I find macbooks work better for my non technical family members.
I tried giving them Chromebooks once and there were all sorts of compatibility problems with printers, my daughter's school website and media sources. Windows PCs were a pain to manage and keep secure. Macbooks have better security properties and take less of my time.
I can't imagine that any website would work on Chrome on OSX that wouldn't work on Chrome on ChromeOS. Of course, browser compatibility issues are nothing new, and you are limited to Chrome on ChromeOS. ChromeOS doesn't have any "compatibility problems" with printers per se - it just can only print via CloudPrint, which means either your printer supports it, or it is hooked up to something else which does (like a PC running the Chrome browser or a print server). The printing issue is the biggest pain with using ChromeOS so if you're going to go that route you do need to plan for it. Media sources that require some kind of plugin definitely are not going to work, though flash usually does (but not always) - many major services have Chrome apps which should work.
You definitely have to adapt what you do to the Chromebook, and not the other way around. You're going to have to ditch stuff like Libreoffice and so on.
All the same, I'd give them serious thought. The only laptop I could imagine buying right now is a Chromebook. I do use both Windows and a somewhat-more-traditional Linux distro on the desktop, but I'm not a typical facebook user either.
If society can change to where we accept that we're all flawed and that a few flaws shouldn't automatically disqualify us, then doxing largely becomes irrelevant and IMHO our world will become a much nicer place.
Yeah, how is that going to happen? Answer: doxing. It will become so commonplace that things we think are a big deal today will become no big deal because we'll learn just how prevalent they are in society.
Tend to agree. Privacy is going to go the way of the dodo. Sooner or later somebody will make a FOSS package that generates a manageable data stream from a video feed that assigns a UUID to every face that enters the frame along with location and time references, and also tags every letter/number that enters the frame, and it will run on something the size of a cell phone without using much power. Then people will mount cameras on their houses/cars/person/etc and upload the data to 15 different public servers in 15 different countries, who will then distribute/aggregate the data. At that point you can just do a google-like search on anybody and show everyplace they've been since birth. When storage/bandwidth gets cheap enough people will also just archive all that raw video permanently and share it, so now you can watch what somebody was doing 20 years ago, having been recorded by 400 different passing cars in 15 minutes.
Sure, it might be a while before the software/hardware catches up, but nothing I've described seems unlikely to happen from a physics standpoint, which means that stopping it will be like trying to stop bittorrent. Information is very hard to contain - and your personal history from birth is nothing more than information that is just currently hard to record/search.
At that point, either nobody will talk-to/do-business-with/elect anybody, or we'll learn to live with it.
When printing perfectly works locally I need to route it to the Goo and back so that the gobbermint can inspect it ???
Printing doesn't work locally on virtually any computer without vendor-supplied drivers. I doubt Google does it they way they do so that the "gobbermint" can inspect it, but rather because as everybody who has tried it has discovered, nobody supports printing on anything other than Windows or maybe OSX.
Besides, if the "gobbermint" really cares what is on your computer, they know already. I doubt they really care what OS you're running.
You have found out why a Chromebook doesn't work for him. Buy him a real computer you cheapskate.
Option 1: Buy a real computer. Visit once every few weeks to remove spyware, deal with cryptolocker, install service packs, etc. Buy a backup solution or deal with the results of a hard drive crash. If the house burns down you most likely lose all your backups too. If the laptop gets lost then deal with identity theft.
Option 2: Be a cheapskate and buy a Chromebook. Have your dad mention at holidays how well his computer is working for him. If it is damaged/destroyed/lost, just buy a new one and sign in and all the settings re-sync. The lost one has full-disk encryption by default.
Properly managing a client PC isn't trivial - we take lots of stuff for granted. If you don't properly manage one, then you're inviting random disaster.
They're high maintenance, and if that isn't bad enough, we all know the crap that ink jet manufacturers pull to drive our costs up even more.
