Get back to me when your software figures out how to fly without your engine, since that is what this laser is targeting. This is not a Hollywood "blow up the plane" weapon, this thing burns through your engine and once the outer casing/bearings fail on a jet engine, the engine it'self will usually tear the plane apart, especially if it is centrally located, as with most fighter jets the world over.
Aaaaand a laser travels at 670,000,000 MPH. Assuming that Lockheed can make a targeting system that can accurately track and target something in the sky and a turret that can aim the laser system accurately (they already demonstrated both), the difference in design challenge is trivial between a target at 120 MPH and 800 MPH. Actually, the smaller drone is probably harder to keep the laser steady on than a full sized jet. Knowing the guys over there, I am confident if the laser technology is there, they can definitely make an effective weapon system out of it, assuming they can get a reasonable set of design specs out of the military without the government cocking it up with bureaucracy and ridiculous requirements.
The reason they are shooting down drones is price tag. If you have a couple of supersonic Soviet aircraft to donate, I am sure they would be happy to shoot them down for you.
Not sure where you are from, but in the real world, airplanes are tissue paper compared to ground vehicles. Unless you are talking about the SR71 blackbird, that had titanium leading surfaces to handle the air friction at high mach number, most conventional planes, including military aircraft, are skinned in either aluminum sheet metal or carbon fiber composite and are not designed to stop any kind of fire. Their key defense is in not getting hit and some level or redundancy if they do get hit. There are a few exceptions (A-10 comes to mind), but the key benefit to lasers over conventional weapons is in taking out fast moving targets, where you don't have to compensate for the trajectory of a physical weapon as you aim for the enemy target.
We already have many better and more effective weapons systems to take out enemy ground targets, but taking out enemy jets equipped with chaff, flares and stealth technology, taking out missiles in flight, those would be key operational advantages that we don't currently possess.
Just for clarity, if you develop the holy grail of laser systems (i.e. a small, omni-directional, computer targeting, rapid fire, efficient laser that can destroy 1 target per second with a range of 10km) SAM and other large, long range weapons become meaningless, because they get shot down 10km away from the plane, and only direct, rapid fire kinetic weapons (like bullets) and other laser systems are a threat to a laser equipped plane in the air, but again, the source of those threats (like other planes) is a big target that will get targeted and shot down 10km away by the laser system, much farther than the effective range of their standard 30mm cannons. If you can afford to weigh down your plane, you can give it ablative ceramic armor or at the least, give it a reflective paint job for the most common EM laser frequency your enemy uses, but if they have a different frequency pointed at you, you are screwed with the reflective paint defense.
Nice try at changing the topic, but I notice that you did not refute or even try to contest my facts. And all you have is confirming that in the past, Trump did what was best for his company within the current law JUST LIKE EVERYONE, EVER. How many times did you not take all the deductions you were allowed to on your tax forms (to help out the federal government?) No one ever does because it is not in your self interest, and you are legally within your rights to keep that money. If you don't like the rubber stamp worker visa programs, you should be thanking Trump, since he has killed the rubber stamp BS. Was it Trump's fault 8 years ago that the federal government was flooding the labor market with cheap foreign workers? No, so STFU already...
Regarding the Chinese steel, as a business, you get quotes and, assuming the vendors can all deliver the same quality, you go with the cheapest quote. If Trump hand not gone with the Chinese steel vendor since they were the lowest bid, you asshat partisans would have been calling him a racist. I refuse to play your bullshit heads I win, tails you lose game.
Also, pretty sure hiring illegals is it'self illegal, and since Trump hasn't been charged with that particular crime, your BS claim is in reality that Trump hired legit sub contractors who in turn hired illegals, which makes your clam 100% false and libelous. That is like you paying Home Depot $2000 to replace your carpet, and then the sub contractor that Home Depot hires out to uses illegals, who then show up at your house to actually do the work. You have no idea and no connection to the illegals, and only an idiot who is looking to conflate truth for political gain would say that you hired illegals.
Fact: Trump is a businessman and in business, you try to make the most profit you legally can. If you can hire an H1B for 60% of what you would pay an American for the same job, you put in the H1B application, because you can be sure your competition is doing the same thing. (To be clear, construction is not a huge H1B job sector to begin with).
Fact: Just because you play by the rules doesn't mean you like them. Trump ran his campaign on putting Americans first, and the Dims can't manage to wrap their tiny brains around the fact that Trump is keeping his campaign promises, and putting Americans first, as demonstrated by a 70% reduction in approved H1B Visas according to the article.
Pull your head out of your bias and just look at the facts of what Trump is doing. If you like it, stop being and intransigent asshat partisan and give the guy credit for the good he is doing...
Fortunately for us in the USA, we have a constitution that prevents gun grabbers like you from trying to take our guns (and we actually own guns, so even if you abrogate the constitution, you are still stuck trying to confiscate 300,000,000 guns from 50,000,000 gun owners who will fight you if you try confiscation by force.)
In the US, your odds of dying in a mass shooting are minuscule, less than 100 fatalities a year https://thesocietypages.org/so... out of 340,000,000 people. It is sensational and tragic, but dogs and bees combined kill about the same number of people each year. https://www.washingtonpost.com... no one is screaming to ban dog ownership or demanding bee licenses. Your odds of dying from medical mistake (500,000 deaths per year) are orders of magnitude higher. Gun murder rates in most of the US (outside of certain inner cities dominated by minorities) are on par with murder rates in Canada and Northern Europe, and unlike those places, we have the option and capability of defending ourselves. OTOH guns save hundreds of lives every day, usually just with defensive warnings or defensive brandishing, which is enough to deter most assaults, rapes and muggings. Further, our democracy is protected by gun ownership. All the disarmed countries are one charismatic leader away from another Nazi Germany. And there is nothing they can do to stop it if it happens, no fundamental backstop to tyranny of their own government...
The truth about freedom is that there is a cost. As a US citizen, I say 100 deaths per year is reasonable in a country of 340,000,000, If there were more law abiding citizens with concealed carry, the country would be even safer. If you are afraid of guns and a gun grabber, you might want to educate yourself on actual facts instead of the spoon fed propaganda you have been force fed for years. Try something like https://www.amazon.com/More-Gu... sorry, it is a "chapter book" that requires at least 3rd grade reading comprehension.
