I'm also thinking of that nasty little book in the 80s (I do apologize for not remembering the title right now) which took a long, hard look at the US and USSR weapon efficiency; the last combined NATO maneuver in the north sea showed all (all!) carriers being (simulated to be) sunk on the very first day.
Well, you're talking about a war between equals in that case. The US carriers would obviously be vulnerable to the USSR back in the 80s, just like every other US or USSR capability of the day. All you're suggesting is that it is uncertain who would win WWIII, and I think most US military planners would agree with that. The only matchup that really comes close to US-vs-USSR today would be US-vs-the-world, and why would anybody want to even try that?
An aircraft carrier these days is a major waste of space, and primarily used for top-class idio^H^H^H^Hpeople to brag^H^H^H^Hprotect our freedom.
Carriers get lots of use today. Clearly you don't agree with how they're used, and many would agree with you. However, from a military perspective they clearly do get things done. Even if the only thing they were good at was bombing 3rd world nations without the consent of adjacent countries, that would be a capability that has some value.
Ah, I see. Of course, you certainly need super-special radar to detect a target, right? Normal shipping radar is certainly not sufficient, right? And we cannot possibly hook up a new system to an existing radar - would be too cheap to build...
Ordinary shipping radar is fine for locating a ship, if you can get in range (carrier groups of course wouldn't let you do that). In reality you'd need airborne or submarine radar to actually get close enough to spot a capital ship that is screened. Both of those would be considered threatening. You also need communications between the detection platform and the launch platform. Fire control radar isn't needed for a GPS-guided missile, although a working GPS system is (which of course the US and allies would disable in an actual shooting war). Inertial guidance actually works pretty well if you know the relative position of the launch platform and the target (which actually isn't easy to do without GPS if the target is located by a different platform).
Which already is more or less how civilians are treated by the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's pretty-much how civilians have been treated by every army in every war in history. That's why the term "martial law" doesn't generally engender warm fuzzy feelings. To the army there is your squad, your chain of command, and everybody else...
I'm not the biggest fan of every US policy in the last decade, but if you're concerned about dead civilians then that's something you think about BEFORE you go to war. The US army by any standard is at least as caring about non-combatants as any I'm aware of in history.
I'm not convinced that the day of the carrier has passed.
What has replaced them?
A carrier gives you the opportunity to have air superiority over a given location. So does an airfield. Both can be destroyed. So, are you essentially arguing that air power is obsolete, except maybe for aircraft with short-field capability that can run on moving improvised bases?
Carriers give major powers an ability to wage conventional war, and this is a capability that is in high demand. Without them, what are your options? ICBMs?
For the most part most theoretical attacks against carrier battle groups tend to be manipulations of the conventions of the seas, like arming merchant ships. That just makes it sound like what is really obsolete is the concept of freedom of navigation on the high seas. Perhaps the next logical step is to just have nations set up inspection stations outside every port and make ships check in before being able to go out to sea?
Uh, you do realize that a sea search radar is limited to the horizon when locating an enemy ship? Unless it is airborne, the radar horizon isn't going to get you the carriers, at best it might find an outside picket.
The only way to locate a carrier would be by airborne radar, or satellite (often with radar as well). A powerful sea-search radar on a plane will DEFINITELY get the attention of the US military, and will likely put the carrier group on alert and get your plane a fighter escort really fast. Satellites can only give up-to-date intel when they are overhead, and most nations that have them already have cruise missiles.
If you don't know where the target ship is, you can't hit it with a cruise missile, satellite guided or otherwise. You could fire it at a random strip of ocean and hope to get lucky - it would turn on its radar seeker and kill the first poor merchant ship it came upon. Once you fire a missile now all your own merchant ships are targets, and they'd be taken out fairly trivailly.
This really depends on your political plans and the scale of the war.
In a one-sided war that you can't lose, hearts and minds is by far the best approach. I'm not sure if it is actually possible, as nobody has ever pulled it off, but I can't think of any other options other than not going to war or things that wouldn't be politically acceptable.
In a matched war where substantial portions of your military have been lost, nobody will care about hearts and minds. Do you think the allies cared about the hearts and minds in Dresden or Tokyo? Do you think that voters in the nations that launched those raids cared about these sorts of things, when EVERYBODY had a relative who had died in the war?