A laser printer is far less maintenance-intense. They do have their costs, but per-page they tend to be really low. A postscript-compatible printer will work on anything from a 30-year-old VAX to whatever OS you're running 20 years from now.
I hardly print anything, but I do occasionally need to print. Heck, I'll be printing my tax forms in a few weeks, because it is far cheaper than paying some company to file for me because the US government won't just let you do it for free via a government-run website (let alone do what most experts advise and just send you a pre-calculated forms to sign and return, or do that online - it isn't like the IRS doesn't know what you should be filing before you do it).
With all the reduced functionality and privacy issues they should be giving them away, then it would cost what it's actually worth.
Privacy issues? Sure, if you're not going to use Chrome at all then I could see where you're exposing your bookmarks/etc to Google (though you can disable this if you want to). However, in general you're far more secure with a Chromebook than you would be with a conventional laptop. When was the last time you knew somebody get hit by Cryptolocker or whatever using a Chromebook? Heck, even if they did encrypt all your files on a cloud service almost all of them keep historical snapshots so you can just restore the unencrypted versions.
Same price basically and you get a proper operating system.
Your proper operating system most likely: 1. Isn't easy to set up with full-disk encryption. Certainly it isn't set up by default. 2. Isn't well-hardened against viruses. 3. Doesn't support full code-signing to prevent undesired tampering. 4. Doesn't sync ALL settings to the cloud so that you can just wipe it and restore it anytime you want to. 5. Doesn't support full management via Google Apps for enterprise deployments.
Or, if it does support most of those, then chances are you can't easily disable any of those features if you do want to modify the OS on it.
ChromeOS on one level is a simple browser-only machine, but it also is very secure in a way that most casual PC users are simply never going to achieve on their own.
Our fleet is far from defenseless against long range threats. The US Navy has some absolutely BADASS surface-to-air and surface-to-surface long range capabilities.
Maybe, but your original statement was "Last I checked, guns and cannons were still devastatingly effective when air-to-air missiles aren't an option." The fact that the US has great SAM systems doesn't make guns more effective for A2A. My only point was that guns weren't really effective for intercepting a large number of bombers - shooting down a bomber after it has already fired its missiles is not terribly useful (sure, better than not shooting it down, but you're still down a carrier).
I don't understand. Are you saying that we should continue building expensive mechanical weapons and ignore the threat of chemical and bio weapons? How do you bomb someone into the stone age when they live in your community?
Not at all. I'm just saying that they aren't very good weapons for warfare.
They're great weapons for terrorists and we certainly should be doing what we can to mitigate against them.
You just seemed to suggest that things like railguns and tanks would be replaced by chemical and biological weapons. That seems unlikely. They have entirely different uses and users. It is a bit like saying that desktop computers are a thing of the past because automatic transmissions are so much more useful than manual ones.
Chemicals and bio weapons are so cheap, so easy to develop and distribute to large and small populations that any money spent on stupid hardware is a ridiculous waste. Any college student (much less an angry mob or small nation) with some talent could wipe out a large population right now in 2015.
Maybe if you're a doomsday cult, but the problem with these kinds of weapons is that they're almost impossible to contain - at least reproducing biological weapons (many biological weapons like Anthrax are actually not dangerous unless the directly-dispersed spores/etc are inhaled). The kind that don't reproduce are actually not all that effective on military forces. So, you might succeed in killing everybody in NYC, but that won't stop the US from bombing you into the stone age.
Now, if your motivation is religious in nature or you're otherwise suicidal, then sure those kinds of weapons can be effective, since you don't care if you kill off your own population as well.
Cold war ICBM/SLBMs already are capable of reaching their targets in 10-30 minutes, depending on how close they are when launched. They go quite fast.
In theory the command authority for a retaliatory strike is already designed to operate faster than that, though I'm not sure whether US bomber forces can be launched in that time unless on a heightened state of alert (I doubt that the entire bomber force is kept with crews standing next to their planes all lined up and flight plans briefed 24x7 these days). It probably wouldn't be that hard to have somebody with authority to order a return strike close to a plane that is ready to take off in case the president can't be evacuated in time. The US actually has ELF transmitters on large aircraft for direct communication with submarines.