The report notes that Apple paid just $1.65 billion in taxes to foreign governments, despite making $44.7 billion outside the U.S. That's a tax rate of 3.7%, which is less than a sixth of the average rate of corporation tax in the world.
This is why complex tax laws are bad, and anyone who thinks companies pay taxes is fooling themselves. Companies sell products to make money, and the price of those products is dependent on a sum of all costs (which includes taxes) and a profit margin.
On the other end, it is actually pretty rare for companies to sit on massive amounts of cash like Apple. Those massive amounts of cash are making the dishonest politicians in the EU drool over the chance to grab more for their failing states, thus all of the tumolt over Apple's perfectly legal tax practices. When companies have billions of dollars, they have the money to hire expensive attorneys to minimize tax liability, and you wind up with companies like apple paying less than 2%. If the EU doesn't like it, they need to fix their shitty tax laws, not try to demonize Apple. Most of the time, companies do one of three things with their cash, they either pay bonuses to people, pay stock holders (through dividends or stock buybacks) or re-invest in the company. Apple is a corner case because they have had such a meteoric rise in profits that they literally do not know what to do with their cash. This is in part due to the incompetence of leadership at Apple (I would love to buy an Apple work station that had premium cooling, a hex core CPU and 64GB DDR4, but if I want one of those, I have to build a Hackintosh. I would love to see real new features in an iPhone (built in micro projector, holographic display, IR camera, true 3D photography, etc.), and some real storage (how about 500GB base size) and a 2 day battery life on my damn phone. For $1200 I can buy a windows gaming laptop, Apple and their rabid fans have lost sight of this simple truth, which is why I am see no reason to upgrade my iPhone 6plus.
Regardless of the incompetencies of management at Apple, the countries "missing out" on tax revenue only have themselves to blame. Instead of trying to tax Apple, which as we have already established above does not pay taxes, just jack up your sales tax rate to what you want. The net effect of making goods and services more expensive is the same, but it is nearly impossible to game the system or find loopholes with sales tax. The consumer still pays the tax and you can fire all the tax attorneys and most of the tax auditors since it is so simple to keep track of sales taxes.
Barak Hussein Obama and the Dims: "If you like your plan you can keep your plan."
Sean Hannity and the conservatives: "In July 2010 the government said small businesses -- 60 percent -- will lose their health care, 45 percent of big business and a large percentage of individual health."
Reality: A huge majority of small business and individual plans were discontinued and those on it LOST THEIR PLANS (mitigated only by Obama's unlawful waivers and failure to enforce the law). Most of those who lost their plans were forced onto much higher priced DIFFERENT plans. You are attempting to conflate meanings in the same way that Politifact tried to. You can lie to yourself all you want, but I have been paying attention for about 40 years and actually remember what was going on.
The best defense against the alt left propaganda is intelligence and the ability to think rationally, I have both, so take your BS elsewhere.
Local media killed it'self. They were every bit as biased as the national journalists that are now in their death throes, but on local issues, it was far more apparent and repulsive. Our local paper died 15 years ago and no one gave a shit.
With local Facebook groups and apps like Nextdoor, citizen journalists are far more empowered than ever to keep local government accountable, and it is far more difficult for local politicians to corrupt this kind of democratized journalism.
It is simple. As I said, Politifact is a shill for the alt left progressives, and they rely on your weak logic skills, and lack of both knowledge and curiosity. Take a look at the FIRST "LIE"...
1. "In July 2010 the government said small businesses -- 60 percent -- will lose their health care, 45 percent of big business and a large percentage of individual health."
By the end of 2013, government analysts said half of all group or employer-based plans would change to the point that they would need to meet the new standards -- which is about what Hannity said.
Essentially every "lie" is along these same lines, twisting the truth and trying to weasel around.
Furthermore, virtually every news agency was reporting the same thing, further highlighting the bias of Politifact and John Stewart and their BS, and the reality is that if Obama had not illegally issued waivers and not enforced the letter of the ACA law, that is exactly what would have happened. https://ballotpedia.org/Health...
NBC News reported that between 50 percent and 75 percent of the 14 million who buy individual health insurance would likely receive a cancellation notice over 2014 because their plans did not meet the requirements of the ACA.[3]
CBS News reported that more than two million Americans were told they could not renew their insurance policies for 2014.[11]
According to NBC News, the Obama administration knew in July 2010 that more than 40 percent to 67 percent of people in the individual market would likely not be able to keep their existing policies.[3]
Health policy consultant Robert Laszewski estimated 80 percent of individual insurance buyers would have to find new policies.[3]
In order to make their alt left claim that Hannity lied, they ignore the fact that this was widely reported at the time and twist the truth of what he said, and try to infer that Hannity said that these people would permanently lose their health insurance, which from the quote is clearly not what he said, and obviously, anyone with a brain can see that. As a viewer, I know this is not what he was saying, but rather that it would be major upheval, and the new plans would cost more, and people losing their existing plans would also directly make a liar out of Obama, who said if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor (proven lie, that they, including the architect of Obamacare knew was a lie from the beginning) and if you like your plan you can keep your plan (same deal, bold faced lie that they knew was a lie from the start). That has always been Hannity's position, not that people would permanently lose their health care and health insurance, but that Obama and the Dims were lying out of their asses the entire time about Obamacare.
Hannity and we conservatives were right, BTW. Millions of people lost their doctors and lost their affordable insurance plans and the replacements were far more expensive. Suck on this headline for a minute: "Average Individual Health Insurance Premiums Increased 99% Since 2013, the Year Before Obamacare, & Family Premiums Increased 140%" https://news.ehealthinsurance....
So you can take anything from Politifact and blow it out your ass, because they have no interest in fact, only shilling for the alt left. 95% of the"lies" of Fox news from John Stewart and Politifact are like this, and the oth
Virtually every incident on the Wikipedia link involves either a personal issue for some person not affecting broadcast content, or something that offends liberal sensibilities instead of a factual error on the words reported or spoken, unlike with CNN, or errors by guests and interviewees (who are not affiliated with Fox news) or racking errors (wrong tape with similar content that materially changes nothing in the story gets loaded by some intern and the host doesn't realize it until later). A fair chunk of the Wikipedia article appears to have been written by Politifact shills (I can see their conflation at work between the lines).
