it's power source.
carrying between 10 and 30 gallons of highly flammable fuel (which forms explosive vapors under normal environmental conditions) in a thin sheet-metal tank with no armor or other protection against penetration).
Quite the contrary. In a conventionally powered car, the fuel tank is located in the rear of the car. In the case of incidents like the Tesla fires, the fuel tank is protected by the entire length of the car, while the Tesla's battery is only minimally protected despite it's more exposed position to such hazards.
So, the people panicking over this and getting rid of Tesla stock, and the people pointing to this to impugn Tesla, need to get a grip.
No, the people who need to get a grip are people like yourself - those who, whether through ignorance or bias, continue to insist on making apples-to-oranges comparisons, misrepresenting the facts, and blowing smoke in order to exonerate the Tesla.
Maybe the top of the gas tank is high, but the bottom of the gas tank is just a few inches off the road.
At the rear of the car - where any road debris is almost certain to hit something else before it can reach the gas tank. Completely unlike the Tesla battery, which is located at the front.
I'm not an expert by any means, but I'd hazard a guess that the results would have been similar with a gasoline powered car.
Your guess would be wrong - because gas tanks are generally located high in the rear of the car precisely to avoid them being hit. The worst a gas power car might get hitting debris in the road is generally an effed up oil pan or transmission leading to engine failure.
Unlike a gasoline powered car, the Tesla's batteries are located in the _most vulnerable location_ to road debris. This difference matters. This difference matters a great deal. And there's a non-trivial chance, especially with these being essentially first generation vehicles, that Tesla's engineers got it wrong.
The time to find this out is now, and all this fanboi handwaving is just stupid.
None of these things are things that'd really have any noticeable impact on my life but that could add up to a substantial saving if it was necessary to tighten my belt.
If you have so much extra disposable income that you buy so much un-needed stuff, that marks you in a decided minority. You just don't realize it.
I suspect many people could tighten their belts by 10% of their wage and not even feel it if they were sensible about it. Those who are living on the line could not, but it's hard to say the US navy is living on the line when it's budget is larger than that of about the next 10 military powers put together:
It's not about the absolute size, it's about the size compared to the requirements laid on it.Compared to what is required of it, it is living on the line - especially as it's forces already been cut almost 40% over the last twenty years while the requirements placed on it have changed very little.
What you probably don't realize is how things work. In an ideal world, a ten carrier force means that around three of them are deployed at any given time. (The balance are in overhaul or refit, in workups or training, or in transit to or from deployment.) Over the last decade we've had around four to five deployed - and in the last two years we've briefly hit six or seven *twice*. It's very expensive to keep delaying maintenance that much (and causes problems down the road with deployment schedules when things start breaking) and extraordinarily hard on the crews - and retaining the crews has historically been a huge problem in it's own right.
*yawn* Given the billions of dollars spent on roads and infrastructure and education... (and that the other things aren't the responsibility of the government) you're a clueless jackass.
Considering that we have 10 carriers, our NATO allies have 8 more, and all countries that could plausibly be considered "enemies" have a total of two, this seems like a reasonable place to cut spending.
Well, it's not as simple as you try to paint it... Collectively the eight carriers owned by our allies are equivalent to maybe three of ours. (I.E., you're comparing semi-trailers (US supercarriers) to pickup trucks (what the rest of the world mainly owns).) Further, carriers don't just fight with other carriers - they also support strikes against land targets. Something potential enemies have plenty of.
Cheaper doesn't have to mean weaker. Cutting a carrier battle group will save tens of billions, but make little difference to our national security.
Well, let's put it this way - could you give up 10% of your paycheck without feeling it? Because that's essentially what you're asking the Navy to do.
Did you even bother to read the message you replied to? Did you note the ongoing failures?
Not to underestimate the difficulty of sending a payload to Mars, but they *do* have the combined 40+ years of US and USSR experience upon which to draw.
