There. Is no such thing as a progressive muslim state. They are all horrendous in one form or another. Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works.
The reality of Egypt is that the choices are grim and grimmer; support Mubarek, and you support an oppressive regime. It may be an iron fist in a velvet glove, but the fist is still made of iron. However, if you support real democratic elections in Egypt, then you're almost certainly going to get an Iranian-style theocracy that'll never have real elections again. And that's the way the vast majority of Egyptians want it. Take away the secular despot, and you're almost guaranteed to get a country run by the Muslim Brotherhood.
I know tons more about Christianity than the average church goer thanks to the Youtube Atheist movement.
Then you really don't know much about Christianity at all, because that's a bit like getting all your info about America by reading Pravda.
As far as the Internet killing religion, I think you'd better look again. Like everyone else, churches are using the Internet to spread and grow. The net has been a real, forgive the expression, blessing to me, because it's given me more resources for theological study than any group of libraries could ever do. Yeah, "Youtube Atheists" can put their arguments online. But so can churches and universities and theological seminaries. Look at the endless amount of Bible translations and theology books that are available online. Want to compare modern English Bible translations to the earliest Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic copies? It's just a few clicks away.
Kill religion? On the contrary, the Internet will only help it grow.
The King James is the most beautiful version of the Bible, literature-wise. It's truly a work of art, even if you're un-religious. The problem I have with it is that it was translated from the Textus Receptus, which has several phrases that appear to have been added after the fact, the most important being the Comma Jahanneum in 1st John 5:7-8, with two phrases specifically added to support the Doctrine of the Trinity. The earliest Greek and Aramaic copies of the books of the Bible don't have these alterations. I'm a Sola Scriptura guy, and so this has soured me on the King James version as a completely reliable record of the authors of the books. The most accurate translation of the best copies we have of the early sources is the New American Standard Bible (not the NIV, as an early poster posited). It's the one that's considered to be the most accurate translation.
If you're a Trinitarian, then the CJ isn't that big a deal... a minor piece of artistic license. If you have doubts about the Trinity doctrine, ahhh... then the CJ becomes a huge problem. This is one of the reasons I've been reading up on Arias so much (the Bishop of Alexandria who had the most popular interpretation of the scriptures... and the nature of Jesus of Nazareth... before the Council of Nicea condemned him for heresy). Arianism and other non-Trinitarian visions of Christianity have had to basically sneak around in the dark ever since. And when religious thinkers and philosophers did want to question it, they couldn't do it openly without risk. Isaac Newton (who by all accounts in his own writings truly loved his God, and spent more time writing on theology than he did on math or science) considered worship of Christ as God Himself blasphemous and an insult to the monotheistic God of Judeo-Christianity. He thought Christ to be divine in parentage and the savior of man, sitting at the right hand of God in glory... but not equal to God himself. But he could never say so in his lifetime because of the risk to his status and career. The KJV, as beautiful as it is, has to be a contributing factor to the suppression of non-Trinitarian religious thought in Christianity.
It's not just Boeing. You've got Lockheed-Martin getting these kinds of technology contracts too. They (and Northrop-Grumman) are giant, generalized technology behemoths now, with no real identity. NG owns shipyards too now. I liked them all so much better when they were airplane companies.
To some extent yes. But I'm tired of the old "obscurity doesn't work" meme. That one is right up there with "violence never solved anything".
The fewer people that know about a security vulnerability means that fewer people will try to exploit it. That's a fact. STO isn't a better model by any means, but can we quit pretending that it's inferior to the open source model? Because the "thousand eyeballs" theory of security has been repeatedly beaten into the ground. As Prof. Gene Spafford at Purdue so eloquently put it, "A thousand eyeballs on your code means nothing if they're focused on how to network your toaster and not security".
The reason why Windows had such a damning security reputation wasn't because it was closed source. It was because of the very philosophy of OS design in Redmond, i.e. "Let's keep adding sparkly stuff instead of making it work well". Security and patching depends not one whit on whether the code is open to the public. It depends on how many dedicated people are assigned to security review. If an open source project doesn't have a sizable cadre of dedicated security staff, then it will be inherently vulnerable too.
The account he broke into was being used by Palin to conduct state business that she wanted to hide from being recorded in her official state email account.
