Hope this sucks the money out of college sports so the schools go back to teaching.
Exactly the opposite happens. You'd think that schools with emphasis on sports would have poor academics, but you'd be wrong. I'm an Auburn fan, and when Alabama lured Nick Saban from the Miami Dolphins for $4 million dollars a year, everyone criticized them at first. But what they're doing was (and I hate to admit it) actually smart. We now have evidence that, the higher the profile a college's athletics program has, the more applications for admission they get. Also, much more alumni and donor money comes in. And so the sports-rich schools are then able to expand all of their departments, and offer more in terms of academics, not less.
Perversely, in the end, having a big time near-pro sports program actually benefits the academic side of things. Big colleges, like those in the SEC, now have departments that do fund raising and campus/faculty expansion full-time (like Tigers Unlimited at Auburn, and the Gator Foundation at U. of Florida), and sports promotion goes hand in hand with that effort. The bigger your football or basketball team is, the better chance you have of building that new chemistry or history building. And so, end the end, that $32 million contract Alabama gave Nick Saban generated so much excitement among fans and alums, they nearly doubled giving to the university, and applications for admission shot through the roof. It turned out to be a pretty good investment for them all the way around. Is $4 million a year to coach a college football team ridiculous? To you and me, yeah. But when it brings in more fans/money/students/faculty/facilities? Its an investment that paid off handsomely.
I don't know what their real reasoning is, but you can be assured that it is not because they want to be responsible and expand with their own money.
The real reason is because these grants are a Faustian Bargain: there are never-ending strings attached to government money. And it's not just the net neutrality issue. If you take that money, there's a whole host of demands the government can make. I work in aviation, and have seen some of this stuff in action with FAA grants, where you accept money for a project, and then there are costly consequences years down the road.
"Sometime between the time Clinton left office and Obama entered office the Federal budget surplus disappeared. Now where did it go? Hrm?"
It was as illusory as the "wealth" created during the housing boom. It was wealth only on paper, and like the housing boom wealth, when the tech bubble burst, it took its paper profits with it. That's what happens when you build a "new economy" with companies that have no business plan and no profit.
... what's the excuse for the next couple of deficits in the Trillions? And that's without the health care bill passing?
The truth of the matter is, regardless of party, the U.S. Government is spending money we don't have. We do it most years, in fact. And regardless of party in power, its accelerating.
Considering that Yemeni's live on an average of $1.25 a day, most of them don't even have access to the Internet. And since it's a vary traditional Muslim country, many would applaud filtering out "harmful foreign content". The author is applying his own feelings and standards to a very different people and culture.
"So what you seem to be advocating is a move to a world with even less freedom of information than we had two decades ago."
They're not in the "freedom of information" business. They're a for-profit business. They sell. They're not a charity. What' you're essentially arguing for is a kind of socialism of information. That's not what they do. They're here to make money. They're not interested in your revolution. Contrary to the revolutionary slogans, "information wants to be free" is utopian claptrap. More information will be free, but the glorious paradise where we have to pay for nothing is never coming. As I mentioned earlier, ads alone won't get it anymore. Even the Internet advertising powerhouses... Google, etc... are moving away from the ads-only model to more paid services. You can say "information wants to be free" all you like, but people want to be paid.
Maybe they should do some research into ads that don't make me want to kick puppies.
You could make plenty of money on ads at one time, but those days are done. Ad rates are much more competitive now, and the field is stretched much farther on the Internet. "Everything should be free" isn't a way to make money. It was an illusion during the dot com bubble, and it's an illusion now. Even Google, who built their empire on ads, is trying to get away from the overreliance on advertising. They know as well that they can't continue to survive that way. Sooner or later, they'll have paid services as well.
Look at another of Murdoch's properties... the Wall Street Journal. Access to many articles online is available for paid subscribers only (full disclosure: I subscribe to the WSJ). Looking at profit and circulation for national papers, the WSJ has been one of only two newspapers whose circulation is actually increasing, while others are dropping every year, some as much as double digits per year. The Journal has made money every year except one during this decade, again, while other powerhouses like the NY Times have had to resort to things like leasing part of their new building to stay afloat. Murdoch views the websites as part of the paper business model, not separate from them, and he's the one that's been making money. All of his media properties make money, especially Fox. I'd say he's doing something right. In fact, I think much of the industry will follow his model. You'll have less traffic for the paid sites, but more profitability. If people think the content is worth it, they'll pay for it.
