They are trying to have it both ways: a minimum price that they collect from everyone regardless of usage and a per-GB price as well.
That's not completely unreasonable. They have fixed costs that don't change whether you use one bit or 10TB. They also have variable costs that change based on data usage.
The channels like ESPN and HBO that you have to get individually or on higher tiers get paid on a per subscriber basis to provide content. But channels like HSN pay the cable company to provide them viewers. So if you cancel your service HSN pays your cable company less money. Since they already need to do hookups and maintain the infrastructure to your house if you have an internet connection, that HSN money is just gravy. So it makes perfect sense for them to charge you more.
The ironic thing about this article is the UK actually leads the pack on conventional EMP weapons. I remember reading an article a few years back which had the US military trying to get access to the technology and being rebuffed.
A more likely explanation is British boffins have made some kind of breakthrough and the leadership is worried other countries will make the same breakthrough before infrastructure in the UK can be hardened.
Is anyone doing anything about that problem? I've watched a lot of documentaries and read a lot of articles swearing that there's plenty of smoking guns lying around all over the place, but I haven't seen much movement on the prosecution front.
Have you considered the possibility those articles are not giving you the entire picture of what went on? Newspapers sell better when they can generate outrage and hysteria. But prosecutors aren't allowed to ignore exculpatory evidence or go with the "everybody knows you guys are crooked..." line of attack. My suspicion is the Obama administration would love, love, love to have a series of high profile Wall Street indictments, and maybe we'll see that sometime in October. But it may also be that the recent financial problems didn't involve much actual crime as much as skewed incentives and garden-variety stupidity.
Nope. See, you need to have evidence to send people to jail. You don't just start jailing people when something bad happens, no matter how much you stamp your feet and crap in the park.
I think my first sentence was a definitive answer to your last post. Also, based on the quality of your thinking I seriously doubt you have better things to do than, well, anything.
Money is fungible. If the US didn't support Israel's defense there would be less money for social programs.
In any event, the current state of affairs is unsustainable because the segment of the population that's having all the children isn't paying taxes or serving in the military and the economy isn't growing fast enough to make up the difference.
Of course corporations have the right to free speech. A corporation isn't a building - it's a group of people who've pooled their resources in a business venture.
It would be hard to get passed in the US because we care more about a corporation's health than a citizen's.
An alternate theory would be here in the US we think it's not the government's place to be dictating how big models should be on the off chance the odd woman will feel sad because she's not bright enough to distinguish fantasy from reality. Following this logic, we ought to ban movies like Twilight and anything associated with Disney princesses.
I doubt they'll ever make antibiotics OTC because otherwise there won't be any left that will work. In general I think you ought to be able to walk into a pharmacy and buy anything you want. But I make an exception for antibiotics.
The F-22 kickbacks have been paid off for a weapon that will likely never see service.
You realize this aircraft is already deployed, right? We hope it will never see service, just like we hope to never use nuclear arsenal. But hope isn't a plan by itself.
The F-22 is not a "debacle". It does what it was designed to do, and will be very useful if we ever go toe to toe with a country that has reasonable air defenses.
From the wiki page on the Delaware class battleship:
For reasons including expected hostilities with Japan, requiring travel across the Pacific Ocean, long operational range was a recurrent theme in all US battleship designs.
Congress authorized the Delaware class in 1906, thirty five years before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. That war was decades in the making.
Actually, the pilots are very expensive. It costs millions of dollars to train a military pilot. By the time we retire the B-52, I'd hazard a guess that nearly every airframe has cost less than the military spent on the pilots that flew it over the years.
The article is over a year old, and anyway the quoted contention about 60mm mortar rounds being too small for GPS guidance is complete BS. There are half a dozen laser guided versions of the 2.75 inch rocket now, which is about 70mm, and GPS easier to do than laser guidance. If they don't have 81mm already, it's got to be somewhere in testing. The 60 would be next, and that's a man-portable weapon.
