The city I live in started recycling pickup a month or so ago, I just put the recyclables list up on the fridge. Problem fucking solved.
I visited the US earlier this year, and was surprised how few recycling bins there were. I saw one in a park, and one (for glass only) at a traveller's hostel.
I spent the first couple of days wandering around with empty bottles in my bag, until I realised recycling just didn't happen. Googling shows one city does kerbside collection, but not in the centre, and the other has a pilot project. Neither had anywhere for me to put an empty drink can while walking in the street.
It varies widely from place to place. In my city, there are recycling bins on nearly every corner and there has been curbside recycling pickup for at least a couple of decades. Where I used to work, there were no recycling bins anywhere - because all separation occurred at the transfer facility (one of those lucky communities where they seem to have more money than they know what to do with). But then I live in California, and we are generally a couple decades ahead of the rest of the country (ducks).
Now let's jump WAY ahead. To the really far out there part. If (and I believe that's a BIG if) you can then express these as Turing machines and you have a complete set of rules to compute with, you're getting closer to building a very accurate (if not perfect) simulator. Gravity, relativity, everything gets bundled up into one neat little Turing Machine that quite simply predicts the future. Perhaps you could simulate atomic movement in vacuums at a fraction of the cost of our current simulator -- and superior (the hope is perfect) accuracy! The final dream, of course, is to simulate the universe perfectly from the Big Bang onward and merely predict the future. It's not hard to see the problems with all of this, however. A simple exercise is to imagine I built this machine yesterday and as the machine begins to compute yesterday and today's events, it's computing itself computing itself computing itself computing itself... now you can parade in the sci-fi authors. Oh, and Raymond Kurzweil.
There are an enormous number of problems with trying to simulate the entire universe. It invariably results in an infinite recursive loop. Basically, in order to simulate the universe you would have to do so from outside the universe, and it would require an entire universe to do so - in order to get a perfectly accurate simulation, there isn't any information you can discard - every subatomic particle and force directly or indirectly affects every other. It is a pipe dream. No matter how fast and complex our computational abilities become, we will always have to pick and choose what information is important for our result, and accept some amount of inaccuracy in any models or predictions - because it is physically and theoretically impossible to account for everything as you would need to for a perfect model.
If there is one thing that will result in the UN stepping in to places like Darfur, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia, clearly it is having email accounts and login credentials spread around. If only T3amP01s0n had been around in the 1940s they could have... um... published UN mailing addresses and lock combinations to prevent the creation of Israel and the disposition of the Palestinian people (? - did they mean dispossession, or do they mean that the UN creating Israel is responsible for Palestinians' bad dispositions?). Thank god for groups like TEAmpoiSON who are working to make the world a better place through releasing such incriminating information on a truly evil organization - clearly a blow for freedom!
I just don't understand the thinking behind actions like this, especially with respect to the groups stated reasons. The UN failed to step in to prevent genocide(s), so we are going to try to harm, embarrass, or destroy the institution... because then, there wouldn't be an institution failing to act in such circumstances, which is clearly a better alternative! And also, Israel!!
The whole system should just be scraped. Disallow anonymous posting and consider implementing a short "lurk" time on new accounts (more for the spam) and the quality of comments is going to improve.
I disagree completely. The current system obviously has some flaws, but it is far better than anything else I've seen - and there is a reason so many of us have been coming here for so long. No reason at all to disallow anonymous posting; while the signal-to-noise ratio may be higher for AC, there is still a lot of signal in there. I never see spam, for example, as the moderation system is pretty damn effective at removing it from view unless I'm browsing at -1.
A lot of the time when people are complaining that one of their posts was unfairly down-modded because their viewpoint disagreed with the "crowd", a quick look at the post in question usually (but certainly not always) shows an unnecessarily inflammatory post, or one full of personal attacks. There are almost always a wide range of opinions that get modded up; the difference is that dissenting opinions do generally need to be better-written and avoid inflammatory/hateful wording in order to be taken seriously, but this is the case in pretty much any discussion setting online or otherwise.