"Microsoft loves to describe Linux as a 'UNIX variant'."
Microsoft is right. Linux is Unix. It's why I started using it. Can it legally be called Unix? No. But if it walks like a duck, etc, it's a duck. Linux is after all a clone of Unix. It's Unix in all but name. A clone of a dog isn't a cat after all... it's a copy of a dog. Comparing Unix and Linux to DOS and XP isn't a good comparison. The former is an OS and a copy of that OS. The later is an earlier OS and it's evolutionary descendant, and XP is more of a nephew to DOS than a son, considering that NT was conceived as a different OS than DOS... it was just built to be largely compatible with DOS.
"Just in the last decade for example, activist judges on our Supreme Court, such as Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, have overturned an unprecedented number of laws implemented by Congress and signed by the president, finding in favor of corporate interests and against individual rights at every turn."
OK, defend "unprecedented". How many has SCOTUS overturned in comparison to past courts? Which specific individual rights have been thrown away to enrich the evil corporate overlords?
There's a danger when one guy has complete control of the project. Not even Linus has that. If the guy bolts or drops dead, you're left in limbo.
If you need a similar compatible version of RH Enterprise Linux, I'd suggest Scientific Linux. It's made by the staff at Fermi Labs (and CERN as well) as a uniform OS platform for all their experiments, and is basically RHEL compiled from source. Like RHEL, it can also be used as a general purpose OS (it just includes a lot of science packages, especially stuff for physics). It's supposed to be 100% compatible, or very very close, and the Fermi guys distribute the ISO's online.
"It is very cheap (inexpensive) and is a good asset."
Whatever else the F-35 is, it is not cheap. Far from it.
For comparison, Boeing is offering the Navy a fixed price quote for new Super Hornets at just over $50 million apiece if a minimum of 230 are purchased. Brand new F-16's are currently around $40 million apiece. The brand new Silent Eagle stealth redesign of the F-15 costs $100 million apiece. That's a top of the line air superiority fighter.
So how much does an optimistic estimate of F-35's run per aircraft?
If you're a taxpayer, read 'em and weep:
Year Aircraft Average unit cost/aircraft
FY2008: 6 $184.2 million FY2009: 8 $200.2 million FY2010: 18 $172.3 million FY2011: 19 $146.4 million FY2012: 40 $124.4 million FY2013: 42 $115.1 million
Sorry, but your link is a USAF sales job. Everything is great, no problems here, never mind the man behind the curtain. It states what a maintenance friendly aircraft the Raptor is, when virtually every other authority states the opposite. It is in fact a maintenance nightmare. That's an Air Force website, giving a rah-rah account. I don't blame them for that... they're not exactly going to openly say "OK, we're disappointed in the aircraft". But recognize it for what it is.
Apparently, we are buying a couple thousand F-35s anyway, which is - again NPR - "only slightly less capable, but far less expensive".
The F-35 is vastly less capable in the air to air mission than the F-22 (when the Raptor isn't grounded for maintenance, that is). And its cost is rapidly approaching that of the F-22 itself. It's like trading that BMW in for a Volkswagen, and then finding that the payments are the same.
"Russia and France both have fighters in development on par with the F22."
Sorry, but bullshit. What does Russia have that compares? The Su-35, which is yet another Su-27 upgrade? Please. The F-22 only works half the time, but modern Russian fighters aren't exactly known for their reliability either. They're even worse at complexity than we are. And the French? Are you kidding me? Surely you're not talking about the Rafale, a newer aircraft that's more or less in the F-16's class.
Where are you getting your figures?
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"As another comparison, the cost per hour in 2008 was $19K, compared to the F15 which was $17k. History shows that this typically goes down as the plane matures and is ironed out"
I don't know where you get your info, but the Washington Post claims they've acquired Pentagon info stating that exactly the opposite is true with the Raptor; maintenance costs are going up over time, not down. They also say this report shows costs of $44K per hour for the F-22, not $19.
"One was produced by Lockheed, the company that had recently delivered the F-117 on-time and under budget."
Which goes to show that choosing on that basis did no good. Past performance is apparently no predictor of future performance, as virtually every program Lockheed Martin ("LockMart") is running is grossly over budget and behind schedule. The Littoral Combat Ship LCS-1 is now approaching three times its initial cost estimate, and the "cheap" F-35 is now approaching the cost of the F-22 itself. CBO says the initial production versions will cost close to $200 million apiece, and even if full production kicks in, we're looking at probably well over $100 million apiece for a "low end" fighter, one that has a top speed that even late 1950's fighters could beat. I'm a gadget freak like anyone else here, and very supportive of a strong military, but we simply cannot sustain this kind of madness. As a defense analyst so eloquently put it, we're getting the worst of both worlds here. We're unilaterally disarming ourselves, and going broke while doing it.