Just a reminder.
And whether or not that's true, it's completely immaterial to the facts of his prosecution. Just a reminder.
Go fight Hitler? Did you miss History, or were you misinformed? The Americans basically sat back saying "meh. Not our business." for two years.
As they should have. Why should they have declared war on Axis powers until they were attacked? For "freedom and democracy"? Isn't that neo-con thinking? It never ceases to amaze me that many of the same people that criticize neocons for their doctrine of forcibly spreading democracy across the world also criticize the US for not jumping right into WWII in 1939.
We tried that, actually, just a couple of decades before. Woodrow Wilson committed this country to war with Germany in 1917. He was looking for a reason to get us in it, and finally got it when the Germans sank the Lusitania (which, yes Virginia, was carrying arms and ammo bound for the British, a violation of our neutrality policy). People were so disillusioned about "saving the world for democracy" precisely because we saw we were snookered in WWI.
So, have we got that straight? Bush was wrong for war with Saddam, but no no no, Wilson didn't send US troops to fight in what was basically a European pissing match over empires. It was making the world safe for democracy.
"Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states."
The article also states that the reason the IG wants to replace the software is that "COBOL is a dead or dying language".
Except, well, no it's not. It's not used as much as in the past, but as we saw in 2000, it's not going away, either. Like the mainframes that COBOL runs on, predictions of the extinction of these systems have be preached from ranks of PC-ville for 30 years. And 30 years from now, they'll probably still be saying the same thing. COBOL's age in and of itself is not a very good justification for changing the software. The same people criticizing COBOL for it's age often advocate going to a language like C, and they seem to forget that C is pretty long in the tooth itself. It's not the age of the language, it's whether or not it can meet your needs. And for mainframe users, COBOL seems to work just fine. As a taxpayer, I have the sinking feeling that a lot of the justification for these multi-million dollar upgrades is simply a case of "keeping up with the Joneses"... the perception that the SSA has to go to pc-based servers, the cloud, Java, etc, because that's what everyone else is doing, so we should do it too, right?.
Exports were always going to make up a very small percentage... less than 20... of the sales of the JSF. And some of those same partners you mentioned are backing off. Only Israel is truly hot for the plane (I'd be too if I knew that US taxpayers would foot the bill... that's not anti-Israel by any means, it's simply a fact that we subsidize the IDF'S purchases).
If it's deemed too much of a mess by our own government, then foreign sales simply won't matter. There'll never be enough of them to justify continuing it. And if it IS canceled, then what is Lockheed competing against? The Gripen and the Rafale (and on the very high end, the Eurofighter. Updated American teen series fighters... the 15, 16, and 18 are all still in production... are very well poised to compete against these models, especially on price per capability. Lockheed would hate it but jump right into pushing F-16's, and Boeing would absolutely love it. So foreign sales are not the impediment that you think to canceling the whole JSF project.
...For what it's worth, the USA doesn't have the resources to build F-22s either;)
Yurt, actually, I'm in complete agreement with you. I've been in the aviation field for a long time now, both for fun and for paychecks. And there was a great article written more than 25 years ago.... Lord, I wish I could find it.... where the writer predicted that the US would eventually come to a point where it could "build a fighter with all of the electronics of the Starship Enterprise, but what good will it do us if we can only afford two of them?"
I think we hit that point starting with the B-2, and have continued it with the F-22 and F-35. Instead of following the American model of WWII... buy the best weapon that you can get in large numbers affordably... we've adopted the German model of WWII, which is to design the finest, most exotic weapons and make do with limited quantities of them (most people would be absolutely shocked if they knew, for instance, just how few tanks the Germans produced in comparison to the Allies. The Germans produced less than 1350 of the legendary Tiger tank, and less than 500 of the King Tiger). I think we saw how that turned out for the Germans. Americans and Russians just kept churning out Shermans and T-34's, and simply overwhelmed them. I'm very much afraid that in any future war with a peer foe (which, for the record, I think is a LONG way off), we might get smeared simply because we don't have enough fighters and ships and tanks and will be outlasted in the field. I think we desperately need large numbers of easy to use and maintain weapons, not 187 F-22's. That's not even enough to guarantee security of US borders, let alone deployment in a Korean or Eurasian war. But not even the greatest economy in the world can afford $183 million per fighter, flyaway (the CBO's estimate of the eventual cost of the F-35). That's simply insane.
