I am Australian, and our criminals have guns. Banning guns won't stop criminals or terrorists getting or making them. A full automatic sub-machine gun can be made in any basic machine shop.
Banning guns will massively reduce their use in domestic disputes and suicide, but it won't stop criminals.
That is really a movie thing, in real life giving the patient enough morphine to shut them up is also a good way to kill them. In WWII medics were very careful about morphine use (eg pinning used syrettes to the soldiers collar so field hospitals would know morphine had been administered).
You are assuming that a fly-by-wire system is more failure prone then the standard mechanical linkages, it is possible that a fly-by-wire system could be simpler and less failure prone then the current systems. And even "basic" models of cars these days have so many electronic extras that fly-by-wire is likely to be a minor additional cost if any at all.
Fly-by-wire has been done in the past, people just prefer having a steering wheel because they are used to it. I think that as more cars transition to be being capable of autonomous driving then people will drop the huge bulky wheel in favour of a small joystick that can be used when needed.
Yeah there is, most traffic is to American sites and we have a limited international cable infrastructure which mostly relies on 2nd and 3rd parties in the link. On my last ISP I had connection problems on occasion because either SingTel or the US ISP at the landing in America would fuck with some settings. With the NBN I believe most of the international links and peering will be handled by NBNCo which should have more bargaining power then the small ISP's currently do (the big ISP's in Australia generally prefer fucking customers over).
For the simple reason that many people might find that sort of thing stinks of Big Brother. People are used to official photographs now but generally find other forms of identification such as fingerprinting to be too associated with law enforcement to be acceptable. The appeal of Iris scans would be to do them when children are born and can't protest, meanwhile the parents are probably too overjoyed and tired to protest either.
Also I suspect the authorities don't like biometrics which change because they like to push through cases on forensic identification and so don't like the public thinking about the false positive rate.
AFAIK rugby players, who play without helmets or padding, show similar injuries but not to the same degree as American Football players. And some countries where rugby is popular are already talking about multi-match or even season medical "bans" for concussed players (concussion is somewhat cumulative, every one you get makes it more likely you will be concussed in future).
But at least football players get better compensated than soldiers with IED caused traumatic brain injuries.
My favourite example of this kind of stuff is the reefs in the pacific made from dumped US and Japanese war surplus. Even though much of that equipment remained in US arsenals through the 1950's and was used by US allies well into the 70's it was cheapest to dump brand new tanks and use the space to ship soldiers home.
[quote]Seems to me like even with the advent of missile subs those tunnels could still have served as a hideout for World Leaders (tm) from our side of the political spectrum if the worst had happened...[/quote]
Not if you RTFA. The camp was abandoned because they had to trim and remove 120 tons of ice a month to maintain the tunnels because of the ice sheets movement. The tunnels themselves also weren't nearly deep enough to shield from "nearby" nuclear explosions or conventional bombings, which would be inevitable as its location was no secret.
Facilities like Raven Rock were far more secure and easier to maintain, not to mention reachable before the bombs fell.
>Most of those aircraft losses were in combat missions, not in training.
There is a difference between crashing an aircraft on a combat missions because it is a piece of shit death trap (like all early jets) and losing one to actual combat.
From what I have been told by the knowledgeable in previous discussions is that civilian twin engine aircraft are designed to function on one engine, so it is a sure bet that military ones are as well. The only case I can think where this mightn't apply is if the aircraft had a full combat load, but this was a training flight.
From the fact that people could hear a failing engine it is likely that both engines failed one after the other (eg catastrophic turbine failure leading to the other engine being damaged by fragments), or this was something like a fuel pump failure.
Re:I agree: nothing here in the Wikileaks Stratfor
on
Is Stratfor a "Joke"?
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· Score: 1
A spy operation would imply that a certain amount of deception (or at least extreme covertness) was used to secure information that is considered proprietary to an organization
No it doesn't. The KGB used to count the cars in the Pentagon car park, the NSA/DIA used to listen for encrypted military radio traffic to gauge readiness levels. Everyone knew they did this, and there was only the most cursory attempts to conceal it.
