I have a variety of machines, mainly using a powerbook and a desktop PC. The PC is relegated to a few duties and the odd bit of work I can't do on the powerbook, the PC mostly gets used for racing & flight sims. Surveys like this one are pretty irrelevant and misleading: what you use depends a great deal on your relationship to technology. PCs are an easy decision for the bulk of consumers who simply see a less expensive way to get online.
When I was given a Kindle I found it interesting but not truly captivating. I found myself far more concerned with what electronic book distribution means long term and it was not a cheery vision. Governments will find it far easier to control the acquisition and distribution of knowledge in a society where print is inherently subversive. When books can be pulled at will we are in serious danger.
The Liberal Party is notorious for promising things in Opposition that they have no intention of following through with. Ultimately the Liberals will promise cash to the poor Provinces that will come out of the pockets of the rich Provinces, return to power and forget about Net Neutrality.
AT&T owes iPhone customers nothing: they have a monopoly and can price accordingly. Fanboys should know the release cycle of Apple products by now and get their contracts accordingly.
I don't think people really understand what the background is with the language issue. 50 years ago French speakers couldn't shop in their own language in may places: company stores hired Anglos only. Montreal was a great city if you spoke English, Yiddish or even Italian but for a Francophone it was a nightmare until the Quiet Revolution. The majority of the Province was Francophone, yet the economy was strictly managed by Anglos only and education was left to the Catholic Church in a deal designed to keep the population compliant. There were many Quebecois complicit in this, Duplessis being the primary criminal, but it is the Church and the Anglos who did the bulk of the work. What we are experiencing now is the tide of absurdity going the other way as the Government continues to expand the linguistic bigotry that Bill 101 gave us. My Grandmere would probably be happy that the battle now is about something as irrelevant as video games, shows how much things have changed.
65,000 feet is within the engagement envelope of a number of SAMs. The weapons it flies above are the lighter, more portable weapons utilised by lighter forces, the kind the US likes to fight.
while we are sorry for your loss our recent round of layoffs was due to the recent problems with the economy. We took the decision to perform a single lay off en masse to allow the remaining associates and other employees to feel secure in their positions. This decision did not allow us to make special cases for those suffering from recent loss, and to be brutally frank if you wish that we consider situations such as yours while making our decisions it would not be a positive factor: we prefer associates who can produce viable offspring at full term. Good luck finding a new position in this economy, rest assured you will have appropriate references from our firm.
Good points. The Player Piano also gave composers the chance to hear pieces human pianists simply could not play. Conlon Nancarrow wrote many pieces that pushed the limits of the Player Piano, astounding recordings of what the instrument was capable of.
His motivation was nothing to do with protecting the Constitution or citizens of the US. He worked at the FBI and participated in operations that violated the Constitution and law far more egregiously than Nixon and his horde. Mark Felt took this action because the system did not believe he was competent enough to rise up the ladder. The promotion would have moved him up the food chain, satisfying his ego and Woodward would never have met Felt.
Woodward had connections in the intelligence community and was not the eager young reporter so often portrayed. Interestingly enough, whenever his record comes under analysis he has a swarm of lawyers on hand to silence his critics. Felt wasn't the only informant Woodward had, and it is pretty straight forward to figure out whom he knew that had access to the Whitehouse.
Watergate left us with a self-aggrandizing press, led to the Carter malaise and mainstreamed Reagan in the backlash. Hmmm, probably better off if Felt had accepted his own limitations rather than pretending he was outraged.
I am always amazed at the chattering about Chomsky & Hermann when they did not introduce a single new concept in media analysis. Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda" and many other works do far more than a facile anti-capitalist analysis, no wonder there is little mention of such a major work in the area in any of Chomsky's media analysis efforts. I believe this oversight is due to Ellul's broader, and hence more damning, critique of propagating influences: it isn't just the other side that makes propaganda and attempts to influence people. Accepting this would be very difficult for Chomsky, and heresy for his legions of followers eager to parrot his latest opinion.
Insightful?!?! There should be a rating for "poppycock." How often do those in power in Western nations "turn their gaze upon themselves?" Governments behave in a very similar manner towards the outside world regardless of their treatment of their own citizens. Those holding power in Beijing look upon the period of a "free" Tibet from 1913 to 1950 as an aberration and not the result of natural forces of history, and trying to change that POV through admonition and protests is a joke.