Only fools go to Politifact as what was once a semi-neutral entity has been completely consumed by the liberal progressives and is now just shilling for the DNC. I am just waiting for the news that they are being directly funded by George Soros and the DNC for the circle jerk that is Politifact to be complete. They routinely twist and conflate statements and facts, and almost always build strawman arguments to allow for their desired outcome, rather than going to actual source material and honestly analyzing claims and positions. If you can't see this after reading a few of their articles you are either blinded by your ideology or not smart enough to be involved in political discussion in the first place.
Nice try Equifax, but I will wait for the findings and recommendations of the federal investigators, not some stooges you hired to put out what amounts to a PR statement.
Only idiots and liberals making straw man arguments say that. The question has always been enough regulation and oversight to keep businesses honest but not too much that you stifle industry and growth.
You give the electorate way too much credit. The situations are often nuanced and most won't investigate the nuances such that over-simplified sound-bites "work".
I agree that the current electorate is like this, by liberal progressive design. 150 years ago, people were focused like a laser on politics and far better informed and educated than today. As a result, today the idiots votes can be persuaded with enough air time, and that is the only way the liberal progressives who want to abridge half the bill of rights ever get elected. My point was, eliminate the state run public schools, teach students how to think, and they will no longer be easily manipulated by the media or political ads.
Off the top of my head, CNN predicted that Comey would testify that he did not tell Trump he was in the clear regarding Russia, the next day Comey testified that he did in fact tell Trump that he was not under suspicion.
CNN has played this Trump Russia collusion thing non stop for 9 months, and it turns out the people getting indicted are Democrat operatives and they are being indicted for actions taken before joining the Trump campaign and in collusion with the Democrats... including Hillary Clinton. http://www.nationalreview.com/...
Oh, and you probably haven't even heard about this if you watch CNN (Bill and Hillary's bribery scheme to sell and illegally export 20% of US Uranium reserves to Russia) where they made over $100M for their foundation, that pays for all their living expenses except their house and their meals... http://www.breitbart.com/radio...
I have known a number of people in my on life who smoked their entire life and died in their 80s, so while I agree that smoking is bad for you, it is hardly the death sentence that the alt left makes it out to be. It largely depends on how much you smoke and your genetics. OTOH, virtually the entire left wing in the US is pro pot and see nothing wrong with smoking pot, which is arguably just as bad for you as cigarettes, if not worse and far more addictive and destructive to your life.
Lung cancer, the number one killer associated with smoking was not well understood for decades, and many of the "evil" tobacco company CEOs smoked themselves, hardly a practice they would engage in if they thought that smoking was deadly and will kill you. It is much more reasonable that science learned over 80 years as both knowledge and science developed that smoking was bad for you and the industry and public lagged behind the science. At worst you can argue that they ignored and stifled early signs and scientists who warned of the long term health problems associated with smoking. But making equivalence between selling cigarettes who no one has to by and which have been used in this country for centuries and hiring goons to murder some innocent is a stretch too far for me, it is not even on the same scale...
"Sure, movies are often based on exaggeration. That's not news. Think of it as Wells Fargo's billing scam on steroids: low-level employees pressured to rip off customers to keep their jobs. Concepts and patterns from real life are exaggerated to create drama. Dinosaurs probably didn't roar and bellow very often before eating/chasing their prey, but most people love that movie meme: it's drama."
There is an un-bridgeable gap between being pressured to create extra banking accounts (that cost the customer nothing) and murdering random strangers/dying for your job. Show me one instance in the US or any other civilized first world country in the last 60 years where a corporation collaborated internally (more than 2 people working together at the direction of the CEO or board of directors) to kill people. IT DOES NOT HAPPEN. EVER.
I am fine with a certain level of artistic license and exaggeration, but pull it out of your ass BS that has never happened and will never happen ON EVERY SINGLE MOVIE FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS is mental deficiency or derangement. Look at any action movie set in the modern era in the last 20 years. 90% plus of the time the murderous villain turns out to be a businessman...
As for businesses buying elections, last time I checked, businesses can't vote, and buying elections traditionally means bribery of election officials to help your candidate to win. That doesn't happen and is a felony. Regarding influencing elections (which is what you are actually complaining about), if you properly educate your population and teach them how to think (instead of what to think) in the state run, mandatory schools, it is impossible for businesses to influence elections through advertising unless they have a valid position, but teaching kids how to think would destroy the liberal progressive method of propagation (brainwashing kids in school and college), so we can't do that. Fake news companies like CNN and manipulators like Google and Facebook can definitely sway opinion and potentially can throw elections, so they need to be regulated as public utilities to behave in a fair, impartial and neutral manner, and I am all for making all paid lobbying by companies much more limited and having stricter laws about former lobbyists in the government (Obama had 65 people in his cabinet and close officials who were current or former lobbyists when hired).
This exactly. This article is nothing but alt left propaganda of the worst kind.
You may not like the law purging voter rolls, but the cry of racism is just blatant BS race baiting by the alt left, who is running out of steam and ideas. The Democrat gravy train of dead voters and voters bused in from out of state and convicted felons voting is ending as the rule of law is re-established now that the dims are out of power.
FFS the program just looks for identical names with identical birthdays, that has to be the least racist thing of all time. You are much more likely to run into racist behavior if you have auditors doing it where they could "accidentally" scrub black sounding names if they have racist inclinations.
Unless the allegation is more people of color illegally register and vote in multiple states? In which case, the author of the article and the alt left are revealed as the true racists...
1. Hollywood has a strangle hold on movie and TV media in the US, and for the most part, conservatives are not interested in playing dress up in front of a camera. This doesn't preclude us from pointing out shitty, trivial garbage that comes out of Hollywood. If you want to see what a good story looks like, there is plenty of content from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as some from the 1980s.