The underlying problem is that downmodding is simply not a useful tool. No matter what you call it, it's an attack on another poster. In the karma system, you do real damage to their future posts (in the term of "all future posts by this user are at -1 or -2 the previous threshold) if you can gather enough bury-brigadiers drive them from Excellent down to Good or below. Even absent a karma system, gathering a bury brigade allows you to do the equivalent of a shout-down attack, forcing anything you don't agree with below the viewing threshold of most people.
Is the meta-moderation system still in place? Assuming people participate it should really help with this problem, as would limiting mod points to people with good karma and/or limiting to people who have x number of visits logged over a given time period (making it much more difficult to create loads of sock puppets to ensure you have mod points available at any given time - mod points are only good for a limited time, so you can't "bank" them). I ask about meta-moderation because there used to be a nag link for it, but I haven't seen it in ages - and if people used it consistently, even only a couple per visit or something, it would probably help a lot.
Hope they treat their employees better than Amazon, though!
A bit out of date now, but Anandtech did a similar warehouse tour at the California location back in 2006. And one at the New Jersey location back in 2008.
Topographic maps have curves that connect equal elevations. This is an elevation heat map.
You describe an isocontour elevation map, which is one type of topographic map. An elevation heat map is another, and a third might be a shaded relief map. Topographic map just means a map that represents the topography, it doesn't actually denote a specific method for representing the topography (albeit isocontour maps are generally the standard, and what people generally think of when when looking for a topo map).
Also, Gibson explained that his IIc's drive was an "extra box". The IIc had a built in drive - maybe he had two?
Or he is mis-remembering his IIe as a IIc, especially with his memory of it being phased out in favor of the Mac - the IIc was actually released after the Mac came out.
Doesn't explain why some of the structures have heavy bomb damage.
Assuming no foreign power has been bombing China- I can't fathom why China would bomb their own calibration units.
(unless it was to test what would happen- before an enemy did it to them)
Could just be for training in photo/radar interpretation for damage assessment, etc. Seems reasonable to set up a few "known" scenarios so you can train the people (or software) that will be dealing with the actual intelligence product. Probably helpful to see the results of a few known explosions when you are trying to determine how big a bomb France dropped on Libya that one time (actually, France didn't drop any ordnance on Libya; they merely surrendered it from altitude).
And why would these be needed. There are already many structures easily visible form space and static, so why not just use one of those?
Lots of reasons for purpose-built ones. You know exact dimensions, they can be made any size/shape/color/material necessary to test the specifics of your imaging system, and they are presumably placed in the desert because there is rarely cloud cover - so good availability. Trying to use various existing objects/places presents all sorts of additional variables that they may wish to avoid.
I second R, and would also suggest adding in R Commander. Adds a fairly usable GUI simplifying lots of common tasks, while maintaining the flexibility of R.
I was hoping for a new entry in the PC sim arena. Oh well.
Seems strange that this is big news (is it really?) - I'd think it would be obvious to apply 3D projection to flight simulators, and pretty damn easy to do. Digital projectors capable of high-resolution 3D are not exactly new, and neither are active shutter glasses. Somewhat expensive until fairly recently, but that's probably not a huge concern for military-grade (or aviation in general) flight simulators.
The purpose of EAS is to alert people to take action that can save their lives, not to act as a source of breaking news.
"Incoming missiles! Get to a bomb shelter!" is a valid alert.
Well, assuming there are such things as "bomb shelters" to run to... I just really don't see a need for a nation-wide alert system like this. Sorry, but there are simply no events that affect the entire nation the same way at the same time that would make such an alert system useful. Seems far more likely to be used to get some politician's face/voice out to as many people as possible in the event of an advertising oppor-, er, I mean, disaster.
At its home turf, despite being a state-owned company, China Telecom, along with China Unicom, is being investigated over alleged monopolistic practices by the Chinese government.
Sounds like it would fit right in here.
The two companies would face penalties of up to 10 percent of their annual business revenues if they were found guilty of monopolistic practices.
Wait, they might actually get punished? Never mind then, won't fit into the U.S. market.
I was going to say something about not trusting a Chinese-government-owned telecoms company, but then I realized who their competition is.