Apparently preparing for doomsday is a remarkably efficient enterprise.
If the delivery system is now hypersonic why attach a nuclear warhead to it? Why not use kinetic energy to destroy the target? Mach 5 - 25 an object hitting a target has to have immense force.
Only for a direct impact. That would sink a ship or put a decent crater in the ground and destroy a building, but a nuke would sink a ship a quarter mile away and take out an entire base. Against aircraft carriers nukes are going to be far more effective because you don't have to score a direct hit.
You can only get to speeds like Mach 25 if you're going in a straight line, which is fine if your target is a building whose position is well-known and doesn't move. If you only have a general sense of where your target is at sea then there is no way that you can approach at Mach 25, spot it on radar 100 miles away 2 seconds before you hit the ocean (yes, it covers 100 miles in 2 seconds at that speed), change course to point at the target, and then continue on at Mach 25. Heck, changing course beyond the slightest bit at that speed is going to be impossible - that's an incredible amount of acceleration. An ICBM is moving at that speed but it accelerates over a period of 5 minutes going up, and then gravity accelerates it over a span of minutes going down, and it goes in a straight line. Forget whatever that recent movie was that had a nuclear warhead smash through a building while being disarmed just over the target city - one of those things is going to look like a laser beam flying at you if you're standing near the target.
Last I checked, guns and cannons were still devastatingly effective when air-to-air missiles aren't an option. And those bombers would be significantly less maneuverable than an F18 or F14. Especially with a full bomb load. And while Mach 1.8 is REALLY fast..... Mach 2.5 is faster.
There's a reason planes are still equipped with them besides strafing soft targets. We found out pretty quick in 'nam that relying solely on Air-to-Air missiles is suicidal.
By the time you'd get close enough to shoot down a Tu22 with guns it would have already fired its missiles and turned around. By the time you detect them they're not that far off from being able to locate the fleet and fire, so you need an interceptor that can fire from 100 miles away.
Also, when the bombers come in they'll be scattered. Even if you close to range on one before it fires its missiles you're now miles away from the next closest bomber. When you're firing active radar missiles from 100 miles away you can have many targets illuminated with your radar at once, and engage them simultaneously.
I'll be surprised if there ever is another gun kill with a modern air superiority fighter. As always we keep fighting the last war - in this case Vietnam. There is no question that the missiles of the 60s weren't up to the job of replacing guns entirely (though to some extent this was also the result of RoE).
I think the next step will be drones carrying missiles - they will themselves be expendable to some degree but they'll basically be aerial SAM sites. Heck, part of me wonders if the next-gen air superiority aircraft is a 747 with a really great radar and a boatload of long-range missiles (think 150 miles). Either that or lasers and such. When the weapons travel at the speed of light and are on turrets with 360deg coverage, you don't need to play turning games.
The cat is already out of the bag. Satellite imagery of a whole ocean pretty much says where a carrier battle group is.
If you're at the point where carriers are actually at risk of getting shot at, the enemy won't have any satellites. They barely maneuver at all and are extremely vulnerable to missiles. Maybe if you have some stealth satellites they might escape the carnage, but they'll be limited to passive detection, and I'm not sure how effective that is at locating a surface fleet (as opposed to radar).
If you're a submarine, then telling everyone where you are is a problem. If you're an aircraft carrier with escort fleet, there's a good bet everyone knows where you are already. Those things aren't exactly silent. Or invisible to satellite.
In a war where carriers are likely to actually be attacked, there won't be any satellites, likely on any side.
Given the one child policy for three generations, a couple supports all their surviving ancestors.
That has to be a weird social dynamic. Imagine going to Christmas dinner and having no brothers, uncles, or cousins there. There are only parents and grandparents, or a child and a grandchild. You might have six people all shopping for one kid, who is of course the center of attention all day, just as their parents were when they were kids.