2a. Unions are not evil, but public employee unions in a democracy are a bad thing (they have cross interest with the country and can sway elections to hire their own boss). 2b. Most progressives in the US are not evil, and that was not what I said, but rather have a believable story of good versus evil. 2c. Aside from movies like Erin Brochovich, most "evil CEO/business man/etc." are totally irrational and stupid. Do CEOs screw their employees, the public and customers sometimes? Sure. How many have thousands of armed guards with full auto machine guns willing to die for minimum wage (like OCP in Robocop, a liberal homage to the action movie genre)? Answer: NONE. When white collar criminals get caught, they go quietly to jail, because that shit is pure fantasy. 2d. You don't like big corporations, that is fine, neither do I (Google, Facebook and Comcast are at the top of my shit list), but that doesn't mean they make a good villain for an action or super hero movie. I guarantee you won't find 10 businessmen in the entire US willing to fire an Uzi into a crowd on the street for $100 million dollars. I bet more than half the current or former population of any jail would go for it though, especially if you backed up an armored truck filled with the cash.
3. The real list of evil qualified for the bogeyman role in an action/hero movie is: Sentient evil: criminals, serial killers, gangs, drug cartels, rogue nations, aliens, etc. Natural evil: Earthquake, fire, flood, plague, asteroid impact, technology, AI, etc.
There are probably a lot more, but notice that there are no CEOs or companies on the list because companies don't kill people on purpose.
The hero winning is not the issue, but the alt left agenda version of a "good heart" is twisted and unrealistic, mostly because to be liberal you must live a life sheltered from reality. Most liberals are created in high school and college, when they are young, inexperienced and stupid. Those that go on to start, own or run a business are quickly cured. Similarly, those that must exhibit significant self reliance are also cured. Those that have everything handed to them by others and do very little for themselves tend to continue in the liberal mindset.
Strand a liberal on a desert island with cannibals and they either die quickly or become conservative.
Having a truly good heart does not preclude you from identifying true evil and dealing out just judgement (those last two words are anathema to liberals, but key to a realistic story line). Killing someone who unrepentantly and malevolently murdered your family and tried to kill you is not only rational, it is also just (as in the justice form of just), especially if your movie setting is outside the framework of a just society that can punish the evildoer (i.e. post apocalyptic).
For maybe 200 years in the US we had a pretty good justice system that removed any risk of revenge and used random citizens to justly punish those who committed evil acts removing the burden from the individual wronged and/or their family. However, the alt left believes that evil acts are a sickness caused by environment and mental state, not free will choices of a depraved and evil heart. Therefore any evil acts are not to be punished, but pitied and the person rehabilitated. That is in conflict with reality (in the US, within 5 years about 77% of violent felons will re-offend). This confusion of evil with illness is at the heart of Liberals confusion and aversion to justice and it makes for a idiotic hero and a shitty, unrealistic story.
I have never watched it, nor read the book. I don't worship at the altar of Ayn Rand. She was as much an idiot as the alt left is today. Selfishness is not a virtue, but it is a fact of human nature, and any worldview that ignores that fact (socialism, communism) is doomed to fail spectacularly (i.e. murdering over 100M dissidents in the last century) before collapsing or converting to fascist, authoritarian capitalism.
Honestly, until Hollywood stops trying to shove their alt left agenda down our throat, they will continue to do poorly. The fact about the left is that their ideology is just theoretical, and when they try to apply it in the real world, it is jarring, as in ruin the entire movie jarring (the hero, after killing mountains of henchmen, spares the evil mastermind because he is "better than that" even though the dude murdered the hero's children and made his wife a zombie plaything. Everyone knows that in reality that the villain would be red paste on the wall, or at the very least, beaten within an inch of his life. (This is why The Walking Dead did so well and Fear the Walking Dead spin-off is total garbage, one is a realistic drama about how normal people would act, the other is a liberal jerk off session about how they think they would act in the same situation). That is why the superhero movies did so well, at least at first. They were based on what is by today's standards, a conservative narrative, with a struggle between good and evil. But now even those stories are being polluted by the liberal agenda (Iron Man sequels anyone?) instead of staying true to the original material.
We need to get back to the classical theorem for our action/epic movies, where there are good guys (albeit still flawed humans) and some evil to overcome (not corporate suits, not CEOs, or other stupid Hollywood retardedness) who do evil things because evil is in their hearts and they want more power to spread their evil. Pick a genre (fantasy, scifi, horror, post apocalypse, apocalyptic, etc.) and away you go.
I predict that Hollywood knows this, and they will make a few "pandering" movies next year to refill the coffers, then go back to putting out their dog shit laced libtard brownies...
OK look, I am not being insulting (I can be if you really want). I was replying to your reply to my post (not to the other guy who you say you were replying to, I suspect I may have my filters set to nuke him because he is a Russian troll and life is too short to read their bullshit).
My basic position is simple. The chain of events makes it highly likely that there was collusion with Russia by the NSA double agent that took home classified cyber weapons under penalty of jail time or firing squad. It is also highly likely that the jack booted FSB (filled with former KGB agents and run by Putin, also a former KGB agent) has their hooks in the employees or the entire company of Kaspersky and has been using it as a spyware to scoop up foreign intelligence and whatever else it can.
Anyone who says this was all just an accident justified by Occam's razor is not a student of Russia, history or the human condition.
Unfortunately, I believe you are referring to hyponatremia, where purified water (not drinking water or electrolyte solutions like Gatorade) washes out the ions sodium and potassium. AFAIK, without blood loss and subsequent IV injection, you can't dilute blood, as your kidneys and GI normally maintain a balance of absorption and excretion and blood pressure and your body has a finite volume limit on total blood volume defined by your CV system.
Also, on the apple front, yes, you can overdose on B17, but calling it a poison is a stretch. I am not sure the science is there for that statement, since billions of people daily eat B17 (the bitter cyanide containing compound that kills most cancer at the cellular level in the lab). You get it from many different sources without becoming ill. Almonds contain small amounts (which gives them their "almond" flavor, which is actually the cyanide aromatic") as well as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, pretty much any wild variety of berry, most seeds and grains, and the list goes on. As with any vitamin, you can overdose, but your analogy calling B17 a poison is like eating 20 multivitamins and then claiming that your vitamins contain poison because it made you sick. To eat 200 apple seeds you would have to eat like 20 apples, unless you were specifically ignoring the apple and only eating the seeds. There is a difference between healthy compounds that you can overdose on and toxic and damaging at any concentration true poisons (like arsenic, cadmium, lead, Ricin, Oleandrin, etc.)
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Get back to me when your software figures out how to fly without your engine, since that is what this laser is targeting. This is not a Hollywood "blow up the plane" weapon, this thing burns through your engine and once the outer casing/bearings fail on a jet engine, the engine it'self will usually tear the plane apart, especially if it is centrally located, as with most fighter jets the world over.
