So use paper. Don't expose the rest of us to a shitty format in order to excuse further legal excess. I find my sympathy level for doctors, litigants, judges and lawyers is approximately equal: zero. That green stuff you see when you look up? That's pond scum.
Of course, if you had simply used HTML as your only target, no one anywhere would have a problem, and the job would be enormously simplifed. You should be asking yourself, "Why is PDF even used?" And the answer is, "No good reason." All PDF does is lock the display format, offer the opportunity to make the document read-only and less accessible, all of which are *entirely* bad things.
And if you *truly* want to ensure it *always* looks the same *everywhere*, you use PDF
There isn't one good reason in the entire world to make sure a document "looks the same everywhere."
What we need is that the document is (1) readable, (2) orderly, and (3) conforms to the reader's needs.
When you have someone with poor vision, you don't want some tiny font used for anything, and zooming the page blows the context right out the window. The reader needs to be able to set the font, and the color(s), and the link colors, if any, and the document width, and quite a few other things.
PDF is unfriendly and the very idea that the author has to set the absolute look of the document reeks of elitism, misplaced "artistic" intent at the expense of readability and usability.
And then there is editing -- a document you can't edit and/or annotate is crippled -- and PDF encourages this unfriendly behavior.
The ideal solution at this point in time is, has been, and is likely to remain, HTML, which resolves every one of those critical problems.
Vanilla HTML is a much better answer. Let the reader control the format - separate the markup from the content, let the reader control the fonts, how emphasis displays, even link colors. Or move one step forward and use (basic!) CSS. PDF is overweight, slow, seriously buggy, can lock content, and is not available for all platforms. HTML readers are ubiquitous, fast, highly compressible and wide open. Heck, I can display and edit a basic HTML file, formatted nicely according to the HTML, on my 1970's-era 64k 6809 machine using a text-based terminal. Now that is good compatibility! And it didn't take long to write, either. Try supporting PDF in a 64k environment. Good luck.
I have never allowed PDF to be used as any form of outgoing documentation for our products; and I've never regretted that decision.
Yes, yes, but now they've charged him with SEXUAL crimes, you see, so none of that matters. Once tarred with the SEXUAL brush, one is pretty well finished as a public figure in society, because people get really, really stupid when the word sex is brought up. So don't worry about the treason thing. They're beyond that already. He must be brought to (cough) "justice" FOR THE CHILDREN!
...we should hunt down Sarah Palin, but I can't face the idea of actually catching her. It would take months of showering with caustic agents to get the stupid off. The woman is the perfect storm of all that is wrong with America's dumbest citizens today. And I'm sure that our north Korean allies on the death panels would not refudiate this.
maybe we should instead take the high road and ask ourselves what the best course of action is, rather than being so quick to cheer at their loss.
My suggestion would be to (1) fire the entire current congress and the judiciary and cancel their retirement benefits for cause (breaking the oaths required to accept their jobs) and (2) instantly repeal every law that violates the letter of the constitution, which would include the patriot act, just about every weapons possession/carry law on the books (probably every, but there might be some exceptions even if I can't think of any), all the ex post facto laws, all the intrastate commerce laws (anything that even looks like it depends on indirect reasoning re interstate), all the search and seizure laws that apply to citizens and try to get around warrants and/or probable cause and/or affirmation, stop printing money that has religious slogans, change the national motto, remove the religious nonsense from congressional sessions, etc.
Then the first thing we need to do after that is establish a real punishment for congresscritters and judges and the executive if they are found to have violated that oath in the future. mandatory fines, prison, loss of benefits.
The next time someone gets the idea that "shall make no law" means "hey, bubba, let's make a law!", or "shall not infringe" means "let's infringe!", and it can be shown in court that they tried to translate these errors into law or regulation, they're done.
From there, if the government feels it needs additional powers to those enumerated as granted to it, they follow article V, as was intended from day one.
As near as I can tell, there is no other path to recovery -- we're well into the establishment of a wealth and power based oligarchy, and very, very far from our legitimately authorized constitutional roots. If it isn't fixed, and fixed soon, we will devolve into this permanently, where rights and freedoms are at the whim of corporations and the rich who dictate all conditions to the government. I repeat: We are very close to this condition now.
Marx makes sense because he's mostly right. Some of his observations are so obviously true that they stand almost shoulder to shoulder with natural law: "It [religion] is the opium of the people", for instance, is only untrue in the sense that it understates the case.
One key problem with Marx (and democracy, and republics, and communism, and socialism, and just about every other -ology, -ism, and -cracy) is that the implementations are very poor. Our republic in particular is an example of great intentions gone horribly wrong over time, instead of correcting towards the ideal implementation.
