Because they don't want something connecting to their network that can do damage to their network.
That's why it is illegal to buy a phone at Walmart instead of renting it from the phone company, and why you had to plug your phone into an acoustic coupler before you could send data over it.
Oh wait, it isn't 1962 any more...
If I connect the copper pairs of the phone line to my mains supply I imagine that it will cause all kinds of mess to my neighborhood's phone system - it might even kill somebody. If I do that, then I'm liable for all the damage I cause - perhaps including criminal liability. The same applies if I backfeed UPS power onto the mains, and so on.
The solution to these problems is proper liability for damage caused, not encasing phone lines in concrete and making it a law to attach your own devices to them. GSM networks work just fine without the draconian policies the CDMA networks employ - they are purely anti-competitive measures under the guise of technical concerns.
XP was introduced in Dec 2001 and is supported until April 2014.
Java 7 (SEVEN - not six - ie the latest version) was introduced in July 2011, and is supported until July 2014 (it might or might not go later, but no promises).
If you used something more sane like Windows 7 then you're supported until 2020.
If you deployed a new piece of software that requires XP you'd only be three months worse off than deploying a new piece of software that requires Java 7.
How about expecting the new software's company to support their newly sold software (and update it to support 7) instead of asking Oracle to support its many years old free software?
Uh, their latest version is only guaranteed support until July 2014 according to their website. Sure, I guess nobody is paying for it, but I'm not sure I'd base my software off of a platform that is not guaranteed to get security updates for more than a year.
The seven years Java 6 got isn't too bad, assuming it was announced that way back in the beginning. However, it still pales compared to the stability of win32/etc.
Sometimes you need to remove a bundled library to get a few games to work right, but I doubt that you'll ever get around issues like that on linux when people distribute binary-only applications without shims.
In case that was actually serious - Gentoo does rolling updates. The install media is updated anywhere from weekly (when things are going well) to every few months (when things aren't). Gentoo doesn't really have releases, so it never really gets into the press. While it doesn't have quite as much activity as it did back in 2004, I'd say things are a whole lot more stable. I've never found anything I actually use to be out of date, though - if a little-known application isn't supported I just package it myself, but anything likely to be mentioned on SlashDot is in the main repository (often including applications that aren't in the main repositories for Ubuntu/etc, but which are instead in PPAs/etc).
Most owners work more. They are usually small companies...
Most owners don't own small companies. That was half of my point. I did say that owners of small companies do tend to work hard, but that is a small portion of all owners. Most owners just own stock.
The Geneva convention only applies to the self identified, uniformed, soldiers of States that are party to the convention. It has nothing to do with someone who does not wear a uniform or carry an ID card.
Hence the reason I started my post with "Well, whether terrorists are 'soldiers' is up for debate."
The parent said, "when you capture the other side's soldiers you try to find out what they know. if they don't talk, you're supposed to try to make them talk." He specifically used the word soldiers, and I pointed out that this is not, in fact, how you treat captured soldiers.
Aircraft have gone off course by far more than that from time to time. There was that flight not all that long ago that the plane ended up circling the last waypoint because the pilots fell asleep. If the plane had been on heading mode instead of following waypoints they could have woken up an hour off shore depending on their flight plans/etc.
Sure, good pilots shouldn't get off course, but who says the mexican military has good pilots? Helicopters tend to be flown manually so the pilot could have just been navigating visually and mixed up landmarks.
I'd like to think that the US military would still keep an eye out for stuff like this, but it was still more likely to be accidental than otherwise.
Aircraft carriers were never really designed for that role anyway.
Initially they were for taking islands in the pacific ocean and supporting naval task forces, and they worked really well for that. They'd do fine in this role today. Then their main purpose was to screen the US against bomber squadrons coming in over the North Atlantic or Pacific.
In a marine role they're as good as just about anything. However, they're really not a replacement for an army and air force. You really do need ground bases in the areas you operate in if you want to operate inland.
If aiding the enemy didn't require intent then you could convict any soldier who fires a shot and misses, or who gets sick and is unable to man their post. Both of these things aid the enemy.
Mens rea - more people need to look it up.
Who would you rather have marry your daughter - somebody who plotted and tried to carry out a murder but was thwarted and the intended victim lived, or somebody who fell asleep at the wheel and ran somebody over? The first had bad intent but no bad consequences, and the latter had bad consequences and no bad intent. The former is clearly a MUCH greater danger to society.