Nobody starts out shooting civilians - but wars tend to escalate. Starting out a war with a sneak attack that sinks 25% or so of the US carrier fleet using civilian-disguised platforms is a very good way to get things escalated a LOT sooner. Just look at the reaction to Pearl Harbor, and that at least was a purely military attack executed completely in compliance with the Geneva Conventions (as far as I'm aware) - it just took place without a declaration of war.
Everybody already takes this approach, that's why Aegis was invented in the 80s. Or are you asking how long until somebody actually launches an attack like this?
Well, if somebody did, they'd be at war. Ok, they've sunk a carrier or two - assuming they managed to get targeting data sufficient to launch an attack (you do need to know within a few miles where a ship is to fire a missile like this). Now the country will be under strategic attack from the US. Even limited to conventional weapons only one or two nations on the planet could even put up a fight. The US doesn't need carriers to attack countries if it can obtain friendly bases nearby (and in a real shooting war on this scale, people will have to pick sides quickly - who was neutral in WWII?). Once shots are fired US forces would operate under wartime conditions, and would simply declare an exclusion zone maybe 1000 miles around the country - they'd be running a blockade anyway. Now getting within launch range would be very difficult.
Actually, a ship like this would be confiscated the moment it entered the national waters of any nation who is friendly with any of the major superpowers if they were aware of it.
Any ship armed with a weapons system in a state that can be deployed is a warship, almost by definition. Warships cannot enter territorial waters without consent - doing so is a diplomatic incident at the very least, and an act of war at worst. In an actual state of war the ship would be an immediate target, and would likely be defenseless which means that any fighter bomber making a ferry run in its vicinity would probably just be dispatched with an extra anti-ship missile to take care of it.
This is really just USS Cole Mark II. A US capital ship in constrained waters like the Persian Gulf might be at some risk if an adversary armed with these things could get an accurate location on it, and sneak this in with merchant traffic. Still, it would be a gamble, and it would certainly start a full-scale war with the US. A country like Iran would lose such a war under virtually any circumstances - they couldn't take out enough of the US navy to actually prevent an invasion. A country like China could make a much bigger impact, but at least at present they couldn't sustain an all-out war against the US. Even a diminished US military would be on the offensive and China would be fighting on its own shores against a US that would be mostly untouched within its borders. The US would also be able to resupply much more easily (more access to oil and other raw materials).
The reality is that weapons like these just make things really messy for everybody. No sovereign nation would actually fire such a weapon, at most they would use them as bargaining chips. No nation would allow terrorists/etc to actually have weapons like these - it isn't in their interests.
And how else will a missile fired against a ship with only a general knowledge of target position find its target? Do you think that a GPS location a few hours old is going to be sufficient for a missile travelling mach 3 to hit a target?
Sat guidance is only good for getting a missile to a particular absolute location on earth. Honestly, you can probably do this well enough with inertial guidance (ICBMs aren't sat-guided, and neither were a lot of earlier cruise missiles used by the US).
Hitting a ship with a missile involves a few problems.
1. Knowing where the ship is. 2. Getting the missile into the vicinity of the ship, close enough for the missile to find the ship with its onboard sensors. 3. Having the missile locate the ship's exact realtime location with its sensors. 4. Evading defenses at every step and actually hitting the thing.
Sat guidance solves #2 really well. A radar jamming system defeats #3.
Sat guidance alone can never eliminate the need to solve #3 in some way - a missile going mach 3 covers a huge space in one second, so unless the sat can give the missile realtime target location with a latency of much less than a second there is no hope of getting a hit. Every foot counts so even the accuracy of GPS might be a concern. Now, the ability to deliver realtime updates with a little more latency might allow the missile to close to a range where it could use IR to detect the ship and defeat radar jamming.
I think that the big problem is #1 - to even take a shot at a ship you need to know where it is in general, and in a serious shooting war between first world powers the first thing that would happen is that any satellite that even looks like a surveillance system would be shot down or at least blinded/jammed, and LEO will probably get so filled with debris that we won't be going into space for a few years except for short-term excursions which the military would be the only ones doing. Without satellites then air superiority or subs are the only way to find a target ship, and the US has a huge lead in both areas.
The other artificial limitation from my memory was that the arm could only be fired off at a 45-degree angle.
I think that the lack of save was the biggest issue. Sure, I've seen it beaten in around 4 hours, but that is a long time to sit down doing one thing, and if you get stuck at some point an hour in, it can be really annoying to have to re-play the previous content the next time.
