The only problem with the F-15's is not that it's being out classed even today as it is the number of flight hours on the existing airframes.
Boeing's F-15 production line is still up and running. A few years ago, they unvieled the F-15 SE (Silent Eagle) for ~$100 million It has updated avionics and a stealthier aspect + export legal stealth coating that is good against air-to-air radar. The current crop of F-15C/E airplanes is also getting some updated radar and avionics, but not a full overhaul.
/Boeing is also offering F-18 variants for ~$50 million each.
Hi there. NSA here. We'd like to ask everyone to stop copying our ideas. Unfortunately we can't patent them for obvious reasons, but we can block you just as much under the 'National Security' stamp, so just forget about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act You can apply for a classified patent and the government can retroactively classify an already granted/applied for patent. Once your patent is classified, your only customer is the government or government contractors with clearance.
This. This is very important: the necessity to seem "non-partisan" for those sites makes it wayyy too easy for the liars. After all, if you get to lie all the time and the "fact checkers" feel compelled to scrutinise your opponents extra-hard just so they can say that both sides have about the same lying rate, it's win-win!
Stop filling cars with stupid user interfaces for electronic systems that require close visual attention to use! ...
Cars of the 1960s with great big toggle switches on wooden dashboards were easier to drive than this.
MyFord Touch was such a hit that Ford chose not to include it standard on their best selling product: the F-series of trucks. Why? Because it was a glitchy mess and they could not afford to jeapordize sales of the best selling truck in America.
For 2013, they're including MyFord Touch standard on some of the premium trim packages, but it's a modified layout with redundant buttons and knobs for climate and radio/cd control. The fact that Ford is unwilling to go full retard on their line of trucks makes me wonder what they're thinking by forcing it into the rest of their product lineup.
Not really. The Germans were flying the $110M (Euro 90M) Eurofigher against the $150M F-22. The Eurofighter is a contemporary of the F-22, only a couple of years older, not something from a previous design generation. The other guy is not going to have some huge numerical advantage.
Who do you think we're supposed to be fighting? Europe? The F-35 and F-22 would be up against the previous generation of jets which are much much cheaper. Quantity has a quality all its own, especially when the fancy stealth jets run out of missiles.
But we should also have modern incarnations of a dedicated fighter and a dedicated close air support aircraft, as we did in the past with the F-16s and A-10s. For those unfamiliar with the origin of these legendary aircraft, the Air Force did not want either one. They were both designed by rouge design teams that did not believe in the concept of multi-mission aircraft, and after demonstrating amazing performance in their respective roles, they were forced upon the Air Force by a cost conscious Congress.
Technology has a profound effect on the way society works and on the way different countries interact. I'm open to a discussion on why paying Pakistanis less than Romanians for the exact same work makes sense, but you mostly seem interested in calling that discussion Marxism and claiming I mean "death to Capitalism! Ra ra."
Am I really the only one who thinks that arbitrarily paying people from certain countries less for the same work is a shitty thing to do? You don't have to be a Socialist to find that idea repellent.
THIS was an administrative hearing which FUNCTIONS much like a court for most intents and purposes. Therefore the ONLY recourse left to VZ is an actual court. And having already been ruled on by an Administrative hearing, the hurdle is much much higher for VZ than normal court case
$1.25 million (paid to the Treasury Dept) works out to 5,208 customers paying $20/month for a year. Raise your hand if you really think Verizon only had 5,208 customers pay for 4G tethering.
Corporations love these consent decrees because it means they get a slap on the wrist in return for promising not to do [bad thing] again. At the absolute bare minimum, Verizon should be paying back the customers their $20 x # of months.
Ninety nine times out of a hundred, consent decrees piss me the hell off.
In practice, they don't seem to be betting that much on wind power.
That's because China is betting on Nuclear power. China is aiming to match France's nuclear power production by 2020, and they're seeking to surpass the USA's output~15 years after that. The dates will probably slip because Fukushima has caused them to halt and reevaluate the safety protocols for their plants, but otherwise: they are aiming to be the #1 producer of nuclear power.
/They've also closed a lot of coal plants because of the pollution. //The air quality in Beijing is a source of constant embarassment to the government.
Norton has supplied parts to most of the new space rocketeers, including Burt Rutan's Mojave, Calif.-based Scaled Composites, which built the first privately funded manned craft to reach the edge of space, and Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. [aka SpaceX] in El Segundo, which launched the first privately funded craft to reach low-Earth orbit this month, though it malfunctioned after half an orbit.