Intelligence gathering is mostly far more prosaic than people assume. The real covert stuff, like using submarines to attach listening devices to Soviet undersea cables, is only a tiny part of what is going on. Mostly it is gathering a whole bunch of "newspaper clippings" and attempting to create an overall impression of what the enemy is up to (and this is why it was easy to "spice up" the Iraq and WMD intel to support an invasion).
And yes this is incredibly dangerous (as Iraq found out) and almost lead to Nuclear War in the 1980's when the Soviets relied on it to figure out if the US was going to pull a first strike.
What I don't understand is why some OTHER definition is required
In the original analogy rich people getting into heaven is virtually impossible (ie actually squeezing through a needle). The gate interpretation lowers the eligibility bar to just rich people giving away their wealth.
Of course this usually gets further re-defined to something like "just giving away their wealth when they die" or "just giving away a lot of wealth".
And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.
That is what Santorum said. And I think most of the West these days considers anything consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home to not be the end of the world and not the governments bloody business.
Also the logical conclusion of Santorum's position is to either "fix" all the gays or to restrain them from being able to have gay sex. I am an Evangelical Christian and I think Santorum is a dangerous man whose basic ideology is antithetical to liberal democracy.
deliberately trying to game the search engine to have your results on top
No gaming involved. Google's search results are based on how popular a particular link is. People find the sexual meaning of santorum to be worth linking to. As pointed out in the article this isn't a Google bomb like linking "miserable failure" to "George H. W. Bush" was.
However, a person's name definitely belongs to them.
No it doesn't unless they have a unique name and have trademarked it. Plenty of Santorums, and santorum, in the world apart from one ludicrously anti-gay presidential wannabe.
due to the sheer number of Redditors there actively defending pedophiles and their crimes under the guise of "free speech"
Pedophilia is a sexual orientation that is as "natural" as any other sexual orientation, and pedophiles should have the same legal rights as anyone else unless they molest children. Also most child molesters aren't pedophiles.
The "crimes" were posting pictures of fully clothed children and making creepy comments. Any actual child pornography was reported and banned as standard policy.
The number of members there who seem to base their morals on whether something is legal or not
Which is exactly what you are doing. Your morals seem to consist of "its against the law" and "its creepy".
It's this versatility that allowed for cheap mass production because instead of having to build light, medium and heavy tanks, USSR could focus on one medium tank that could perform well in light and heavy roles as well.
That's nice but bears no resemblance to history. The Soviets still built heavy tanks (the KV and IS series), self-propelled guns, and assault guns to the end of the war because the T-34, even in numbers, had a hard time dealing with late war German heavy armour and dug in anti-tank guns and was not designed for infantry support. The T-34 was built in such large numbers because they were lost in such large numbers.
The Main Battle Tank happened after WWII when improvements in metallurgy made a fast, heavily armed, and well armoured tank possible.
They still get busted regularly by this as it is trivial for a CC company to run an analysis and find the common factors amongst multiple stolen numbers.
Sure in theory you could dilute the numbers enough to make this kind of tracking infeasible, but most low-level criminals are too stupid and lazy to run a secure scam. Smart criminals either never touch the money and run things from the dark, or they go big into corporate crime.
[quote]With the tanks the German made Leopards we just retired were superior in a lot of roles[/quote]
Yes but they were mostly worn out. We operated stuff like the Leopards and M113's well past the use-by-date on the chassis.
The real problem with the Abram's deal is that our government is terrified of anything to do with the words "nuclear" or "uranium" (unless it is exporting uranium) and so we got the crappy armour for our Abram's that the Americans replaced in the mid-80's.