China is an authoritarian government concerned with keeping order and power within the hands of a select few. Truthfully they are only a few degrees removed from every other government in the world. What has happened is that the folks who used to cry for East Timor needed another cause celebre and Tibet has been groomed for this since the CIA started funding the Dalai Lama. Then the oppressed members of Falun Gong started their own media campaign and protests around the world. Falun Gong loves a martyr, just like the Communist labor organizers in "In Dubious Battle," knowingly pushing the limits of a strictly controlled society in a quest for headlines.
Human Rights granted by international charter are truly idealist. Most societies cope with tremendous restrictions because in the daily struggle to survive some things don't seem to matter that much. Are the Chinese "self-absorbed?" Probably no more so than any other nationality. The US is probably the best Western example of navel gazing while blundering about causing suffering in places known and unknown. Right now Chinese perfidy is confined within their borders, whereas US and Western activities go on all over the world.
Re:Every country has a different threshold
on
China Blocks iTunes
·
· Score: 1
South Africa could be largely ignored and chided into changing their ways, but China is big enough to pretty much do as they like. Somebody will always deal with you when you have over 1 billion people, and hold the US economy by the short hairs.
Downloading songs for Tibet is pretty weak if it is meant to be some form of protest. The funny thing is that few people seem to know the key role played by the CIA in the securing the modern mythology of Tibet.
The workaround only makes sense to get back to Vancouver itself. Going to the US or the airport one would skip recrossing the river on the Trans Canada.
A few years ago I was hired by a security company to do IT work and was required to get a government security license due to the nature of the data on the network. Kind of a hassle, but in this case it was mostly down to insurance. I am not familiar with Texas laws but from a cursory glance this seems a bit onerous.
I also found the "gliding bug" but not only in the Med. I used to plan missions in the North Cape area where I had to glide home most of the way after clearing enemy airspace. I am trying to remember the route for some unrealistic epic missions. I would fly over Finland, finding a nice seam in the radar coverage and hit an airfield near Kandalashka(IIRC) then move on to something between there and Polyarnyy then onto Severomorsk and Pechenga. There was an SA-5 (IIRC) battery that I liked to take out to make my egress easier.
I would climb as soon as I hit the outer mark of the ranges I had put on my map marking where I had encountered enemy activity. There was one airfield I really liked in Norway that was on an island and gave you a relatively easier dead stick approach.
I also enjoyed Gunship when it came out. In high school a friend and I stayed up all night playing Gunship before our history final. Lots of fun on 64k.
Nice they are so concerned about power consumption that they reduced the capabilities of the unit yet still make it necessary for a visit to the shop to change a firkin battery! I have a number of Apple products, like them all. The only drawback is I don't like the folks who think I want to talk with them because I have Apple stuff "just like them." The iPhone does not have the fail-safe of easy battery swap, that is pretty much why I have passed at this point. I always have spare batteries for my electronics, especially my cell phone. The number of times I have been forced to swap batteries is probably under 20 but at least 4 of them were critical calls that were made from relative isolation. Maybe they will give us a wireless charger that uses residual energy from Job's ego to charge the iphone.
Insightful comments, especially the sheep one. I have met more sheep in the IT field than any where except anyone involved with supply in the Army. Just like the sheep who pay sticker price; the sheep who buy "this season's" fashions; the sheep who grovel at the feet of MS, Google or Apple; the sheep who bleat about paying for anything; the sheep who think some flavor of *nix will save the world; folks who imbue anything with the prefix "i" as being a product of genius. The world is full of them.
Yes we all know how wonderful vinyl sounds as the quality was universally good in every pressing. Naturally if you first heard something on vinyl that is the way it was meant to sound...right? All recording mediums have positive and negative qualities, and some of these have far more pluses than minuses. I once had a Woody Guthrie fan tell me in all earnestness that he felt the clay cylinder recordings were more representative of the music than LPs! Listen to what you want, it neither breaks my nose nor picks my pocket, but stop trying to convince me that there is some special over-riding purity in vinyl.
Yet another problem with the myth that self-interest is the cure to all ills. When driven primarily by self-interest the basic music consumer likely sees no need to paying for what he/she can download for free. 20 years ago many of us made tapes of friend's music, or were given tapes, but the limited technology meant that it was a time consuming process to make them. Now you can download a pretty diverse array of music, or more efficiently you can have a few friends over and copy everyone's music library in an afternoon. The behavior has been there since the home user has had the ability to make copies of recorded music, the "personal use" argument was the standard cassette copying defence, but now what used to take hours of attention is done with a few keystrokes.