Aaaaand a laser travels at 670,000,000 MPH. Assuming that Lockheed can make a targeting system that can accurately track and target something in the sky and a turret that can aim the laser system accurately (they already demonstrated both), the difference in design challenge is trivial between a target at 120 MPH and 800 MPH. Actually, the smaller drone is probably harder to keep the laser steady on than a full sized jet. Knowing the guys over there, I am confident if the laser technology is there, they can definitely make an effective weapon system out of it, assuming they can get a reasonable set of design specs out of the military without the government cocking it up with bureaucracy and ridiculous requirements.
The reason they are shooting down drones is price tag. If you have a couple of supersonic Soviet aircraft to donate, I am sure they would be happy to shoot them down for you.
A couple of points:
Not sure where you are from, but in the real world, airplanes are tissue paper compared to ground vehicles. Unless you are talking about the SR71 blackbird, that had titanium leading surfaces to handle the air friction at high mach number, most conventional planes, including military aircraft, are skinned in either aluminum sheet metal or carbon fiber composite and are not designed to stop any kind of fire. Their key defense is in not getting hit and some level or redundancy if they do get hit. There are a few exceptions (A-10 comes to mind), but the key benefit to lasers over conventional weapons is in taking out fast moving targets, where you don't have to compensate for the trajectory of a physical weapon as you aim for the enemy target.
We already have many better and more effective weapons systems to take out enemy ground targets, but taking out enemy jets equipped with chaff, flares and stealth technology, taking out missiles in flight, those would be key operational advantages that we don't currently possess.
Just for clarity, if you develop the holy grail of laser systems (i.e. a small, omni-directional, computer targeting, rapid fire, efficient laser that can destroy 1 target per second with a range of 10km) SAM and other large, long range weapons become meaningless, because they get shot down 10km away from the plane, and only direct, rapid fire kinetic weapons (like bullets) and other laser systems are a threat to a laser equipped plane in the air, but again, the source of those threats (like other planes) is a big target that will get targeted and shot down 10km away by the laser system, much farther than the effective range of their standard 30mm cannons. If you can afford to weigh down your plane, you can give it ablative ceramic armor or at the least, give it a reflective paint job for the most common EM laser frequency your enemy uses, but if they have a different frequency pointed at you, you are screwed with the reflective paint defense.
Nice try at changing the topic, but I notice that you did not refute or even try to contest my facts. And all you have is confirming that in the past, Trump did what was best for his company within the current law JUST LIKE EVERYONE, EVER. How many times did you not take all the deductions you were allowed to on your tax forms (to help out the federal government?) No one ever does because it is not in your self interest, and you are legally within your rights to keep that money. If you don't like the rubber stamp worker visa programs, you should be thanking Trump, since he has killed the rubber stamp BS. Was it Trump's fault 8 years ago that the federal government was flooding the labor market with cheap foreign workers? No, so STFU already...
Regarding the Chinese steel, as a business, you get quotes and, assuming the vendors can all deliver the same quality, you go with the cheapest quote. If Trump hand not gone with the Chinese steel vendor since they were the lowest bid, you asshat partisans would have been calling him a racist. I refuse to play your bullshit heads I win, tails you lose game.
Also, pretty sure hiring illegals is it'self illegal, and since Trump hasn't been charged with that particular crime, your BS claim is in reality that Trump hired legit sub contractors who in turn hired illegals, which makes your clam 100% false and libelous. That is like you paying Home Depot $2000 to replace your carpet, and then the sub contractor that Home Depot hires out to uses illegals, who then show up at your house to actually do the work. You have no idea and no connection to the illegals, and only an idiot who is looking to conflate truth for political gain would say that you hired illegals.
Fact: Trump is a businessman and in business, you try to make the most profit you legally can. If you can hire an H1B for 60% of what you would pay an American for the same job, you put in the H1B application, because you can be sure your competition is doing the same thing. (To be clear, construction is not a huge H1B job sector to begin with).
Fact: Just because you play by the rules doesn't mean you like them. Trump ran his campaign on putting Americans first, and the Dims can't manage to wrap their tiny brains around the fact that Trump is keeping his campaign promises, and putting Americans first, as demonstrated by a 70% reduction in approved H1B Visas according to the article.
Pull your head out of your bias and just look at the facts of what Trump is doing. If you like it, stop being and intransigent asshat partisan and give the guy credit for the good he is doing...
Fortunately for us in the USA, we have a constitution that prevents gun grabbers like you from trying to take our guns (and we actually own guns, so even if you abrogate the constitution, you are still stuck trying to confiscate 300,000,000 guns from 50,000,000 gun owners who will fight you if you try confiscation by force.)
In the US, your odds of dying in a mass shooting are minuscule, less than 100 fatalities a year https://thesocietypages.org/so... out of 340,000,000 people. It is sensational and tragic, but dogs and bees combined kill about the same number of people each year. https://www.washingtonpost.com... no one is screaming to ban dog ownership or demanding bee licenses. Your odds of dying from medical mistake (500,000 deaths per year) are orders of magnitude higher. Gun murder rates in most of the US (outside of certain inner cities dominated by minorities) are on par with murder rates in Canada and Northern Europe, and unlike those places, we have the option and capability of defending ourselves. OTOH guns save hundreds of lives every day, usually just with defensive warnings or defensive brandishing, which is enough to deter most assaults, rapes and muggings. Further, our democracy is protected by gun ownership. All the disarmed countries are one charismatic leader away from another Nazi Germany. And there is nothing they can do to stop it if it happens, no fundamental backstop to tyranny of their own government...
The truth about freedom is that there is a cost. As a US citizen, I say 100 deaths per year is reasonable in a country of 340,000,000, If there were more law abiding citizens with concealed carry, the country would be even safer. If you are afraid of guns and a gun grabber, you might want to educate yourself on actual facts instead of the spoon fed propaganda you have been force fed for years. Try something like https://www.amazon.com/More-Gu... sorry, it is a "chapter book" that requires at least 3rd grade reading comprehension.
The report notes that Apple paid just $1.65 billion in taxes to foreign governments, despite making $44.7 billion outside the U.S. That's a tax rate of 3.7%, which is less than a sixth of the average rate of corporation tax in the world.
