Having lived for over 5 years in Japan, I doubt the Japanese subcontractors would build anything without clear specifications.
The problem is the toilet seat bracket had to be made 1/10 mm thicker for supersized passengers, and that was properly annotated by the seat mfgr on blueprint revision #24352. Unfortunately the news never reached the design engineers for the landing gear who need to adjust blueprint revision #7652 foward by 2 mm
My extensive experience with electronic design is if the Chinese say they'll give you a container full of old fashioned thru hole 1K resistors at a tenth of a penny each or whatever they will in fact do so. Maybe they painted the resistor color code with lead paint and the assembly line workers are political prisoners, but the resistance and power dissipation specs will be more or less as per the data sheet. And you can talk the Indonesians into providing a container full of microwave medium power bipolar transistors with a Pd of one watt and a Ft of 25 GHz for two bucks each and they will in fact do it. But god help you if you tell both of them, "I'd like a class A biased driver amp assembly so you two kids cooperate mkay?" Now multiply that by one zillion subcontractors all operating more or less without adult oversight by design to save money as a new project management technique, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
"I've got an idea, lets improve the obvious metrics, then you little guys can work together to design and build it which will make me a bunch of money, mkay?" That stuff doesn't fly.
TLDR scalability issue due to cubed vs square law scaling.
High temperature can blow up some Li cells. The total thermal energy scales with volume, but the surface heat can escape from scales with surface area. So its hard (although not impossible) for one cell in a laptop to blow up the adjacent cells. But if you make the individual cells big enough you can get a chain reaction going.
This is a meta issue anyway. There are battery techs not susceptible to chain reactions, and not susceptible to occasionally blowing up an individual cell anyway.
Lets say you decide to make mousepads out of fissionable plutonium. Boss reports that they're getting bad PR because of mfgr variations or mishandling sometimes the plutonium mousepad blows up, although you tried to design it for a very unfavorable geometry. Well you can argue geometry and mfgr tolerances all day, but the mistake was making the mousepad out of plutonium, not making it "wrong".
rather than having the puzzle solved and asking the suppliers to provide a defined puzzle piece, they asked suppliers to create their own blueprints for parts. The puzzle hadn't been properly solved when Boeing asked suppliers for the pieces.
Using some computer science-lite language their design and physical parts "networks" used to be a hub-n-spoke topology. That has always worked pretty well. This time around they tried something like a fully connected mesh for design (because in real world engineering, unlike CS, practically everything affects everything) but they maintained the hub-n-spoke topology for physical parts. There's a bit of a mismatch there.
I believe the hope -n- dream was forcing the subs to mesh with every other sub would result in outsourcing that huge design workload to the subs, on the assumption the subs: 1) Could do it (uhhhh commissioned salesperson says yes, R+D says no Fing way) 2) Would want to do it, hoping taking the hit during design means they'll get production contracts (vs telling Boeing to F off and hoping for airbus subcontracts instead)
So what happens when you make the leap of faith that your subcontractors will care more about your product than apparently you do? Well, it isn't pretty.
There's also a hubris effect. Lets try new tech throughout an entire plane AND a completely new R+D model at the same time. What could go wrong? Now if they were doing R+D for something really "boring" like yet another generic mp3 player, or yet another water heater, the new development experiment probably would have worked. Or if they tried a mostly new technology plane with the traditional development process, it probably would have worked. But both at the same time? In a price sensitive commercial market (unlike.mil or.gov contracts) ? Not looking good. The company might survive, it might even turn out OK in the end, but its kinda like picking up nickles in front of a steamroller, just not wise at all.
Should McDonald's tell you exactly what is in their burgers when we buy them or should we have the foresight to look up nutrition facts before buying?
Someone else already beat me to the car analogy, so a better McDonalds analogy would be you purchase and pay for a double quarter pounder and they give you a single, and when you complain "WTF, its still a hamburger stop complaining"
Probably a better analogy would be making fun of the contents. Like our McDonalds ball pit in the play land only has half the vomit and pee content of neighboring mcdonalds... Umm thanks but no thanks just give me an ipad instead.
When a subscription is removed, all data is permanently lost.
Bwahh ha ha ha the black hats going to have fun cancelling businesses accounts.