The question of morality is interesting. The promotion of self-interest will invariably lead to cheating when people try to get as much as they can for cheap or free without regard for the possible consequences if their behavior was copied by others. Poor driving, theft, littering and on and on: there is an endless list of issues large and small that are rife with hidden costs. In many cases the concept of morality is simply a red herring, an attempt at justifying one action or another through reducing the issue to one of the existence or concept of universal morality.
I teach the odd college class, and I have given seminars to business people on similar material. They are structured differently but they do have examinations of some kind. Naturally the business seminars are not graded per se, but over the years I have found that most people like some form of quantitative reference for what they can regurgitate back to me on paper. I have never caught a person cheating on my exams or other work when business people are involved but I have caught many students cheating. Are the business types better cheaters? Are they more "moral?" Are they simply following their self-interest?
Many students simply want good grades, knowledge is secondary or irrelevant. The business professionals taking a course are interested in learning something that will improve their profitability. When the motivation is to learn, cheating becomes unthinkable and self-defeating. Regardless if the motivation is getting good grades, or saving money and building a collection by downloading music, self-interest dictates that the seemingly "immoral" choice.
True, the B-58 used an external pod to carry the weapon and the new system uses a bomb bay, but in what sense is that contrary to the hype of the article? There is mention of "first time ever" but no mention of a weapons bay other than as the location of the new system. Use of a weapons bay at supersonic speeds is not entirely new, the A-5 could drop its payload at supersonic speeds from an internal bay...granted the weapon was ejected out the back of the aircraft from a bay between the engines.
The B-58 could drop at supersonic speeds, and the A-5 Vigilante may also have had this capability. During the 50's the USAF had a serious hard-on for all things supersonic. Given the generally limited supersonic capabilities of aircraft from that era the ultimate utility of the concept must have been called into question. The supersonic cruise ability of the new generation of aircraft has simply re-awakened a dormant idea. Much like the fashion industry, the institutional memory is so limited that many folks inside have no clue what has been done before.
General Ripper "went as mad as a bloody march hare" sending the 843 Bomb Wing to attack the Soviet Union and that initiated the sequence of events that led to the end of life as they knew it. Would Ripper have made the decision if he had known about the Soviets "doomsday device?" Dr. Strangelove makes one of the most cogent points about deterrence when he says "[D]eterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack." The gut reaction of General Turgidson to the Soviet Ambassador's announcement of the doomsday machine is "what a load of commie bull" and I imagine that Ripper would have been as dismissive.
Ultimately Ripper was the person who exceeded his authority and sent the bombers on their missions. When "the Leper Colony" (Picken's B-52) can't be recalled and ends up dropping a bomb it is still due to Ripper's abuse of command authority. The device would not have been triggered without the bomb that was dropped through Ripper's inappropriate use of Plan R.
Could the Soviets have waited to arm the device until after the announcement or at least make it operational concurrent with the announcement? The Soviets had to get it operational and tested before any announcement was made. Saying something like "in 6 months we will have a doomsday machine" is an invitation to a preemptive strike. Saying you have it when it is not operational is risky because enemy intel may have correct information. Ideally, the enemy doesn't know about the Doomsday device until it is operational.
The concept of a doomsday machine in the Strangelove universe was dismissed by the good doctor as "not a practical deterrent." Would this consideration have blinded US intel to Soviet development of such a device? Yes it is just a movie.
What about the crew of the Leper Colony? Assuming they reach Weathership Tango Delta and survived to get home somehow would they be subject to court martial or decoration? Major Kong and the crew believed they were following a lawful order and had no procedure to confirm the order with a higher authority, at least in the case of Plan R. Plan R was a contingency based upon the possible lost of National Command Authority, or decapitation, and the orders assume that there is considerable damage to the C&C network.
"the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"
Hmm, do you believe that having subs means needing a big surface fleet to protect them? The US has a big navy because they have a need to be everywhere at once. Some places the US likes to get involved lack any friendly air bases so they need carrier groups. China has no need to try to match the US Navy, just as the US has no need to match the size of the Chinese Army. Additionally, any intelligence of value on current US sub programs is already in Moscow and Beijing: history has shown how simple it is to buy information in a debt driven economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a variety of machines, mainly using a powerbook and a desktop PC. The PC is relegated to a few duties and the odd bit of work I can't do on the powerbook, the PC mostly gets used for racing & flight sims. Surveys like this one are pretty irrelevant and misleading: what you use depends a great deal on your relationship to technology. PCs are an easy decision for the bulk of consumers who simply see a less expensive way to get online.
