When the people are active in a society they question things, get involved in things, and yes challenge things they feel aren't right.
That's pretty condescending. What makes you think they can't watch a few hours of television and still be informed? When people refer to large groups of people as "sheeple" and wail they won't "wake up" it implies if only people were paying attention they'd think like I think. Well, and stay with me here, maybe they already question things, they're already involved, and they already "challenge things they feel aren't right." Maybe their vision of how things ought to be isn't the same as yours.
I'm guessing from the way your post is written you're not from the US. I'm at a little bit of a loss to understand why you think we in the US would make our country just like yours if only we didn't watch so much television.
The cable company has to pay for some channels (They pay a lot for ESPN), for some no money changes hands (the legacy networks, I think), and some pay the cable company (HSN). So yeah, that's exactly what's happening. If you're on the lowest tier they make money by having you as a customer (neglecting sunk costs) even if you don't pay.
The US would lose face internationally then and would be required to grind Iran into the dust.
This. The Iranians are in the same predicament in which Zulu king Cetshwayo found himself at the outset of the Anglo-Zulu war. He couldn't beat the British in an all-out war, but he thought he could bloody them enough that they'd leave the Zulus alone. So the plan was to bleed the British invasion forces without actually threatening British colonies. Unfortunately (for Cetshwayo, anyway) the Zulus achieved a crushing victory at Isandlwana, which required the British to commit major resources to a massive second invasion, in which the Zulu nation was ground, as you say, into the dust.
The Iranian government would be walking a tightrope. If it fared too poorly the Iranian people, who aren't exactly thrilled with them to start with, would hang them all from lampposts. But if they fared too well the US would reduce their infrastructure to rubble, or even invade. So the best outcome they could hope for is to sink a few US frigates (preventing a complete loss of face) at the cost of their navy, their air force (such as it is), and their petroleum infrastructure. Not a good position to be in.
I think the point is that it doesn't have to. It just needs to survive long enough to launch a missile.
Missile-armed boats are relatively expensive. Iran has only about 20 of them, 10 of which date back to the 1970s. And probably a handful are out of service for repairs or maintenance at any given time.
Also, I guess if fifty of these things are attacking a ship, only a few of them have to launch their missiles or come up alongside and detonate their explosives for the tactic to be effective.
Boats like that are so fragile a.50 cal will tear them apart in a few seconds. After the USS Cole incident American warships were issued heavy machine guns that clip onto the rails and sailors were trained in their use. The only way the "pull up alongside and detonate" tactic will work is if the ROE won't allow the crew to fire until it's too late.
Also, frigates are fast - almost certainly faster than a speedboat packed with enough explosives to do actual damage. Attacking an alert (and they're surely alert at this point) crew in a ship underway is a whole different kettle of fish than attacking a ship in port.
That said, if they are really well and truly nuts, I'm still not worried about a fleet of speed boats- it's the nukes that will be a problem.
That's not going to be a problem for a few years yet, though, and it's going to be at least a decade or so before they have something they can deliver with a missile.
There are no warships that can survive a missile striking the hull.
Nonsense. There are a whole lot of warships that can survive a missile striking the hull. In 1987 the USS Stark was struck by an Exocet missile and survived. The Stark was a frigate about 4% the size of a US carrier. Nobody knows how many missiles it would take to sink a carrier, which is armored, but most experts believe it would take two or three missiles of the type the Iranians can bring to the party.
Iran doesn't have ballistic missiles with the right seeker to attack ships. The most advanced anti-ship missile the Iranians have have is the Chinese C-802 "Silkworm" cruise missile. It's not fast or stealthy, and can be shot down pretty easily.
A third of the world subsists on less than a dollar a day. Our grandchildren will be long dead before there's "no cheap labor left". India isn't particularly cheap, by the way. Most of the manufacturing leaving China is going to places like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Guatemala. And then there's Africa, in which a whole lot of places are untouched by anything resembling economic development.
Anyway, you proceed from a false assumption, which is that cheap labor drives an expanding economy. If that were true the world economy would have stalled with the end of slavery, which was ubiquitous well into the 19th century. Expensive labor means consumers with money to spend on cars and flat-screen televisions, as well as savings to invest in new ventures.
And yet a lot of young people move to NYC for the social aspects. I don't really understand it myself, but I do know people in their 20s who'd rather live on a friend's couch in NYC than a mansion in Palo Alto. Not that Palo Alto is a cheap place to live, by any means.
the U.S. military's most expensive fighter jet, never called into combat despite conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, continues to experience equipment problems
I had to roll my eyes at this little gem. Yes, it's never been called on despite the small wars we've fought over the last decade. Because it's an air superiority fighter. We haven't fought anyone who could challenge the decades old F-16, let alone the F-15 or the F-22. Shall we use a screwdriver to pound in a nail because it's a really expensive screwdriver?
If we actually use the F-22 for anything more than a glorified test of its pitiful strike capability then something really bad has happened, because it means the US is at war with a country like the UK, France, Russia, China, or India.