In the financially strapped 1960s/70s the Soviet Mig 25 Foxbat appeared and it's rumored capabilities saved the US F14 and F15 projects from significant budget cutbacks or cancellation. Perhaps the savior of the F22 and F35 projects has arrived.
I've thought about this, and the Foxbat comparison might be apt here. This will sound conspiracy theory-ish, but Lockheed is probably going to milk this for all it's worth in order to drive their own sales. "Look, ooooh, a scary Chinese stealth fighter! Better buy more of ours!".
So... more engines and bigger equals "decisively superior," based solely on some photos?
Before anyone gets their panties in a wad about this airplane, please note that it may not even be able to fly. These photos are from "taxi tests"... basically, driving it down a runway. Some pretty knowledgeable people are asking if this isn't another MiG 1.42, an infamous "potemkin fighter". In other words, a model that looks good but that will never see service, built mainly as a bluff against the West. At least the PAK-FA can get off the ground, and it's fire control system is still vaporware, and it's using older engines from the Su-27 family of fighters. The truth is that neither Russia nor China have the resources to build anything like the F-22.
The article says it would be a contender for the F-22, and calls it the world's only fully operational stealth fighter. Why don't the f-117 or even the f-35's count?
The F-117 has been retired, and the F-35 isn't operational yet. Indeed, there's a growing scandal about the lack of progress in flight testing (as well as the emergence of weight and exhaust heat problems) for the F-35, and it's likely at that at least one version... probably the STOVL "B" version... will be canceled. And it's possible that the whole project will be canceled.
(This, incidentally, was the view of the American Founding Fathers. They had an acute sense of natural rights -- endowed by the Creator and only recognized by the government -- but did not consider copyright among them.)
This is an outright falsification, sir. They very well did believe in copyright because they put it in Article I of the Constitution:
"...to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
They didn't believe in the longer terms of copyright that we now employed, but they certainly recognized both the right to and the value of copyright itself.
Fox didn't go to "protect their right to lie". Your source link is an intentional distortion of the facts of the court case, and if you'd actually looked to a non-biased source, you'd know that already.
The Wikipedia article for Jane Akre lays out of the fact of the case pretty clearly (along with her history of being a self-proclaimed "whistleblower" that was fired from multiple news orgs before coming to Fox).
It's not that Fox ordered her to "lie". Fox wouldn't run her anti-Monstanto story because they though it was biased against the company without reasonable proof. Her editors ordered her to re-write the story... numerous times... and she wouldn't change the essential charges against Monsanto in the story. When Fox decided not to run the story she sued her employer, and they then terminated her.
Please note that the lower court found against her on all assertions save one... the "whistleblower" charge, and that was the one that was overturned by a higher court. So she was found to be not credible by both a jury of her peers and an appeals court judge.
I'll make you a deal. I'll support a ban on submissions from Fox News as long as we never have to see another submission from MSNBC, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, or anything similar.
Or, you can simply evaluate stories as they are, and quit whining about "faux news". A news org can have a viewpoint and still be a news org. This is the model, in fact, in much of the world, especially Europe. America's one of the few places where big sources pretend not to have a viewpoint.
We certainly gave Saddam support during the Iran-Iraq war... he was considered the lesser of two evils compared to the Ayatolla Khomeini... but we did NOT put Saddam in power. He brutally seized power himself in 1979 to prevent what was in effect a merger with Syria. He hated Hafez Assad's guts, and knew that he would be pushed into obscurity if the unification of the two nations proceeded. This is what led to the infamous Baath party meeting where he accused longtime party members of treason... on camera... and had them led out, one by one, to prison, and eventually, the firing squad.
Wikipedia's account of his rise to power has no mention of the US even helping Saddam in 1979, let alone "putting him in power". Perhaps you need better sources of information.
Hmmmm.....seems to have worked fairly well in Germany and Japan.
Indeed, the "you can't force Democracy" trope is just a variant of "violence doesn't solve anything", which is also a pile of manure, as violence has settled quite a bit in human history... especially Germany and Japan.