At least you don't have to decide whose family to spend Christmas with - the older will come visit the younger since they have absolutely nobody else to spend the day with.
I have no idea if Christmas is a thing in China - if not I'm sure the youngest descendant's birthday gets as much fanfare.
True enough, but if you're just going to fight world war III then hit the carrier with an ICBM. The carrier can't travel more than a few miles while it is in-flight, though you do need decent initial targeting info. Oceans are big - finding carriers isn't as easy as it might seem. Subs would certainly help, assuming they aren't being tailed.
I was referring to having located the carrier within 10 miles, not being within 10 miles of it. You can fire a missile at a target hundreds of miles away, but you need to have some kind of sense of where your target is at when you do so. A radar seeker can't spot ships hundreds of miles away - you need to get the missile to fly within a few miles of the target at most for a conventional missile. Of course the missile can fly a path and look for targets along that path, so you can be less precise on one axis. Of course, even that is only to a point - if you are counting on your missile to hit a carrier you don't want it to blow up the first destroyer it stumbles upon. Heck, you could probably put decoys in a fleet as well.
As to your list of problems, the Indians and Russians have demonstrated the ability to steer and hit targets.
Cite? I'm genuinely interested in just what level of capability has been demonstrated here, as the problem is not a small one.
Sensors to detect the target are helpful, but you can fit fairly powerful warheads to these things (including tactical nukes) and one of the big advantages of hypersonic missiles is that the target can't get very far in the time between your spotter plane/satellite seeing it and the missile arriving.
If your goal is to nuke a carrier, then yes, the carrier is probably going to die if you have anywhere near a decent location on it (which again isn't trivial to obtain in a serious war).
But, if we're fighting a nuclear war then everything changes. For starters, whoever is firing that nuke doesn't have any military bases or much in the way of cities, power, and so on - or if it does it won't for long. You don't just casually fire off a tactical nuclear weapon at a carrier task force and expect the other side to go away.
If you think the missile has problems steering to the target, consider how hard is to to take evasive action in a large ship when you have only seconds between seeing the missile come over the horizon and it hitting you.
Oh, a ship is basically a still target as far as a missile is concerned. The reason you have to have terminal guidance is that most likely the platform firing the missile couldn't see the ship when they fired at it. If your target is somewhere in a 10 mile circle, then you are counting on the missile to find the target and hit it on its own. Even a nuke can't destroy a ship from miles away reliably (unless you're carpeting the entire region or such).
ISIS are sensible enough to stop their campaigns at the border of Iran, and Turkey. Taking over some half-collapsed government in Syria and the inept appointed authority of Iraq is hard enough - they aren't dumb enough to start a war they can't win.
True. To be fair they can only win against the US because people really are tired of caring about Iraq and just want to leave. If Mexican cartels were taking over towns in Texas you can bet that the gloves would come off. Invading Iran is as likely to be successful, except in that case there will be fewer smart bombs and more mosque bombs (likely where your higher-ups attend services).
No, but they've lost plenty of peaces. How'd that Iraq thing turn out? And have they stamped out the Taliban yet?
Meh, I don't think the US lost in Iraq any more than France did. Sure, it cost a boatload of money, but not a crippling amount. Sure, the US didn't get anything out of it, but neither did anybody else. Maybe you could say that Iran won, but I'm not sure how well they get along with ISIS.
Maybe from a nationalism/pride standpoint you could say that the US lost. I just don't see how in the big picture anything changed one way or another. The Iraqi people were losers before and after.
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I find macbooks work better for my non technical family members.
I tried giving them Chromebooks once and there were all sorts of compatibility problems with printers, my daughter's school website and media sources. Windows PCs were a pain to manage and keep secure. Macbooks have better security properties and take less of my time.