This is why complex tax laws are bad, and anyone who thinks companies pay taxes is fooling themselves. Companies sell products to make money, and the price of those products is dependent on a sum of all costs (which includes taxes) and a profit margin.
On the other end, it is actually pretty rare for companies to sit on massive amounts of cash like Apple. Those massive amounts of cash are making the dishonest politicians in the EU drool over the chance to grab more for their failing states, thus all of the tumolt over Apple's perfectly legal tax practices. When companies have billions of dollars, they have the money to hire expensive attorneys to minimize tax liability, and you wind up with companies like apple paying less than 2%. If the EU doesn't like it, they need to fix their shitty tax laws, not try to demonize Apple. Most of the time, companies do one of three things with their cash, they either pay bonuses to people, pay stock holders (through dividends or stock buybacks) or re-invest in the company. Apple is a corner case because they have had such a meteoric rise in profits that they literally do not know what to do with their cash. This is in part due to the incompetence of leadership at Apple (I would love to buy an Apple work station that had premium cooling, a hex core CPU and 64GB DDR4, but if I want one of those, I have to build a Hackintosh. I would love to see real new features in an iPhone (built in micro projector, holographic display, IR camera, true 3D photography, etc.), and some real storage (how about 500GB base size) and a 2 day battery life on my damn phone. For $1200 I can buy a windows gaming laptop, Apple and their rabid fans have lost sight of this simple truth, which is why I am see no reason to upgrade my iPhone 6plus.
Regardless of the incompetencies of management at Apple, the countries "missing out" on tax revenue only have themselves to blame. Instead of trying to tax Apple, which as we have already established above does not pay taxes, just jack up your sales tax rate to what you want. The net effect of making goods and services more expensive is the same, but it is nearly impossible to game the system or find loopholes with sales tax. The consumer still pays the tax and you can fire all the tax attorneys and most of the tax auditors since it is so simple to keep track of sales taxes.
If you had actually been paying attention:
Barak Hussein Obama and the Dims: "If you like your plan you can keep your plan."
Sean Hannity and the conservatives: "In July 2010 the government said small businesses -- 60 percent -- will lose their health care, 45 percent of big business and a large percentage of individual health."
Reality: A huge majority of small business and individual plans were discontinued and those on it LOST THEIR PLANS (mitigated only by Obama's unlawful waivers and failure to enforce the law). Most of those who lost their plans were forced onto much higher priced DIFFERENT plans. You are attempting to conflate meanings in the same way that Politifact tried to. You can lie to yourself all you want, but I have been paying attention for about 40 years and actually remember what was going on.
The best defense against the alt left propaganda is intelligence and the ability to think rationally, I have both, so take your BS elsewhere.
Local media killed it'self. They were every bit as biased as the national journalists that are now in their death throes, but on local issues, it was far more apparent and repulsive. Our local paper died 15 years ago and no one gave a shit.
With local Facebook groups and apps like Nextdoor, citizen journalists are far more empowered than ever to keep local government accountable, and it is far more difficult for local politicians to corrupt this kind of democratized journalism.
It is simple. As I said, Politifact is a shill for the alt left progressives, and they rely on your weak logic skills, and lack of both knowledge and curiosity. Take a look at the FIRST "LIE"...
1. "In July 2010 the government said small businesses -- 60 percent -- will lose their health care, 45 percent of big business and a large percentage of individual health."
Sean Hannity, Nov. 11, 2013
Yet if you read the actual article here: http://www.politifact.com/pund...
You will find that:
By the end of 2013, government analysts said half of all group or employer-based plans would change to the point that they would need to meet the new standards -- which is about what Hannity said.
Essentially every "lie" is along these same lines, twisting the truth and trying to weasel around.
Furthermore, virtually every news agency was reporting the same thing, further highlighting the bias of Politifact and John Stewart and their BS, and the reality is that if Obama had not illegally issued waivers and not enforced the letter of the ACA law, that is exactly what would have happened. https://ballotpedia.org/Health...
NBC News reported that between 50 percent and 75 percent of the 14 million who buy individual health insurance would likely receive a cancellation notice over 2014 because their plans did not meet the requirements of the ACA.[3]
CBS News reported that more than two million Americans were told they could not renew their insurance policies for 2014.[11]
According to NBC News, the Obama administration knew in July 2010 that more than 40 percent to 67 percent of people in the individual market would likely not be able to keep their existing policies.[3]
Health policy consultant Robert Laszewski estimated 80 percent of individual insurance buyers would have to find new policies.[3]
In order to make their alt left claim that Hannity lied, they ignore the fact that this was widely reported at the time and twist the truth of what he said, and try to infer that Hannity said that these people would permanently lose their health insurance, which from the quote is clearly not what he said, and obviously, anyone with a brain can see that. As a viewer, I know this is not what he was saying, but rather that it would be major upheval, and the new plans would cost more, and people losing their existing plans would also directly make a liar out of Obama, who said if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor (proven lie, that they, including the architect of Obamacare knew was a lie from the beginning) and if you like your plan you can keep your plan (same deal, bold faced lie that they knew was a lie from the start). That has always been Hannity's position, not that people would permanently lose their health care and health insurance, but that Obama and the Dims were lying out of their asses the entire time about Obamacare.
Hannity and we conservatives were right, BTW. Millions of people lost their doctors and lost their affordable insurance plans and the replacements were far more expensive. Suck on this headline for a minute: "Average Individual Health Insurance Premiums Increased 99% Since 2013, the Year Before Obamacare, & Family Premiums Increased 140%" https://news.ehealthinsurance....
So you can take anything from Politifact and blow it out your ass, because they have no interest in fact, only shilling for the alt left. 95% of the"lies" of Fox news from John Stewart and Politifact are like this, and the oth
Virtually every incident on the Wikipedia link involves either a personal issue for some person not affecting broadcast content, or something that offends liberal sensibilities instead of a factual error on the words reported or spoken, unlike with CNN, or errors by guests and interviewees (who are not affiliated with Fox news) or racking errors (wrong tape with similar content that materially changes nothing in the story gets loaded by some intern and the host doesn't realize it until later). A fair chunk of the Wikipedia article appears to have been written by Politifact shills (I can see their conflation at work between the lines).