In mountain driving. As one who has made the drive in question dozens of times, I'm immediately thinking about The Grapevine, aka the Tejon Pass
Can a Tesla even make it from Magic Mountain to Bakersfiled with that kind of mountainous driving? I think you'd need at least 3 charging stations, one on the San Juaquine side of the Grapevine, and one on the Los Angeles side of the Grapevine, then one somewhere in the middle of the San Juaquine valley.
The nice thing about mountains is that, for an electric car, pretty much all the energy you use going up you get back on the way down. Assuming it can make it to the top of the pass, shouldn't limit the range too much as it will be a (mostly) free ride on the way down.
How would an equidistant supercharger (thus, one that is 200 miles from each of two points, themselves 400 miles apart) fail to help drivers with cars that have a 230 mile range?
The idea, I think, is that you wouldn't be able to do the round trip. If the charging station is equidistant, it would still be 400 miles round trip from the station to LA and back to the station. Not sure why you would want to drive round-trip to LA and back in a single day, but that's the only reasoning I can come up with.
Wow dude. The racism in this thread is so thick it's almost overpowering.
It isn't racism to observe that there tends to be more cheating among Asians, if this is in fact what one has observed. It would be racist to assume that a given student cheats just because they are Asian.
In my experience, which jives with the experience of literally every graduate student or professor I have talked to about it, students from mainland China are by far the worst offenders in terms of cheating/groupwork, at least at the graduate level. I don't know if it is a cultural thing (certainly not shared with the Chinese Americans I know, my wife included) or just reliance on the fact that their sponsors (almost invariably also from mainland China at this point) would never let them actually be punished. I generally assumed the former, but conversations overheard by a friend fluent in Mandarin (he was in law school at the time, specializing in international law - and most emphatically not Asian) while visiting another friend (in the statistics department at another university) suggests the latter, at least for that particular group overheard.
Re:The next new airplane to get axed...
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Remember the recent Tanker fiasco... Boeing and Airbus fighting over pork with gravy while the KC-135 fleet gets older and older. And the new tanker is still YEARS away.
This was again mostly the fault of the DoD. They ran the worst acquisition program ever. They basically issued requirements which Boeing and Airbus had no trouble meeting. However, they didn't really nail down the desired capacity for the new tanker. Boeing was told (by DoD personnel) that they preferred a smaller tanker; Airbus was told (by different DoD personnel) that they desired a larger tanker. Airbus easily could have offered a smaller tanker to meet the requirements; Boeing easily could have offered a larger. But because the Air Force's requirements were so poorly put together, it wasn't really clear what they wanted. The first round of the selection, which Airbus won, was decided largely because the Airbus solution offered greater fuel capacity. Boeing objected to the selection because Airbus received bonus points in the evaluation for offering more capacity - which Boeing also could have offered had it been clear that the Air Force was going to give bonus points for it.
Not the only issue by far in the tanker competition, but it could have been avoided if the DoD had just spent a little more time figuring out exactly what they wanted before calling for bids. Just as with civilian airliners, I really don't think there is much to choose between a Boeing-based platform and an Airbus-based platform, and a purely cost vs. capability evaluation would probably depend on easily-fudgeable (or difficult to predict, depending on your mood) analyses of lifetime costs; adding in slightly different requirements for each just makes it impossible to have a fair evaluation.
Re:The next new airplane to get axed...
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
I'd say they do have the money. They're continuing production of the Tu-160, which is easily the best strategic bomber in the world, and if I recall they're ordering several hundred PAK FA as well as modernizing their Flanker fleet to the Su-35 standard, which should make it one of the best 4+-generation fighters out there.