Intent is everything - and half the problem with our legal system is that if anything it isn't weighted enough.
Well, whether terrorists are "soldiers" is up for debate, but when you do capture the other side's soldiers you are supposed to follow the Geneva conventions. The US signed them, after all, in part because it was the right thing to do, and in part because we'd like our own soldiers to be treated accordingly.
You can ask them for their name, rank, and serial number. After that whether they want to talk is up to them.
They're making unlicensed copies of copyrighted works every time they retransmit a packet.
For whatever reason this kind of trivial argument is allowed to make things like EULAs enforceable in some court rulings (you copy software into RAM to run it), but it doesn't apply to wire transmissions. The bottom line is that the first case gives big corporations more power, and the second case would just cost them money.
The saner approach to copyright is to consider all of this stuff non-infringing - they aren't reselling movies and such, which was the whole point of copyright back before all the nonsense took off.
So, my main issue with this sort of argument is that it assumes that everybody really has equal opportunity.
What do you do with somebody who is born with no arms or legs, and mentally retarded? Do you leave him out on a hill to starve, or do you take care of him? If the latter, do you just give him enough to suffer in near starvation for 60 years, or do you actually try to give him some chance to have a meaningful life?
The difference between that guy and yourself is entirely a matter of degree. As productivity increases you don't need as many people to work, and you require a higher level of talent to hold a job. Sure, right now there are jobs to design the robots/software, but they're not going to be filled by the average person.
So, you either have to write people off and let them die, or you need to come up with some way to feed them, and that is socialism.
Then factor in people who are very talented but are between highly specialized jobs and need an opportunity to retrain. You could employ them stocking shelves, or you could let them focus on doing higher value work much sooner, which is just better for everybody.
As far as fire insurance and all that goes - if emergency services were truly privatized then no company is going to provide those services for free to non-paying customers. If an employee of one of those companies runs into a house acting like a hero and gets hurt, good luck getting employer-provided insurance to cover the injuries. And if companies did operate this way (perhaps required by law) then the state of firefighting would be like the state of the center city ER - saddled with non-paying customers they can't turn away and unable to afford to provide proper care to anybody as a result.
The reason socialism ultimately comes about is that sooner or later you realize that people can't stomach living like Spartans who just leave kids out to die on the hill. Once you acknowledge that you're going to be bailing people out anyway, you might as well go the full nanny-state route and bail them out in the cheapest way possible. That means educating them so that they're more likely to at least hold minimal employment and not be complete wards of the state, and doing preventive care so that you're not spending so much in the ER. We don't do a good job of that stuff anyway - a recent Frontline episode pointed out some guy who was costing medicare tens of thousands a year in ER visits for genuine breathing problems and their costs dropped to zero when some foundation went in and spend a few thousand patching up his crumbling drywall at home. Taxpayers would have a fit over giving poor people nicer homes to live in, but they tolerate paying for preventable ER visits because they can't actually handle watching the poor guy suffocate on the sidewalk. The whole stick-it-to-em / ok-maybe-he-really-needs-help mood swings in the US just leave taxpayers paying even more money while leaving the poor even more miserable.
Good points, and I won't get into having the drone go autonomous once a target is designated as somebody else pointed out.
However, here is another angle to think about - what IS situational awareness? Sure, part of it is looking out the window and at your sensors, but a big part of it is digesting all the sources of info available.
Once you move to drones you're not limited to having a single pilot - the drone can be controlled by a team. The pilot isn't stuck facing forward either - you can have people keeping their eyes on various potential threats (ground, sky, intel, etc). You can have some monitoring the mission, and some monitoring defense. You can also have specialization - the bombing guy can do the bombing, and the dogfight guy can do the dogfights, and the rookie can fly the drone for the three hours it is transiting to/from the mission area. It isn't like you'd need 47 people per drone. It is more that you'd have 100 drones and 150 people to manage them, and at any time different people are running drones. You can't swap crews in the middle of a manned mission, but with a drone you could do it without even getting out of your chair.
There would still be human endurance issues though. On the one hand you'd have an advantage that if you're going into a dogfight you wouldn't have been sitting in a chair for four hours without a bathroom break staring at blue sky first. On the other hand, if you're the ace dogfighter on the team could you really sustain just going from one fight to the next for six hours a day minus a few breaks?