I can't imagine that any website would work on Chrome on OSX that wouldn't work on Chrome on ChromeOS. Of course, browser compatibility issues are nothing new, and you are limited to Chrome on ChromeOS. ChromeOS doesn't have any "compatibility problems" with printers per se - it just can only print via CloudPrint, which means either your printer supports it, or it is hooked up to something else which does (like a PC running the Chrome browser or a print server). The printing issue is the biggest pain with using ChromeOS so if you're going to go that route you do need to plan for it. Media sources that require some kind of plugin definitely are not going to work, though flash usually does (but not always) - many major services have Chrome apps which should work.
You definitely have to adapt what you do to the Chromebook, and not the other way around. You're going to have to ditch stuff like Libreoffice and so on.
All the same, I'd give them serious thought. The only laptop I could imagine buying right now is a Chromebook. I do use both Windows and a somewhat-more-traditional Linux distro on the desktop, but I'm not a typical facebook user either.
NetFlix should be able to implement end-to-end security that makes sure the target device belongs to a USA IP address, even when a VPN is deployed.
Uh, sure. Can you go ahead and geolocate 196.168.1.10 for me?
If society can change to where we accept that we're all flawed and that a few flaws shouldn't automatically disqualify us, then doxing largely becomes irrelevant and IMHO our world will become a much nicer place.
Yeah, how is that going to happen? Answer: doxing. It will become so commonplace that things we think are a big deal today will become no big deal because we'll learn just how prevalent they are in society.
Tend to agree. Privacy is going to go the way of the dodo. Sooner or later somebody will make a FOSS package that generates a manageable data stream from a video feed that assigns a UUID to every face that enters the frame along with location and time references, and also tags every letter/number that enters the frame, and it will run on something the size of a cell phone without using much power. Then people will mount cameras on their houses/cars/person/etc and upload the data to 15 different public servers in 15 different countries, who will then distribute/aggregate the data. At that point you can just do a google-like search on anybody and show everyplace they've been since birth. When storage/bandwidth gets cheap enough people will also just archive all that raw video permanently and share it, so now you can watch what somebody was doing 20 years ago, having been recorded by 400 different passing cars in 15 minutes.
Sure, it might be a while before the software/hardware catches up, but nothing I've described seems unlikely to happen from a physics standpoint, which means that stopping it will be like trying to stop bittorrent. Information is very hard to contain - and your personal history from birth is nothing more than information that is just currently hard to record/search.
At that point, either nobody will talk-to/do-business-with/elect anybody, or we'll learn to live with it.
When printing perfectly works locally I need to route it to the Goo and back so that the gobbermint can inspect it ???
Printing doesn't work locally on virtually any computer without vendor-supplied drivers. I doubt Google does it they way they do so that the "gobbermint" can inspect it, but rather because as everybody who has tried it has discovered, nobody supports printing on anything other than Windows or maybe OSX.
Besides, if the "gobbermint" really cares what is on your computer, they know already. I doubt they really care what OS you're running.
>My father is considering a Chromebook,
You have found out why a Chromebook doesn't work for him.
Buy him a real computer you cheapskate.
Option 1: Buy a real computer.
Visit once every few weeks to remove spyware, deal with cryptolocker, install service packs, etc. Buy a backup solution or deal with the results of a hard drive crash. If the house burns down you most likely lose all your backups too. If the laptop gets lost then deal with identity theft.
Option 2: Be a cheapskate and buy a Chromebook.
Have your dad mention at holidays how well his computer is working for him. If it is damaged/destroyed/lost, just buy a new one and sign in and all the settings re-sync. The lost one has full-disk encryption by default.
Properly managing a client PC isn't trivial - we take lots of stuff for granted. If you don't properly manage one, then you're inviting random disaster.
They're high maintenance, and if that isn't bad enough, we all know the crap that ink jet manufacturers pull to drive our costs up even more.
A laser printer is far less maintenance-intense. They do have their costs, but per-page they tend to be really low. A postscript-compatible printer will work on anything from a 30-year-old VAX to whatever OS you're running 20 years from now.