Regarding the Tu-160, the reason the U.S. has pretty much abandoned that type of aircraft is that it has become largely obsolete. There are better, safer ways of delivering nuclear and non-nuclear munitions to defended targets than sending in a very fast strategic bomber. If you look at U.S. operations over the past decades, they almost always start with sea-and air-launched cruise missile attacks on the air defense network. Once the air defenses are down, B-52s, as old as they are, are able to carry plenty of ordnance wherever you need it. That's the issue - despite the speed, a Tu-160 wouldn't really be much more successful in attacking a well-defended target than a B-52 would; MACH 2.0 vs. 0.7 just doesn't matter that much compared to the capabilities of modern surface to air missiles. Speed and altitude just aren't the defenses they were when the B-70 and B-1A (and Tu-160) were on the drawing board. What you get with the Tu-160 is a hideously expensive to fly strategic bomber with marginally better payload capacity (by weight) than a B-52 or Tu-95. The only reason they are restarting production is that Putin likes the intimidation factor of a supersonic bomber (and the bragging rights of having the biggest and fastest); the reason that there are only 16 of them active compared to ~500 Tu-95 is that they are simply too expensive without really being significantly more capable in real-world scenarios. This is probably the same reason we haven't seen a real replacement for the B-52; while we could build one with a greater payload capacity and be marginally more cost effective/efficient, unless we spend the huge amounts necessary to go stealth and/or high-speed it just isn't going to change the way we can utilize them. We have other weapons for high-risk strikes into well-defended territory; there is no real significant improvement possible for our current use of B-52s, which is to transport large amounts of ordnance from Point A and drop it on Area B.
Paradoxically, the answer is more industrialization, not less. History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000. Below that number, citizens care more about the fundamental basic needs, and would rather have more money than a cleaner environment. As the citizenry gets richer, they start to care more about the environment they live in and demand that their government does something about it, and are willing to sacrifice some income to achieve it.
Luckily, China can take advantage of technological process, and will likely never be as bad as countries that industrialized earlier. No place ever has been or ever will be as polluted as London was in the late 1800s.
The problem, of course, is that at this point the damage is already done. It is extraordinarily more expensive to get pollution out of the soil and groundwater once it is there than it is to prevent it in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
The city I live in started recycling pickup a month or so ago, I just put the recyclables list up on the fridge. Problem fucking solved.
I visited the US earlier this year, and was surprised how few recycling bins there were. I saw one in a park, and one (for glass only) at a traveller's hostel.
I spent the first couple of days wandering around with empty bottles in my bag, until I realised recycling just didn't happen. Googling shows one city does kerbside collection, but not in the centre, and the other has a pilot project. Neither had anywhere for me to put an empty drink can while walking in the street.
It varies widely from place to place. In my city, there are recycling bins on nearly every corner and there has been curbside recycling pickup for at least a couple of decades. Where I used to work, there were no recycling bins anywhere - because all separation occurred at the transfer facility (one of those lucky communities where they seem to have more money than they know what to do with). But then I live in California, and we are generally a couple decades ahead of the rest of the country (ducks).
Now let's jump WAY ahead. To the really far out there part. If (and I believe that's a BIG if) you can then express these as Turing machines and you have a complete set of rules to compute with, you're getting closer to building a very accurate (if not perfect) simulator. Gravity, relativity, everything gets bundled up into one neat little Turing Machine that quite simply predicts the future. Perhaps you could simulate atomic movement in vacuums at a fraction of the cost of our current simulator -- and superior (the hope is perfect) accuracy! The final dream, of course, is to simulate the universe perfectly from the Big Bang onward and merely predict the future. It's not hard to see the problems with all of this, however. A simple exercise is to imagine I built this machine yesterday and as the machine begins to compute yesterday and today's events, it's computing itself computing itself computing itself computing itself ... now you can parade in the sci-fi authors. Oh, and Raymond Kurzweil.
There are an enormous number of problems with trying to simulate the entire universe. It invariably results in an infinite recursive loop. Basically, in order to simulate the universe you would have to do so from outside the universe, and it would require an entire universe to do so - in order to get a perfectly accurate simulation, there isn't any information you can discard - every subatomic particle and force directly or indirectly affects every other. It is a pipe dream. No matter how fast and complex our computational abilities become, we will always have to pick and choose what information is important for our result, and accept some amount of inaccuracy in any models or predictions - because it is physically and theoretically impossible to account for everything as you would need to for a perfect model.