"Hi, its me, I just wanted to let you know that we've switched to apple macs so you cancel our accounts. Bye bye. Love, Ford Motor co" Really? Destruction of data is going to be just that simple?
Thought experiment - self destruction of the office suite... What would happen? My guess is a dramatic increase in productivity. 1) Can't waste time on powerpoints 2) Can't use Excel as the corporate database management system 3) Can't use Word as the corporate database management system. Wordpad is good enough for the average user. In fact even wordpad has too many features for the average goofball. 4) Can't produce meaningless made up metrics using excel 5) Nobody uses outlook unless they have to, so I'd expect a dramatic surge in gmail popularity. Maybe g+/FB/twitter make some inroads into business communication. Linkedin should be paying attention at the change to intermediate themselves as a business social network.
I'm seeing a distinct possibility of a dramatic upsurge in business productivity... either that ore more time spent in meetings and at the water cooler gossip. either way the world would be a better place without office suites.
And for mac and windows apps I've had some luck with virtualbox displaying over Xwindows. Yes I know he wanted app level not full on remote desktop, but you can visually simulate that into being apparently identical without much effort, at least for windows stuff. Ends justify the means and all that. VNC into a windows desktop on virtualbox works pretty well too.
When it come down to it they won't be averse to bombshelling the whole building before they send their infantry in.
Which brings us right back to the original topic of this training being big cities in their home countries.
Blow up the Iraqi telecommunications building? Sure, why not, its not mine and I'm not Iraqi! On the other hand, your home town... eh not to motivated to level it... OTOH wouldn't be the first time in military history for the whole "make a desert and call it peace" "had to destroy the village to save the village" "Sherman's march to the sea" etc.
Right back to my original "Stupidity or desperation can force infantry into being slaughtered by armor, but it usually doesn't turn out that way"
Yes, when standing in an empty field and throwing rocks, or an unarmed refugee column, infantry have a rough time of it vs tanks
The ideal way to fight a tank is not to make a better tank out of hardware store parts and then slug it out on fair ground fighting tank style using tank rules. Now yes yes you are correct a M1A1 can actually do that and win vs an old T-72. But that's not the point.
One thing will stop a tank dead in the city... a bedsheet. Whats behind that sheet... hmm. You can fire a round to clear, but sheets are cheaper than rounds and the ammo supply truck is unarmored and the sound of a tank firing does kind of give away your position. Its fun to pile junk up in the road and make a roadblock, especially since who knows what is under the pile that can go boom if you crash into it. Also you're going to freeze for a second thinking about it, great time for the opposition to... Also throwing tracks isn't very hard to do and hardware stores are full of tough tangly stuff. Tanks burn pretty well too and the underbelly armor isn't very impressive although layers of sandbags help. Really all you need to do is blow a track off and its all over, you hardly need to vaporize the entire hull. Regardless of whatever else, the crew eventually have to get out of the tin can, we have no armored fuel tankers that I know of, etc. Yes combined arms action with infantry helps with these tank-busting tactics. But then you're right back to snipers popping infantry on their home ground and you're making the infantry less effective than sending them in without the tanks.
I think we're rather talking at cross points. The original claim was tanks are a magic silver bullet. I say they aren't. You say they're really very capable tanks. I say, yeah, but they're still tanks, not silver bullets. Not sure where we'll go from here.
Then figure out how you'll kill the other 100+ M1's that are right behind it.
LOL you pop the first one and the last one to block them into the narrow city street in an ambush and then the real fun begins. Again this is one of those things where doing something dumb in an open field probably won't turn out well, but the professionals can pretty much have their way with the tanks as long as its on their own schedule.
Warfare is all about position rather than specs. Get in the right position and you win. True, the specs might limit the "proper" position, but it always exists.
I think you're confusing tanks with APCs. APCs are full of infantry who have nothing better to do. Tanks don't have holes in their armor (well, not like that anyway) and the crew is too busy doing "stuff" to shoot at infantry. APCs are troop carriers. Generally lightly armored (as in, shell fragment proof but you don't want to put them up against tanks or heavy caliber). M1A1 vs a Bradley.
I'm pretty sure he wants to sell the whole package.