I suspect that the future of drones will be a combination of all of this stuff. A drone won't be assigned to one pilot with one mission who is strapped to his chair as if he could pull the ejection handles. On the other hand, automation will probably take over much of the work - computers and a team of people will identify/prioritize threats, feed them to the AI, and the AI will just go down the queue taking care of each one. The queue might even be served by a team of drones, and the AI might use tactics like sacrifice/etc when it makes sense. A retreating squadron of drones might send one drone back to attack a whole squadron of manned attackers - if you're a pilot in a squadron and you see one drone closing in to potentially fire a missile at a range with a very high PK do you just charge ahead and sacrifice the pilot who happens to draw the short straw (possibly yourself), or do you employ defensive tactics, which means that you likely get the drone but trade one drone for the opportunity to down the whole squadron you were chasing?
Maybe an example to look at is naval warfare - a ship is commanded as a team. Granted, a drone is far more expendable, but if you have the luxury of crewing it with a team why not do it? A ship has people with roles of processing incoming info, prioritizing threats (potentially in multiple theaters), and engaging threats. They can deal with subs, missiles, and offensive missions all at once, because no one person has to push all the buttons.
Jammers would only work from the standpoint of disabling remote control. However, if the drone is programmed to fly towards the jamming source until in-range, and then fire off a home-on-jam missile (with optional radar if the jamming turns off) then those jammers would not have a very long life.
Only issue with current SAMs is that they are generally fixed position, or slow to move.
Fixed position makes them vulnerable to cruise missiles and the like, or even artillery close to the line. Slow means that they're only in friendly territory - they're a defensive weapon.
If you want to escort a group of bombers you can't do it with SAM sites. Drones on the other hand are a good option. They could have lower radar cross section, and they could close without concern over being shot down.
You could think of a drone like an expendable/reusable first stage for your 1000 mile range SAM site, which launches missiles from runways instead of tubes/rails.
Well, a phoenix missile is about as close as you'll get to an ICBM in an air-air missile. That still doesn't go that fast, but it has a much higher trajectory than most.
I'd think that you'd launch the decoys as soon as the launch was detected, and since at range the missile takes seconds to close the distance you don't need to maneuver much to get separation. It probably matters more for things like torpedos which go back into search mode once they pass a decoy and they can search for tens of minutes (torpedos also don't burn all their fuel in a few seconds and glide).
That depends on how expensive they are. The pilot is probably just a small portion of the total cost of operation.
If your cost is measured only in tax dollars, sure.
However, when you measure cost in terms of votes, dead bodies are VERY expensive these days. Oh, and training pilots isn't exactly cheap either, and the best ones aren't replicable on an assembly line.
Glad somebody finds it useful. Now I know to hit the "this is a gift" checkbox even if not giftwrapping, but the recommendations are still heavily slanted to whatever mp3s I last bought for the kids.
The only reason anybody can make this argument is because it is an algorithm.
If I walk into a bar and ask for a particular brand of beer, and they don't sell it, then the bartender is going to suggest something they feel is similar. If I walk into a Honda dealer and ask to see a Camry, are they going to just tell you to go to the Toyota dealer, or are they going to suggest that I might be interested in an Accord?
Yup, common practice, and also highly anti-competitive.
If I were dictator I'd ban exclusive agreements of any kind. If you want to sell more data plans then have the best data plan, not an exclusive agreement so that in order to buy the phone you want you have to buy a data plan you don't want.
Also consider the legal implications for yourself if you have such a recording device. If you ever are suspected of a crime, or investigated, sued, or anything else, they will subpoena the video / audio from this device.
Well, a solution to that would be to recognize divulgence of passwords/keys as self-incrimination and subject to the 5th ammendment. Why it isn't already makes no sense to me.
I'm wondering how long it will be before it becomes practical to reliably obtain the memories of somebody against their will. What is the difference between playing back a recording of an event, or simply directly obtaining the memories of all the witnesses of the event (including the accused and victim)? We already lock people up forever if they refuse to divulge encryption keys.
>Conversely, if if you're paying somebody $50/task to do something,
That's where you went wrong. We're talking about employees, not vendors/contractors. So they're being paid by the hour (or month), not by the task.
WHY did you hire the employees in the first place? Did you hire them because you have hours in the day where you aren't losing enough money? More likely, you hired them because you had work to get done.