Britain has adapted many of the things Orwell wrote about in his iconic book. The surveillance society, doublespeak, and now, thought crimes. I wonder what George would think of his country so willingly embracing all the things he tried to warn them about?
"To compensate the loss of income due to private copy, we pay taxes when we buy any device able to reproduce any copyrighted work (photocopiers, CDs, iPods, hard disks,...). There is also a tax for TV and radio devices on public places."
Ah, I didn't know this. Interesting that you have a tax on physical devices as a compensation for the copyright.
I assume that Spain has a supreme court of some kind, and that there are avenues to appeal. I have a hard time believing that higher judges would accept that mass internet copyright infringement is a right. But you never know. This is Spain, a country that has judges that take it upon themselves to prosecute foreign "war criminals", and was only recently rebuffed in their efforts to do so. They might well rule "Hey, download all you like here".
From the article (yeah I know, Slashdot, not supposed to, etc)
If Nazi engineers had had more time, would this jet have ultimately changed the outcome of the war?
IIRC the United States developed something called Atomic Bombs that would have counteracted any advantage Germany would have gained from stealth jets.
Keep in mind that the Manhattan Project only had enough material for two bombs in 1945. Once they were gone, we were out of atom bombs for a period of months at the very least. So if Hitler gets his stealth aircraft, do you bomb Germany, or do you save those two bombs for Japan, where a manned invasion will cost hundreds of thousands of casualties? Choices, choices.
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named.
There were indeed technical issues with Northrop's flying wing designs, but they were in no way considered insurmountable. Northrop's wings were killed by the USAF not on technical merits, but from political scheming. The Air Force wanted Northrop to merge with Convair, and Jack Northrop refused. As punishment, his wing designs were canceled and the prototypes ordered destroyed, and in a particularly petty and sadistic twist, Northrop employees were made to watch as USAF officials literally took buzzsaws to the YB-49 prototypes. The intent was to send a message to Jack Northrop... go along to get along, or else.
Young Air Force officers that were involved were ashamed of the whole affair, and as they became older (and reached General Officer ranks) became advocates of Northrop's old flying wing designs. Its been reported that when some of these now-older officers showed Jack Northrop a model of the then-secret B-2 flying wing design in 1979, Northrop wept. It took 30 years, but he'd finally been vindicated.
Here's a copy of a Los Angeles Times interview with Northrop in 1980, where he revealed what really happened. Aviation Journalists like Bill Sweetman (as well as many NASA engineers and Wright-Pat and Edwards test people) had heard rumors of what really happened to the YB-49 back in the 70's.
Whether it actually reduced radar signature is an issue here, and without doing a comparison of leading edges with and without the added carbon, how do we know that the slight signature wasn't simply due to the small size and low metal content?
Northorp Grumman says their tests proved the stealth value of the aircraft. I'd say that's pretty definitive.
Northop has quite a lot of experience with flying wings and stealth, as we now call it. Jack Northorp built several examples starting in 1940, and after the war, military planners began to take radar seriously. The Chain Home system was seen as invaluable in the defense of Britain, everyone was adapting radar more and more, and so aircraft manufacturers began studying how the shapes of aircraft affected radar coverage. Northrop was the first US company to really study the issue, and they found that flying wing designs were naturally less reflective of radar than standard fuselage designs. As for wood, both Northrop's N-1M and N-9M testbeds had a lot of wood in the construction, so they're well aware of the effect wood has in relation to radar signatures. And the Ho 229 itself is mostly metal in the center of the aircraft. Look at the Wikipedia article's photos of the sole-remaining original prototype, and you'll notice that its rusting away in storage. So I'd have to conclude that, yes, Northrop knows the difference between the signatures of a mostly-wood aircraft, and one with the carbon leading edges added.
Slashdot Mirror
Hope this sucks the money out of college sports so the schools go back to teaching.