I hardly print anything, but I do occasionally need to print. Heck, I'll be printing my tax forms in a few weeks, because it is far cheaper than paying some company to file for me because the US government won't just let you do it for free via a government-run website (let alone do what most experts advise and just send you a pre-calculated forms to sign and return, or do that online - it isn't like the IRS doesn't know what you should be filing before you do it).
With all the reduced functionality and privacy issues they should be giving them away, then it would cost what it's actually worth.
Privacy issues? Sure, if you're not going to use Chrome at all then I could see where you're exposing your bookmarks/etc to Google (though you can disable this if you want to). However, in general you're far more secure with a Chromebook than you would be with a conventional laptop. When was the last time you knew somebody get hit by Cryptolocker or whatever using a Chromebook? Heck, even if they did encrypt all your files on a cloud service almost all of them keep historical snapshots so you can just restore the unencrypted versions.
Same price basically and you get a proper operating system.
Your proper operating system most likely:
1. Isn't easy to set up with full-disk encryption. Certainly it isn't set up by default.
2. Isn't well-hardened against viruses.
3. Doesn't support full code-signing to prevent undesired tampering.
4. Doesn't sync ALL settings to the cloud so that you can just wipe it and restore it anytime you want to.
5. Doesn't support full management via Google Apps for enterprise deployments.
Or, if it does support most of those, then chances are you can't easily disable any of those features if you do want to modify the OS on it.
ChromeOS on one level is a simple browser-only machine, but it also is very secure in a way that most casual PC users are simply never going to achieve on their own.
He doesn't say that at all. He just can't interface his printer to Google without an intermediary device.
Meh, disregard. His issue isn't with Google, but rather that he has no home internet connectivity to connect the printer up to.
He doesn't say that at all. He just can't interface his printer to Google without an intermediary device.
Our fleet is far from defenseless against long range threats. The US Navy has some absolutely BADASS surface-to-air and surface-to-surface long range capabilities.
Maybe, but your original statement was "Last I checked, guns and cannons were still devastatingly effective when air-to-air missiles aren't an option." The fact that the US has great SAM systems doesn't make guns more effective for A2A. My only point was that guns weren't really effective for intercepting a large number of bombers - shooting down a bomber after it has already fired its missiles is not terribly useful (sure, better than not shooting it down, but you're still down a carrier).
I don't understand. Are you saying that we should continue building expensive mechanical weapons and ignore the threat of chemical and bio weapons? How do you bomb someone into the stone age when they live in your community?
Not at all. I'm just saying that they aren't very good weapons for warfare.
They're great weapons for terrorists and we certainly should be doing what we can to mitigate against them.
You just seemed to suggest that things like railguns and tanks would be replaced by chemical and biological weapons. That seems unlikely. They have entirely different uses and users. It is a bit like saying that desktop computers are a thing of the past because automatic transmissions are so much more useful than manual ones.
Chemicals and bio weapons are so cheap, so easy to develop and distribute to large and small populations that any money spent on stupid hardware is a ridiculous waste. Any college student (much less an angry mob or small nation) with some talent could wipe out a large population right now in 2015.
Maybe if you're a doomsday cult, but the problem with these kinds of weapons is that they're almost impossible to contain - at least reproducing biological weapons (many biological weapons like Anthrax are actually not dangerous unless the directly-dispersed spores/etc are inhaled). The kind that don't reproduce are actually not all that effective on military forces. So, you might succeed in killing everybody in NYC, but that won't stop the US from bombing you into the stone age.
Now, if your motivation is religious in nature or you're otherwise suicidal, then sure those kinds of weapons can be effective, since you don't care if you kill off your own population as well.
Cold war ICBM/SLBMs already are capable of reaching their targets in 10-30 minutes, depending on how close they are when launched. They go quite fast.