If there is one thing that will result in the UN stepping in to places like Darfur, Rwanda, and Yugoslavia, clearly it is having email accounts and login credentials spread around. If only T3amP01s0n had been around in the 1940s they could have... um... published UN mailing addresses and lock combinations to prevent the creation of Israel and the disposition of the Palestinian people (? - did they mean dispossession, or do they mean that the UN creating Israel is responsible for Palestinians' bad dispositions?). Thank god for groups like TEAmpoiSON who are working to make the world a better place through releasing such incriminating information on a truly evil organization - clearly a blow for freedom!
I just don't understand the thinking behind actions like this, especially with respect to the groups stated reasons. The UN failed to step in to prevent genocide(s), so we are going to try to harm, embarrass, or destroy the institution... because then, there wouldn't be an institution failing to act in such circumstances, which is clearly a better alternative! And also, Israel!!
The whole system should just be scraped. Disallow anonymous posting and consider implementing a short "lurk" time on new accounts (more for the spam) and the quality of comments is going to improve.
I disagree completely. The current system obviously has some flaws, but it is far better than anything else I've seen - and there is a reason so many of us have been coming here for so long. No reason at all to disallow anonymous posting; while the signal-to-noise ratio may be higher for AC, there is still a lot of signal in there. I never see spam, for example, as the moderation system is pretty damn effective at removing it from view unless I'm browsing at -1.
A lot of the time when people are complaining that one of their posts was unfairly down-modded because their viewpoint disagreed with the "crowd", a quick look at the post in question usually (but certainly not always) shows an unnecessarily inflammatory post, or one full of personal attacks. There are almost always a wide range of opinions that get modded up; the difference is that dissenting opinions do generally need to be better-written and avoid inflammatory/hateful wording in order to be taken seriously, but this is the case in pretty much any discussion setting online or otherwise.
The underlying problem is that downmodding is simply not a useful tool. No matter what you call it, it's an attack on another poster. In the karma system, you do real damage to their future posts (in the term of "all future posts by this user are at -1 or -2 the previous threshold) if you can gather enough bury-brigadiers drive them from Excellent down to Good or below. Even absent a karma system, gathering a bury brigade allows you to do the equivalent of a shout-down attack, forcing anything you don't agree with below the viewing threshold of most people.
Is the meta-moderation system still in place? Assuming people participate it should really help with this problem, as would limiting mod points to people with good karma and/or limiting to people who have x number of visits logged over a given time period (making it much more difficult to create loads of sock puppets to ensure you have mod points available at any given time - mod points are only good for a limited time, so you can't "bank" them). I ask about meta-moderation because there used to be a nag link for it, but I haven't seen it in ages - and if people used it consistently, even only a couple per visit or something, it would probably help a lot.
It smokes and it glows red? And here I thought Apple products couldn't get any cooler!
Those guys are slower than snails.
Hope they treat their employees better than Amazon, though!
A bit out of date now, but Anandtech did a similar warehouse tour at the California location back in 2006. And one at the New Jersey location back in 2008.
Topographic maps have curves that connect equal elevations. This is an elevation heat map.
You describe an isocontour elevation map, which is one type of topographic map. An elevation heat map is another, and a third might be a shaded relief map. Topographic map just means a map that represents the topography, it doesn't actually denote a specific method for representing the topography (albeit isocontour maps are generally the standard, and what people generally think of when when looking for a topo map).
But can it send BitCoins?
(Only slightly less well known than "yes, but does it run linux?")
Also, Gibson explained that his IIc's drive was an "extra box". The IIc had a built in drive - maybe he had two?
Or he is mis-remembering his IIe as a IIc, especially with his memory of it being phased out in favor of the Mac - the IIc was actually released after the Mac came out.
Doesn't explain why some of the structures have heavy bomb damage.
Assuming no foreign power has been bombing China- I can't fathom why China would bomb their own calibration units.
(unless it was to test what would happen- before an enemy did it to them)
Could just be for training in photo/radar interpretation for damage assessment, etc. Seems reasonable to set up a few "known" scenarios so you can train the people (or software) that will be dealing with the actual intelligence product. Probably helpful to see the results of a few known explosions when you are trying to determine how big a bomb France dropped on Libya that one time (actually, France didn't drop any ordnance on Libya; they merely surrendered it from altitude).