Exactly the opposite happens. You'd think that schools with emphasis on sports would have poor academics, but you'd be wrong. I'm an Auburn fan, and when Alabama lured Nick Saban from the Miami Dolphins for $4 million dollars a year, everyone criticized them at first. But what they're doing was (and I hate to admit it) actually smart. We now have evidence that, the higher the profile a college's athletics program has, the more applications for admission they get. Also, much more alumni and donor money comes in. And so the sports-rich schools are then able to expand all of their departments, and offer more in terms of academics, not less.
Perversely, in the end, having a big time near-pro sports program actually benefits the academic side of things. Big colleges, like those in the SEC, now have departments that do fund raising and campus/faculty expansion full-time (like Tigers Unlimited at Auburn, and the Gator Foundation at U. of Florida), and sports promotion goes hand in hand with that effort. The bigger your football or basketball team is, the better chance you have of building that new chemistry or history building. And so, end the end, that $32 million contract Alabama gave Nick Saban generated so much excitement among fans and alums, they nearly doubled giving to the university, and applications for admission shot through the roof. It turned out to be a pretty good investment for them all the way around. Is $4 million a year to coach a college football team ridiculous? To you and me, yeah. But when it brings in more fans/money/students/faculty/facilities? Its an investment that paid off handsomely.
Breastfeeding is a natural thing
Taking a piss and having sex are natural too. We can't do them in public though. "Natural" in and of itself isn't a justification for a public action.
I don't know what their real reasoning is, but you can be assured that it is not because they want to be responsible and expand with their own money.
The real reason is because these grants are a Faustian Bargain: there are never-ending strings attached to government money. And it's not just the net neutrality issue. If you take that money, there's a whole host of demands the government can make. I work in aviation, and have seen some of this stuff in action with FAA grants, where you accept money for a project, and then there are costly consequences years down the road.
"Sometime between the time Clinton left office and Obama entered office the Federal budget surplus disappeared. Now where did it go? Hrm?"
It was as illusory as the "wealth" created during the housing boom. It was wealth only on paper, and like the housing boom wealth, when the tech bubble burst, it took its paper profits with it. That's what happens when you build a "new economy" with companies that have no business plan and no profit.
... what's the excuse for the next couple of deficits in the Trillions? And that's without the health care bill passing?
The truth of the matter is, regardless of party, the U.S. Government is spending money we don't have. We do it most years, in fact. And regardless of party in power, its accelerating.
Considering that Yemeni's live on an average of $1.25 a day, most of them don't even have access to the Internet. And since it's a vary traditional Muslim country, many would applaud filtering out "harmful foreign content". The author is applying his own feelings and standards to a very different people and culture.
"So what you seem to be advocating is a move to a world with even less freedom of information than we had two decades ago."
They're not in the "freedom of information" business. They're a for-profit business. They sell. They're not a charity. What' you're essentially arguing for is a kind of socialism of information. That's not what they do. They're here to make money. They're not interested in your revolution. Contrary to the revolutionary slogans, "information wants to be free" is utopian claptrap. More information will be free, but the glorious paradise where we have to pay for nothing is never coming. As I mentioned earlier, ads alone won't get it anymore. Even the Internet advertising powerhouses... Google, etc... are moving away from the ads-only model to more paid services. You can say "information wants to be free" all you like, but people want to be paid.
Maybe they should do some research into ads that don't make me want to kick puppies.
You could make plenty of money on ads at one time, but those days are done. Ad rates are much more competitive now, and the field is stretched much farther on the Internet. "Everything should be free" isn't a way to make money. It was an illusion during the dot com bubble, and it's an illusion now. Even Google, who built their empire on ads, is trying to get away from the overreliance on advertising. They know as well that they can't continue to survive that way. Sooner or later, they'll have paid services as well.
Look at another of Murdoch's properties... the Wall Street Journal. Access to many articles online is available for paid subscribers only (full disclosure: I subscribe to the WSJ). Looking at profit and circulation for national papers, the WSJ has been one of only two newspapers whose circulation is actually increasing, while others are dropping every year, some as much as double digits per year. The Journal has made money every year except one during this decade, again, while other powerhouses like the NY Times have had to resort to things like leasing part of their new building to stay afloat. Murdoch views the websites as part of the paper business model, not separate from them, and he's the one that's been making money. All of his media properties make money, especially Fox. I'd say he's doing something right. In fact, I think much of the industry will follow his model. You'll have less traffic for the paid sites, but more profitability. If people think the content is worth it, they'll pay for it.
"Microsoft loves to describe Linux as a 'UNIX variant'."