We've also recently deployed a 155mm GPS guided artillery shell (called Excalibur), which was supposed to be far off in the future because of the acceleration stresses involved. Governments are putting a whole lot of effort into this because being able to drop ordinance right where you want it means you need only a tiny fraction of the ammo you needed for barrages, and that has a huge positive effect on the logistics chain. Plus, you can use it much closer to friendlies, meaning you can pound an enemy position with mortars and artillery and then assault it before the enemy's ears stop ringing.
The wiki lists the flyaway cost of the F-22 at 150 million but considering the problems we have had with it (not to mention the USAF not wanting to deploy them to the ME because of how expensive they are) I'd say that is a pretty conservative estimation.
The cost for these systems is always heavily dependent on your assumptions on the accounting. The F-22 is variously quoted as costing somewhere between $350m and $500m, but that's including the development cost. So it's not difficult for me to believe we can crank them out at $150m per if we decide to make more.
Be nice if they could get the oxygen generators to work, though.
The reason they haven't been used in the ME is there hasn't been a conflict which required a fighter in that role. We haven't fought anybody that could touch or fleet of F-16s/F-18s/F-15s since the F-22 was deployed. The F-22 has some strike capability, but no more than the older airframes, of which we have thousands.. And we'd like to avoid a repeat of the F-117 fiasco in which a cutting edge stealth system was downed over Serbia and the pieces shipped to our potential enemies.
Neither of those fighters is deployed. The J-20, in particular, is just a prototype that isn't even envisioned for production. So no, they haven't caught up. It will be decades before either country gets the kinks worked out and gets the airframe into service. By that time we'll have drones.
Nah, you're missing the point. If you're tooling around in the ABL and you detect a launch, you can't just automatically destroy the missile. You have to get orders from higher up, and those orders aren't going to come in the sixty seconds (or whatever) you have to do your job. So the only way this laser system can actually be effective is if your CO tells you "if you see a launch shoot it down immediately" beforehand. You're not going to get those orders unless everyone is expecting a fight.
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They are trying to have it both ways: a minimum price that they collect from everyone regardless of usage and a per-GB price as well.
That's not completely unreasonable. They have fixed costs that don't change whether you use one bit or 10TB. They also have variable costs that change based on data usage.
The channels like ESPN and HBO that you have to get individually or on higher tiers get paid on a per subscriber basis to provide content. But channels like HSN pay the cable company to provide them viewers. So if you cancel your service HSN pays your cable company less money. Since they already need to do hookups and maintain the infrastructure to your house if you have an internet connection, that HSN money is just gravy. So it makes perfect sense for them to charge you more.
Not a conventionally-generated EMP. Something that powerful would have to be nuclear.
The ironic thing about this article is the UK actually leads the pack on conventional EMP weapons. I remember reading an article a few years back which had the US military trying to get access to the technology and being rebuffed.
A more likely explanation is British boffins have made some kind of breakthrough and the leadership is worried other countries will make the same breakthrough before infrastructure in the UK can be hardened.
I read the first part of the summary, but the paragraph was really too long. I find these days I'm prone to starting one thing and then
Have you considered the possibility those articles are not giving you the entire picture of what went on? Newspapers sell better when they can generate outrage and hysteria. But prosecutors aren't allowed to ignore exculpatory evidence or go with the "everybody knows you guys are crooked..." line of attack. My suspicion is the Obama administration would love, love, love to have a series of high profile Wall Street indictments, and maybe we'll see that sometime in October. But it may also be that the recent financial problems didn't involve much actual crime as much as skewed incentives and garden-variety stupidity.
Nope. See, you need to have evidence to send people to jail. You don't just start jailing people when something bad happens, no matter how much you stamp your feet and crap in the park.
I think my first sentence was a definitive answer to your last post. Also, based on the quality of your thinking I seriously doubt you have better things to do than, well, anything.