These private companies can build their 'cheap' rockets because they're bootstrapping with the results of hundreds of millions in 60s NASA cast offs.
This is what I like about rocket engines. A rocket engine designed for a specific load in the 60s and today would have nearly the same design. A modernized F1 is entirely logical.
There have been plenty of advances since the 60s, especially in the materials sciences, it's just that no one but NASA would spend the money on R&D.
Even the private space companies of today are building their engines using cast-offs from the NASA programs of old. They look for parts in a California junkyard called Norton Sales, where used NASA parts go to die. You're not going to find cheap rocket grade titanium turbopumps anywhere else in the world.
Heck, even NASA has had to go scrounging through that junkyard, because they've destroyed the blueprints for so many old pieces of equipment, that the only way to rebuild them is to find an original and reverse engineer it.
A baseball bat is more useful than martial arts training.
Anyone trained in hand to hand combat will take it away and beat you with it. Unless you have a really really good grip on it, then they might have to break your arm first.
A high powered stun baton can give you similar reach and will drop all but the most drug addled attacker.
The trick is to teach kids how to handle the gun so that you take away the mystery.
3 year old kids? More than enough kids have killed themselves or someone else by accident because they knew how to get to a gun. While I'm glad you and your siblings survived, it's bad public policy to encourage the not-storing of loaded guns.
As they say: if you have a pool in the backyard, which do you think would be more effective: Putting a fence around it, or teaching your kids to swim?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine I'm going to go with "Putting a fence around it" if you want to avoid being sued out of house and home if someone else's kid drowns. In most jurisdictions, you'll start racking up daily fines if you refuse to put up a fence around any attractive nuisances on your land.
Aye, no Scotsman would do such a thing "But a police force bought these safes and distributed them to trained officers and a kid ended up getting shot"
Next job: use Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ from a thumb-drive, and you won't have to worry about it.
Windows is so smart and clever, it caches traces everywhere. There are.db files with a thumbnail of every picture that goes through the machine. The registry is stuffed full of filenames and filepaths you might not be interested in sharing. There's a virtualstore folder full of junk, there are savepoints every time an update is applied, and so on.
You really do have to nuke it from orbit to be sure. Even if you use portableapps.
We live in an era where we shy back from the edge achieved in the past. Air transport speeds have stagnated around mach 0.9,
No one has anything to prove. If you can make a business case for a supersonic passenger jet, everyone would love to see it. .9 mach in a widebody jet is the best compromise of speed and fuel efficiency that you're going to get. And the R&D guys have long been stymied by suits who are looking at cost efficiency.
If you want cutting edge, you have to get into military R&D. Sometimes they create technology that can trickle down into the civilian sector.
/and most racing leagues have target speeds for the cars, so they spend a lot of effort fiddling with the rules to keep speeds down.
The gun the shooter use was already illegal in Colorado. How will further disarming the victims make anything better?
[Citation Needed] Last I checked, the guns the shooter used were purchased in Colorado. Almost everything else he ordered off the internet (yes, tear gas grenades can be bought online)
3D printing is going to make gun control laws moot.
Almost all our power generation requires water. If you don't have water security, you can't have power security.
Even in the USA, we're dealing with nuclear and coal plants on the brink of shutting down, because the mild winter and extended drought is bringing rivers down near critical levels.
In Africa, you need to desalinate water before you can do anything. And desalination creates its own set of problems (what do you do with the brine?).
Slashdot Mirror
The moral of the story is that, just like complex software, complex aircraft can exhibit emergent bug behaviour that you won't catch with unit tests.
It's not rocket science to figure out that inserting a carbon filter into your airflow would restrict the airflow.
The only problem with the F-15's is not that it's being out classed even today as it is the number of flight hours on the existing airframes.
Boeing's F-15 production line is still up and running.
A few years ago, they unvieled the F-15 SE (Silent Eagle) for ~$100 million
It has updated avionics and a stealthier aspect + export legal stealth coating that is good against air-to-air radar.
The current crop of F-15C/E airplanes is also getting some updated radar and avionics, but not a full overhaul.
/Boeing is also offering F-18 variants for ~$50 million each.