I wonder if boeing buys from aircraft spruce and specialty like everyone else? And yes aircraftspruce.com does sell different chemistries for aviation lithium systems. Probably due to quantity Boeing goes direct to mfgr.
They'd be infinitely more likely to go with a COTS LiFe system than jury rig somebodies Li-Ion car or rocket battery into place.
Lithium ION can be made to blow up and you can only put those on a plane if is a LSA, ultralight, experimental... or maybe Boeing. Can anyone confirm the actually battery chemistry? There's about a zillion different Li chemistries all with different issues. Lithium IRON phosphate is FAA / DOT / whatever approved and theoretically electrochemically impossible to blow up, and only a bit heavier. If Boeing actually managed to set a LiFe battery on fire thats gotta be the first deployed LiFe fire I've ever heard of, they're supposed to be heavy but indestructible. I know several general aviation planes have LiFe batteries having seen them with my own eyes. I don't know what the A+P mechanics had to do, I'm told modern Rotax charging systems are drop in compatible, donno about random 40 year old electrical charging systems for example. Worst case, new alternator maybe?
I'm not a pilot or A+P but I wanted to be one once, and I've got lots of pilot friends, so this is all hearsay, but at least semi-informed hearsay. There are lots of LiFe GA planes flying around and lots of Li-Ion LSA/ultralights flying around.
The problem with "no us soil" is "us soil" will get redefined to make the political point. So... Guam was just a territory. Hawaii was never in "real danger", well we know this in retrospect anyway. The war of 1812 doesn't matter because they're our allies now and alliances never shift, err, theres a lot of cognitive dissonance in that line isn't there. I have faith in the opposition that if mexico successfully somehow annexed Lousiana from us, we'd shortly be subjected to claims that "louisiana purchase territory isn't really US soil anyway". We like to pretend we're not an empire when its convenient (like "no us soil") and pretend we are an empire pretty much all the rest of the time. You might not personally like aspects of Imperialism, but that doesn't mean you don't actually live in an Empire or imperial politics don't matter just because you don't personally like empires.
Another good example would be Berlin... if they REALLY wanted all of Berlin there would have been pretty much nothing we could have done about it. They were passive aggressive enough to shut down land transport to starve us out, but that was about it and it didn't work, so... In retrospect carving up Berlin was pretty stupid, so we should have peacefully traded that land for somewhat more useful/defensible land along the border (or some border, anyway), but...
Attitudes around the time of the Hungarian revolution of '56 were quite a bit different than during the detente era in the 70s. Civil war next door to your allies makes people nervous.
Well, here's someone never in.mil nor looked at a map. Even wargamers know tanks are dead meat in cities under any circumstances other than a peaceful show of force, and more generally without infantry support they don't last long even in the "open" countryside. Generally speaking tanks vs infantry turns out pretty well for the infantry as a group given identical intelligence / experience / skill. Stupidity or desperation can force infantry into being slaughtered by armor, but it usually doesn't turn out that way. Basically tanks can't see very well, can only shoot in one direction (and slowly) and are remarkably fragile other than frontal armor hits where they are, admittedly, pretty much invincible. Tanks are really good at helping infantry take out a hard position like a machine gun bunker, plus or minus the bunker having some anti-tank rounds or more hilariously anti-tank minefield in the "obvious" firing positions.
Combined arms only works if... its combined... not just merely exists or deployed separately in complete isolation
Now what infantry really doesn't like is trained experienced snipers operating defensive at time and place of their choosing on their own very well known turf aka gun nuts.
Also if you think the supply line for a bunch of, basically, overgrown hunters, is insecure and easy to cut, you surely have never seen an armor supply line. The best way to fight armor (and air!), if you're in no great hurry, is to hide from / avoid / ignore it and go after the fuel / food / water / supply convoys. Hmm sound like a scenario where the US has recently lost the war? A broken tank is basically useless tactically and the MTBF isn't as good as you'd like to think under combat conditions.
Depending on your definition of "our soil" you've got our legal territory Guam being actually occupied for a couple years, and if you merely want "risk" then Hawaii was pretty much freaking out about it in late '41 to '42 era. If you really wanna stretch "our soil" into gunboat diplomacy then nearly everywhere the Japanese invaded between "us and them" was pretty much "our soil". A good example of a "gunboat diplomacy region" actually being taken over post WWII would be Cuba and arguably Nicaragua. In conus we were safe mostly because of the USN and the royal navy, combined with the lack of long range jet fighters and transports.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Just what is it they're training for?