When I was given a Kindle I found it interesting but not truly captivating. I found myself far more concerned with what electronic book distribution means long term and it was not a cheery vision. Governments will find it far easier to control the acquisition and distribution of knowledge in a society where print is inherently subversive. When books can be pulled at will we are in serious danger.
The Liberal Party is notorious for promising things in Opposition that they have no intention of following through with. Ultimately the Liberals will promise cash to the poor Provinces that will come out of the pockets of the rich Provinces, return to power and forget about Net Neutrality.
AT&T owes iPhone customers nothing: they have a monopoly and can price accordingly. Fanboys should know the release cycle of Apple products by now and get their contracts accordingly.
I don't think people really understand what the background is with the language issue. 50 years ago French speakers couldn't shop in their own language in may places: company stores hired Anglos only. Montreal was a great city if you spoke English, Yiddish or even Italian but for a Francophone it was a nightmare until the Quiet Revolution. The majority of the Province was Francophone, yet the economy was strictly managed by Anglos only and education was left to the Catholic Church in a deal designed to keep the population compliant. There were many Quebecois complicit in this, Duplessis being the primary criminal, but it is the Church and the Anglos who did the bulk of the work. What we are experiencing now is the tide of absurdity going the other way as the Government continues to expand the linguistic bigotry that Bill 101 gave us. My Grandmere would probably be happy that the battle now is about something as irrelevant as video games, shows how much things have changed.
65,000 feet is within the engagement envelope of a number of SAMs. The weapons it flies above are the lighter, more portable weapons utilised by lighter forces, the kind the US likes to fight.
Shinyung Oh's email!
Ms. Oh,
while we are sorry for your loss our recent round of layoffs was due to the recent problems with the economy. We took the decision to perform a single lay off en masse to allow the remaining associates and other employees to feel secure in their positions. This decision did not allow us to make special cases for those suffering from recent loss, and to be brutally frank if you wish that we consider situations such as yours while making our decisions it would not be a positive factor: we prefer associates who can produce viable offspring at full term. Good luck finding a new position in this economy, rest assured you will have appropriate references from our firm.
Good points. The Player Piano also gave composers the chance to hear pieces human pianists simply could not play. Conlon Nancarrow wrote many pieces that pushed the limits of the Player Piano, astounding recordings of what the instrument was capable of.
His motivation was nothing to do with protecting the Constitution or citizens of the US. He worked at the FBI and participated in operations that violated the Constitution and law far more egregiously than Nixon and his horde. Mark Felt took this action because the system did not believe he was competent enough to rise up the ladder. The promotion would have moved him up the food chain, satisfying his ego and Woodward would never have met Felt.
Woodward had connections in the intelligence community and was not the eager young reporter so often portrayed. Interestingly enough, whenever his record comes under analysis he has a swarm of lawyers on hand to silence his critics. Felt wasn't the only informant Woodward had, and it is pretty straight forward to figure out whom he knew that had access to the Whitehouse.
Watergate left us with a self-aggrandizing press, led to the Carter malaise and mainstreamed Reagan in the backlash. Hmmm, probably better off if Felt had accepted his own limitations rather than pretending he was outraged.
I am always amazed at the chattering about Chomsky & Hermann when they did not introduce a single new concept in media analysis. Jacques Ellul's "Propaganda" and many other works do far more than a facile anti-capitalist analysis, no wonder there is little mention of such a major work in the area in any of Chomsky's media analysis efforts. I believe this oversight is due to Ellul's broader, and hence more damning, critique of propagating influences: it isn't just the other side that makes propaganda and attempts to influence people. Accepting this would be very difficult for Chomsky, and heresy for his legions of followers eager to parrot his latest opinion.
Insightful?!?! There should be a rating for "poppycock." How often do those in power in Western nations "turn their gaze upon themselves?" Governments behave in a very similar manner towards the outside world regardless of their treatment of their own citizens. Those holding power in Beijing look upon the period of a "free" Tibet from 1913 to 1950 as an aberration and not the result of natural forces of history, and trying to change that POV through admonition and protests is a joke.