All of the cables published on the WikiLeaks website - a little over a thousand the last time I checked - were first vetted and published by one of the five newspapers they partnered with.
This means absolutely nothing. One, the papers may not have really vetted anything, and two, the New York Times, for one example, will publish pretty much anything that hurts the government. Pinch Sulzberger is angry that Obama and Hillary have "gone neocon".
Let me clarify -- why is this allowed? Colleges have shitloads of government funding and regulation behind them, why are they allowed to engage in business that is clearly at odds with their primary purpose? And if sports are OK then why not, say, strip clubs?
Because college sports are not in and of themselves out of place at universities. All colleges from their beginnings emphasized mental, spiritual, and physical development. It's just that the spiritual has been all but driven from campus (except for a few devout schools, not even Catholic colleges are very Catholic these days), and the physical has been overemphasized because of money and a host of other reasons. "Short Bus" students are not only admitted on sports teams because they can score touchdowns, either. Have you looked at incoming freshmen classes lately? In any one, there's going to be a large group of *fill in "underrepresented* minority here* students that are admitted with lower GPA's and test scores because of 'diversity' goals. There are indeed dum dum's on the football field, but they're also in remedial freshmen classes as well, and most don't wear a sports jersey these days.
I'm a huge college football fan, but heavens yes, I recognize the commercial aspect is outrageous. Alabama's coach, Nick Saban, makes $4 million dollars a year to coach the football team, a record salary. The average BCS salary is now between $1 and $2 million per head coach. But the ugly truth of it is that filling the seats at football stadiums and basketball arenas also attract more non-athlete applicants, raise donor revenue levels, and sell lots of licensed merchandise which the schools rake in tons of money with. There's absolutely no doubt that having a successful sports program benefits the school greatly overall. But is it a devil's bargain? Yes, I think maybe it is. Should we go back to the same admission standards for athletes as baseline freshmen? Of course we should. But we should also eliminate "diversity" admissions too. Either you make the grade and you're ready for college, or bye, see us after two years of junior college. You can score touchdowns but have a low high school GPA? Juco's have football teams too. See you in two years.
We both know that'll never happen, though, for reasons of both money and politics. I'm actually against a playoff specifically because it further professionalizes the game. We've now moved up to an NCAA 12 game regular football season precisely because colleges wanted the revenue from that extra game. They cloak it in "the kids want to play", but we know that reason is secondary. I've always thought the NCAA tournament was farcical in regards to "amateur" status as well. Really, after a long, grueling basketball season, with up to two games played per week... during the semester... now you want a 64 team playoff? Just when are these kids supposed to go to class?
I'd like to see NCAA football go back to a 10 game regular season, no championship games, and limit the number of bowls to 15 or 16. But we know that'll never happen. Young men with spotty academics will continue to be admitted along with young men with spotty academics that have no athletic talent at all as long as they're filling the right admissions quota. Just the way it is.
Ever wondered why your country is getting it's ass kicked in every sphere known to mankind except the number of lawyers per head of population?
While I bitch about the state of the Union as much as anyone, to say the United States is getting it's "ass kicked in every sphere known to mankind" is not only demonstrably untrue, it's not even a very good troll. The only reason I even responded was because some morons actually modded you insightful.
They did name one after Daddy Bush though. (And fair enough because he did fight in WWII in the Navy. Carter got a sub named after him because he was a sub captain.
There's a great political cartoon that came out when the Carter was commissioned... "An attack submarine???".
USS Gerald R. Ford? You have to be kidding me. What's next. USS Chevy Chase?
Trust me, many Navy vets (including this one, who served on a carrier) are tired of the Navy naming our biggest capital ships after politicians. Layups like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, no problem. But Gerald Ford? Really? There's a feeling in the Navy that we should stick to traditional names.... the Essex, the Hornet, the Lexington, etc, for our most prominent ships. But don't look for this practice to end, because appealing to political egos helps grease the Congressional appropriation machine.
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There. Is no such thing as a progressive muslim state. They are all horrendous in one form or another. Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works.