Those with education and reading comprehension will note the ongoing failures of the US and USSR - both of whom have direct experience with Mars probes (which India does not) and far more experience with space probes than India. Clueless idiots just parrot crap like "they have other programs experience to draw on". (Which they don't really, especially since (to the best of my knowledge) they employ none of the individuals who have that experience.)
Yes, it's totally a dupe from August 13 - because the October report contains nothing substantially new. Project West Ford hits the Slashdot front pages about three or four times a year, with nothing new each time.
Sure. But it's equally stupid to try and pretend it's valueless.
Training is nothing more than guided experience on a schedule. Intelligent people, it may surprise you, have experiences all the time, and being intelligent they can process those experiences into a useful understanding, gasp, without formal training!
True, but misleading. You mistakenly undervalue the 'guided' part. By the time I was allowed to sit the MCC supervisors chair and be responsible for sixteen nuclear missiles I'd been through months of schools, a couple of hundred hours in the simulator, and months of supervised on-the-job training and qualification. That guided process ensured that not only did I have the theory, I had experience in day-to-day operations, and I had exposure to off-nominal operations. By the time I was handed the keys to the system, I'd already proven I could handle the job.
But you're right - any person of average intelligence could soak up most of what I knew just by experience - most. (We supervisors even used to joke - "a trained monkey could do 99% of our jobs - we earned our pay doing the other 1%".) It's that part that's not in the most that's the problem though. That's the part that leaves systems down for hours or days while the person without formal training flounders - or in the case of a driver wearing Google Glass gets them or the people around them injured or killed.
I have lots of technical certs which I know a lot of people train for with classes and whatever, but I never took classes or read any books. I had enough unscheduled, unguided real world experience to just get the certs. Training isn't magical, it doesn't represent an exclusive path to knowledge and ability, so stop patronizing people.
Good for you, welcome to the right hand side of the bell curve. Careful though, the view from here can dazzle the impressionable, confuse the inexperienced, and lead the untrained into error because they've never been exposed to the situation.
Seriously, you're badly confused. You're mixing up studying (book learning/technical certs) with the goal of passing a standardized test with training for real world physical activities - the two are not even remotely close even if they are often described with the same word. (Damn slippery English language!) Training, in the sense used by the grandparent, isn't just about book learning. It's also about building reflexes, instilling thought processes, etc... etc... All the stuff that can't be effectively done just wandering about and hoping you don't kill someone.
As someone who grew up during that time, nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down during our lifetime.
You're correct - nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down, not cleanly at least. More nuanced thinkers however recognized the difference between the Iron Curtain and the USSR as then constituted. The former could easily stand even as the latter convulsed and changed - witness China during both the Cultural Revolution and the economic revolution of the 1980's.
The events of 1989 remain one of the most shocking and indelible in my memory - right up there with Challenger and 9/11. Like the millions of people who now claim to have attended Woodstock, plenty of people now claim to have predicted the fall of the Soviet Union in hindsight.
There were plenty of people discussing the possibility that the USSR might come apart at the seams - but they were largely ignored not because nobody believed it would crumble, but because that predictions that it would crumble (even with exact dates) were pretty much useless. What we needed to know, and what nobody could predict, was *how* it would crumble. What many expected was open internecine warfare, between Party factions or (worse still, but considered more likely) between the Party and the military.* Both could get really, really ugly and and such scenario had a high probability of slopover outside of the borders of the USSR and her client states. The big surprise on 1989 wasn't the fall of the USSR, but that it was so peaceful.
*There's a reason why the KGB and it's predecessors had as one of their main duties the role of keeping the military in check. From the Party's point of view, this also served to keep the KGB in check.
Sandy did not change my view of disasters. I still remain prepared for disaster, and when stuff looks like it is going to happen, I use my brain instead of burying my head in the sand and thinking things like "oh it won't happen to me" or "oh well Government will be there to save me," which is exactly what happened in New York.
This. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we face the risk of earthquakes regularly, we have our usual winter storms, we have our volcanoes... Sandy didn't change anything for me. I was prepared before, I'm prepared now. (In fact, my RV battery expires next quarter, so I'm off to get a new one when I go shopping later this afternoon.)
New York, like most of the East Coast north of the Chesapeake, hadn't had a major disaster threaten in a generation or been hit with one in even longer. They don't live on the hurricane coast, or in tornado alley, or in earthquake country, or... well, they simply don't face the routine threats the rest of us do. That lulled them when it came to non-routine threats.
The picture you paint of Europe is a little simplistic too. France has a few large cities, but the tenth-biggest one has less than half a million inhabitants. It has tens of thousands of villages with 1000 or less inhabitants.
No, he covered that bit. It's under the part about how the US is sprawling and has a low population density - Neither of which describes France. Their 'tens of thousands' of villages are crammed into an area that's a small faction of the size of the continental US.
Slashdot Mirror
They would if they have reason to believe a better offer would be forthcoming or that the company is worth significantly more than the offered price.
That hasn't been true for years. Over the past century the Guard has increasingly been part of the regular forces and under Federal control.
It's interesting, but no, it's not particularly exciting. Pie-in-the-sky speculation isn't basic research, research (even basic research) is intended to investigate specific things - which is especially important in this multi-billion-dollar case because if you don't know what you want to look for, you can't even design the detectors to look for it.
That being said, the grandparent is as off-base as you are. Pie-in-the-sky is quite acceptable at this very early pre-preliminary stage. It gets the theoretical and experimental physicists thinking about what they might be able to research given those energies. From those thoughts and investigations comes more concrete planning and research which eventually gels into the level of detail the grandparent wants. From there, specific research proposals arise, and eventually detector plans based on solid science, research, and reasoning. That is how research, basic or applied, proceeds in an established field. Not by just throwing darts and hoping something interesting happens. Darts certainly have their place in some fields and some circumstance, but this isn't one of them.
There's another type of sight you're missing here though... hindsight. When Netflix first hit the scene, it was anything but clear that they would survive - let alone prosper. Hindsight is always 20/20, and I find it hard to blame people for having cloudy crystal balls.
Keep in mind that at the time, it was anything but clear that Netflix would survive... let alone prosper. The same for Redbox. Hindsight is always 20/20.
The same way a subcompact car is cheaper than a sedan - it's smaller and less capable. (And in the case of MOM having a smaller suite of simpler instruments.) Building cheap is one thing, actually accomplishing it's mission is another. Despite the premature hype over "on track to be the first nation to reach Mars on it's first try", it remains to be seen if this approach will be a successful one. Let's wait and see if it works before wondering how they did it so cheap.
True. But the ones cited by the grandparent are all having their lunch eaten by Target and Wal-Mart, by the rise of the all-one supercenter retailers*, as well as by more specialized retailers (Toys R' Us, various clothing chains, etc...).. That's been a huge problem for department stores for a long time - you're competing with literally everyone. The rise of the mall specialty store over the last fifty years and the all-in-one supercenter over the last twenty have been particularly problematic. The big department stores have been coasting for decades on the strength of their brand names, but brand loyalty has decreased markedly over the last thirty-forty years, especially in Gen-X and younger.
Sears, JC Penney, et al... have a tough problem, and it's not clear that a solution exists.
*For example, here in the Pacific Northwest we have Fred Meyer, which is essentially Sears with a grocery store attached.
He's not talking about alcoholics - he's talking about the considerably larger numbers of Joe and Jane Schmoes out for a few beers/shots on Friday night. They currently limit themselves to Friday night because Tuesday night they have to work on Wednesday... Now, if they can get tanked on Tuesday and be just fine on Wednesday, they're much more likely to be driving/dealing with kids/etc... tanked much more often.