Sure, the employee is paid by the hour. However, they're also expected to get work done as well. So, just multiple $/hr with hr/task and you get what you're paying them by the task. If you could get all the work done in other ways for less than that you should fire the worker immediately regardless of how busy they are. To do otherwise would be like hiring 50 ditch diggers for a week instead of paying somebody $500 to come out with their backhoe for an afternoon. Those ditch diggers could generate an impressive amount of sweat and hard labor during that week, but as far as the bottom line goes they generate nothing that the one guy working the backhoe with a cup of lemonade in the armrest doesn't.
If you don't understand the actual business value created by your employees then you were a fool to hire them. If you do understand it, then you'll have no trouble understanding that value whether they work at home or not.
The issue tends to be with large corporations governed by middle managers who could care less about the value of the work they deliver - they just care about making their boss happy and collecting their paycheck. The boss is in a similar position, and it is easy to walk around and see how busy everybody looks. Making a profit is a secondary concern - little of that profit goes into their pockets.
Small business owners would probably understand how to manage remote work better, though often the types of businesses they operate benefit less from it (you can't exactly let the guy stocking shelves work from home).
My argument wasn't with the laudable goal of minimizing the role of government. I merely wanted to point out that government employees are productive.
Perhaps some of the issue with the growing size of government is that there is increasing importance being placed on socialism, and this tends to be accomplished through government services. For whatever reason it is OK to have public schools help rich and poor alike, but it isn't OK to issue vouchers to send poor kids to private schools.
Education is a case where this debate is fairly mature, but it isn't actually a great example. To your point about the free market, kids don't really get a choice in whether they even want to be educated in the first place, and giving them that choice would be unwise.
If you want to actually give people a real choice in private providers of what are traditionally government services then socialism basically needs to consist of pure wealth redistribution - taxing rich people, giving money to everybody else, and letting them decide what to use it for. That starts breaking down when people go out to the movies more and skip the payments for their fire insurance (which now includes the service of putting out the fire), and then entire neighborhoods burn down while fire-fighters just form perimeters around the homes of paying customers and otherwise toast marshmallows. I don't think our society is REALLY willing to let people suffer the full consequences of their decisions, and I'm not entirely convinced that doing so is the right thing to do, even if it is the more economically efficient thing to do.
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Because they don't want something connecting to their network that can do damage to their network.
That's why it is illegal to buy a phone at Walmart instead of renting it from the phone company, and why you had to plug your phone into an acoustic coupler before you could send data over it.
Oh wait, it isn't 1962 any more...
If I connect the copper pairs of the phone line to my mains supply I imagine that it will cause all kinds of mess to my neighborhood's phone system - it might even kill somebody. If I do that, then I'm liable for all the damage I cause - perhaps including criminal liability. The same applies if I backfeed UPS power onto the mains, and so on.
The solution to these problems is proper liability for damage caused, not encasing phone lines in concrete and making it a law to attach your own devices to them. GSM networks work just fine without the draconian policies the CDMA networks employ - they are purely anti-competitive measures under the guise of technical concerns.
I wouldn't complain too much about XP.
XP was introduced in Dec 2001 and is supported until April 2014.
Java 7 (SEVEN - not six - ie the latest version) was introduced in July 2011, and is supported until July 2014 (it might or might not go later, but no promises).
If you used something more sane like Windows 7 then you're supported until 2020.
If you deployed a new piece of software that requires XP you'd only be three months worse off than deploying a new piece of software that requires Java 7.
How about expecting the new software's company to support their newly sold software (and update it to support 7) instead of asking Oracle to support its many years old free software?
Uh, their latest version is only guaranteed support until July 2014 according to their website. Sure, I guess nobody is paying for it, but I'm not sure I'd base my software off of a platform that is not guaranteed to get security updates for more than a year.
The seven years Java 6 got isn't too bad, assuming it was announced that way back in the beginning. However, it still pales compared to the stability of win32/etc.
Works fine on Gentoo as well.
Sometimes you need to remove a bundled library to get a few games to work right, but I doubt that you'll ever get around issues like that on linux when people distribute binary-only applications without shims.
In case that was actually serious - Gentoo does rolling updates. The install media is updated anywhere from weekly (when things are going well) to every few months (when things aren't). Gentoo doesn't really have releases, so it never really gets into the press. While it doesn't have quite as much activity as it did back in 2004, I'd say things are a whole lot more stable. I've never found anything I actually use to be out of date, though - if a little-known application isn't supported I just package it myself, but anything likely to be mentioned on SlashDot is in the main repository (often including applications that aren't in the main repositories for Ubuntu/etc, but which are instead in PPAs/etc).