The problem is that most of our local defence needs are going to involve urban/jungle warfare where "modern" AT weapons (like the ancient RPG-7) would tear our under-armoured Abrams, let alone Leopards, apart. We would have been better off spending the money on some tracked IFV's with a big gun version of that IFV to fill the tank role. Instead we bought MBT's which we have little use for and lack the logistics to support properly, and are mostly reliant on wheeled IFVs like the ASLAV or Bushmaster. Those are fine for the dry season but would be almost totally worthless in the rainy season.
Most of them don't care. It is pretty obvious when someone is a copper thief.
I think anything less than full photo registration of sellers, and a bureaucracy to make sure sure no scap is being "laundered", is about the only way to stop it. However that would probably cost more than the copper thieves do.
Test pilot is synonymous with risk, even more so than being a fighter pilot.
Except these aren't test models. The F-22 production model was finalised in 1997, the first production models were delivered in 2003! To put that in perspective entire jet aircraft were designed, flown in combat, and retired during a similar amount of time in the Cold War.
These are production aircraft that have only been used on "test" missions because they are too expensive to risk on real missions, and they have a history of stupid problems like this one which can easily lead to loss of aircraft on a real mission even without enemy action. The airforce won't shitcan the aircraft because it is the only proper stealth (JFS stealth is a joke) manned aircraft they are getting.
The military procurement system in the English speaking world (significant because it is mostly the same companies at the top in the US, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom) has been sick since the 80's and I can't remember a major procurement since then that didn't last longer then a world war and end in a notably flawed product (maybe the F/A-18 Super Hornet). The USN has aluminium hulled boats corroding due to lack of cathodic protection, the USMC took 20 years to get the Osprey to stop falling out of the sky, the USAF has the F-22 and JSF, the US Army had the Bradley (whose terrible procurement process spawned a book and a movie). At this point we may as well open the treasuries to the defence contractors and say "take what you want, just deliver a working weapon system within a decade".
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I am Australian, and our criminals have guns. Banning guns won't stop criminals or terrorists getting or making them. A full automatic sub-machine gun can be made in any basic machine shop.
Banning guns will massively reduce their use in domestic disputes and suicide, but it won't stop criminals.
That is really a movie thing, in real life giving the patient enough morphine to shut them up is also a good way to kill them. In WWII medics were very careful about morphine use (eg pinning used syrettes to the soldiers collar so field hospitals would know morphine had been administered).
You are assuming that a fly-by-wire system is more failure prone then the standard mechanical linkages, it is possible that a fly-by-wire system could be simpler and less failure prone then the current systems. And even "basic" models of cars these days have so many electronic extras that fly-by-wire is likely to be a minor additional cost if any at all.
Fly-by-wire has been done in the past, people just prefer having a steering wheel because they are used to it. I think that as more cars transition to be being capable of autonomous driving then people will drop the huge bulky wheel in favour of a small joystick that can be used when needed.
>There is little excuse for it
Yeah there is, most traffic is to American sites and we have a limited international cable infrastructure which mostly relies on 2nd and 3rd parties in the link. On my last ISP I had connection problems on occasion because either SingTel or the US ISP at the landing in America would fuck with some settings. With the NBN I believe most of the international links and peering will be handled by NBNCo which should have more bargaining power then the small ISP's currently do (the big ISP's in Australia generally prefer fucking customers over).
For the simple reason that many people might find that sort of thing stinks of Big Brother. People are used to official photographs now but generally find other forms of identification such as fingerprinting to be too associated with law enforcement to be acceptable. The appeal of Iris scans would be to do them when children are born and can't protest, meanwhile the parents are probably too overjoyed and tired to protest either.
Also I suspect the authorities don't like biometrics which change because they like to push through cases on forensic identification and so don't like the public thinking about the false positive rate.
AFAIK rugby players, who play without helmets or padding, show similar injuries but not to the same degree as American Football players. And some countries where rugby is popular are already talking about multi-match or even season medical "bans" for concussed players (concussion is somewhat cumulative, every one you get makes it more likely you will be concussed in future).
But at least football players get better compensated than soldiers with IED caused traumatic brain injuries.