China is an authoritarian government concerned with keeping order and power within the hands of a select few. Truthfully they are only a few degrees removed from every other government in the world. What has happened is that the folks who used to cry for East Timor needed another cause celebre and Tibet has been groomed for this since the CIA started funding the Dalai Lama. Then the oppressed members of Falun Gong started their own media campaign and protests around the world. Falun Gong loves a martyr, just like the Communist labor organizers in "In Dubious Battle," knowingly pushing the limits of a strictly controlled society in a quest for headlines.
Human Rights granted by international charter are truly idealist. Most societies cope with tremendous restrictions because in the daily struggle to survive some things don't seem to matter that much. Are the Chinese "self-absorbed?" Probably no more so than any other nationality. The US is probably the best Western example of navel gazing while blundering about causing suffering in places known and unknown. Right now Chinese perfidy is confined within their borders, whereas US and Western activities go on all over the world.
South Africa could be largely ignored and chided into changing their ways, but China is big enough to pretty much do as they like. Somebody will always deal with you when you have over 1 billion people, and hold the US economy by the short hairs.
Downloading songs for Tibet is pretty weak if it is meant to be some form of protest. The funny thing is that few people seem to know the key role played by the CIA in the securing the modern mythology of Tibet.
The workaround only makes sense to get back to Vancouver itself. Going to the US or the airport one would skip recrossing the river on the Trans Canada.
A few years ago I was hired by a security company to do IT work and was required to get a government security license due to the nature of the data on the network. Kind of a hassle, but in this case it was mostly down to insurance. I am not familiar with Texas laws but from a cursory glance this seems a bit onerous.
I also found the "gliding bug" but not only in the Med. I used to plan missions in the North Cape area where I had to glide home most of the way after clearing enemy airspace. I am trying to remember the route for some unrealistic epic missions. I would fly over Finland, finding a nice seam in the radar coverage and hit an airfield near Kandalashka(IIRC) then move on to something between there and Polyarnyy then onto Severomorsk and Pechenga. There was an SA-5 (IIRC) battery that I liked to take out to make my egress easier.
I would climb as soon as I hit the outer mark of the ranges I had put on my map marking where I had encountered enemy activity. There was one airfield I really liked in Norway that was on an island and gave you a relatively easier dead stick approach.
I also enjoyed Gunship when it came out. In high school a friend and I stayed up all night playing Gunship before our history final. Lots of fun on 64k.
Nice they are so concerned about power consumption that they reduced the capabilities of the unit yet still make it necessary for a visit to the shop to change a firkin battery! I have a number of Apple products, like them all. The only drawback is I don't like the folks who think I want to talk with them because I have Apple stuff "just like them." The iPhone does not have the fail-safe of easy battery swap, that is pretty much why I have passed at this point. I always have spare batteries for my electronics, especially my cell phone. The number of times I have been forced to swap batteries is probably under 20 but at least 4 of them were critical calls that were made from relative isolation. Maybe they will give us a wireless charger that uses residual energy from Job's ego to charge the iphone.
Hilarious fanboy logic: Windows users going to Macs are at fault...right.
Insightful comments, especially the sheep one. I have met more sheep in the IT field than any where except anyone involved with supply in the Army. Just like the sheep who pay sticker price; the sheep who buy "this season's" fashions; the sheep who grovel at the feet of MS, Google or Apple; the sheep who bleat about paying for anything; the sheep who think some flavor of *nix will save the world; folks who imbue anything with the prefix "i" as being a product of genius. The world is full of them.
Che Palle!
Yes we all know how wonderful vinyl sounds as the quality was universally good in every pressing. Naturally if you first heard something on vinyl that is the way it was meant to sound...right? All recording mediums have positive and negative qualities, and some of these have far more pluses than minuses. I once had a Woody Guthrie fan tell me in all earnestness that he felt the clay cylinder recordings were more representative of the music than LPs! Listen to what you want, it neither breaks my nose nor picks my pocket, but stop trying to convince me that there is some special over-riding purity in vinyl.
Yet another problem with the myth that self-interest is the cure to all ills. When driven primarily by self-interest the basic music consumer likely sees no need to paying for what he/she can download for free. 20 years ago many of us made tapes of friend's music, or were given tapes, but the limited technology meant that it was a time consuming process to make them. Now you can download a pretty diverse array of music, or more efficiently you can have a few friends over and copy everyone's music library in an afternoon. The behavior has been there since the home user has had the ability to make copies of recorded music, the "personal use" argument was the standard cassette copying defence, but now what used to take hours of attention is done with a few keystrokes.