Another game that shares the same issue was Solomon's key. I remember hitting points that were real doozys (the first one to come to mind is the level with the fire-breathers going up both sides of the screen with a wide-open middle). After getting past it I'd breeze through seven levels, and get stuck again, but now to stop I'd need to restart from the beginning again.
Emulators are a big plus in these kinds of situations - it is VERY nice to hit save ANY time you want to.
Agreed. I'm fine with intervention to prevent danger to the rest of the economy, but ONLY when that is accompanied by measures to rectify the problem.
In this case the solution is to allow a few airlines to go out of business and some consolidation to sure up the industry a bit. Prices are obviously too low, which is why the government needs to step in so often. Airlines are always looking for handouts.
Same thing with banks/etc. A bank that is too big to fail is too big to exist.
And bailouts have to be turned into something that nobody wants to ask for - instead companies should be fighting against them. How do you do this?
Simple - bailouts take the form of eminent domain. The government takes ownership of the company, ignoring any poison pill or change of control provisions in executive contracts. The government operates the company with the public welfare in mind and long-term health of the company/industry. The government cleans it up and fixes it, with executives staying or going based on how they fit into that, with those who are separated getting two weeks pay in lieu of notice just like the guys in the mail room. Then the government chops it up or splits it up or leaves it alone as makes sense long term. When all is done the government does an IPO and gets rid of it. Then the government does an accounting - it adds together the IPO proceeds and the earnings that came in, subtracts the cost of any money the taxpayers spent plus interest at treasury rates. If that number ends up being positive then it gets divided among all the previous shareholders, and if that number isn't positive then they're up the creek - they should have voted for better directors.
Were this to become standard policy, you'd see a lot more companies trying to figure out how to do it alone. Of course, the government should not need permission to do a "bailout" - it should be in service to the public interest. The previous owners of the company still get compensated, if their company is actually worth anything. Companies shouldn't be free to wreak havoc just to keep paying executive bonuses.
Could it be because all those major infrastructure systems were carefully checked for Y2K problems?
Sure, some of it was hype. Some people were certifying things like microwaves that don't store a date. However, lots of important transactions utilize datetime stamps, and errors in these transactions could be serious in a system that supports vital functions.
Your typical small business can probably cope. A power plant, or a major enterprise might have trouble. They depend on automation to deal with their volumes, and errors could be expensive to deal with.
Most likely I'll never have a house fire all my life, but I still buy fire insurance...
And it had the soundtrack from another game that was intensely annoying to play. (Bionic Commando was it?) As I recall it lacked saves, but was incredibly long - kind of like Ghosts and Goblins. And, as an added bonus it placed all kinds of arbitrary limitations on your movement that made things 40x harder than they might appear at first glance...
The problem is that local politics is VERY corrupt. It is very hard to influence local politics, since most voters just vote party line. Your ability to actually impact an election is small - as odd as that might seem.
All the geeks on the internet can speak with a loud voice at the national level. All the geeks in Folksville, IN would be 1-2 people most likely - good luck having an impact with that.
You raise a valid argument, but I think you also need to consider lifestyle. I don't have any qualms with feeding somebody in the 3rd world as opposed to allowing somebody in the US to buy a 3rd car. However, it seems like these wages don't even allow a basic standard of living.
The fact that many in China are much worse off doesn't change the fact that those working in these factories don't have even the most basic amenities.
Products built under these conditions ought to be tariffed. No, they don't need to pay for every employee to have half an acre with four bedrooms and two cars. However, three meals a day with basic nutrition with at least 8 hours of sleep and 15 minute breaks every four hours are not an unreasonable standard to require. That would probably cost Microsoft all of 0.1 cents per mouse or something like that.
Every country has income disparity - that will never change. However, even the unemployed (and likely the homeless) in the US live in better conditions than those in these factories.
State A collects the tax at time of sale. There is no paid tax receipt from State B. Second, state A is taxing the sale (legally), not the use, so why would paying use tax somewhere else have anything to do with it.
Use tax is just a euphamistic way of wording something that violates the ICC.
Considering how much the ICC is used to extend the power of government, occasionally using it to reduce the power of government doesn't seem so bad to me.
Yeah, but when the major you like is goofing off, or the history of art, good luck paying off your student loans when you graduate. There is this lovely concept that we seem to teach kids - that college is about experiences and developing yourself and becoming well-rounded, and we shouldn't be so preoccupied about pay. Well, that only works well if the government is willing to loan you $200k for you to tie a financial noose around your neck for four years. When the loans stop coming, there is a day of reckoning. Those four years of fun can cost quite a few of anguish if you don't find something practical to do with yourself...