The reality of Egypt is that the choices are grim and grimmer; support Mubarek, and you support an oppressive regime. It may be an iron fist in a velvet glove, but the fist is still made of iron. However, if you support real democratic elections in Egypt, then you're almost certainly going to get an Iranian-style theocracy that'll never have real elections again. And that's the way the vast majority of Egyptians want it. Take away the secular despot, and you're almost guaranteed to get a country run by the Muslim Brotherhood.
I know tons more about Christianity than the average church goer thanks to the Youtube Atheist movement.
Then you really don't know much about Christianity at all, because that's a bit like getting all your info about America by reading Pravda.
As far as the Internet killing religion, I think you'd better look again. Like everyone else, churches are using the Internet to spread and grow. The net has been a real, forgive the expression, blessing to me, because it's given me more resources for theological study than any group of libraries could ever do. Yeah, "Youtube Atheists" can put their arguments online. But so can churches and universities and theological seminaries. Look at the endless amount of Bible translations and theology books that are available online. Want to compare modern English Bible translations to the earliest Greek and Hebrew and Aramaic copies? It's just a few clicks away.
Kill religion? On the contrary, the Internet will only help it grow.
" Not as bad as the "do not lie", but still.."
The King James is the most beautiful version of the Bible, literature-wise. It's truly a work of art, even if you're un-religious. The problem I have with it is that it was translated from the Textus Receptus, which has several phrases that appear to have been added after the fact, the most important being the Comma Jahanneum in 1st John 5:7-8, with two phrases specifically added to support the Doctrine of the Trinity. The earliest Greek and Aramaic copies of the books of the Bible don't have these alterations. I'm a Sola Scriptura guy, and so this has soured me on the King James version as a completely reliable record of the authors of the books. The most accurate translation of the best copies we have of the early sources is the New American Standard Bible (not the NIV, as an early poster posited). It's the one that's considered to be the most accurate translation.
If you're a Trinitarian, then the CJ isn't that big a deal... a minor piece of artistic license. If you have doubts about the Trinity doctrine, ahhh... then the CJ becomes a huge problem. This is one of the reasons I've been reading up on Arias so much (the Bishop of Alexandria who had the most popular interpretation of the scriptures... and the nature of Jesus of Nazareth... before the Council of Nicea condemned him for heresy). Arianism and other non-Trinitarian visions of Christianity have had to basically sneak around in the dark ever since. And when religious thinkers and philosophers did want to question it, they couldn't do it openly without risk. Isaac Newton (who by all accounts in his own writings truly loved his God, and spent more time writing on theology than he did on math or science) considered worship of Christ as God Himself blasphemous and an insult to the monotheistic God of Judeo-Christianity. He thought Christ to be divine in parentage and the savior of man, sitting at the right hand of God in glory... but not equal to God himself. But he could never say so in his lifetime because of the risk to his status and career. The KJV, as beautiful as it is, has to be a contributing factor to the suppression of non-Trinitarian religious thought in Christianity.
It's not just Boeing. You've got Lockheed-Martin getting these kinds of technology contracts too. They (and Northrop-Grumman) are giant, generalized technology behemoths now, with no real identity. NG owns shipyards too now. I liked them all so much better when they were airplane companies.
Just some FUD to sell an app.
To some extent yes. But I'm tired of the old "obscurity doesn't work" meme. That one is right up there with "violence never solved anything".
The fewer people that know about a security vulnerability means that fewer people will try to exploit it. That's a fact. STO isn't a better model by any means, but can we quit pretending that it's inferior to the open source model? Because the "thousand eyeballs" theory of security has been repeatedly beaten into the ground. As Prof. Gene Spafford at Purdue so eloquently put it, "A thousand eyeballs on your code means nothing if they're focused on how to network your toaster and not security".
The reason why Windows had such a damning security reputation wasn't because it was closed source. It was because of the very philosophy of OS design in Redmond, i.e. "Let's keep adding sparkly stuff instead of making it work well". Security and patching depends not one whit on whether the code is open to the public. It depends on how many dedicated people are assigned to security review. If an open source project doesn't have a sizable cadre of dedicated security staff, then it will be inherently vulnerable too.
The account he broke into was being used by Palin to conduct state business that she wanted to hide from being recorded in her official state email account.
Just a reminder.
And whether or not that's true, it's completely immaterial to the facts of his prosecution. Just a reminder.