In theory the command authority for a retaliatory strike is already designed to operate faster than that, though I'm not sure whether US bomber forces can be launched in that time unless on a heightened state of alert (I doubt that the entire bomber force is kept with crews standing next to their planes all lined up and flight plans briefed 24x7 these days). It probably wouldn't be that hard to have somebody with authority to order a return strike close to a plane that is ready to take off in case the president can't be evacuated in time. The US actually has ELF transmitters on large aircraft for direct communication with submarines.
Apparently preparing for doomsday is a remarkably efficient enterprise.
If the delivery system is now hypersonic why attach a nuclear warhead to it? Why not use kinetic energy to destroy the target? Mach 5 - 25 an object hitting a target has to have immense force.
Only for a direct impact. That would sink a ship or put a decent crater in the ground and destroy a building, but a nuke would sink a ship a quarter mile away and take out an entire base. Against aircraft carriers nukes are going to be far more effective because you don't have to score a direct hit.
You can only get to speeds like Mach 25 if you're going in a straight line, which is fine if your target is a building whose position is well-known and doesn't move. If you only have a general sense of where your target is at sea then there is no way that you can approach at Mach 25, spot it on radar 100 miles away 2 seconds before you hit the ocean (yes, it covers 100 miles in 2 seconds at that speed), change course to point at the target, and then continue on at Mach 25. Heck, changing course beyond the slightest bit at that speed is going to be impossible - that's an incredible amount of acceleration. An ICBM is moving at that speed but it accelerates over a period of 5 minutes going up, and then gravity accelerates it over a span of minutes going down, and it goes in a straight line. Forget whatever that recent movie was that had a nuclear warhead smash through a building while being disarmed just over the target city - one of those things is going to look like a laser beam flying at you if you're standing near the target.
Last I checked, guns and cannons were still devastatingly effective when air-to-air missiles aren't an option. And those bombers would be significantly less maneuverable than an F18 or F14. Especially with a full bomb load. And while Mach 1.8 is REALLY fast..... Mach 2.5 is faster.
There's a reason planes are still equipped with them besides strafing soft targets. We found out pretty quick in 'nam that relying solely on Air-to-Air missiles is suicidal.
By the time you'd get close enough to shoot down a Tu22 with guns it would have already fired its missiles and turned around. By the time you detect them they're not that far off from being able to locate the fleet and fire, so you need an interceptor that can fire from 100 miles away.
Also, when the bombers come in they'll be scattered. Even if you close to range on one before it fires its missiles you're now miles away from the next closest bomber. When you're firing active radar missiles from 100 miles away you can have many targets illuminated with your radar at once, and engage them simultaneously.
I'll be surprised if there ever is another gun kill with a modern air superiority fighter. As always we keep fighting the last war - in this case Vietnam. There is no question that the missiles of the 60s weren't up to the job of replacing guns entirely (though to some extent this was also the result of RoE).
I think the next step will be drones carrying missiles - they will themselves be expendable to some degree but they'll basically be aerial SAM sites. Heck, part of me wonders if the next-gen air superiority aircraft is a 747 with a really great radar and a boatload of long-range missiles (think 150 miles). Either that or lasers and such. When the weapons travel at the speed of light and are on turrets with 360deg coverage, you don't need to play turning games.
The cat is already out of the bag. Satellite imagery of a whole ocean pretty much says where a carrier battle group is.
If you're at the point where carriers are actually at risk of getting shot at, the enemy won't have any satellites. They barely maneuver at all and are extremely vulnerable to missiles. Maybe if you have some stealth satellites they might escape the carnage, but they'll be limited to passive detection, and I'm not sure how effective that is at locating a surface fleet (as opposed to radar).
If you're a submarine, then telling everyone where you are is a problem. If you're an aircraft carrier with escort fleet, there's a good bet everyone knows where you are already. Those things aren't exactly silent. Or invisible to satellite.
In a war where carriers are likely to actually be attacked, there won't be any satellites, likely on any side.
Given the one child policy for three generations, a couple supports all their surviving ancestors.