Most jobs don't require 1/10th of the stuff they teach you in college.
If you're a dumb person copying to maintain a grade, chances are you'll bomb out in the real world unless you get into management quickly (better have people skills).
If you're smart and just don't want to be bothered, chances are there will be little impact. Do you think that the fact that you copied somebody else's term paper in English Composition in Psychology is going to have a big impact on your career in IT? Most IT jobs in the US don't even require you to program these days...
Indeed, in addition to the distribution of the ash being non-uniform, I'd imagine that its composition could be non-uniform today. Maybe today it is spewing something innocuous, and tomorrow it will spew stuff capable of boring a hole straight through the ball bearings?
Yup - those kinds of cycles are usually based on real-world experience. They test and see how often parts fail, and then set the maintenance cycles to ensure that everything gets looked at several standard deviations before even a fluke failure would occur.
However, if you test the engines on clean air, and operate them on condensed glass particles, then you're probably not going to get favorable results.
What do you do when a truck carrying insulin or blood or even pills dies and is stranded in a desert for a week? Most likely you end up throwing everything out. Even if it is ok at the moment it makes it to the warehouse, the goods probably have months subtracted for their shelf life, which means that a year later some poor guy will suffer for it if they try taking it (some medicines degrade into harmful substances, most just become ineffective, but if you need that medication to survive ineffective can be just as bad).
The only way to safely operate in these conditions is to run a statistically meaningful set of tests - and keep repeating them over time (no guarantees that the ash thrown up today will be the same as the stuff from yesterday), and then redesign the maintenance schedule from the ground up. Chances are it will be cheaper just to ground the planes...
Right now it seems we're relying on satellite information (note to idiots who don't think space flight is important -- think again).
Uh, who is claiming that spaceflight isn't important? You seem to be getting this confused with folks who think that MANNED spaceflight isn't super-important. Last time I checked there weren't any people on those satellites, and it is fairly routine to launch them.
There's a common moral squeamishness about deciding, for the greater financial good, who gets to precreate.
Sure, but it is just the next step after making people pay to raise other people's kids.
If I have to pay for the care of somebody who is sick, or whatever, now suddenly I have a voice (like it or not) in whether such a person should be born in the first place. The only alternative is to give people a voice in whether to care for said kids after they are born, which is clearly less desirable as now the poor kid is suffering in neglect through no action of his own.
My question is - why even land on Mars? What is down there that is so important to look at? If you must, deploy robotics and control them in near-realtime from manned Mars orbiters.
It seems like building stations in space is a lot more practical. Or if having some solid land is useful, settle some asteroids. It is a whole lot easier to dock with an asteroid, and to return afterwards.
I don't really see what is of practical value in landing on any of these planets.
Now, if you want to terraform a planet, now I can see this going somewhere. In that case we should be sending robots and bacteria and plants first. In a century or two the manned mission won't be all that hard - you need to land safely but if something goes wrong the crew can live indefinitely in the forests of Mars or wherever.
It doesn't get too much more secure than Mixmaster. Granted, I'm not sure if anybody is still running it these days. This was a big thing about the time that pgp was being written in the first place.
Additionally, it doesn't sound like he even wants the domain back. He just wants people to stop using it to impersonate him.
Suppose I own a domain, and want to stop using it. No big deal - I let it lapse. I don't want to pay for it - I don't need it. However, if somebody were to register it expressly for the purpose of impersonating me, I'd certainly care about it!
The same thing can happen offline. Suppose I buy a home and phone number that used to be owned by Bill Gates simply so that I can impersonate him and clean out his bank accounts or whatever. Should Bill Gates need to dispute my purchase of the home? That isn't what is at issue.
The problem is fraud, not domain ownership in this case.
The real solution is to not tie identity to a domain. Sure, you can deliver based on a domain, but emails should be encrypted to a certificate, and signed by a certificate, and identity should be based on that.
For whatever reason it seems like we live in this fantasyland where security and authentication is an afterthought in almost all internet protocols...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm also thinking of that nasty little book in the 80s (I do apologize for not remembering the title right now) which took a long, hard look at the US and USSR weapon efficiency; the last combined NATO maneuver in the north sea showed all (all!) carriers being (simulated to be) sunk on the very first day.