My favourite example of this kind of stuff is the reefs in the pacific made from dumped US and Japanese war surplus. Even though much of that equipment remained in US arsenals through the 1950's and was used by US allies well into the 70's it was cheapest to dump brand new tanks and use the space to ship soldiers home.
[quote]Seems to me like even with the advent of missile subs those tunnels could still have served as a hideout for World Leaders (tm) from our side of the political spectrum if the worst had happened...[/quote]
Not if you RTFA. The camp was abandoned because they had to trim and remove 120 tons of ice a month to maintain the tunnels because of the ice sheets movement. The tunnels themselves also weren't nearly deep enough to shield from "nearby" nuclear explosions or conventional bombings, which would be inevitable as its location was no secret.
Facilities like Raven Rock were far more secure and easier to maintain, not to mention reachable before the bombs fell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raven_Rock,_Pennsylvania
>Most of those aircraft losses were in combat missions, not in training.
There is a difference between crashing an aircraft on a combat missions because it is a piece of shit death trap (like all early jets) and losing one to actual combat.
From what I have been told by the knowledgeable in previous discussions is that civilian twin engine aircraft are designed to function on one engine, so it is a sure bet that military ones are as well. The only case I can think where this mightn't apply is if the aircraft had a full combat load, but this was a training flight.
From the fact that people could hear a failing engine it is likely that both engines failed one after the other (eg catastrophic turbine failure leading to the other engine being damaged by fragments), or this was something like a fuel pump failure.
What do you think caused WWIII in Star Trek?
A spy operation would imply that a certain amount of deception (or at least extreme covertness) was used to secure information that is considered proprietary to an organization
No it doesn't. The KGB used to count the cars in the Pentagon car park, the NSA/DIA used to listen for encrypted military radio traffic to gauge readiness levels. Everyone knew they did this, and there was only the most cursory attempts to conceal it.
Intelligence gathering is mostly far more prosaic than people assume. The real covert stuff, like using submarines to attach listening devices to Soviet undersea cables, is only a tiny part of what is going on. Mostly it is gathering a whole bunch of "newspaper clippings" and attempting to create an overall impression of what the enemy is up to (and this is why it was easy to "spice up" the Iraq and WMD intel to support an invasion).
And yes this is incredibly dangerous (as Iraq found out) and almost lead to Nuclear War in the 1980's when the Soviets relied on it to figure out if the US was going to pull a first strike.
What I don't understand is why some OTHER definition is required
In the original analogy rich people getting into heaven is virtually impossible (ie actually squeezing through a needle). The gate interpretation lowers the eligibility bar to just rich people giving away their wealth.
Of course this usually gets further re-defined to something like "just giving away their wealth when they die" or "just giving away a lot of wealth".
You do in Australia because the wages are crazy here ($100,000 to drive a truck) and apparently female operators are gentler on the equipment.
That may be, but doesn't that happen all the time? Attorneys representing a client for a portion of any damages/settlement is pretty damn common.
This whole incident reminds me of a playground bully running to tell the teachers that a victim dared to fight back.
And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.
That is what Santorum said. And I think most of the West these days considers anything consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home to not be the end of the world and not the governments bloody business.
Also the logical conclusion of Santorum's position is to either "fix" all the gays or to restrain them from being able to have gay sex. I am an Evangelical Christian and I think Santorum is a dangerous man whose basic ideology is antithetical to liberal democracy.
deliberately trying to game the search engine to have your results on top
No gaming involved. Google's search results are based on how popular a particular link is. People find the sexual meaning of santorum to be worth linking to. As pointed out in the article this isn't a Google bomb like linking "miserable failure" to "George H. W. Bush" was.
However, a person's name definitely belongs to them.