Microsoft is right. Linux is Unix. It's why I started using it. Can it legally be called Unix? No. But if it walks like a duck, etc, it's a duck. Linux is after all a clone of Unix. It's Unix in all but name. A clone of a dog isn't a cat after all... it's a copy of a dog. Comparing Unix and Linux to DOS and XP isn't a good comparison. The former is an OS and a copy of that OS. The later is an earlier OS and it's evolutionary descendant, and XP is more of a nephew to DOS than a son, considering that NT was conceived as a different OS than DOS... it was just built to be largely compatible with DOS.
"Just in the last decade for example, activist judges on our Supreme Court, such as Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, have overturned an unprecedented number of laws implemented by Congress and signed by the president, finding in favor of corporate interests and against individual rights at every turn."
OK, defend "unprecedented". How many has SCOTUS overturned in comparison to past courts? Which specific individual rights have been thrown away to enrich the evil corporate overlords?
There's a danger when one guy has complete control of the project. Not even Linus has that. If the guy bolts or drops dead, you're left in limbo.
If you need a similar compatible version of RH Enterprise Linux, I'd suggest Scientific Linux. It's made by the staff at Fermi Labs (and CERN as well) as a uniform OS platform for all their experiments, and is basically RHEL compiled from source. Like RHEL, it can also be used as a general purpose OS (it just includes a lot of science packages, especially stuff for physics). It's supposed to be 100% compatible, or very very close, and the Fermi guys distribute the ISO's online.
"It is very cheap (inexpensive) and is a good asset."
Whatever else the F-35 is, it is not cheap. Far from it.
For comparison, Boeing is offering the Navy a fixed price quote for new Super Hornets at just over $50 million apiece if a minimum of 230 are purchased. Brand new F-16's are currently around $40 million apiece. The brand new Silent Eagle stealth redesign of the F-15 costs $100 million apiece. That's a top of the line air superiority fighter.
So how much does an optimistic estimate of F-35's run per aircraft?
If you're a taxpayer, read 'em and weep:
Year Aircraft Average unit cost/aircraft
FY2008: 6 $184.2 million
FY2009: 8 $200.2 million
FY2010: 18 $172.3 million
FY2011: 19 $146.4 million
FY2012: 40 $124.4 million
FY2013: 42 $115.1 million
Sorry, but your link is a USAF sales job. Everything is great, no problems here, never mind the man behind the curtain. It states what a maintenance friendly aircraft the Raptor is, when virtually every other authority states the opposite. It is in fact a maintenance nightmare. That's an Air Force website, giving a rah-rah account. I don't blame them for that... they're not exactly going to openly say "OK, we're disappointed in the aircraft". But recognize it for what it is.
Apparently, we are buying a couple thousand F-35s anyway, which is - again NPR - "only slightly less capable, but far less expensive".
The F-35 is vastly less capable in the air to air mission than the F-22 (when the Raptor isn't grounded for maintenance, that is). And its cost is rapidly approaching that of the F-22 itself. It's like trading that BMW in for a Volkswagen, and then finding that the payments are the same.
"Russia and France both have fighters in development on par with the F22."
Sorry, but bullshit. What does Russia have that compares? The Su-35, which is yet another Su-27 upgrade? Please. The F-22 only works half the time, but modern Russian fighters aren't exactly known for their reliability either. They're even worse at complexity than we are. And the French? Are you kidding me? Surely you're not talking about the Rafale, a newer aircraft that's more or less in the F-16's class.
"As another comparison, the cost per hour in 2008 was $19K, compared to the F15 which was $17k. History shows that this typically goes down as the plane matures and is ironed out"
I don't know where you get your info, but the Washington Post claims they've acquired Pentagon info stating that exactly the opposite is true with the Raptor; maintenance costs are going up over time, not down. They also say this report shows costs of $44K per hour for the F-22, not $19.
"One was produced by Lockheed, the company that had recently delivered the F-117 on-time and under budget."
Which goes to show that choosing on that basis did no good. Past performance is apparently no predictor of future performance, as virtually every program Lockheed Martin ("LockMart") is running is grossly over budget and behind schedule. The Littoral Combat Ship LCS-1 is now approaching three times its initial cost estimate, and the "cheap" F-35 is now approaching the cost of the F-22 itself. CBO says the initial production versions will cost close to $200 million apiece, and even if full production kicks in, we're looking at probably well over $100 million apiece for a "low end" fighter, one that has a top speed that even late 1950's fighters could beat. I'm a gadget freak like anyone else here, and very supportive of a strong military, but we simply cannot sustain this kind of madness. As a defense analyst so eloquently put it, we're getting the worst of both worlds here. We're unilaterally disarming ourselves, and going broke while doing it.
