All systems of government are dependent on a taxation system and some form of security forces. Of course you can pretend you do not need to tax people and just borrow instead and then have the next government pay the bill. Life sure is grand...
Just image the consequences of a simultaneous Chinese invasion of Korea (both of them) and Taiwan and then figure out the consequences. Since you are in/. you probably know how the supply chain of our modern hardware industry works so do the numbers.
Yes the USA is post-consumer. USA citizens now live on a diet of pink unicorns and cow farts while playing World of Warcraft in their iPads. Oh wait...
You would have to be terribly misinformed not to notice Chinese military buildup in the last decade. Just looking at the Navy the Chinese now possess the two largest shipyards in the world today. The have been churning out all sorts of frigates, destroyers, amphibious assault ships, fast patrol boats, etc. They even started an aircraft carrier program which is something which is only necessary for power projection at long distances. Then there is their Air Force which has seen its fighters completely overhauled and they are now in the process of making a stealth fighter. They are also working in air refueling, another necessary technology for power projection, their main problem in the air force is large transport aircraft and bombers. In components it is engines. There have been several rumours of the Chinese working on a large flying wing stealth bomber but it is unknown if the project exists in fact or not.
Would probably be cheaper to buy chunks of Australia instead. Closer and has less population. However the Chinese are building yet more of those superdams (Three Gorges was just the first of a set of three superdams they want to make). The increased mechanization of all sorts of activities will lead to an increase in mechanized agriculture in China as well which should increase production eventually even if today it is an issue. The state has not focused on agriculture at all for a long time. Which is counter to traditional Chinese policies since like... the Qin dynasty.
They keep claiming the RQ-170 drone wasn't hacked when there have been all sorts of hacks of the video feeds years before. The thing is anything can be hacked. The tendency is to automate the airplanes increasingly. It may get to the point where an automated system even pulls the trigger. That should not be allowed.
Yet they invaded Vietnam in the late 1970s and lets not forget Tibet, or their repeated attempts to invade Mongolia. They only failed in cases where the USSR funded the local resistance in order to contain their imperialistic ambitions.
The simple fact is you need more lines of code to do the same thing in Java. Java is arguably even worse than C++ at some times. While C++ code can be become unreadable, Java code becomes so bloated it makes it hard to analyze it properly. Python would be great if it had better performance. But it is still of use even for non-trivial programs. I hate so called OO languages because they try so damn hard to force you to use the paradigm coding gets cumbersome. Sometimes the OO paradigm is not the best way to solve the problem. It could be plain imperative programming, event driven, relational, or whatever.
Python is not flawless but it is certainly refreshing after working with some of the convoluted messes out there.
Yes, just the boilerplate code alone is usually more than the code you want to actually write yourself. That is why a Java programmer without an IDE loses like most of his productivity.
You are falling into the same trap of those who said conventional bombers were obsolete in the ballistic missile age. The aircraft is reusable the missiles are not. You can save a lot of resources by using the aircraft to deliver the payload. The aircraft also can be used to increase the range of the said cruise missiles, laser guided bombs, JDAMs or whatever.
The Japanese government actually distributed the iodine tablets, if that is not planning and taking care of your population, I do not know what is. In other places where similar disasters happened in a large scale no such thing was done. Last time a country stopped using nuclear power... well that was Italy. They only managed to make their electricity more expensive, still largely nuclear powered (but imported from France), and get into economic problems. BTW 20% of France's exports are nuclear powered electricity. If they close their plants like the new asshole in charge is saying, I wonder how they will ever pay back the deficit...
You will live to see people coming back there and putting flowers in a shrine to the "victims" of Fukushima in your lifetime. Heck I have seen it happen at Hiroshima and that was an actual nuclear bomb going off rather than some minor leak in a power plant.
Oh and the waves of the tsunami would break the wave power plants (ever seen one of those actually working in the world providing cheap electricity?). Wave power has been researched since like the 1960's. It's the laughingstock in energy generation much like fusion power. People who die during evacuations? That can happen in any flooding, I do not remember any nuclear power plants being an issue in New Orleans a couple of years back when the levee broke.
If you use hot dry rock techniques for geothermal (i.e. water injection deep underground) you can cause earthquakes. One project in, eh, I think around Basel was stopped because of that.
Nah, they will just prefer to see old people and children dying with cold in the winter, or from heat strokes in the summer from lack of air conditioning and heating. Not to mention the proven fact that carbon monoxide emissions cause increased risk for cardiovascular problems (the main cause of death in modern society - even manages to beat cancer).
Ideas are a penny a dozen anyway. I did say... reading a XIXth century dictionary would be an interesting comparison. There is a lot of revisionism or subtle word changes in time that people sometimes do not notice. I am old enough to notice that some words today have lost their original meaning and this is probably yet another one of them. Probably the next step is when you open an encyclopedia or Google for "Boston Strangler" you will find a match to "content piracy".:-)
Actually it is even more expensive. The platform is a 747. The problem with current electric lasers is just low efficiency, heavy weight, and fragility. All of those problems are being worked on and are progressing along. You can get 100 kW electric lasers today in a unit the size of a refrigerator. As for the power supply you are underestimating the generation capacity of modern gas turbine engines. You do not need to go nuclear powered, even if you could in the case of a naval frigate or something similar.