Most owners work more. They are usually small companies...
Most owners don't own small companies. That was half of my point. I did say that owners of small companies do tend to work hard, but that is a small portion of all owners. Most owners just own stock.
The Geneva convention only applies to the self identified, uniformed, soldiers of States that are party to the convention. It has nothing to do with someone who does not wear a uniform or carry an ID card.
Hence the reason I started my post with "Well, whether terrorists are 'soldiers' is up for debate."
The parent said, "when you capture the other side's soldiers you try to find out what they know. if they don't talk, you're supposed to try to make them talk." He specifically used the word soldiers, and I pointed out that this is not, in fact, how you treat captured soldiers.
Aircraft have gone off course by far more than that from time to time. There was that flight not all that long ago that the plane ended up circling the last waypoint because the pilots fell asleep. If the plane had been on heading mode instead of following waypoints they could have woken up an hour off shore depending on their flight plans/etc.
Sure, good pilots shouldn't get off course, but who says the mexican military has good pilots? Helicopters tend to be flown manually so the pilot could have just been navigating visually and mixed up landmarks.
I'd like to think that the US military would still keep an eye out for stuff like this, but it was still more likely to be accidental than otherwise.
Aircraft carriers were never really designed for that role anyway.
Initially they were for taking islands in the pacific ocean and supporting naval task forces, and they worked really well for that. They'd do fine in this role today. Then their main purpose was to screen the US against bomber squadrons coming in over the North Atlantic or Pacific.
In a marine role they're as good as just about anything. However, they're really not a replacement for an army and air force. You really do need ground bases in the areas you operate in if you want to operate inland.
If aiding the enemy didn't require intent then you could convict any soldier who fires a shot and misses, or who gets sick and is unable to man their post. Both of these things aid the enemy.
Mens rea - more people need to look it up.
Who would you rather have marry your daughter - somebody who plotted and tried to carry out a murder but was thwarted and the intended victim lived, or somebody who fell asleep at the wheel and ran somebody over? The first had bad intent but no bad consequences, and the latter had bad consequences and no bad intent. The former is clearly a MUCH greater danger to society.
Intent is everything - and half the problem with our legal system is that if anything it isn't weighted enough.
Well, whether terrorists are "soldiers" is up for debate, but when you do capture the other side's soldiers you are supposed to follow the Geneva conventions. The US signed them, after all, in part because it was the right thing to do, and in part because we'd like our own soldiers to be treated accordingly.
You can ask them for their name, rank, and serial number. After that whether they want to talk is up to them.
They're making unlicensed copies of copyrighted works every time they retransmit a packet.
For whatever reason this kind of trivial argument is allowed to make things like EULAs enforceable in some court rulings (you copy software into RAM to run it), but it doesn't apply to wire transmissions. The bottom line is that the first case gives big corporations more power, and the second case would just cost them money.
The saner approach to copyright is to consider all of this stuff non-infringing - they aren't reselling movies and such, which was the whole point of copyright back before all the nonsense took off.
So, my main issue with this sort of argument is that it assumes that everybody really has equal opportunity.
What do you do with somebody who is born with no arms or legs, and mentally retarded? Do you leave him out on a hill to starve, or do you take care of him? If the latter, do you just give him enough to suffer in near starvation for 60 years, or do you actually try to give him some chance to have a meaningful life?
The difference between that guy and yourself is entirely a matter of degree. As productivity increases you don't need as many people to work, and you require a higher level of talent to hold a job. Sure, right now there are jobs to design the robots/software, but they're not going to be filled by the average person.
So, you either have to write people off and let them die, or you need to come up with some way to feed them, and that is socialism.
Then factor in people who are very talented but are between highly specialized jobs and need an opportunity to retrain. You could employ them stocking shelves, or you could let them focus on doing higher value work much sooner, which is just better for everybody.
As far as fire insurance and all that goes - if emergency services were truly privatized then no company is going to provide those services for free to non-paying customers. If an employee of one of those companies runs into a house acting like a hero and gets hurt, good luck getting employer-provided insurance to cover the injuries. And if companies did operate this way (perhaps required by law) then the state of firefighting would be like the state of the center city ER - saddled with non-paying customers they can't turn away and unable to afford to provide proper care to anybody as a result.