Only fools go to Politifact as what was once a semi-neutral entity has been completely consumed by the liberal progressives and is now just shilling for the DNC. I am just waiting for the news that they are being directly funded by George Soros and the DNC for the circle jerk that is Politifact to be complete. They routinely twist and conflate statements and facts, and almost always build strawman arguments to allow for their desired outcome, rather than going to actual source material and honestly analyzing claims and positions. If you can't see this after reading a few of their articles you are either blinded by your ideology or not smart enough to be involved in political discussion in the first place.
Nice try Equifax, but I will wait for the findings and recommendations of the federal investigators, not some stooges you hired to put out what amounts to a PR statement.
Only idiots and liberals making straw man arguments say that. The question has always been enough regulation and oversight to keep businesses honest but not too much that you stifle industry and growth.
You give the electorate way too much credit. The situations are often nuanced and most won't investigate the nuances such that over-simplified sound-bites "work".
I agree that the current electorate is like this, by liberal progressive design. 150 years ago, people were focused like a laser on politics and far better informed and educated than today. As a result, today the idiots votes can be persuaded with enough air time, and that is the only way the liberal progressives who want to abridge half the bill of rights ever get elected. My point was, eliminate the state run public schools, teach students how to think, and they will no longer be easily manipulated by the media or political ads.
As far as CNN, you can start with this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And this: http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/2...
Off the top of my head, CNN predicted that Comey would testify that he did not tell Trump he was in the clear regarding Russia, the next day Comey testified that he did in fact tell Trump that he was not under suspicion.
CNN has played this Trump Russia collusion thing non stop for 9 months, and it turns out the people getting indicted are Democrat operatives and they are being indicted for actions taken before joining the Trump campaign and in collusion with the Democrats... including Hillary Clinton.
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
Oh, and you probably haven't even heard about this if you watch CNN (Bill and Hillary's bribery scheme to sell and illegally export 20% of US Uranium reserves to Russia) where they made over $100M for their foundation, that pays for all their living expenses except their house and their meals... http://www.breitbart.com/radio...
I have known a number of people in my on life who smoked their entire life and died in their 80s, so while I agree that smoking is bad for you, it is hardly the death sentence that the alt left makes it out to be. It largely depends on how much you smoke and your genetics. OTOH, virtually the entire left wing in the US is pro pot and see nothing wrong with smoking pot, which is arguably just as bad for you as cigarettes, if not worse and far more addictive and destructive to your life.
Lung cancer, the number one killer associated with smoking was not well understood for decades, and many of the "evil" tobacco company CEOs smoked themselves, hardly a practice they would engage in if they thought that smoking was deadly and will kill you. It is much more reasonable that science learned over 80 years as both knowledge and science developed that smoking was bad for you and the industry and public lagged behind the science. At worst you can argue that they ignored and stifled early signs and scientists who warned of the long term health problems associated with smoking. But making equivalence between selling cigarettes who no one has to by and which have been used in this country for centuries and hiring goons to murder some innocent is a stretch too far for me, it is not even on the same scale...
"Sure, movies are often based on exaggeration. That's not news. Think of it as Wells Fargo's billing scam on steroids: low-level employees pressured to rip off customers to keep their jobs. Concepts and patterns from real life are exaggerated to create drama. Dinosaurs probably didn't roar and bellow very often before eating/chasing their prey, but most people love that movie meme: it's drama."
There is an un-bridgeable gap between being pressured to create extra banking accounts (that cost the customer nothing) and murdering random strangers/dying for your job. Show me one instance in the US or any other civilized first world country in the last 60 years where a corporation collaborated internally (more than 2 people working together at the direction of the CEO or board of directors) to kill people. IT DOES NOT HAPPEN. EVER.
I am fine with a certain level of artistic license and exaggeration, but pull it out of your ass BS that has never happened and will never happen ON EVERY SINGLE MOVIE FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS is mental deficiency or derangement. Look at any action movie set in the modern era in the last 20 years. 90% plus of the time the murderous villain turns out to be a businessman...
As for businesses buying elections, last time I checked, businesses can't vote, and buying elections traditionally means bribery of election officials to help your candidate to win. That doesn't happen and is a felony. Regarding influencing elections (which is what you are actually complaining about), if you properly educate your population and teach them how to think (instead of what to think) in the state run, mandatory schools, it is impossible for businesses to influence elections through advertising unless they have a valid position, but teaching kids how to think would destroy the liberal progressive method of propagation (brainwashing kids in school and college), so we can't do that. Fake news companies like CNN and manipulators like Google and Facebook can definitely sway opinion and potentially can throw elections, so they need to be regulated as public utilities to behave in a fair, impartial and neutral manner, and I am all for making all paid lobbying by companies much more limited and having stricter laws about former lobbyists in the government (Obama had 65 people in his cabinet and close officials who were current or former lobbyists when hired).
This exactly. This article is nothing but alt left propaganda of the worst kind.
You may not like the law purging voter rolls, but the cry of racism is just blatant BS race baiting by the alt left, who is running out of steam and ideas. The Democrat gravy train of dead voters and voters bused in from out of state and convicted felons voting is ending as the rule of law is re-established now that the dims are out of power.
FFS the program just looks for identical names with identical birthdays, that has to be the least racist thing of all time. You are much more likely to run into racist behavior if you have auditors doing it where they could "accidentally" scrub black sounding names if they have racist inclinations.
Unless the allegation is more people of color illegally register and vote in multiple states? In which case, the author of the article and the alt left are revealed as the true racists...
Penetrating logic from a proud product of our public schools no doubt...
The only brown shirts in 2017 are Antifa, and they are on your side of the aisle.
1. Hollywood has a strangle hold on movie and TV media in the US, and for the most part, conservatives are not interested in playing dress up in front of a camera. This doesn't preclude us from pointing out shitty, trivial garbage that comes out of Hollywood. If you want to see what a good story looks like, there is plenty of content from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as some from the 1980s.
2a. Unions are not evil, but public employee unions in a democracy are a bad thing (they have cross interest with the country and can sway elections to hire their own boss).
2b. Most progressives in the US are not evil, and that was not what I said, but rather have a believable story of good versus evil.