Iran most likely. I recently finished "A year amongst the Persians" by edward granville brown (a (free) librivox recording) and if I were trying to pick a piece of american geography like Iran they could do worse than Houston. The miami connection is probably more to do with size/road architecture than climate. Although Miami is a 3rd world city, at least in parts, which might help with training.
I donno if that really works. In addition to Miami and Houston, there's also machine gun fire in Detroit and Baltimore today, although thats BAU people still duck anyway.
Note the original article is from a journalist. Obviously they have an industry bias against anything that is stable, aka works. In industry, we use what works, thats why 99% of the code on the machines I run is written in C or bash or Perl. Some C++ is slipping in.
I will give you that iteration syntax over a AoA can look a little weird to the uninitiated.
I pretty much stopped using multidimensional arrays as a complex data structure when I learned OO except for the obvious mathematical applications. Although for hard core math I tend to take advantage of octave. I've used Inline::Octave from cpan but thats kinda weird.
I wouldn't do massive scale text processing in Octave unless I had a really good reason, much as I wouldn't do massive math work in Perl unless I had a really good reason.
The easiest "hack" on AoA is not to use them, if the application is simple enough. If you just need a crude data store just make a simple hash. So instead of [2][3][4] as a 3-dimensional coordinate, just store "2 3 4" as a hash key.
Slashdot Mirror
Having lived for over 5 years in Japan, I doubt the Japanese subcontractors would build anything without clear specifications.
The problem is the toilet seat bracket had to be made 1/10 mm thicker for supersized passengers, and that was properly annotated by the seat mfgr on blueprint revision #24352. Unfortunately the news never reached the design engineers for the landing gear who need to adjust blueprint revision #7652 foward by 2 mm
My extensive experience with electronic design is if the Chinese say they'll give you a container full of old fashioned thru hole 1K resistors at a tenth of a penny each or whatever they will in fact do so. Maybe they painted the resistor color code with lead paint and the assembly line workers are political prisoners, but the resistance and power dissipation specs will be more or less as per the data sheet. And you can talk the Indonesians into providing a container full of microwave medium power bipolar transistors with a Pd of one watt and a Ft of 25 GHz for two bucks each and they will in fact do it. But god help you if you tell both of them, "I'd like a class A biased driver amp assembly so you two kids cooperate mkay?" Now multiply that by one zillion subcontractors all operating more or less without adult oversight by design to save money as a new project management technique, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
"I've got an idea, lets improve the obvious metrics, then you little guys can work together to design and build it which will make me a bunch of money, mkay?" That stuff doesn't fly.
TLDR scalability issue due to cubed vs square law scaling.
High temperature can blow up some Li cells. The total thermal energy scales with volume, but the surface heat can escape from scales with surface area. So its hard (although not impossible) for one cell in a laptop to blow up the adjacent cells. But if you make the individual cells big enough you can get a chain reaction going.
This is a meta issue anyway. There are battery techs not susceptible to chain reactions, and not susceptible to occasionally blowing up an individual cell anyway.
Lets say you decide to make mousepads out of fissionable plutonium. Boss reports that they're getting bad PR because of mfgr variations or mishandling sometimes the plutonium mousepad blows up, although you tried to design it for a very unfavorable geometry. Well you can argue geometry and mfgr tolerances all day, but the mistake was making the mousepad out of plutonium, not making it "wrong".
rather than having the puzzle solved and asking the suppliers to provide a defined puzzle piece, they asked suppliers to create their own blueprints for parts. The puzzle hadn't been properly solved when Boeing asked suppliers for the pieces.
Using some computer science-lite language their design and physical parts "networks" used to be a hub-n-spoke topology. That has always worked pretty well. This time around they tried something like a fully connected mesh for design (because in real world engineering, unlike CS, practically everything affects everything) but they maintained the hub-n-spoke topology for physical parts. There's a bit of a mismatch there.