Hi there. NSA here. We'd like to ask everyone to stop copying our ideas. Unfortunately we can't patent them for obvious reasons, but we can block you just as much under the 'National Security' stamp, so just forget about it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_Secrecy_Act
You can apply for a classified patent and the government can retroactively classify an already granted/applied for patent.
Once your patent is classified, your only customer is the government or government contractors with clearance.
This. This is very important: the necessity to seem "non-partisan" for those sites makes it wayyy too easy for the liars. After all, if you get to lie all the time and the "fact checkers" feel compelled to scrutinise your opponents extra-hard just so they can say that both sides have about the same lying rate, it's win-win!
[Citation Needed]
There is a difference between your computer's desktop and a desktop computer.
Reports of the Linux Desktop's death have been greatly exaggerated.
Anonymous Coward: FROST PIST
What the Moderators do: -5 Off Topic
What the Anonymous Coward sees: +5 Attention.
This is not how negative feedback was supposed to work.
Stop filling cars with stupid user interfaces for electronic systems that require close visual attention to use!
...
Cars of the 1960s with great big toggle switches on wooden dashboards were easier to drive than this.
MyFord Touch was such a hit that Ford chose not to include it standard on their best selling product: the F-series of trucks.
Why? Because it was a glitchy mess and they could not afford to jeapordize sales of the best selling truck in America.
For 2013, they're including MyFord Touch standard on some of the premium trim packages,
but it's a modified layout with redundant buttons and knobs for climate and radio/cd control.
The fact that Ford is unwilling to go full retard on their line of trucks makes me wonder what they're thinking by forcing it into the rest of their product lineup.
Not really. The Germans were flying the $110M (Euro 90M) Eurofigher against the $150M F-22. The Eurofighter is a contemporary of the F-22, only a couple of years older, not something from a previous design generation. The other guy is not going to have some huge numerical advantage.
Who do you think we're supposed to be fighting? Europe?
The F-35 and F-22 would be up against the previous generation of jets which are much much cheaper.
Quantity has a quality all its own, especially when the fancy stealth jets run out of missiles.
But we should also have modern incarnations of a dedicated fighter and a dedicated close air support aircraft, as we did in the past with the F-16s and A-10s. For those unfamiliar with the origin of these legendary aircraft, the Air Force did not want either one. They were both designed by rouge design teams that did not believe in the concept of multi-mission aircraft, and after demonstrating amazing performance in their respective roles, they were forced upon the Air Force by a cost conscious Congress.
From that Wired article is a link to another article written by the guy who co-designed the F-16 and A-10
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/The-F-35s-Air-to-Air-Capability-Controversy-05089/
He takes a long shit all over the F-35. It's going to be the compromise that nobody wants, but everybody is stuck with.
Technology has a profound effect on the way society works and on the way different countries interact.
I'm open to a discussion on why paying Pakistanis less than Romanians for the exact same work makes sense,
but you mostly seem interested in calling that discussion Marxism and claiming I mean "death to Capitalism! Ra ra."
Am I really the only one who thinks that arbitrarily paying people from certain countries less for the same work is a shitty thing to do?
You don't have to be a Socialist to find that idea repellent.
payments are on a sliding scale, with lower rates for poorer countries
There's no meaningful reason to do this other than corporate profits.
Are the customers getting their money back?
You know, for the tethering costs they should never have paid?
Never Mind
THIS was an administrative hearing which FUNCTIONS much like a court for most intents and purposes. Therefore the ONLY recourse left to VZ is an actual court. And having already been ruled on by an Administrative hearing, the hurdle is much much higher for VZ than normal court case
$1.25 million (paid to the Treasury Dept) works out to 5,208 customers paying $20/month for a year.
Raise your hand if you really think Verizon only had 5,208 customers pay for 4G tethering.
Corporations love these consent decrees because it means they get a slap on the wrist in return for promising not to do [bad thing] again.
At the absolute bare minimum, Verizon should be paying back the customers their $20 x # of months.
Ninety nine times out of a hundred, consent decrees piss me the hell off.
1 line to do shutdown -h now.
99,999 lines to build a GUI.
That sounds about right.
In practice, they don't seem to be betting that much on wind power.
That's because China is betting on Nuclear power.
China is aiming to match France's nuclear power production by 2020,
and they're seeking to surpass the USA's output~15 years after that.