The reason socialism ultimately comes about is that sooner or later you realize that people can't stomach living like Spartans who just leave kids out to die on the hill. Once you acknowledge that you're going to be bailing people out anyway, you might as well go the full nanny-state route and bail them out in the cheapest way possible. That means educating them so that they're more likely to at least hold minimal employment and not be complete wards of the state, and doing preventive care so that you're not spending so much in the ER. We don't do a good job of that stuff anyway - a recent Frontline episode pointed out some guy who was costing medicare tens of thousands a year in ER visits for genuine breathing problems and their costs dropped to zero when some foundation went in and spend a few thousand patching up his crumbling drywall at home. Taxpayers would have a fit over giving poor people nicer homes to live in, but they tolerate paying for preventable ER visits because they can't actually handle watching the poor guy suffocate on the sidewalk. The whole stick-it-to-em / ok-maybe-he-really-needs-help mood swings in the US just leave taxpayers paying even more money while leaving the poor even more miserable.
Good points, and I won't get into having the drone go autonomous once a target is designated as somebody else pointed out.
However, here is another angle to think about - what IS situational awareness? Sure, part of it is looking out the window and at your sensors, but a big part of it is digesting all the sources of info available.
Once you move to drones you're not limited to having a single pilot - the drone can be controlled by a team. The pilot isn't stuck facing forward either - you can have people keeping their eyes on various potential threats (ground, sky, intel, etc). You can have some monitoring the mission, and some monitoring defense. You can also have specialization - the bombing guy can do the bombing, and the dogfight guy can do the dogfights, and the rookie can fly the drone for the three hours it is transiting to/from the mission area. It isn't like you'd need 47 people per drone. It is more that you'd have 100 drones and 150 people to manage them, and at any time different people are running drones. You can't swap crews in the middle of a manned mission, but with a drone you could do it without even getting out of your chair.
There would still be human endurance issues though. On the one hand you'd have an advantage that if you're going into a dogfight you wouldn't have been sitting in a chair for four hours without a bathroom break staring at blue sky first. On the other hand, if you're the ace dogfighter on the team could you really sustain just going from one fight to the next for six hours a day minus a few breaks?
I suspect that the future of drones will be a combination of all of this stuff. A drone won't be assigned to one pilot with one mission who is strapped to his chair as if he could pull the ejection handles. On the other hand, automation will probably take over much of the work - computers and a team of people will identify/prioritize threats, feed them to the AI, and the AI will just go down the queue taking care of each one. The queue might even be served by a team of drones, and the AI might use tactics like sacrifice/etc when it makes sense. A retreating squadron of drones might send one drone back to attack a whole squadron of manned attackers - if you're a pilot in a squadron and you see one drone closing in to potentially fire a missile at a range with a very high PK do you just charge ahead and sacrifice the pilot who happens to draw the short straw (possibly yourself), or do you employ defensive tactics, which means that you likely get the drone but trade one drone for the opportunity to down the whole squadron you were chasing?
Maybe an example to look at is naval warfare - a ship is commanded as a team. Granted, a drone is far more expendable, but if you have the luxury of crewing it with a team why not do it? A ship has people with roles of processing incoming info, prioritizing threats (potentially in multiple theaters), and engaging threats. They can deal with subs, missiles, and offensive missions all at once, because no one person has to push all the buttons.
Jammers would only work from the standpoint of disabling remote control. However, if the drone is programmed to fly towards the jamming source until in-range, and then fire off a home-on-jam missile (with optional radar if the jamming turns off) then those jammers would not have a very long life.
Only issue with current SAMs is that they are generally fixed position, or slow to move.
Fixed position makes them vulnerable to cruise missiles and the like, or even artillery close to the line. Slow means that they're only in friendly territory - they're a defensive weapon.
If you want to escort a group of bombers you can't do it with SAM sites. Drones on the other hand are a good option. They could have lower radar cross section, and they could close without concern over being shot down.
You could think of a drone like an expendable/reusable first stage for your 1000 mile range SAM site, which launches missiles from runways instead of tubes/rails.
Well, a phoenix missile is about as close as you'll get to an ICBM in an air-air missile. That still doesn't go that fast, but it has a much higher trajectory than most.
I'd think that you'd launch the decoys as soon as the launch was detected, and since at range the missile takes seconds to close the distance you don't need to maneuver much to get separation. It probably matters more for things like torpedos which go back into search mode once they pass a decoy and they can search for tens of minutes (torpedos also don't burn all their fuel in a few seconds and glide).