I believe the hope -n- dream was forcing the subs to mesh with every other sub would result in outsourcing that huge design workload to the subs, on the assumption the subs:
1) Could do it (uhhhh commissioned salesperson says yes, R+D says no Fing way)
2) Would want to do it, hoping taking the hit during design means they'll get production contracts (vs telling Boeing to F off and hoping for airbus subcontracts instead)
So what happens when you make the leap of faith that your subcontractors will care more about your product than apparently you do? Well, it isn't pretty.
There's also a hubris effect. Lets try new tech throughout an entire plane AND a completely new R+D model at the same time. What could go wrong? Now if they were doing R+D for something really "boring" like yet another generic mp3 player, or yet another water heater, the new development experiment probably would have worked. Or if they tried a mostly new technology plane with the traditional development process, it probably would have worked. But both at the same time? In a price sensitive commercial market (unlike .mil or .gov contracts) ? Not looking good. The company might survive, it might even turn out OK in the end, but its kinda like picking up nickles in front of a steamroller, just not wise at all.
Yeah you're right, they should have done the training in Maine during a blizzard.
Should McDonald's tell you exactly what is in their burgers when we buy them or should we have the foresight to look up nutrition facts before buying?
Someone else already beat me to the car analogy, so a better McDonalds analogy would be you purchase and pay for a double quarter pounder and they give you a single, and when you complain "WTF, its still a hamburger stop complaining"
Probably a better analogy would be making fun of the contents. Like our McDonalds ball pit in the play land only has half the vomit and pee content of neighboring mcdonalds... Umm thanks but no thanks just give me an ipad instead.
they just want their core apps to work excellently and their phone to be secure.
They have no way to evaluate the latter, and for the former they'd buy an iphone.
No cameras so some workplaces actually allow it.
In fact no external plugs USB or removable memory or whatever. Inductive charging, wifi, bt, and nfc thats it.
Built in rdesktop / vnc / whatever support.
When a subscription is removed, all data is permanently lost.
Bwahh ha ha ha the black hats going to have fun cancelling businesses accounts.
"Hi, its me, I just wanted to let you know that we've switched to apple macs so you cancel our accounts. Bye bye. Love, Ford Motor co" Really? Destruction of data is going to be just that simple?
Thought experiment - self destruction of the office suite... What would happen? My guess is a dramatic increase in productivity.
1) Can't waste time on powerpoints
2) Can't use Excel as the corporate database management system
3) Can't use Word as the corporate database management system. Wordpad is good enough for the average user. In fact even wordpad has too many features for the average goofball.
4) Can't produce meaningless made up metrics using excel
5) Nobody uses outlook unless they have to, so I'd expect a dramatic surge in gmail popularity. Maybe g+/FB/twitter make some inroads into business communication. Linkedin should be paying attention at the change to intermediate themselves as a business social network.
I'm seeing a distinct possibility of a dramatic upsurge in business productivity... either that ore more time spent in meetings and at the water cooler gossip. either way the world would be a better place without office suites.
And for mac and windows apps I've had some luck with virtualbox displaying over Xwindows.
Yes I know he wanted app level not full on remote desktop, but you can visually simulate that into being apparently identical without much effort, at least for windows stuff. Ends justify the means and all that.
VNC into a windows desktop on virtualbox works pretty well too.
When it come down to it they won't be averse to bombshelling the whole building before they send their infantry in.
Which brings us right back to the original topic of this training being big cities in their home countries.
Blow up the Iraqi telecommunications building? Sure, why not, its not mine and I'm not Iraqi! On the other hand, your home town... eh not to motivated to level it... OTOH wouldn't be the first time in military history for the whole "make a desert and call it peace" "had to destroy the village to save the village" "Sherman's march to the sea" etc.
Right back to my original "Stupidity or desperation can force infantry into being slaughtered by armor, but it usually doesn't turn out that way"
Yes, when standing in an empty field and throwing rocks, or an unarmed refugee column, infantry have a rough time of it vs tanks
The ideal way to fight a tank is not to make a better tank out of hardware store parts and then slug it out on fair ground fighting tank style using tank rules. Now yes yes you are correct a M1A1 can actually do that and win vs an old T-72. But that's not the point.