And why would these be needed. There are already many structures easily visible form space and static, so why not just use one of those?
Lots of reasons for purpose-built ones. You know exact dimensions, they can be made any size/shape/color/material necessary to test the specifics of your imaging system, and they are presumably placed in the desert because there is rarely cloud cover - so good availability. Trying to use various existing objects/places presents all sorts of additional variables that they may wish to avoid.
And there was much rejoicing.
I second R, and would also suggest adding in R Commander. Adds a fairly usable GUI simplifying lots of common tasks, while maintaining the flexibility of R.
I was hoping for a new entry in the PC sim arena. Oh well.
Seems strange that this is big news (is it really?) - I'd think it would be obvious to apply 3D projection to flight simulators, and pretty damn easy to do. Digital projectors capable of high-resolution 3D are not exactly new, and neither are active shutter glasses. Somewhat expensive until fairly recently, but that's probably not a huge concern for military-grade (or aviation in general) flight simulators.
The purpose of EAS is to alert people to take action that can save their lives, not to act as a source of breaking news.
"Incoming missiles! Get to a bomb shelter!" is a valid alert.
Well, assuming there are such things as "bomb shelters" to run to...
I just really don't see a need for a nation-wide alert system like this. Sorry, but there are simply no events that affect the entire nation the same way at the same time that would make such an alert system useful. Seems far more likely to be used to get some politician's face/voice out to as many people as possible in the event of an advertising oppor-, er, I mean, disaster.
At its home turf, despite being a state-owned company, China Telecom, along with China Unicom, is being investigated over alleged monopolistic practices by the Chinese government.
Sounds like it would fit right in here.
The two companies would face penalties of up to 10 percent of their annual business revenues if they were found guilty of monopolistic practices.
Wait, they might actually get punished? Never mind then, won't fit into the U.S. market.
I was going to say something about not trusting a Chinese-government-owned telecoms company, but then I realized who their competition is.
Oh, and I've found Alice...
Alice? Who the fuck is Alice?
Sorry, couldn't resist... you may go about your business. Move along.
I have no idea what I'd do with it,
When in doubt, try to hump it. It works for my dog.
Why did you get a dog if you don't know what to do with it? Also, reporting you to the SPCA...
In mountain driving. As one who has made the drive in question dozens of times, I'm immediately thinking about The Grapevine, aka the Tejon Pass
Can a Tesla even make it from Magic Mountain to Bakersfiled with that kind of mountainous driving? I think you'd need at least 3 charging stations, one on the San Juaquine side of the Grapevine, and one on the Los Angeles side of the Grapevine, then one somewhere in the middle of the San Juaquine valley.
The nice thing about mountains is that, for an electric car, pretty much all the energy you use going up you get back on the way down. Assuming it can make it to the top of the pass, shouldn't limit the range too much as it will be a (mostly) free ride on the way down.
How would an equidistant supercharger (thus, one that is 200 miles from each of two points, themselves 400 miles apart) fail to help drivers with cars that have a 230 mile range?
The idea, I think, is that you wouldn't be able to do the round trip. If the charging station is equidistant, it would still be 400 miles round trip from the station to LA and back to the station. Not sure why you would want to drive round-trip to LA and back in a single day, but that's the only reasoning I can come up with.
Wow dude. The racism in this thread is so thick it's almost overpowering.
It isn't racism to observe that there tends to be more cheating among Asians, if this is in fact what one has observed. It would be racist to assume that a given student cheats just because they are Asian.
In my experience, which jives with the experience of literally every graduate student or professor I have talked to about it, students from mainland China are by far the worst offenders in terms of cheating/groupwork, at least at the graduate level. I don't know if it is a cultural thing (certainly not shared with the Chinese Americans I know, my wife included) or just reliance on the fact that their sponsors (almost invariably also from mainland China at this point) would never let them actually be punished. I generally assumed the former, but conversations overheard by a friend fluent in Mandarin (he was in law school at the time, specializing in international law - and most emphatically not Asian) while visiting another friend (in the statistics department at another university) suggests the latter, at least for that particular group overheard.