Well, you're talking about a war between equals in that case. The US carriers would obviously be vulnerable to the USSR back in the 80s, just like every other US or USSR capability of the day. All you're suggesting is that it is uncertain who would win WWIII, and I think most US military planners would agree with that. The only matchup that really comes close to US-vs-USSR today would be US-vs-the-world, and why would anybody want to even try that?
An aircraft carrier these days is a major waste of space, and primarily used for top-class idio^H^H^H^Hpeople to brag^H^H^H^Hprotect our freedom.
Carriers get lots of use today. Clearly you don't agree with how they're used, and many would agree with you. However, from a military perspective they clearly do get things done. Even if the only thing they were good at was bombing 3rd world nations without the consent of adjacent countries, that would be a capability that has some value.
Ah, I see. Of course, you certainly need super-special radar to detect a target, right? Normal shipping radar is certainly not sufficient, right? And we cannot possibly hook up a new system to an existing radar - would be too cheap to build...
Ordinary shipping radar is fine for locating a ship, if you can get in range (carrier groups of course wouldn't let you do that). In reality you'd need airborne or submarine radar to actually get close enough to spot a capital ship that is screened. Both of those would be considered threatening. You also need communications between the detection platform and the launch platform. Fire control radar isn't needed for a GPS-guided missile, although a working GPS system is (which of course the US and allies would disable in an actual shooting war). Inertial guidance actually works pretty well if you know the relative position of the launch platform and the target (which actually isn't easy to do without GPS if the target is located by a different platform).
Which already is more or less how civilians are treated by the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan.
That's pretty-much how civilians have been treated by every army in every war in history. That's why the term "martial law" doesn't generally engender warm fuzzy feelings. To the army there is your squad, your chain of command, and everybody else...
I'm not the biggest fan of every US policy in the last decade, but if you're concerned about dead civilians then that's something you think about BEFORE you go to war. The US army by any standard is at least as caring about non-combatants as any I'm aware of in history.
I'm not convinced that the day of the carrier has passed.
What has replaced them?
A carrier gives you the opportunity to have air superiority over a given location. So does an airfield. Both can be destroyed. So, are you essentially arguing that air power is obsolete, except maybe for aircraft with short-field capability that can run on moving improvised bases?
Carriers give major powers an ability to wage conventional war, and this is a capability that is in high demand. Without them, what are your options? ICBMs?
For the most part most theoretical attacks against carrier battle groups tend to be manipulations of the conventions of the seas, like arming merchant ships. That just makes it sound like what is really obsolete is the concept of freedom of navigation on the high seas. Perhaps the next logical step is to just have nations set up inspection stations outside every port and make ships check in before being able to go out to sea?
Uh, you do realize that a sea search radar is limited to the horizon when locating an enemy ship? Unless it is airborne, the radar horizon isn't going to get you the carriers, at best it might find an outside picket.
The only way to locate a carrier would be by airborne radar, or satellite (often with radar as well). A powerful sea-search radar on a plane will DEFINITELY get the attention of the US military, and will likely put the carrier group on alert and get your plane a fighter escort really fast. Satellites can only give up-to-date intel when they are overhead, and most nations that have them already have cruise missiles.
If you don't know where the target ship is, you can't hit it with a cruise missile, satellite guided or otherwise. You could fire it at a random strip of ocean and hope to get lucky - it would turn on its radar seeker and kill the first poor merchant ship it came upon. Once you fire a missile now all your own merchant ships are targets, and they'd be taken out fairly trivailly.
This really depends on your political plans and the scale of the war.
In a one-sided war that you can't lose, hearts and minds is by far the best approach. I'm not sure if it is actually possible, as nobody has ever pulled it off, but I can't think of any other options other than not going to war or things that wouldn't be politically acceptable.
In a matched war where substantial portions of your military have been lost, nobody will care about hearts and minds. Do you think the allies cared about the hearts and minds in Dresden or Tokyo? Do you think that voters in the nations that launched those raids cared about these sorts of things, when EVERYBODY had a relative who had died in the war?
Nobody starts out shooting civilians - but wars tend to escalate. Starting out a war with a sneak attack that sinks 25% or so of the US carrier fleet using civilian-disguised platforms is a very good way to get things escalated a LOT sooner. Just look at the reaction to Pearl Harbor, and that at least was a purely military attack executed completely in compliance with the Geneva Conventions (as far as I'm aware) - it just took place without a declaration of war.