Britain has adapted many of the things Orwell wrote about in his iconic book. The surveillance society, doublespeak, and now, thought crimes. I wonder what George would think of his country so willingly embracing all the things he tried to warn them about?
"To compensate the loss of income due to private copy, we pay taxes when we buy any device able to reproduce any copyrighted work (photocopiers, CDs, iPods, hard disks, ...). There is also a tax for TV and radio devices on public places."
Ah, I didn't know this. Interesting that you have a tax on physical devices as a compensation for the copyright.
are you comparing a war criminal with a file downloader ?
No, simply pointing out that Spanish judges seem to take more of an internationalist perspective on law than other countries.
How does a sperm "know" if a female is attractive? Or are we talking about money shots from porn films here?
I assume that Spain has a supreme court of some kind, and that there are avenues to appeal. I have a hard time believing that higher judges would accept that mass internet copyright infringement is a right. But you never know. This is Spain, a country that has judges that take it upon themselves to prosecute foreign "war criminals", and was only recently rebuffed in their efforts to do so. They might well rule "Hey, download all you like here".
From the article (yeah I know, Slashdot, not supposed to, etc)
IIRC the United States developed something called Atomic Bombs that would have counteracted any advantage Germany would have gained from stealth jets.
Keep in mind that the Manhattan Project only had enough material for two bombs in 1945. Once they were gone, we were out of atom bombs for a period of months at the very least. So if Hitler gets his stealth aircraft, do you bomb Germany, or do you save those two bombs for Japan, where a manned invasion will cost hundreds of thousands of casualties? Choices, choices.
The flying wing was a hugely unstable design. The sole Ho IX V2 crashed on 18 February 1945, after only two hours of flight time. On 5 June 1948, Northrop's YB-49 (their second attempt to build a flying wing after the B-35 was cancelled due to insurmountable technical issues) crashed, killing its pilot and co-pilot Daniel Forbes and Glen Edwards, for whom Forbes and Edwards airforce bases are named.
There were indeed technical issues with Northrop's flying wing designs, but they were in no way considered insurmountable. Northrop's wings were killed by the USAF not on technical merits, but from political scheming. The Air Force wanted Northrop to merge with Convair, and Jack Northrop refused. As punishment, his wing designs were canceled and the prototypes ordered destroyed, and in a particularly petty and sadistic twist, Northrop employees were made to watch as USAF officials literally took buzzsaws to the YB-49 prototypes. The intent was to send a message to Jack Northrop... go along to get along, or else.
Young Air Force officers that were involved were ashamed of the whole affair, and as they became older (and reached General Officer ranks) became advocates of Northrop's old flying wing designs. Its been reported that when some of these now-older officers showed Jack Northrop a model of the then-secret B-2 flying wing design in 1979, Northrop wept. It took 30 years, but he'd finally been vindicated.
Here's a copy of a Los Angeles Times interview with Northrop in 1980, where he revealed what really happened. Aviation Journalists like Bill Sweetman (as well as many NASA engineers and Wright-Pat and Edwards test people) had heard rumors of what really happened to the YB-49 back in the 70's.
Whether it actually reduced radar signature is an issue here, and without doing a comparison of leading edges with and without the added carbon, how do we know that the slight signature wasn't simply due to the small size and low metal content?
Northorp Grumman says their tests proved the stealth value of the aircraft. I'd say that's pretty definitive.
Northop has quite a lot of experience with flying wings and stealth, as we now call it. Jack Northorp built several examples starting in 1940, and after the war, military planners began to take radar seriously. The Chain Home system was seen as invaluable in the defense of Britain, everyone was adapting radar more and more, and so aircraft manufacturers began studying how the shapes of aircraft affected radar coverage. Northrop was the first US company to really study the issue, and they found that flying wing designs were naturally less reflective of radar than standard fuselage designs. As for wood, both Northrop's N-1M and N-9M testbeds had a lot of wood in the construction, so they're well aware of the effect wood has in relation to radar signatures. And the Ho 229 itself is mostly metal in the center of the aircraft. Look at the Wikipedia article's photos of the sole-remaining original prototype, and you'll notice that its rusting away in storage. So I'd have to conclude that, yes, Northrop knows the difference between the signatures of a mostly-wood aircraft, and one with the carbon leading edges added.