Well there was the P-80 Shooting Star. That fighter was developed in record time (143 days to develop the airframe for e.g.) near the end of WW2 by Kelly Johnson's team. Those flew first in Korea. The thing is no one expected the Russians to actually have something with a better airframe. But the US already did have the F-86 under design and test around the same time as the Mig-15. It was just that it was originally intended to never leave the US or be exported.
All it took was one F-117 down over Serbia for the airplane to be decommissioned pronto in favor of the F-22 which has never flown an actual combat mission. Duh.
Considering that the Russians developed the theory used behind the design of the stealth shapes of modern stealth aircraft it was probably fear of the Russians doing it first. The Russians only started work on their own stealth fighter designs later, after the theory was more developed and it was less computationally expensive to compute the radar reflection characteristics of an aircraft shape.
It happens eventually. See the cancellation of the T-80 tank (never meant to be exported by the USSR) and its replacement by the T-90 which is an enhanced T-72 tank with much worse specs but lower cost as well. Russia figured out during the Chechen wars that the T-80 did not have a more favorable exchange ratio at much higher cost per unit not to mention the horrendous fuel consumption of the gas turbine engine in it. The same thing happened with other projects.
The Soviet Union made a bunch of strategic jet bombers none of which fly today. The only strategic bombers the Russians use today are the Tu-95 Bear (designed around the same time of the B-52 but with turboprops) and the Tu-160 which is kind of like an enlarged B-1. Even the Tu-22M will be replaced by something like the Su-34 which is nothing like it... the range is not the same.
The Russians designed the AN-94 rifle which is supposedly much better than the AK-74s they have. But the per unit cost and maintenance are so high only some special forces actually use the weapon.
The US cancelled the XB-70 Valkyrie Mach 3 bomber, the Mach 3 fighters. The materials and design for the Valkyrie were a bloody mess. Honeycomb composite structure which deformed during the test flights. Kind of a modern day Spruce Goose if you will. Sometimes you hit dead ends during weapon design, only to come back at it decades later and getting it to work properly that time around.
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All systems of government are dependent on a taxation system and some form of security forces. Of course you can pretend you do not need to tax people and just borrow instead and then have the next government pay the bill. Life sure is grand...
If its 3D i'm definitively not going to see it. I do not enjoy puking in a closed set.
Just image the consequences of a simultaneous Chinese invasion of Korea (both of them) and Taiwan and then figure out the consequences. Since you are in /. you probably know how the supply chain of our modern hardware industry works so do the numbers.
Yes the USA is post-consumer. USA citizens now live on a diet of pink unicorns and cow farts while playing World of Warcraft in their iPads. Oh wait...
You would have to be terribly misinformed not to notice Chinese military buildup in the last decade. Just looking at the Navy the Chinese now possess the two largest shipyards in the world today. The have been churning out all sorts of frigates, destroyers, amphibious assault ships, fast patrol boats, etc. They even started an aircraft carrier program which is something which is only necessary for power projection at long distances. Then there is their Air Force which has seen its fighters completely overhauled and they are now in the process of making a stealth fighter. They are also working in air refueling, another necessary technology for power projection, their main problem in the air force is large transport aircraft and bombers. In components it is engines. There have been several rumours of the Chinese working on a large flying wing stealth bomber but it is unknown if the project exists in fact or not.
Would probably be cheaper to buy chunks of Australia instead. Closer and has less population. However the Chinese are building yet more of those superdams (Three Gorges was just the first of a set of three superdams they want to make). The increased mechanization of all sorts of activities will lead to an increase in mechanized agriculture in China as well which should increase production eventually even if today it is an issue. The state has not focused on agriculture at all for a long time. Which is counter to traditional Chinese policies since like... the Qin dynasty.
They keep claiming the RQ-170 drone wasn't hacked when there have been all sorts of hacks of the video feeds years before. The thing is anything can be hacked. The tendency is to automate the airplanes increasingly. It may get to the point where an automated system even pulls the trigger. That should not be allowed.
Yet they invaded Vietnam in the late 1970s and lets not forget Tibet, or their repeated attempts to invade Mongolia. They only failed in cases where the USSR funded the local resistance in order to contain their imperialistic ambitions.
The simple fact is you need more lines of code to do the same thing in Java. Java is arguably even worse than C++ at some times. While C++ code can be become unreadable, Java code becomes so bloated it makes it hard to analyze it properly. Python would be great if it had better performance. But it is still of use even for non-trivial programs. I hate so called OO languages because they try so damn hard to force you to use the paradigm coding gets cumbersome. Sometimes the OO paradigm is not the best way to solve the problem. It could be plain imperative programming, event driven, relational, or whatever.
Python is not flawless but it is certainly refreshing after working with some of the convoluted messes out there.