Everybody already takes this approach, that's why Aegis was invented in the 80s. Or are you asking how long until somebody actually launches an attack like this?
Well, if somebody did, they'd be at war. Ok, they've sunk a carrier or two - assuming they managed to get targeting data sufficient to launch an attack (you do need to know within a few miles where a ship is to fire a missile like this). Now the country will be under strategic attack from the US. Even limited to conventional weapons only one or two nations on the planet could even put up a fight. The US doesn't need carriers to attack countries if it can obtain friendly bases nearby (and in a real shooting war on this scale, people will have to pick sides quickly - who was neutral in WWII?). Once shots are fired US forces would operate under wartime conditions, and would simply declare an exclusion zone maybe 1000 miles around the country - they'd be running a blockade anyway. Now getting within launch range would be very difficult.
Actually, a ship like this would be confiscated the moment it entered the national waters of any nation who is friendly with any of the major superpowers if they were aware of it.
Any ship armed with a weapons system in a state that can be deployed is a warship, almost by definition. Warships cannot enter territorial waters without consent - doing so is a diplomatic incident at the very least, and an act of war at worst. In an actual state of war the ship would be an immediate target, and would likely be defenseless which means that any fighter bomber making a ferry run in its vicinity would probably just be dispatched with an extra anti-ship missile to take care of it.
This is really just USS Cole Mark II. A US capital ship in constrained waters like the Persian Gulf might be at some risk if an adversary armed with these things could get an accurate location on it, and sneak this in with merchant traffic. Still, it would be a gamble, and it would certainly start a full-scale war with the US. A country like Iran would lose such a war under virtually any circumstances - they couldn't take out enough of the US navy to actually prevent an invasion. A country like China could make a much bigger impact, but at least at present they couldn't sustain an all-out war against the US. Even a diminished US military would be on the offensive and China would be fighting on its own shores against a US that would be mostly untouched within its borders. The US would also be able to resupply much more easily (more access to oil and other raw materials).
The reality is that weapons like these just make things really messy for everybody. No sovereign nation would actually fire such a weapon, at most they would use them as bargaining chips. No nation would allow terrorists/etc to actually have weapons like these - it isn't in their interests.
And how else will a missile fired against a ship with only a general knowledge of target position find its target? Do you think that a GPS location a few hours old is going to be sufficient for a missile travelling mach 3 to hit a target?
Sat guidance is only good for getting a missile to a particular absolute location on earth. Honestly, you can probably do this well enough with inertial guidance (ICBMs aren't sat-guided, and neither were a lot of earlier cruise missiles used by the US).
Hitting a ship with a missile involves a few problems.
1. Knowing where the ship is.
2. Getting the missile into the vicinity of the ship, close enough for the missile to find the ship with its onboard sensors.
3. Having the missile locate the ship's exact realtime location with its sensors.
4. Evading defenses at every step and actually hitting the thing.
Sat guidance solves #2 really well. A radar jamming system defeats #3.
Sat guidance alone can never eliminate the need to solve #3 in some way - a missile going mach 3 covers a huge space in one second, so unless the sat can give the missile realtime target location with a latency of much less than a second there is no hope of getting a hit. Every foot counts so even the accuracy of GPS might be a concern. Now, the ability to deliver realtime updates with a little more latency might allow the missile to close to a range where it could use IR to detect the ship and defeat radar jamming.
I think that the big problem is #1 - to even take a shot at a ship you need to know where it is in general, and in a serious shooting war between first world powers the first thing that would happen is that any satellite that even looks like a surveillance system would be shot down or at least blinded/jammed, and LEO will probably get so filled with debris that we won't be going into space for a few years except for short-term excursions which the military would be the only ones doing. Without satellites then air superiority or subs are the only way to find a target ship, and the US has a huge lead in both areas.
The other artificial limitation from my memory was that the arm could only be fired off at a 45-degree angle.
I think that the lack of save was the biggest issue. Sure, I've seen it beaten in around 4 hours, but that is a long time to sit down doing one thing, and if you get stuck at some point an hour in, it can be really annoying to have to re-play the previous content the next time.
Another game that shares the same issue was Solomon's key. I remember hitting points that were real doozys (the first one to come to mind is the level with the fire-breathers going up both sides of the screen with a wide-open middle). After getting past it I'd breeze through seven levels, and get stuck again, but now to stop I'd need to restart from the beginning again.