That depends on how expensive they are. The pilot is probably just a small portion of the total cost of operation.
If your cost is measured only in tax dollars, sure.
However, when you measure cost in terms of votes, dead bodies are VERY expensive these days. Oh, and training pilots isn't exactly cheap either, and the best ones aren't replicable on an assembly line.
Glad somebody finds it useful. Now I know to hit the "this is a gift" checkbox even if not giftwrapping, but the recommendations are still heavily slanted to whatever mp3s I last bought for the kids.
The only reason anybody can make this argument is because it is an algorithm.
If I walk into a bar and ask for a particular brand of beer, and they don't sell it, then the bartender is going to suggest something they feel is similar. If I walk into a Honda dealer and ask to see a Camry, are they going to just tell you to go to the Toyota dealer, or are they going to suggest that I might be interested in an Accord?
Yup, common practice, and also highly anti-competitive.
If I were dictator I'd ban exclusive agreements of any kind. If you want to sell more data plans then have the best data plan, not an exclusive agreement so that in order to buy the phone you want you have to buy a data plan you don't want.
Also consider the legal implications for yourself if you have such a recording device. If you ever are suspected of a crime, or investigated, sued, or anything else, they will subpoena the video / audio from this device.
Well, a solution to that would be to recognize divulgence of passwords/keys as self-incrimination and subject to the 5th ammendment. Why it isn't already makes no sense to me.
I'm wondering how long it will be before it becomes practical to reliably obtain the memories of somebody against their will. What is the difference between playing back a recording of an event, or simply directly obtaining the memories of all the witnesses of the event (including the accused and victim)? We already lock people up forever if they refuse to divulge encryption keys.
>Conversely, if if you're paying somebody $50/task to do something,
That's where you went wrong. We're talking about employees, not vendors/contractors. So they're being paid by the hour (or month), not by the task.
WHY did you hire the employees in the first place? Did you hire them because you have hours in the day where you aren't losing enough money? More likely, you hired them because you had work to get done.
Sure, the employee is paid by the hour. However, they're also expected to get work done as well. So, just multiple $/hr with hr/task and you get what you're paying them by the task. If you could get all the work done in other ways for less than that you should fire the worker immediately regardless of how busy they are. To do otherwise would be like hiring 50 ditch diggers for a week instead of paying somebody $500 to come out with their backhoe for an afternoon. Those ditch diggers could generate an impressive amount of sweat and hard labor during that week, but as far as the bottom line goes they generate nothing that the one guy working the backhoe with a cup of lemonade in the armrest doesn't.
If you don't understand the actual business value created by your employees then you were a fool to hire them. If you do understand it, then you'll have no trouble understanding that value whether they work at home or not.
The issue tends to be with large corporations governed by middle managers who could care less about the value of the work they deliver - they just care about making their boss happy and collecting their paycheck. The boss is in a similar position, and it is easy to walk around and see how busy everybody looks. Making a profit is a secondary concern - little of that profit goes into their pockets.
Small business owners would probably understand how to manage remote work better, though often the types of businesses they operate benefit less from it (you can't exactly let the guy stocking shelves work from home).
My argument wasn't with the laudable goal of minimizing the role of government. I merely wanted to point out that government employees are productive.
Perhaps some of the issue with the growing size of government is that there is increasing importance being placed on socialism, and this tends to be accomplished through government services. For whatever reason it is OK to have public schools help rich and poor alike, but it isn't OK to issue vouchers to send poor kids to private schools.
Education is a case where this debate is fairly mature, but it isn't actually a great example. To your point about the free market, kids don't really get a choice in whether they even want to be educated in the first place, and giving them that choice would be unwise.
If you want to actually give people a real choice in private providers of what are traditionally government services then socialism basically needs to consist of pure wealth redistribution - taxing rich people, giving money to everybody else, and letting them decide what to use it for. That starts breaking down when people go out to the movies more and skip the payments for their fire insurance (which now includes the service of putting out the fire), and then entire neighborhoods burn down while fire-fighters just form perimeters around the homes of paying customers and otherwise toast marshmallows. I don't think our society is REALLY willing to let people suffer the full consequences of their decisions, and I'm not entirely convinced that doing so is the right thing to do, even if it is the more economically efficient thing to do.