That has to be a weird social dynamic. Imagine going to Christmas dinner and having no brothers, uncles, or cousins there. There are only parents and grandparents, or a child and a grandchild. You might have six people all shopping for one kid, who is of course the center of attention all day, just as their parents were when they were kids.
At least you don't have to decide whose family to spend Christmas with - the older will come visit the younger since they have absolutely nobody else to spend the day with.
I have no idea if Christmas is a thing in China - if not I'm sure the youngest descendant's birthday gets as much fanfare.
True enough, but if you're just going to fight world war III then hit the carrier with an ICBM. The carrier can't travel more than a few miles while it is in-flight, though you do need decent initial targeting info. Oceans are big - finding carriers isn't as easy as it might seem. Subs would certainly help, assuming they aren't being tailed.
I was referring to having located the carrier within 10 miles, not being within 10 miles of it. You can fire a missile at a target hundreds of miles away, but you need to have some kind of sense of where your target is at when you do so. A radar seeker can't spot ships hundreds of miles away - you need to get the missile to fly within a few miles of the target at most for a conventional missile. Of course the missile can fly a path and look for targets along that path, so you can be less precise on one axis. Of course, even that is only to a point - if you are counting on your missile to hit a carrier you don't want it to blow up the first destroyer it stumbles upon. Heck, you could probably put decoys in a fleet as well.
As to your list of problems, the Indians and Russians have demonstrated the ability to steer and hit targets.
Cite? I'm genuinely interested in just what level of capability has been demonstrated here, as the problem is not a small one.
Sensors to detect the target are helpful, but you can fit fairly powerful warheads to these things (including tactical nukes) and one of the big advantages of hypersonic missiles is that the target can't get very far in the time between your spotter plane/satellite seeing it and the missile arriving.
If your goal is to nuke a carrier, then yes, the carrier is probably going to die if you have anywhere near a decent location on it (which again isn't trivial to obtain in a serious war).
But, if we're fighting a nuclear war then everything changes. For starters, whoever is firing that nuke doesn't have any military bases or much in the way of cities, power, and so on - or if it does it won't for long. You don't just casually fire off a tactical nuclear weapon at a carrier task force and expect the other side to go away.
If you think the missile has problems steering to the target, consider how hard is to to take evasive action in a large ship when you have only seconds between seeing the missile come over the horizon and it hitting you.
Oh, a ship is basically a still target as far as a missile is concerned. The reason you have to have terminal guidance is that most likely the platform firing the missile couldn't see the ship when they fired at it. If your target is somewhere in a 10 mile circle, then you are counting on the missile to find the target and hit it on its own. Even a nuke can't destroy a ship from miles away reliably (unless you're carpeting the entire region or such).
ISIS are sensible enough to stop their campaigns at the border of Iran, and Turkey. Taking over some half-collapsed government in Syria and the inept appointed authority of Iraq is hard enough - they aren't dumb enough to start a war they can't win.
True. To be fair they can only win against the US because people really are tired of caring about Iraq and just want to leave. If Mexican cartels were taking over towns in Texas you can bet that the gloves would come off. Invading Iran is as likely to be successful, except in that case there will be fewer smart bombs and more mosque bombs (likely where your higher-ups attend services).
Should a cat or a reasonably well trained dog be the difference between the cops breaking down the door or not?
Meh, a dog just gives them some target practice. SOP is to shoot any dogs on sight. Great being a suspect, right?
No, but they've lost plenty of peaces. How'd that Iraq thing turn out? And have they stamped out the Taliban yet?
Meh, I don't think the US lost in Iraq any more than France did. Sure, it cost a boatload of money, but not a crippling amount. Sure, the US didn't get anything out of it, but neither did anybody else. Maybe you could say that Iran won, but I'm not sure how well they get along with ISIS.
Maybe from a nationalism/pride standpoint you could say that the US lost. I just don't see how in the big picture anything changed one way or another. The Iraqi people were losers before and after.