Emulators are a big plus in these kinds of situations - it is VERY nice to hit save ANY time you want to.
Agreed. I'm fine with intervention to prevent danger to the rest of the economy, but ONLY when that is accompanied by measures to rectify the problem.
In this case the solution is to allow a few airlines to go out of business and some consolidation to sure up the industry a bit. Prices are obviously too low, which is why the government needs to step in so often. Airlines are always looking for handouts.
Same thing with banks/etc. A bank that is too big to fail is too big to exist.
And bailouts have to be turned into something that nobody wants to ask for - instead companies should be fighting against them. How do you do this?
Simple - bailouts take the form of eminent domain. The government takes ownership of the company, ignoring any poison pill or change of control provisions in executive contracts. The government operates the company with the public welfare in mind and long-term health of the company/industry. The government cleans it up and fixes it, with executives staying or going based on how they fit into that, with those who are separated getting two weeks pay in lieu of notice just like the guys in the mail room. Then the government chops it up or splits it up or leaves it alone as makes sense long term. When all is done the government does an IPO and gets rid of it. Then the government does an accounting - it adds together the IPO proceeds and the earnings that came in, subtracts the cost of any money the taxpayers spent plus interest at treasury rates. If that number ends up being positive then it gets divided among all the previous shareholders, and if that number isn't positive then they're up the creek - they should have voted for better directors.
Were this to become standard policy, you'd see a lot more companies trying to figure out how to do it alone. Of course, the government should not need permission to do a "bailout" - it should be in service to the public interest. The previous owners of the company still get compensated, if their company is actually worth anything. Companies shouldn't be free to wreak havoc just to keep paying executive bonuses.
Yup, I guess the airlines figure they'll lose just as much in lawsuits whether passengers live or die after a crash - so why bother?
Cars are built to much higher safety standards than planes - at least in terms of crashworthiness.
That said, procedures and systems on aircraft are typically maintained to very safe levels. Granted, this is likely in large part due to regulation...
Could it be because all those major infrastructure systems were carefully checked for Y2K problems?
Sure, some of it was hype. Some people were certifying things like microwaves that don't store a date. However, lots of important transactions utilize datetime stamps, and errors in these transactions could be serious in a system that supports vital functions.
Your typical small business can probably cope. A power plant, or a major enterprise might have trouble. They depend on automation to deal with their volumes, and errors could be expensive to deal with.
Most likely I'll never have a house fire all my life, but I still buy fire insurance...
And it had the soundtrack from another game that was intensely annoying to play. (Bionic Commando was it?) As I recall it lacked saves, but was incredibly long - kind of like Ghosts and Goblins. And, as an added bonus it placed all kinds of arbitrary limitations on your movement that made things 40x harder than they might appear at first glance...
The problem is that local politics is VERY corrupt. It is very hard to influence local politics, since most voters just vote party line. Your ability to actually impact an election is small - as odd as that might seem.
All the geeks on the internet can speak with a loud voice at the national level. All the geeks in Folksville, IN would be 1-2 people most likely - good luck having an impact with that.
You raise a valid argument, but I think you also need to consider lifestyle. I don't have any qualms with feeding somebody in the 3rd world as opposed to allowing somebody in the US to buy a 3rd car. However, it seems like these wages don't even allow a basic standard of living.
The fact that many in China are much worse off doesn't change the fact that those working in these factories don't have even the most basic amenities.
Products built under these conditions ought to be tariffed. No, they don't need to pay for every employee to have half an acre with four bedrooms and two cars. However, three meals a day with basic nutrition with at least 8 hours of sleep and 15 minute breaks every four hours are not an unreasonable standard to require. That would probably cost Microsoft all of 0.1 cents per mouse or something like that.
Every country has income disparity - that will never change. However, even the unemployed (and likely the homeless) in the US live in better conditions than those in these factories.
State A collects the tax at time of sale. There is no paid tax receipt from State B. Second, state A is taxing the sale (legally), not the use, so why would paying use tax somewhere else have anything to do with it.
Use tax is just a euphamistic way of wording something that violates the ICC.
Considering how much the ICC is used to extend the power of government, occasionally using it to reduce the power of government doesn't seem so bad to me.