But the best part is that once you fix a bug in an automated system, it's fixed forever
Sure, the same way any bug is fixed forever. But software is still loaded with bugs. Even a completely bug-free system will accumulate bugs over time as the code is maintained and/or features are added.
With an appropriate network topology, adding more and more nodes to a network increases your overall bandwidth, not decreases it.
This hasn't been "innovation" since the '50s - it's the entire rationale behind a cell network. Everybody knows with more cells you can squeeze more bandwidth out of the network. The problem is cells cost far more money to site than most people realize. A single site can run in the millions depending on where you want to put it, and in many cases you have to pay monthly rents.
It will be interesting to see which major carriers adapt to a decentralized model, and which ones die fighting it.
The decentralized model will never work for data traffic because the demand for individuals is potentially unlimited. You'll have one guy in your neighborhood downloading The Complete Hollywood Collection in HD, 1900-2000 and nobody else will be able to get on to check their mail.
Western ethics is mostly based on the Bible which clearly states that "Thou shalt not kill.".
Except that it really doesn't say that. The original wording was much closer to "you shall not murder", which brings in a lot of contextual baggage. The ancient Hebrews had the death penalty and applied it much more liberally than we do.
It is not a real aircraft carrier, it's an oversized aircraft-carrying cruiser.
Oh, come on, that's ridiculous. It's as large as any carrier in the world outside the US fleet, and it's far larger than carriers were when we started calling them "carriers".
Now things brings up the question, why on earth did they name the newest, most advanced aircraft carriers on the planet after a President who was never elected by anyone...
That doesn't mean he wasn't president. And he wasn't a failure, either. He just wasn't there long enough to have a big impact on the country.
Who knows if China is going to follow that, but being an old design and stripped of many useful things, they'd be better off building a fresh one with new design, tech and materials, and keep using this as a "research" ship.
They've gutted it and replaced all the old Soviet junk with shiny new Chinese weapons systems. Radars, fire control computers, grid... everything. A month or two back they installed its first weapons system - a modern anti-aircraft system.
Of course the Chinese navy couldn't actually protect it in a fight with the US, but countries like the Philippines, Japan, and Vietnam have various island territorial disputes with China and aren't really equipped to deal with a modern carrier.
People I've talked to say it's likely still mostly a training ship, and that the Russians told them they'd need a good twenty years to train up an effective air wing. The key question will be what kind of teething problems China has with the two additional carriers they intend to build from the keel up.
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That's pretty condescending. What makes you think they can't watch a few hours of television and still be informed? When people refer to large groups of people as "sheeple" and wail they won't "wake up" it implies if only people were paying attention they'd think like I think. Well, and stay with me here, maybe they already question things, they're already involved, and they already "challenge things they feel aren't right." Maybe their vision of how things ought to be isn't the same as yours.
I'm guessing from the way your post is written you're not from the US. I'm at a little bit of a loss to understand why you think we in the US would make our country just like yours if only we didn't watch so much television.
The cable company has to pay for some channels (They pay a lot for ESPN), for some no money changes hands (the legacy networks, I think), and some pay the cable company (HSN). So yeah, that's exactly what's happening. If you're on the lowest tier they make money by having you as a customer (neglecting sunk costs) even if you don't pay.
So there's a dearth of satellite bandwidth, is there?
Yeah. The whole thing looks a lot more like pork to me than any legitimate materials research.
It always does.
The US would lose face internationally then and would be required to grind Iran into the dust.
This. The Iranians are in the same predicament in which Zulu king Cetshwayo found himself at the outset of the Anglo-Zulu war. He couldn't beat the British in an all-out war, but he thought he could bloody them enough that they'd leave the Zulus alone. So the plan was to bleed the British invasion forces without actually threatening British colonies. Unfortunately (for Cetshwayo, anyway) the Zulus achieved a crushing victory at Isandlwana, which required the British to commit major resources to a massive second invasion, in which the Zulu nation was ground, as you say, into the dust.
The Iranian government would be walking a tightrope. If it fared too poorly the Iranian people, who aren't exactly thrilled with them to start with, would hang them all from lampposts. But if they fared too well the US would reduce their infrastructure to rubble, or even invade. So the best outcome they could hope for is to sink a few US frigates (preventing a complete loss of face) at the cost of their navy, their air force (such as it is), and their petroleum infrastructure. Not a good position to be in.
I think the point is that it doesn't have to. It just needs to survive long enough to launch a missile.
Missile-armed boats are relatively expensive. Iran has only about 20 of them, 10 of which date back to the 1970s. And probably a handful are out of service for repairs or maintenance at any given time.
Also, I guess if fifty of these things are attacking a ship, only a few of them have to launch their missiles or come up alongside and detonate their explosives for the tactic to be effective.
Boats like that are so fragile a .50 cal will tear them apart in a few seconds. After the USS Cole incident American warships were issued heavy machine guns that clip onto the rails and sailors were trained in their use. The only way the "pull up alongside and detonate" tactic will work is if the ROE won't allow the crew to fire until it's too late.