Less than a year actually... for every heavy carrier we had at Midway, we had four more already under construction. (The US would ultimately build 26 heavy carriers in WWII. We had more carriers in service in 1942 alone than the Japanese had during the entire war.) The ratios for cruisers, tin cans, submarines and oilers was even higher... for aircraft, unimaginably higher still. The main effect of a Japanese victory would have been for Japan to be more heavily entrenched in the Southern Pacific.
But that wouldn't have changed much in the long run.
WWII, like many wars in the industrial era, was essentially a war of attrition between two dueling economies - and in the case of US vs. Japan... Japan was screwed from day one. Their only hope was to win 'on points' (by making US victory too long or too costly), because they couldn't win long term on straight force-on-force. (The page Grim Economic Realities goes into this in some detail.) Even though it would take some years for all the effects to play out, they lost the war at Midway because they couldn't fight evenly force-on-force after that and thus couldn't force a win 'on points'.
In all three cases the fire was caused by an event that rarely causes a fire in a conventionally powered car. That it was an outside source is irrelevant to this, as it's a normal hazard of operating a car over the road - regardless of it's power source.
Quite the contrary. In a conventionally powered car, the fuel tank is located in the rear of the car. In the case of incidents like the Tesla fires, the fuel tank is protected by the entire length of the car , while the Tesla's battery is only minimally protected despite it's more exposed position to such hazards.
No, the people who need to get a grip are people like yourself - those who, whether through ignorance or bias, continue to insist on making apples-to-oranges comparisons, misrepresenting the facts, and blowing smoke in order to exonerate the Tesla.
First you have to prove I'm wrong. You've signally failed to do so.
But I shouldn't be surprised, you're terminally clueless.
No, it's not a footnote - it's a fairy tale. (Well, I guess legends and other fiction could appear in a footnote...)
At the rear of the car - where any road debris is almost certain to hit something else before it can reach the gas tank. Completely unlike the Tesla battery, which is located at the front.
Your guess would be wrong - because gas tanks are generally located high in the rear of the car precisely to avoid them being hit. The worst a gas power car might get hitting debris in the road is generally an effed up oil pan or transmission leading to engine failure.
Unlike a gasoline powered car, the Tesla's batteries are located in the _most vulnerable location_ to road debris. This difference matters. This difference matters a great deal. And there's a non-trivial chance, especially with these being essentially first generation vehicles, that Tesla's engineers got it wrong.
The time to find this out is now, and all this fanboi handwaving is just stupid.
If you have so much extra disposable income that you buy so much un-needed stuff, that marks you in a decided minority. You just don't realize it.
It's not about the absolute size, it's about the size compared to the requirements laid on it.Compared to what is required of it, it is living on the line - especially as it's forces already been cut almost 40% over the last twenty years while the requirements placed on it have changed very little.
What you probably don't realize is how things work. In an ideal world, a ten carrier force means that around three of them are deployed at any given time. (The balance are in overhaul or refit, in workups or training, or in transit to or from deployment.) Over the last decade we've had around four to five deployed - and in the last two years we've briefly hit six or seven *twice*. It's very expensive to keep delaying maintenance that much (and causes problems down the road with deployment schedules when things start breaking) and extraordinarily hard on the crews - and retaining the crews has historically been a huge problem in it's own right.
*yawn* Given the billions of dollars spent on roads and infrastructure and education... (and that the other things aren't the responsibility of the government) you're a clueless jackass.
I find it kind of sad that you think it should be moderated Insightful at all.
Well, it's not as simple as you try to paint it... Collectively the eight carriers owned by our allies are equivalent to maybe three of ours. (I.E., you're comparing semi-trailers (US supercarriers) to pickup trucks (what the rest of the world mainly owns).) Further, carriers don't just fight with other carriers - they also support strikes against land targets. Something potential enemies have plenty of.
Well, let's put it this way - could you give up 10% of your paycheck without feeling it? Because that's essentially what you're asking the Navy to do.