Java: class World { public static void main(String [] args) { System.out.println("Hello, world"); } }
Python: print "Hello, world"
Yes, just the boilerplate code alone is usually more than the code you want to actually write yourself. That is why a Java programmer without an IDE loses like most of his productivity.
You are falling into the same trap of those who said conventional bombers were obsolete in the ballistic missile age. The aircraft is reusable the missiles are not. You can save a lot of resources by using the aircraft to deliver the payload. The aircraft also can be used to increase the range of the said cruise missiles, laser guided bombs, JDAMs or whatever.
The Japanese government actually distributed the iodine tablets, if that is not planning and taking care of your population, I do not know what is. In other places where similar disasters happened in a large scale no such thing was done. Last time a country stopped using nuclear power... well that was Italy. They only managed to make their electricity more expensive, still largely nuclear powered (but imported from France), and get into economic problems. BTW 20% of France's exports are nuclear powered electricity. If they close their plants like the new asshole in charge is saying, I wonder how they will ever pay back the deficit...
You will live to see people coming back there and putting flowers in a shrine to the "victims" of Fukushima in your lifetime. Heck I have seen it happen at Hiroshima and that was an actual nuclear bomb going off rather than some minor leak in a power plant.
Oh and the waves of the tsunami would break the wave power plants (ever seen one of those actually working in the world providing cheap electricity?). Wave power has been researched since like the 1960's. It's the laughingstock in energy generation much like fusion power. People who die during evacuations? That can happen in any flooding, I do not remember any nuclear power plants being an issue in New Orleans a couple of years back when the levee broke.
"Safe" hydropower in a zone which gets 9.something earthquakes in the Richter scale? Surely you jest.
If you use hot dry rock techniques for geothermal (i.e. water injection deep underground) you can cause earthquakes. One project in, eh, I think around Basel was stopped because of that.
Nah, they will just prefer to see old people and children dying with cold in the winter, or from heat strokes in the summer from lack of air conditioning and heating. Not to mention the proven fact that carbon monoxide emissions cause increased risk for cardiovascular problems (the main cause of death in modern society - even manages to beat cancer).
Ideas are a penny a dozen anyway. I did say... reading a XIXth century dictionary would be an interesting comparison. There is a lot of revisionism or subtle word changes in time that people sometimes do not notice. I am old enough to notice that some words today have lost their original meaning and this is probably yet another one of them. Probably the next step is when you open an encyclopedia or Google for "Boston Strangler" you will find a match to "content piracy". :-)
Actually it is even more expensive. The platform is a 747. The problem with current electric lasers is just low efficiency, heavy weight, and fragility. All of those problems are being worked on and are progressing along. You can get 100 kW electric lasers today in a unit the size of a refrigerator. As for the power supply you are underestimating the generation capacity of modern gas turbine engines. You do not need to go nuclear powered, even if you could in the case of a naval frigate or something similar.
Well there was the P-80 Shooting Star. That fighter was developed in record time (143 days to develop the airframe for e.g.) near the end of WW2 by Kelly Johnson's team. Those flew first in Korea. The thing is no one expected the Russians to actually have something with a better airframe. But the US already did have the F-86 under design and test around the same time as the Mig-15. It was just that it was originally intended to never leave the US or be exported.
NK? Their most recent airplanes are probably Mig-21s...
All it took was one F-117 down over Serbia for the airplane to be decommissioned pronto in favor of the F-22 which has never flown an actual combat mission. Duh.
Considering that the Russians developed the theory used behind the design of the stealth shapes of modern stealth aircraft it was probably fear of the Russians doing it first. The Russians only started work on their own stealth fighter designs later, after the theory was more developed and it was less computationally expensive to compute the radar reflection characteristics of an aircraft shape.
It happens eventually. See the cancellation of the T-80 tank (never meant to be exported by the USSR) and its replacement by the T-90 which is an enhanced T-72 tank with much worse specs but lower cost as well. Russia figured out during the Chechen wars that the T-80 did not have a more favorable exchange ratio at much higher cost per unit not to mention the horrendous fuel consumption of the gas turbine engine in it. The same thing happened with other projects.
The Soviet Union made a bunch of strategic jet bombers none of which fly today. The only strategic bombers the Russians use today are the Tu-95 Bear (designed around the same time of the B-52 but with turboprops) and the Tu-160 which is kind of like an enlarged B-1. Even the Tu-22M will be replaced by something like the Su-34 which is nothing like it... the range is not the same.
The Russians designed the AN-94 rifle which is supposedly much better than the AK-74s they have. But the per unit cost and maintenance are so high only some special forces actually use the weapon.
The US cancelled the XB-70 Valkyrie Mach 3 bomber, the Mach 3 fighters. The materials and design for the Valkyrie were a bloody mess. Honeycomb composite structure which deformed during the test flights. Kind of a modern day Spruce Goose if you will. Sometimes you hit dead ends during weapon design, only to come back at it decades later and getting it to work properly that time around.