The question of morality is interesting. The promotion of self-interest will invariably lead to cheating when people try to get as much as they can for cheap or free without regard for the possible consequences if their behavior was copied by others. Poor driving, theft, littering and on and on: there is an endless list of issues large and small that are rife with hidden costs. In many cases the concept of morality is simply a red herring, an attempt at justifying one action or another through reducing the issue to one of the existence or concept of universal morality.
I teach the odd college class, and I have given seminars to business people on similar material. They are structured differently but they do have examinations of some kind. Naturally the business seminars are not graded per se, but over the years I have found that most people like some form of quantitative reference for what they can regurgitate back to me on paper. I have never caught a person cheating on my exams or other work when business people are involved but I have caught many students cheating. Are the business types better cheaters? Are they more "moral?" Are they simply following their self-interest?
Many students simply want good grades, knowledge is secondary or irrelevant. The business professionals taking a course are interested in learning something that will improve their profitability. When the motivation is to learn, cheating becomes unthinkable and self-defeating. Regardless if the motivation is getting good grades, or saving money and building a collection by downloading music, self-interest dictates that the seemingly "immoral" choice.
True, the B-58 used an external pod to carry the weapon and the new system uses a bomb bay, but in what sense is that contrary to the hype of the article? There is mention of "first time ever" but no mention of a weapons bay other than as the location of the new system. Use of a weapons bay at supersonic speeds is not entirely new, the A-5 could drop its payload at supersonic speeds from an internal bay...granted the weapon was ejected out the back of the aircraft from a bay between the engines.
The B-58 could drop at supersonic speeds, and the A-5 Vigilante may also have had this capability. During the 50's the USAF had a serious hard-on for all things supersonic. Given the generally limited supersonic capabilities of aircraft from that era the ultimate utility of the concept must have been called into question. The supersonic cruise ability of the new generation of aircraft has simply re-awakened a dormant idea. Much like the fashion industry, the institutional memory is so limited that many folks inside have no clue what has been done before.
General Ripper "went as mad as a bloody march hare" sending the 843 Bomb Wing to attack the Soviet Union and that initiated the sequence of events that led to the end of life as they knew it. Would Ripper have made the decision if he had known about the Soviets "doomsday device?" Dr. Strangelove makes one of the most cogent points about deterrence when he says "[D]eterrence is the art of producing in the mind of the enemy the fear to attack." The gut reaction of General Turgidson to the Soviet Ambassador's announcement of the doomsday machine is "what a load of commie bull" and I imagine that Ripper would have been as dismissive.
Ultimately Ripper was the person who exceeded his authority and sent the bombers on their missions. When "the Leper Colony" (Picken's B-52) can't be recalled and ends up dropping a bomb it is still due to Ripper's abuse of command authority. The device would not have been triggered without the bomb that was dropped through Ripper's inappropriate use of Plan R.
Could the Soviets have waited to arm the device until after the announcement or at least make it operational concurrent with the announcement? The Soviets had to get it operational and tested before any announcement was made. Saying something like "in 6 months we will have a doomsday machine" is an invitation to a preemptive strike. Saying you have it when it is not operational is risky because enemy intel may have correct information. Ideally, the enemy doesn't know about the Doomsday device until it is operational.
The concept of a doomsday machine in the Strangelove universe was dismissed by the good doctor as "not a practical deterrent." Would this consideration have blinded US intel to Soviet development of such a device? Yes it is just a movie.
What about the crew of the Leper Colony? Assuming they reach Weathership Tango Delta and survived to get home somehow would they be subject to court martial or decoration? Major Kong and the crew believed they were following a lawful order and had no procedure to confirm the order with a higher authority, at least in the case of Plan R. Plan R was a contingency based upon the possible lost of National Command Authority, or decapitation, and the orders assume that there is considerable damage to the C&C network.
"the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"
Hmm, do you believe that having subs means needing a big surface fleet to protect them? The US has a big navy because they have a need to be everywhere at once. Some places the US likes to get involved lack any friendly air bases so they need carrier groups. China has no need to try to match the US Navy, just as the US has no need to match the size of the Chinese Army. Additionally, any intelligence of value on current US sub programs is already in Moscow and Beijing: history has shown how simple it is to buy information in a debt driven economy.