Go fight Hitler? Did you miss History, or were you misinformed? The Americans basically sat back saying "meh. Not our business." for two years.
As they should have. Why should they have declared war on Axis powers until they were attacked? For "freedom and democracy"? Isn't that neo-con thinking? It never ceases to amaze me that many of the same people that criticize neocons for their doctrine of forcibly spreading democracy across the world also criticize the US for not jumping right into WWII in 1939.
We tried that, actually, just a couple of decades before. Woodrow Wilson committed this country to war with Germany in 1917. He was looking for a reason to get us in it, and finally got it when the Germans sank the Lusitania (which, yes Virginia, was carrying arms and ammo bound for the British, a violation of our neutrality policy). People were so disillusioned about "saving the world for democracy" precisely because we saw we were snookered in WWI.
So, have we got that straight? Bush was wrong for war with Saddam, but no no no, Wilson didn't send US troops to fight in what was basically a European pissing match over empires. It was making the world safe for democracy.
"Then again, a lot of it is written in COBOL, as the article states."
The article also states that the reason the IG wants to replace the software is that "COBOL is a dead or dying language".
Except, well, no it's not. It's not used as much as in the past, but as we saw in 2000, it's not going away, either. Like the mainframes that COBOL runs on, predictions of the extinction of these systems have be preached from ranks of PC-ville for 30 years. And 30 years from now, they'll probably still be saying the same thing. COBOL's age in and of itself is not a very good justification for changing the software. The same people criticizing COBOL for it's age often advocate going to a language like C, and they seem to forget that C is pretty long in the tooth itself. It's not the age of the language, it's whether or not it can meet your needs. And for mainframe users, COBOL seems to work just fine. As a taxpayer, I have the sinking feeling that a lot of the justification for these multi-million dollar upgrades is simply a case of "keeping up with the Joneses"... the perception that the SSA has to go to pc-based servers, the cloud, Java, etc, because that's what everyone else is doing, so we should do it too, right?.
Sounds a bit like Huxley's Brave New World minus the genetic tampering.
Except that the genetic tampering is coming, too.
Exports were always going to make up a very small percentage... less than 20... of the sales of the JSF. And some of those same partners you mentioned are backing off. Only Israel is truly hot for the plane (I'd be too if I knew that US taxpayers would foot the bill... that's not anti-Israel by any means, it's simply a fact that we subsidize the IDF'S purchases).
If it's deemed too much of a mess by our own government, then foreign sales simply won't matter. There'll never be enough of them to justify continuing it. And if it IS canceled, then what is Lockheed competing against? The Gripen and the Rafale (and on the very high end, the Eurofighter. Updated American teen series fighters... the 15, 16, and 18 are all still in production... are very well poised to compete against these models, especially on price per capability. Lockheed would hate it but jump right into pushing F-16's, and Boeing would absolutely love it. So foreign sales are not the impediment that you think to canceling the whole JSF project.
...For what it's worth, the USA doesn't have the resources to build F-22s either ;)
Yurt, actually, I'm in complete agreement with you. I've been in the aviation field for a long time now, both for fun and for paychecks. And there was a great article written more than 25 years ago.... Lord, I wish I could find it.... where the writer predicted that the US would eventually come to a point where it could "build a fighter with all of the electronics of the Starship Enterprise, but what good will it do us if we can only afford two of them?"
I think we hit that point starting with the B-2, and have continued it with the F-22 and F-35. Instead of following the American model of WWII... buy the best weapon that you can get in large numbers affordably... we've adopted the German model of WWII, which is to design the finest, most exotic weapons and make do with limited quantities of them (most people would be absolutely shocked if they knew, for instance, just how few tanks the Germans produced in comparison to the Allies. The Germans produced less than 1350 of the legendary Tiger tank, and less than 500 of the King Tiger). I think we saw how that turned out for the Germans. Americans and Russians just kept churning out Shermans and T-34's, and simply overwhelmed them. I'm very much afraid that in any future war with a peer foe (which, for the record, I think is a LONG way off), we might get smeared simply because we don't have enough fighters and ships and tanks and will be outlasted in the field. I think we desperately need large numbers of easy to use and maintain weapons, not 187 F-22's. That's not even enough to guarantee security of US borders, let alone deployment in a Korean or Eurasian war. But not even the greatest economy in the world can afford $183 million per fighter, flyaway (the CBO's estimate of the eventual cost of the F-35). That's simply insane.