Also, frigates are fast - almost certainly faster than a speedboat packed with enough explosives to do actual damage. Attacking an alert (and they're surely alert at this point) crew in a ship underway is a whole different kettle of fish than attacking a ship in port.
Carriers haven't been armoured since WWII.
This is wrong. The hull isn't armored, but the critical areas are.
That said, if they are really well and truly nuts, I'm still not worried about a fleet of speed boats- it's the nukes that will be a problem.
That's not going to be a problem for a few years yet, though, and it's going to be at least a decade or so before they have something they can deliver with a missile.
There are no warships that can survive a missile striking the hull.
Nonsense. There are a whole lot of warships that can survive a missile striking the hull. In 1987 the USS Stark was struck by an Exocet missile and survived. The Stark was a frigate about 4% the size of a US carrier. Nobody knows how many missiles it would take to sink a carrier, which is armored, but most experts believe it would take two or three missiles of the type the Iranians can bring to the party.
Iran doesn't have ballistic missiles with the right seeker to attack ships. The most advanced anti-ship missile the Iranians have have is the Chinese C-802 "Silkworm" cruise missile. It's not fast or stealthy, and can be shot down pretty easily.
A third of the world subsists on less than a dollar a day. Our grandchildren will be long dead before there's "no cheap labor left". India isn't particularly cheap, by the way. Most of the manufacturing leaving China is going to places like Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Guatemala. And then there's Africa, in which a whole lot of places are untouched by anything resembling economic development.
Anyway, you proceed from a false assumption, which is that cheap labor drives an expanding economy. If that were true the world economy would have stalled with the end of slavery, which was ubiquitous well into the 19th century. Expensive labor means consumers with money to spend on cars and flat-screen televisions, as well as savings to invest in new ventures.
Heh. Yeah, there's a distinct possibility people are leaving because this guy is hard to work for, and it has nothing to do with money.
That's what I'm hearing in the SF bay area as well. People time out as contractors and have another position by the end of the week.
And yet a lot of young people move to NYC for the social aspects. I don't really understand it myself, but I do know people in their 20s who'd rather live on a friend's couch in NYC than a mansion in Palo Alto. Not that Palo Alto is a cheap place to live, by any means.
I had to roll my eyes at this little gem. Yes, it's never been called on despite the small wars we've fought over the last decade. Because it's an air superiority fighter. We haven't fought anyone who could challenge the decades old F-16, let alone the F-15 or the F-22. Shall we use a screwdriver to pound in a nail because it's a really expensive screwdriver?
If we actually use the F-22 for anything more than a glorified test of its pitiful strike capability then something really bad has happened, because it means the US is at war with a country like the UK, France, Russia, China, or India.
Ah, I see. Not really workable for mobiles, though, because of power.
Sure, the same way any bug is fixed forever. But software is still loaded with bugs. Even a completely bug-free system will accumulate bugs over time as the code is maintained and/or features are added.
It's not about infrastructure. It's about spectrum.
This hasn't been "innovation" since the '50s - it's the entire rationale behind a cell network. Everybody knows with more cells you can squeeze more bandwidth out of the network. The problem is cells cost far more money to site than most people realize. A single site can run in the millions depending on where you want to put it, and in many cases you have to pay monthly rents.
The decentralized model will never work for data traffic because the demand for individuals is potentially unlimited. You'll have one guy in your neighborhood downloading The Complete Hollywood Collection in HD, 1900-2000 and nobody else will be able to get on to check their mail.
I don't see how scripts on the web portal can protect against keyloggers and other spyware.
Western ethics is mostly based on the Bible which clearly states that "Thou shalt not kill.".
Except that it really doesn't say that. The original wording was much closer to "you shall not murder", which brings in a lot of contextual baggage. The ancient Hebrews had the death penalty and applied it much more liberally than we do.
It is not a real aircraft carrier, it's an oversized aircraft-carrying cruiser.
Oh, come on, that's ridiculous. It's as large as any carrier in the world outside the US fleet, and it's far larger than carriers were when we started calling them "carriers".
Now things brings up the question, why on earth did they name the newest, most advanced aircraft carriers on the planet after a President who was never elected by anyone...
That doesn't mean he wasn't president. And he wasn't a failure, either. He just wasn't there long enough to have a big impact on the country.
Who knows if China is going to follow that, but being an old design and stripped of many useful things, they'd be better off building a fresh one with new design, tech and materials, and keep using this as a "research" ship.
They've gutted it and replaced all the old Soviet junk with shiny new Chinese weapons systems. Radars, fire control computers, grid... everything. A month or two back they installed its first weapons system - a modern anti-aircraft system.
Of course the Chinese navy couldn't actually protect it in a fight with the US, but countries like the Philippines, Japan, and Vietnam have various island territorial disputes with China and aren't really equipped to deal with a modern carrier.
People I've talked to say it's likely still mostly a training ship, and that the Russians told them they'd need a good twenty years to train up an effective air wing. The key question will be what kind of teething problems China has with the two additional carriers they intend to build from the keel up.