The dates will probably slip because Fukushima has caused them to halt
and reevaluate the safety protocols for their plants, but otherwise: they are aiming to be the #1 producer of nuclear power.
/They've also closed a lot of coal plants because of the pollution.
//The air quality in Beijing is a source of constant embarassment to the government.
SpaceX does not use second-hand parts from Norton.
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/mar/25/science/sci-junkyard25
Norton has supplied parts to most of the new space rocketeers, including Burt Rutan's Mojave, Calif.-based Scaled Composites, which built the first privately funded manned craft to reach the edge of space, and Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies Corp. [aka SpaceX] in El Segundo, which launched the first privately funded craft to reach low-Earth orbit this month, though it malfunctioned after half an orbit.
These private companies can build their 'cheap' rockets because they're bootstrapping with the results of hundreds of millions in 60s NASA cast offs.
This is what I like about rocket engines. A rocket engine designed for a specific load in the 60s and today would have nearly the same design. A modernized F1 is entirely logical.
There have been plenty of advances since the 60s, especially in the materials sciences,
it's just that no one but NASA would spend the money on R&D.
Even the private space companies of today are building their engines using cast-offs from the NASA programs of old.
They look for parts in a California junkyard called Norton Sales, where used NASA parts go to die.
You're not going to find cheap rocket grade titanium turbopumps anywhere else in the world.
Heck, even NASA has had to go scrounging through that junkyard,
because they've destroyed the blueprints for so many old pieces of equipment,
that the only way to rebuild them is to find an original and reverse engineer it.
A baseball bat is more useful than martial arts training.
Anyone trained in hand to hand combat will take it away and beat you with it.
Unless you have a really really good grip on it, then they might have to break your arm first.
A high powered stun baton can give you similar reach and will drop all but the most drug addled attacker.
The trick is to teach kids how to handle the gun so that you take away the mystery.
3 year old kids?
More than enough kids have killed themselves or someone else by accident because they knew how to get to a gun.
While I'm glad you and your siblings survived, it's bad public policy to encourage the not-storing of loaded guns.
As they say: if you have a pool in the backyard, which do you think would be more effective: Putting a fence around it, or teaching your kids to swim?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractive_nuisance_doctrine
I'm going to go with "Putting a fence around it" if you want to avoid being sued out of house and home if someone else's kid drowns.
In most jurisdictions, you'll start racking up daily fines if you refuse to put up a fence around any attractive nuisances on your land.
A real gun owner would know this.
Aye, no Scotsman would do such a thing
"But a police force bought these safes and distributed them to trained officers and a kid ended up getting shot"
Well.... No true Scotsman would do such a thing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_warranty
Those safes are not fit for their intended purpose.
Start suing.
Next job: use Portable Apps http://portableapps.com/ from a thumb-drive, and you won't have to worry about it.
Windows is so smart and clever, it caches traces everywhere. .db files with a thumbnail of every picture that goes through the machine.
There are
The registry is stuffed full of filenames and filepaths you might not be interested in sharing.
There's a virtualstore folder full of junk, there are savepoints every time an update is applied, and so on.
You really do have to nuke it from orbit to be sure.
Even if you use portableapps.
Are fuzzing tools really that hard to write?
We live in an era where we shy back from the edge achieved in the past. Air transport speeds have stagnated around mach 0.9,
No one has anything to prove. If you can make a business case for a supersonic passenger jet, everyone would love to see it.
.9 mach in a widebody jet is the best compromise of speed and fuel efficiency that you're going to get.
And the R&D guys have long been stymied by suits who are looking at cost efficiency.
If you want cutting edge, you have to get into military R&D.
Sometimes they create technology that can trickle down into the civilian sector.
/and most racing leagues have target speeds for the cars, so they spend a lot of effort fiddling with the rules to keep speeds down.
The gun the shooter use was already illegal in Colorado. How will further disarming the victims make anything better?
[Citation Needed]
Last I checked, the guns the shooter used were purchased in Colorado.
Almost everything else he ordered off the internet (yes, tear gas grenades can be bought online)
3D printing is going to make gun control laws moot.
Almost all our power generation requires water.
If you don't have water security, you can't have power security.
Even in the USA, we're dealing with nuclear and coal plants on the brink of shutting down,
because the mild winter and extended drought is bringing rivers down near critical levels.
In Africa, you need to desalinate water before you can do anything.
And desalination creates its own set of problems (what do you do with the brine?).