One thing will stop a tank dead in the city... a bedsheet. Whats behind that sheet... hmm. You can fire a round to clear, but sheets are cheaper than rounds and the ammo supply truck is unarmored and the sound of a tank firing does kind of give away your position. Its fun to pile junk up in the road and make a roadblock, especially since who knows what is under the pile that can go boom if you crash into it. Also you're going to freeze for a second thinking about it, great time for the opposition to... Also throwing tracks isn't very hard to do and hardware stores are full of tough tangly stuff. Tanks burn pretty well too and the underbelly armor isn't very impressive although layers of sandbags help. Really all you need to do is blow a track off and its all over, you hardly need to vaporize the entire hull. Regardless of whatever else, the crew eventually have to get out of the tin can, we have no armored fuel tankers that I know of, etc. Yes combined arms action with infantry helps with these tank-busting tactics. But then you're right back to snipers popping infantry on their home ground and you're making the infantry less effective than sending them in without the tanks.
I think we're rather talking at cross points. The original claim was tanks are a magic silver bullet. I say they aren't. You say they're really very capable tanks. I say, yeah, but they're still tanks, not silver bullets. Not sure where we'll go from here.
Then figure out how you'll kill the other 100+ M1's that are right behind it.
LOL you pop the first one and the last one to block them into the narrow city street in an ambush and then the real fun begins. Again this is one of those things where doing something dumb in an open field probably won't turn out well, but the professionals can pretty much have their way with the tanks as long as its on their own schedule.
Warfare is all about position rather than specs. Get in the right position and you win. True, the specs might limit the "proper" position, but it always exists.
I think you're confusing tanks with APCs. APCs are full of infantry who have nothing better to do. Tanks don't have holes in their armor (well, not like that anyway) and the crew is too busy doing "stuff" to shoot at infantry. APCs are troop carriers. Generally lightly armored (as in, shell fragment proof but you don't want to put them up against tanks or heavy caliber). M1A1 vs a Bradley.
I'm pretty sure he wants to sell the whole package.
I wonder if boeing buys from aircraft spruce and specialty like everyone else? And yes aircraftspruce.com does sell different chemistries for aviation lithium systems. Probably due to quantity Boeing goes direct to mfgr.
They'd be infinitely more likely to go with a COTS LiFe system than jury rig somebodies Li-Ion car or rocket battery into place.
Lithium ION can be made to blow up and you can only put those on a plane if is a LSA, ultralight, experimental... or maybe Boeing. Can anyone confirm the actually battery chemistry? There's about a zillion different Li chemistries all with different issues. Lithium IRON phosphate is FAA / DOT / whatever approved and theoretically electrochemically impossible to blow up, and only a bit heavier. If Boeing actually managed to set a LiFe battery on fire thats gotta be the first deployed LiFe fire I've ever heard of, they're supposed to be heavy but indestructible. I know several general aviation planes have LiFe batteries having seen them with my own eyes. I don't know what the A+P mechanics had to do, I'm told modern Rotax charging systems are drop in compatible, donno about random 40 year old electrical charging systems for example. Worst case, new alternator maybe?
I'm not a pilot or A+P but I wanted to be one once, and I've got lots of pilot friends, so this is all hearsay, but at least semi-informed hearsay. There are lots of LiFe GA planes flying around and lots of Li-Ion LSA/ultralights flying around.
The problem with "no us soil" is "us soil" will get redefined to make the political point. So... Guam was just a territory. Hawaii was never in "real danger", well we know this in retrospect anyway. The war of 1812 doesn't matter because they're our allies now and alliances never shift, err, theres a lot of cognitive dissonance in that line isn't there. I have faith in the opposition that if mexico successfully somehow annexed Lousiana from us, we'd shortly be subjected to claims that "louisiana purchase territory isn't really US soil anyway". We like to pretend we're not an empire when its convenient (like "no us soil") and pretend we are an empire pretty much all the rest of the time. You might not personally like aspects of Imperialism, but that doesn't mean you don't actually live in an Empire or imperial politics don't matter just because you don't personally like empires.
Another good example would be Berlin... if they REALLY wanted all of Berlin there would have been pretty much nothing we could have done about it. They were passive aggressive enough to shut down land transport to starve us out, but that was about it and it didn't work, so... In retrospect carving up Berlin was pretty stupid, so we should have peacefully traded that land for somewhat more useful/defensible land along the border (or some border, anyway), but...