Money is fungible. If the US didn't support Israel's defense there would be less money for social programs.
In any event, the current state of affairs is unsustainable because the segment of the population that's having all the children isn't paying taxes or serving in the military and the economy isn't growing fast enough to make up the difference.
That's exactly what happened to Aurthur Anderson. The corporation was charged in criminal court and was essentilally "executed".
Of course corporations have the right to free speech. A corporation isn't a building - it's a group of people who've pooled their resources in a business venture.
It would be hard to get passed in the US because we care more about a corporation's health than a citizen's.
An alternate theory would be here in the US we think it's not the government's place to be dictating how big models should be on the off chance the odd woman will feel sad because she's not bright enough to distinguish fantasy from reality. Following this logic, we ought to ban movies like Twilight and anything associated with Disney princesses.
Don't forget that utopia has been constructed partially with US tax dollars.
I doubt they'll ever make antibiotics OTC because otherwise there won't be any left that will work. In general I think you ought to be able to walk into a pharmacy and buy anything you want. But I make an exception for antibiotics.
Well, you may have been. Five years ago.
You realize this aircraft is already deployed, right? We hope it will never see service, just like we hope to never use nuclear arsenal. But hope isn't a plan by itself.
The F-22 is not a "debacle". It does what it was designed to do, and will be very useful if we ever go toe to toe with a country that has reasonable air defenses.
When you put it that way, we look like the smart ones :)
From the wiki page on the Delaware class battleship:
Congress authorized the Delaware class in 1906, thirty five years before the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. That war was decades in the making.
Which makes it different from other weapon systems... how?
Actually, the pilots are very expensive. It costs millions of dollars to train a military pilot. By the time we retire the B-52, I'd hazard a guess that nearly every airframe has cost less than the military spent on the pilots that flew it over the years.
The article is over a year old, and anyway the quoted contention about 60mm mortar rounds being too small for GPS guidance is complete BS. There are half a dozen laser guided versions of the 2.75 inch rocket now, which is about 70mm, and GPS easier to do than laser guidance. If they don't have 81mm already, it's got to be somewhere in testing. The 60 would be next, and that's a man-portable weapon.
We've also recently deployed a 155mm GPS guided artillery shell (called Excalibur), which was supposed to be far off in the future because of the acceleration stresses involved. Governments are putting a whole lot of effort into this because being able to drop ordinance right where you want it means you need only a tiny fraction of the ammo you needed for barrages, and that has a huge positive effect on the logistics chain. Plus, you can use it much closer to friendlies, meaning you can pound an enemy position with mortars and artillery and then assault it before the enemy's ears stop ringing.
The cost for these systems is always heavily dependent on your assumptions on the accounting. The F-22 is variously quoted as costing somewhere between $350m and $500m, but that's including the development cost. So it's not difficult for me to believe we can crank them out at $150m per if we decide to make more.
Be nice if they could get the oxygen generators to work, though.
The reason they haven't been used in the ME is there hasn't been a conflict which required a fighter in that role. We haven't fought anybody that could touch or fleet of F-16s/F-18s/F-15s since the F-22 was deployed. The F-22 has some strike capability, but no more than the older airframes, of which we have thousands.. And we'd like to avoid a repeat of the F-117 fiasco in which a cutting edge stealth system was downed over Serbia and the pieces shipped to our potential enemies.
Neither of those fighters is deployed. The J-20, in particular, is just a prototype that isn't even envisioned for production. So no, they haven't caught up. It will be decades before either country gets the kinks worked out and gets the airframe into service. By that time we'll have drones.
Nah, you're missing the point. If you're tooling around in the ABL and you detect a launch, you can't just automatically destroy the missile. You have to get orders from higher up, and those orders aren't going to come in the sixty seconds (or whatever) you have to do your job. So the only way this laser system can actually be effective is if your CO tells you "if you see a launch shoot it down immediately" beforehand. You're not going to get those orders unless everyone is expecting a fight.