No it doesn't unless they have a unique name and have trademarked it. Plenty of Santorums, and santorum, in the world apart from one ludicrously anti-gay presidential wannabe.
due to the sheer number of Redditors there actively defending pedophiles and their crimes under the guise of "free speech"
Pedophilia is a sexual orientation that is as "natural" as any other sexual orientation, and pedophiles should have the same legal rights as anyone else unless they molest children. Also most child molesters aren't pedophiles.
The "crimes" were posting pictures of fully clothed children and making creepy comments. Any actual child pornography was reported and banned as standard policy.
The number of members there who seem to base their morals on whether something is legal or not
Which is exactly what you are doing. Your morals seem to consist of "its against the law" and "its creepy".
It's this versatility that allowed for cheap mass production because instead of having to build light, medium and heavy tanks, USSR could focus on one medium tank that could perform well in light and heavy roles as well.
That's nice but bears no resemblance to history. The Soviets still built heavy tanks (the KV and IS series), self-propelled guns, and assault guns to the end of the war because the T-34, even in numbers, had a hard time dealing with late war German heavy armour and dug in anti-tank guns and was not designed for infantry support. The T-34 was built in such large numbers because they were lost in such large numbers.
The Main Battle Tank happened after WWII when improvements in metallurgy made a fast, heavily armed, and well armoured tank possible.
They still get busted regularly by this as it is trivial for a CC company to run an analysis and find the common factors amongst multiple stolen numbers.
Sure in theory you could dilute the numbers enough to make this kind of tracking infeasible, but most low-level criminals are too stupid and lazy to run a secure scam. Smart criminals either never touch the money and run things from the dark, or they go big into corporate crime.
[quote]With the tanks the German made Leopards we just retired were superior in a lot of roles[/quote]
Yes but they were mostly worn out. We operated stuff like the Leopards and M113's well past the use-by-date on the chassis.
The real problem with the Abram's deal is that our government is terrified of anything to do with the words "nuclear" or "uranium" (unless it is exporting uranium) and so we got the crappy armour for our Abram's that the Americans replaced in the mid-80's.
The problem is that most of our local defence needs are going to involve urban/jungle warfare where "modern" AT weapons (like the ancient RPG-7) would tear our under-armoured Abrams, let alone Leopards, apart. We would have been better off spending the money on some tracked IFV's with a big gun version of that IFV to fill the tank role. Instead we bought MBT's which we have little use for and lack the logistics to support properly, and are mostly reliant on wheeled IFVs like the ASLAV or Bushmaster. Those are fine for the dry season but would be almost totally worthless in the rainy season.
Most of them don't care. It is pretty obvious when someone is a copper thief.
I think anything less than full photo registration of sellers, and a bureaucracy to make sure sure no scap is being "laundered", is about the only way to stop it. However that would probably cost more than the copper thieves do.
I couldn't care less if it is banned here because I have started buying new releases from the UK to save $30+.
Test pilot is synonymous with risk, even more so than being a fighter pilot.
Except these aren't test models. The F-22 production model was finalised in 1997, the first production models were delivered in 2003! To put that in perspective entire jet aircraft were designed, flown in combat, and retired during a similar amount of time in the Cold War.
These are production aircraft that have only been used on "test" missions because they are too expensive to risk on real missions, and they have a history of stupid problems like this one which can easily lead to loss of aircraft on a real mission even without enemy action. The airforce won't shitcan the aircraft because it is the only proper stealth (JFS stealth is a joke) manned aircraft they are getting.
The military procurement system in the English speaking world (significant because it is mostly the same companies at the top in the US, Australia, Canada, United Kingdom) has been sick since the 80's and I can't remember a major procurement since then that didn't last longer then a world war and end in a notably flawed product (maybe the F/A-18 Super Hornet). The USN has aluminium hulled boats corroding due to lack of cathodic protection, the USMC took 20 years to get the Osprey to stop falling out of the sky, the USAF has the F-22 and JSF, the US Army had the Bradley (whose terrible procurement process spawned a book and a movie). At this point we may as well open the treasuries to the defence contractors and say "take what you want, just deliver a working weapon system within a decade".