Attitudes around the time of the Hungarian revolution of '56 were quite a bit different than during the detente era in the 70s. Civil war next door to your allies makes people nervous.
Well, here's someone never in .mil nor looked at a map. Even wargamers know tanks are dead meat in cities under any circumstances other than a peaceful show of force, and more generally without infantry support they don't last long even in the "open" countryside. Generally speaking tanks vs infantry turns out pretty well for the infantry as a group given identical intelligence / experience / skill. Stupidity or desperation can force infantry into being slaughtered by armor, but it usually doesn't turn out that way. Basically tanks can't see very well, can only shoot in one direction (and slowly) and are remarkably fragile other than frontal armor hits where they are, admittedly, pretty much invincible. Tanks are really good at helping infantry take out a hard position like a machine gun bunker, plus or minus the bunker having some anti-tank rounds or more hilariously anti-tank minefield in the "obvious" firing positions.
Combined arms only works if... its combined... not just merely exists or deployed separately in complete isolation
Now what infantry really doesn't like is trained experienced snipers operating defensive at time and place of their choosing on their own very well known turf aka gun nuts.
Also if you think the supply line for a bunch of, basically, overgrown hunters, is insecure and easy to cut, you surely have never seen an armor supply line. The best way to fight armor (and air!), if you're in no great hurry, is to hide from / avoid / ignore it and go after the fuel / food / water / supply convoys. Hmm sound like a scenario where the US has recently lost the war? A broken tank is basically useless tactically and the MTBF isn't as good as you'd like to think under combat conditions.
Depending on your definition of "our soil" you've got our legal territory Guam being actually occupied for a couple years, and if you merely want "risk" then Hawaii was pretty much freaking out about it in late '41 to '42 era. If you really wanna stretch "our soil" into gunboat diplomacy then nearly everywhere the Japanese invaded between "us and them" was pretty much "our soil". A good example of a "gunboat diplomacy region" actually being taken over post WWII would be Cuba and arguably Nicaragua. In conus we were safe mostly because of the USN and the royal navy, combined with the lack of long range jet fighters and transports.
This is exactly what I was thinking. Just what is it they're training for?
Iran most likely. I recently finished "A year amongst the Persians" by edward granville brown (a (free) librivox recording) and if I were trying to pick a piece of american geography like Iran they could do worse than Houston. The miami connection is probably more to do with size/road architecture than climate. Although Miami is a 3rd world city, at least in parts, which might help with training.
I donno if that really works. In addition to Miami and Houston, there's also machine gun fire in Detroit and Baltimore today, although thats BAU people still duck anyway.
Note the original article is from a journalist. Obviously they have an industry bias against anything that is stable, aka works. In industry, we use what works, thats why 99% of the code on the machines I run is written in C or bash or Perl. Some C++ is slipping in.
On the one hand, with Perl, you can't even create and use a multi dimensional array without barely comprehensible hacks.
Unimpressed.
http://perldoc.perl.org/perldsc.html#ARRAYS-OF-ARRAYS
$AoA[0][0] = "Fred";
print $AoA[0][0];
I will give you that iteration syntax over a AoA can look a little weird to the uninitiated.
I pretty much stopped using multidimensional arrays as a complex data structure when I learned OO except for the obvious mathematical applications. Although for hard core math I tend to take advantage of octave. I've used Inline::Octave from cpan but thats kinda weird.
I wouldn't do massive scale text processing in Octave unless I had a really good reason, much as I wouldn't do massive math work in Perl unless I had a really good reason.
The easiest "hack" on AoA is not to use them, if the application is simple enough. If you just need a crude data store just make a simple hash. So instead of [2][3][4] as a 3-dimensional coordinate, just store "2 3 4" as a hash key.
TIOBE is based on search hits regarding a particular language,
Massive inherent bias toward the new. "Perl? What is that? Is it new? Maybe I should google for it." Seriously?
Just put the neocons to work and we'll get up to that level.
There used to be an "rm" community, but it got deleted :P
I'd link to the wikipedia article, but those deletionist aholes got to it first