In the financially strapped 1960s/70s the Soviet Mig 25 Foxbat appeared and it's rumored capabilities saved the US F14 and F15 projects from significant budget cutbacks or cancellation. Perhaps the savior of the F22 and F35 projects has arrived.
I've thought about this, and the Foxbat comparison might be apt here. This will sound conspiracy theory-ish, but Lockheed is probably going to milk this for all it's worth in order to drive their own sales. "Look, ooooh, a scary Chinese stealth fighter! Better buy more of ours!".
So... more engines and bigger equals "decisively superior," based solely on some photos?
Before anyone gets their panties in a wad about this airplane, please note that it may not even be able to fly. These photos are from "taxi tests"... basically, driving it down a runway. Some pretty knowledgeable people are asking if this isn't another MiG 1.42, an infamous "potemkin fighter". In other words, a model that looks good but that will never see service, built mainly as a bluff against the West. At least the PAK-FA can get off the ground, and it's fire control system is still vaporware, and it's using older engines from the Su-27 family of fighters. The truth is that neither Russia nor China have the resources to build anything like the F-22.
The article says it would be a contender for the F-22, and calls it the world's only fully operational stealth fighter. Why don't the f-117 or even the f-35's count?
The F-117 has been retired, and the F-35 isn't operational yet. Indeed, there's a growing scandal about the lack of progress in flight testing (as well as the emergence of weight and exhaust heat problems) for the F-35, and it's likely at that at least one version... probably the STOVL "B" version... will be canceled. And it's possible that the whole project will be canceled.
(This, incidentally, was the view of the American Founding Fathers. They had an acute sense of natural rights -- endowed by the Creator and only recognized by the government -- but did not consider copyright among them.)
This is an outright falsification, sir. They very well did believe in copyright because they put it in Article I of the Constitution:
They didn't believe in the longer terms of copyright that we now employed, but they certainly recognized both the right to and the value of copyright itself.
Fox didn't go to "protect their right to lie". Your source link is an intentional distortion of the facts of the court case, and if you'd actually looked to a non-biased source, you'd know that already.
The Wikipedia article for Jane Akre lays out of the fact of the case pretty clearly (along with her history of being a self-proclaimed "whistleblower" that was fired from multiple news orgs before coming to Fox).
It's not that Fox ordered her to "lie". Fox wouldn't run her anti-Monstanto story because they though it was biased against the company without reasonable proof. Her editors ordered her to re-write the story... numerous times... and she wouldn't change the essential charges against Monsanto in the story. When Fox decided not to run the story she sued her employer, and they then terminated her.
Please note that the lower court found against her on all assertions save one... the "whistleblower" charge, and that was the one that was overturned by a higher court. So she was found to be not credible by both a jury of her peers and an appeals court judge.
I'll make you a deal. I'll support a ban on submissions from Fox News as long as we never have to see another submission from MSNBC, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, or anything similar.
Or, you can simply evaluate stories as they are, and quit whining about "faux news". A news org can have a viewpoint and still be a news org. This is the model, in fact, in much of the world, especially Europe. America's one of the few places where big sources pretend not to have a viewpoint.
We certainly gave Saddam support during the Iran-Iraq war... he was considered the lesser of two evils compared to the Ayatolla Khomeini... but we did NOT put Saddam in power. He brutally seized power himself in 1979 to prevent what was in effect a merger with Syria. He hated Hafez Assad's guts, and knew that he would be pushed into obscurity if the unification of the two nations proceeded. This is what led to the infamous Baath party meeting where he accused longtime party members of treason... on camera... and had them led out, one by one, to prison, and eventually, the firing squad.
Wikipedia's account of his rise to power has no mention of the US even helping Saddam in 1979, let alone "putting him in power". Perhaps you need better sources of information.
Hmmmm.....seems to have worked fairly well in Germany and Japan.
Indeed, the "you can't force Democracy" trope is just a variant of "violence doesn't solve anything", which is also a pile of manure, as violence has settled quite a bit in human history... especially Germany and Japan.