Remember the recent Tanker fiasco... Boeing and Airbus fighting over pork with gravy while the KC-135 fleet gets older and older. And the new tanker is still YEARS away.
This was again mostly the fault of the DoD. They ran the worst acquisition program ever. They basically issued requirements which Boeing and Airbus had no trouble meeting. However, they didn't really nail down the desired capacity for the new tanker. Boeing was told (by DoD personnel) that they preferred a smaller tanker; Airbus was told (by different DoD personnel) that they desired a larger tanker. Airbus easily could have offered a smaller tanker to meet the requirements; Boeing easily could have offered a larger. But because the Air Force's requirements were so poorly put together, it wasn't really clear what they wanted. The first round of the selection, which Airbus won, was decided largely because the Airbus solution offered greater fuel capacity. Boeing objected to the selection because Airbus received bonus points in the evaluation for offering more capacity - which Boeing also could have offered had it been clear that the Air Force was going to give bonus points for it.
Not the only issue by far in the tanker competition, but it could have been avoided if the DoD had just spent a little more time figuring out exactly what they wanted before calling for bids. Just as with civilian airliners, I really don't think there is much to choose between a Boeing-based platform and an Airbus-based platform, and a purely cost vs. capability evaluation would probably depend on easily-fudgeable (or difficult to predict, depending on your mood) analyses of lifetime costs; adding in slightly different requirements for each just makes it impossible to have a fair evaluation.
I'd say they do have the money. They're continuing production of the Tu-160, which is easily the best strategic bomber in the world, and if I recall they're ordering several hundred PAK FA as well as modernizing their Flanker fleet to the Su-35 standard, which should make it one of the best 4+-generation fighters out there.
Regarding the Tu-160, the reason the U.S. has pretty much abandoned that type of aircraft is that it has become largely obsolete. There are better, safer ways of delivering nuclear and non-nuclear munitions to defended targets than sending in a very fast strategic bomber. If you look at U.S. operations over the past decades, they almost always start with sea-and air-launched cruise missile attacks on the air defense network. Once the air defenses are down, B-52s, as old as they are, are able to carry plenty of ordnance wherever you need it. That's the issue - despite the speed, a Tu-160 wouldn't really be much more successful in attacking a well-defended target than a B-52 would; MACH 2.0 vs. 0.7 just doesn't matter that much compared to the capabilities of modern surface to air missiles. Speed and altitude just aren't the defenses they were when the B-70 and B-1A (and Tu-160) were on the drawing board. What you get with the Tu-160 is a hideously expensive to fly strategic bomber with marginally better payload capacity (by weight) than a B-52 or Tu-95. The only reason they are restarting production is that Putin likes the intimidation factor of a supersonic bomber (and the bragging rights of having the biggest and fastest); the reason that there are only 16 of them active compared to ~500 Tu-95 is that they are simply too expensive without really being significantly more capable in real-world scenarios. This is probably the same reason we haven't seen a real replacement for the B-52; while we could build one with a greater payload capacity and be marginally more cost effective/efficient, unless we spend the huge amounts necessary to go stealth and/or high-speed it just isn't going to change the way we can utilize them. We have other weapons for high-risk strikes into well-defended territory; there is no real significant improvement possible for our current use of B-52s, which is to transport large amounts of ordnance from Point A and drop it on Area B.
Paradoxically, the answer is more industrialization, not less. History shows that pollution reaches a maximum for a country around when GDP per head reaches about $10,000. Below that number, citizens care more about the fundamental basic needs, and would rather have more money than a cleaner environment. As the citizenry gets richer, they start to care more about the environment they live in and demand that their government does something about it, and are willing to sacrifice some income to achieve it.
Luckily, China can take advantage of technological process, and will likely never be as bad as countries that industrialized earlier. No place ever has been or ever will be as polluted as London was in the late 1800s.
The problem, of course, is that at this point the damage is already done. It is extraordinarily more expensive to get pollution out of the soil and groundwater once it is there than it is to prevent it in the first place.