Did you even bother to read the message you replied to? Did you note the ongoing failures?
Those with education and reading comprehension will note the ongoing failures of the US and USSR - both of whom have direct experience with Mars probes (which India does not) and far more experience with space probes than India. Clueless idiots just parrot crap like "they have other programs experience to draw on". (Which they don't really, especially since (to the best of my knowledge) they employ none of the individuals who have that experience.)
Um, no. Nobody educated has that question.
No more than adding a Mr Fusion would convert a Tesla S into a time machine.
Yes, it's totally a dupe from August 13 - because the October report contains nothing substantially new. Project West Ford hits the Slashdot front pages about three or four times a year, with nothing new each time.
Sure. But it's equally stupid to try and pretend it's valueless.
True, but misleading. You mistakenly undervalue the 'guided' part. By the time I was allowed to sit the MCC supervisors chair and be responsible for sixteen nuclear missiles I'd been through months of schools, a couple of hundred hours in the simulator, and months of supervised on-the-job training and qualification. That guided process ensured that not only did I have the theory, I had experience in day-to-day operations, and I had exposure to off-nominal operations. By the time I was handed the keys to the system, I'd already proven I could handle the job.
But you're right - any person of average intelligence could soak up most of what I knew just by experience - most. (We supervisors even used to joke - "a trained monkey could do 99% of our jobs - we earned our pay doing the other 1%".) It's that part that's not in the most that's the problem though. That's the part that leaves systems down for hours or days while the person without formal training flounders - or in the case of a driver wearing Google Glass gets them or the people around them injured or killed.
Good for you, welcome to the right hand side of the bell curve. Careful though, the view from here can dazzle the impressionable, confuse the inexperienced, and lead the untrained into error because they've never been exposed to the situation.
Seriously, you're badly confused. You're mixing up studying (book learning/technical certs) with the goal of passing a standardized test with training for real world physical activities - the two are not even remotely close even if they are often described with the same word. (Damn slippery English language!) Training, in the sense used by the grandparent, isn't just about book learning. It's also about building reflexes, instilling thought processes, etc... etc... All the stuff that can't be effectively done just wandering about and hoping you don't kill someone.
You're correct - nobody believed the Iron Curtain was going to come down, not cleanly at least. More nuanced thinkers however recognized the difference between the Iron Curtain and the USSR as then constituted. The former could easily stand even as the latter convulsed and changed - witness China during both the Cultural Revolution and the economic revolution of the 1980's.
There were plenty of people discussing the possibility that the USSR might come apart at the seams - but they were largely ignored not because nobody believed it would crumble, but because that predictions that it would crumble (even with exact dates) were pretty much useless. What we needed to know, and what nobody could predict, was *how* it would crumble. What many expected was open internecine warfare, between Party factions or (worse still, but considered more likely) between the Party and the military.* Both could get really, really ugly and and such scenario had a high probability of slopover outside of the borders of the USSR and her client states. The big surprise on 1989 wasn't the fall of the USSR, but that it was so peaceful.
*There's a reason why the KGB and it's predecessors had as one of their main duties the role of keeping the military in check. From the Party's point of view, this also served to keep the KGB in check.
This. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we face the risk of earthquakes regularly, we have our usual winter storms, we have our volcanoes... Sandy didn't change anything for me. I was prepared before, I'm prepared now. (In fact, my RV battery expires next quarter, so I'm off to get a new one when I go shopping later this afternoon.)
New York, like most of the East Coast north of the Chesapeake, hadn't had a major disaster threaten in a generation or been hit with one in even longer. They don't live on the hurricane coast, or in tornado alley, or in earthquake country, or... well, they simply don't face the routine threats the rest of us do. That lulled them when it came to non-routine threats.
No, he covered that bit. It's under the part about how the US is sprawling and has a low population density - Neither of which describes France. Their 'tens of thousands' of villages are crammed into an area that's a small faction of the size of the continental US.
Read comprehension, get some.