All of the cables published on the WikiLeaks website - a little over a thousand the last time I checked - were first vetted and published by one of the five newspapers they partnered with.
This means absolutely nothing. One, the papers may not have really vetted anything, and two, the New York Times, for one example, will publish pretty much anything that hurts the government. Pinch Sulzberger is angry that Obama and Hillary have "gone neocon".
That can buy him a lot prison commissary and some over priced phone calls.
Unless the money is guaranteed, maybe not, since his biggest fans are the very ones most likely to steal... ahem, "share" the Kindle version.
Let me clarify -- why is this allowed? Colleges have shitloads of government funding and regulation behind them, why are they allowed to engage in business that is clearly at odds with their primary purpose? And if sports are OK then why not, say, strip clubs?
Because college sports are not in and of themselves out of place at universities. All colleges from their beginnings emphasized mental, spiritual, and physical development. It's just that the spiritual has been all but driven from campus (except for a few devout schools, not even Catholic colleges are very Catholic these days), and the physical has been overemphasized because of money and a host of other reasons. "Short Bus" students are not only admitted on sports teams because they can score touchdowns, either. Have you looked at incoming freshmen classes lately? In any one, there's going to be a large group of *fill in "underrepresented* minority here* students that are admitted with lower GPA's and test scores because of 'diversity' goals. There are indeed dum dum's on the football field, but they're also in remedial freshmen classes as well, and most don't wear a sports jersey these days.
I'm a huge college football fan, but heavens yes, I recognize the commercial aspect is outrageous. Alabama's coach, Nick Saban, makes $4 million dollars a year to coach the football team, a record salary. The average BCS salary is now between $1 and $2 million per head coach. But the ugly truth of it is that filling the seats at football stadiums and basketball arenas also attract more non-athlete applicants, raise donor revenue levels, and sell lots of licensed merchandise which the schools rake in tons of money with. There's absolutely no doubt that having a successful sports program benefits the school greatly overall. But is it a devil's bargain? Yes, I think maybe it is. Should we go back to the same admission standards for athletes as baseline freshmen? Of course we should. But we should also eliminate "diversity" admissions too. Either you make the grade and you're ready for college, or bye, see us after two years of junior college. You can score touchdowns but have a low high school GPA? Juco's have football teams too. See you in two years.
We both know that'll never happen, though, for reasons of both money and politics. I'm actually against a playoff specifically because it further professionalizes the game. We've now moved up to an NCAA 12 game regular football season precisely because colleges wanted the revenue from that extra game. They cloak it in "the kids want to play", but we know that reason is secondary. I've always thought the NCAA tournament was farcical in regards to "amateur" status as well. Really, after a long, grueling basketball season, with up to two games played per week... during the semester... now you want a 64 team playoff? Just when are these kids supposed to go to class?
I'd like to see NCAA football go back to a 10 game regular season, no championship games, and limit the number of bowls to 15 or 16. But we know that'll never happen. Young men with spotty academics will continue to be admitted along with young men with spotty academics that have no athletic talent at all as long as they're filling the right admissions quota. Just the way it is.
Ever wondered why your country is getting it's ass kicked in every sphere known to mankind except the number of lawyers per head of population?
While I bitch about the state of the Union as much as anyone, to say the United States is getting it's "ass kicked in every sphere known to mankind" is not only demonstrably untrue, it's not even a very good troll. The only reason I even responded was because some morons actually modded you insightful.
They did name one after Daddy Bush though. (And fair enough because he did fight in WWII in the Navy. Carter got a sub named after him because he was a sub captain.
There's a great political cartoon that came out when the Carter was commissioned... "An attack submarine???".
USS Gerald R. Ford? You have to be kidding me. What's next. USS Chevy Chase?
Trust me, many Navy vets (including this one, who served on a carrier) are tired of the Navy naming our biggest capital ships after politicians. Layups like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, no problem. But Gerald Ford? Really? There's a feeling in the Navy that we should stick to traditional names.... the Essex, the Hornet, the Lexington, etc, for our most prominent ships. But don't look for this practice to end, because appealing to political egos helps grease the Congressional appropriation machine.