2c. Aside from movies like Erin Brochovich, most "evil CEO/business man/etc." are totally irrational and stupid. Do CEOs screw their employees, the public and customers sometimes? Sure. How many have thousands of armed guards with full auto machine guns willing to die for minimum wage (like OCP in Robocop, a liberal homage to the action movie genre)? Answer: NONE. When white collar criminals get caught, they go quietly to jail, because that shit is pure fantasy.
2d. You don't like big corporations, that is fine, neither do I (Google, Facebook and Comcast are at the top of my shit list), but that doesn't mean they make a good villain for an action or super hero movie. I guarantee you won't find 10 businessmen in the entire US willing to fire an Uzi into a crowd on the street for $100 million dollars. I bet more than half the current or former population of any jail would go for it though, especially if you backed up an armored truck filled with the cash.
3. The real list of evil qualified for the bogeyman role in an action/hero movie is:
Sentient evil: criminals, serial killers, gangs, drug cartels, rogue nations, aliens, etc.
Natural evil: Earthquake, fire, flood, plague, asteroid impact, technology, AI, etc.
There are probably a lot more, but notice that there are no CEOs or companies on the list because companies don't kill people on purpose.
The hero winning is not the issue, but the alt left agenda version of a "good heart" is twisted and unrealistic, mostly because to be liberal you must live a life sheltered from reality. Most liberals are created in high school and college, when they are young, inexperienced and stupid. Those that go on to start, own or run a business are quickly cured. Similarly, those that must exhibit significant self reliance are also cured. Those that have everything handed to them by others and do very little for themselves tend to continue in the liberal mindset.
Strand a liberal on a desert island with cannibals and they either die quickly or become conservative.
Having a truly good heart does not preclude you from identifying true evil and dealing out just judgement (those last two words are anathema to liberals, but key to a realistic story line). Killing someone who unrepentantly and malevolently murdered your family and tried to kill you is not only rational, it is also just (as in the justice form of just), especially if your movie setting is outside the framework of a just society that can punish the evildoer (i.e. post apocalyptic).
For maybe 200 years in the US we had a pretty good justice system that removed any risk of revenge and used random citizens to justly punish those who committed evil acts removing the burden from the individual wronged and/or their family. However, the alt left believes that evil acts are a sickness caused by environment and mental state, not free will choices of a depraved and evil heart. Therefore any evil acts are not to be punished, but pitied and the person rehabilitated. That is in conflict with reality (in the US, within 5 years about 77% of violent felons will re-offend). This confusion of evil with illness is at the heart of Liberals confusion and aversion to justice and it makes for a idiotic hero and a shitty, unrealistic story.
I have never watched it, nor read the book. I don't worship at the altar of Ayn Rand. She was as much an idiot as the alt left is today. Selfishness is not a virtue, but it is a fact of human nature, and any worldview that ignores that fact (socialism, communism) is doomed to fail spectacularly (i.e. murdering over 100M dissidents in the last century) before collapsing or converting to fascist, authoritarian capitalism.
Honestly, until Hollywood stops trying to shove their alt left agenda down our throat, they will continue to do poorly. The fact about the left is that their ideology is just theoretical, and when they try to apply it in the real world, it is jarring, as in ruin the entire movie jarring (the hero, after killing mountains of henchmen, spares the evil mastermind because he is "better than that" even though the dude murdered the hero's children and made his wife a zombie plaything. Everyone knows that in reality that the villain would be red paste on the wall, or at the very least, beaten within an inch of his life. (This is why The Walking Dead did so well and Fear the Walking Dead spin-off is total garbage, one is a realistic drama about how normal people would act, the other is a liberal jerk off session about how they think they would act in the same situation). That is why the superhero movies did so well, at least at first. They were based on what is by today's standards, a conservative narrative, with a struggle between good and evil. But now even those stories are being polluted by the liberal agenda (Iron Man sequels anyone?) instead of staying true to the original material.
We need to get back to the classical theorem for our action/epic movies, where there are good guys (albeit still flawed humans) and some evil to overcome (not corporate suits, not CEOs, or other stupid Hollywood retardedness) who do evil things because evil is in their hearts and they want more power to spread their evil. Pick a genre (fantasy, scifi, horror, post apocalypse, apocalyptic, etc.) and away you go.
I predict that Hollywood knows this, and they will make a few "pandering" movies next year to refill the coffers, then go back to putting out their dog shit laced libtard brownies...
OK look, I am not being insulting (I can be if you really want). I was replying to your reply to my post (not to the other guy who you say you were replying to, I suspect I may have my filters set to nuke him because he is a Russian troll and life is too short to read their bullshit).
My basic position is simple. The chain of events makes it highly likely that there was collusion with Russia by the NSA double agent that took home classified cyber weapons under penalty of jail time or firing squad. It is also highly likely that the jack booted FSB (filled with former KGB agents and run by Putin, also a former KGB agent) has their hooks in the employees or the entire company of Kaspersky and has been using it as a spyware to scoop up foreign intelligence and whatever else it can.
Anyone who says this was all just an accident justified by Occam's razor is not a student of Russia, history or the human condition.
Unfortunately, I believe you are referring to hyponatremia, where purified water (not drinking water or electrolyte solutions like Gatorade) washes out the ions sodium and potassium. AFAIK, without blood loss and subsequent IV injection, you can't dilute blood, as your kidneys and GI normally maintain a balance of absorption and excretion and blood pressure and your body has a finite volume limit on total blood volume defined by your CV system.
Also, on the apple front, yes, you can overdose on B17, but calling it a poison is a stretch. I am not sure the science is there for that statement, since billions of people daily eat B17 (the bitter cyanide containing compound that kills most cancer at the cellular level in the lab). You get it from many different sources without becoming ill. Almonds contain small amounts (which gives them their "almond" flavor, which is actually the cyanide aromatic") as well as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, pretty much any wild variety of berry, most seeds and grains, and the list goes on. As with any vitamin, you can overdose, but your analogy calling B17 a poison is like eating 20 multivitamins and then claiming that your vitamins contain poison because it made you sick. To eat 200 apple seeds you would have to eat like 20 apples, unless you were specifically ignoring the apple and only eating the seeds. There is a difference between healthy compounds that you can overdose on and toxic and damaging at any concentration true poisons (like arsenic, cadmium, lead, Ricin, Oleandrin, etc.)