Yeah, but when the major you like is goofing off, or the history of art, good luck paying off your student loans when you graduate. There is this lovely concept that we seem to teach kids - that college is about experiences and developing yourself and becoming well-rounded, and we shouldn't be so preoccupied about pay. Well, that only works well if the government is willing to loan you $200k for you to tie a financial noose around your neck for four years. When the loans stop coming, there is a day of reckoning. Those four years of fun can cost quite a few of anguish if you don't find something practical to do with yourself...
Most jobs don't require 1/10th of the stuff they teach you in college.
If you're a dumb person copying to maintain a grade, chances are you'll bomb out in the real world unless you get into management quickly (better have people skills).
If you're smart and just don't want to be bothered, chances are there will be little impact. Do you think that the fact that you copied somebody else's term paper in English Composition in Psychology is going to have a big impact on your career in IT? Most IT jobs in the US don't even require you to program these days...
Indeed, in addition to the distribution of the ash being non-uniform, I'd imagine that its composition could be non-uniform today. Maybe today it is spewing something innocuous, and tomorrow it will spew stuff capable of boring a hole straight through the ball bearings?
Yup - those kinds of cycles are usually based on real-world experience. They test and see how often parts fail, and then set the maintenance cycles to ensure that everything gets looked at several standard deviations before even a fluke failure would occur.
However, if you test the engines on clean air, and operate them on condensed glass particles, then you're probably not going to get favorable results.
What do you do when a truck carrying insulin or blood or even pills dies and is stranded in a desert for a week? Most likely you end up throwing everything out. Even if it is ok at the moment it makes it to the warehouse, the goods probably have months subtracted for their shelf life, which means that a year later some poor guy will suffer for it if they try taking it (some medicines degrade into harmful substances, most just become ineffective, but if you need that medication to survive ineffective can be just as bad).
The only way to safely operate in these conditions is to run a statistically meaningful set of tests - and keep repeating them over time (no guarantees that the ash thrown up today will be the same as the stuff from yesterday), and then redesign the maintenance schedule from the ground up. Chances are it will be cheaper just to ground the planes...
Right now it seems we're relying on satellite information (note to idiots who don't think space flight is important -- think again).
Uh, who is claiming that spaceflight isn't important? You seem to be getting this confused with folks who think that MANNED spaceflight isn't super-important. Last time I checked there weren't any people on those satellites, and it is fairly routine to launch them.
There's a common moral squeamishness about deciding, for the greater financial good, who gets to precreate.
Sure, but it is just the next step after making people pay to raise other people's kids.
If I have to pay for the care of somebody who is sick, or whatever, now suddenly I have a voice (like it or not) in whether such a person should be born in the first place. The only alternative is to give people a voice in whether to care for said kids after they are born, which is clearly less desirable as now the poor kid is suffering in neglect through no action of his own.
Agreed on the gravity well bit.
My question is - why even land on Mars? What is down there that is so important to look at? If you must, deploy robotics and control them in near-realtime from manned Mars orbiters.
It seems like building stations in space is a lot more practical. Or if having some solid land is useful, settle some asteroids. It is a whole lot easier to dock with an asteroid, and to return afterwards.
I don't really see what is of practical value in landing on any of these planets.
Now, if you want to terraform a planet, now I can see this going somewhere. In that case we should be sending robots and bacteria and plants first. In a century or two the manned mission won't be all that hard - you need to land safely but if something goes wrong the crew can live indefinitely in the forests of Mars or wherever.
Just use the gold standard.
It doesn't get too much more secure than Mixmaster. Granted, I'm not sure if anybody is still running it these days. This was a big thing about the time that pgp was being written in the first place.
Additionally, it doesn't sound like he even wants the domain back. He just wants people to stop using it to impersonate him.
Suppose I own a domain, and want to stop using it. No big deal - I let it lapse. I don't want to pay for it - I don't need it. However, if somebody were to register it expressly for the purpose of impersonating me, I'd certainly care about it!
The same thing can happen offline. Suppose I buy a home and phone number that used to be owned by Bill Gates simply so that I can impersonate him and clean out his bank accounts or whatever. Should Bill Gates need to dispute my purchase of the home? That isn't what is at issue.
The problem is fraud, not domain ownership in this case.
The real solution is to not tie identity to a domain. Sure, you can deliver based on a domain, but emails should be encrypted to a certificate, and signed by a certificate, and identity should be based on that.
For whatever reason it seems like we live in this fantasyland where security and authentication is an afterthought in almost all internet protocols...