When I was a young man, "papers, please" was a joke, a straightforward mocking of the idiocy of the Nazis, to be delivered in a German accent because only the Germans would be so evil. Today it's the law of the land within 150 miles of the border, as are warrentless searches and detainment without probable cause, taking of personal property and funds with no recourse and no recompense, secret "no-fly" and "no-buy" lists, direct invasion of private communications, banking information, and more; ex post facto laws, forbidden to both federal and state governments, are on the books everywhere; the commerce clause has been literally inverted; the judiciary has usurped article V powers; it's like a caricature of "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
So don't confuse a scholarly description of a system, or even a constitution, with the flaws of the people and systems which implement it poorly. Personally, I much prefer a religion-free constitutional republic with an underpinning of capitalism, which in turn is buffered by treating corporations via regulation like the dangerous psychopaths they generally are; but I don't get to get my way, and that's the end of it.
It doesn't make my ideas religion, or unworthy of speech or consideration. It just makes them goals to aspire to, and all the more important to put, and keep, on the table.
If you want to increase our self-sufficiency and isolationism
Yes, I'd very much like that. I'm all for trade. I'm not for military pacts. You want to buy weapons, maybe we'll sell them to you, if we like you. Maybe we won't. You don't want to buy what we have to offer? Fine. You want to buy non-weapons (wheat, for example), we'll sell it to you no matter who you are, presuming we have it to spare and your price is adequate. That kind of thing. Likewise, when we buy stuff, we should pick and choose our vendors carefully. This is the *most* pressure we should be putting on anyone at this point in time, unless, of course, they attempt to cross our borders or directly attack our military, in which case that's why we have a military in the first place, to deal with such events. I'm not against bombing he living hell out of someone if they attack us, either, but I do think that land wars are a very bad idea, and the only land that is worth such an effort to us is this land right here.
Alright, how far back do you want to go?
I don't want to "go" anywhere. I want our service people to come home and defend the lands we now own. I don't want them defending Taiwan or Japan or Iraq or Sudan or Kuwait. Those countries need to come to terms with others on their own merits, or lack thereof. You can make the point that China is *really* not happy with Taiwan. In return, I would make the point that I *really* don't care. We need to get our own house in order, and spending the enormous amount of money we do on foreign military support and aggression, as well as foreign aid, is not helping. The more isolationist we are, the more jobs we'll generate; the more jobs we generate, the healthier our economy will become; the healthier the economy becomes, the healthier, wealthier and better educated the citizens will become. That's the USG's only valid job aside from border defense: seeing to it that this country, not other countries, is run as well as possible.
I can't believe that you think we'd be able to extract ourselves from the rest of the world without any secrecy at all.
I think that we should try to extract ourselves, that's all, secrecy not really being an issue in that regard. I think that as long as we don't try, the country is operating in a highly immoral and unethical fashion. But my primary concern is that we are operating in a way that is severely disadvantageous to our citizens, particularly with regard to the constitutional basis for government and liberty. My general point about secrecy is that since the USG doesn't respect the privacy of its citizens, I am only amused when it characterizes a breach of its own privacy as an "attack." I always think it's funny when deep hypocrisy is so blatantly exposed.
From a criminal's viewpoint, the cop is the enemy. And in that sense, yes, Julian is the enemy of the USG. Because he's exposing its criminal activities, like bartering away the lives of people detained in Guantanamo, torturing people, and so on. The USG he is "attacking" is not the one that was described to you in grade school. The USG he is attacking is the one that has, via the persons in the house, the senate, the executive, and the judiciary, broken explicit oaths to defend and obey the constitution and is now running amuck, trampling its own citizen's liberties.
Yes, we do have traitors in our midst. Of particular note are those people in congress and the judiciary that have broken their oaths to defend and obey the constitution. In this particular instance, with regard to the 4th amendment -- but that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's the privacy I refer to. Not gathering information of other nations.
If you think you "give" respect, you don't understand what it is. Respect arises internally as a consequence of your preconceptions, manifesting as an opinion of what another entity has done; it's not something you choose, it's something another entity engenders. This is what is meant by saying respect is "earned."
Demonstrating respect is something else; but it's still tied to this: If your feelings are as I describe above, then you are, in fact, demonstrating respect. If your feelings are other, but you go through the motions of demonstrating respect anyway, you are engaging in sycophancy. Sometimes sycophancy may be forced upon you, as in a courtroom, where failing to display respect may result in violence against your person in the form of loss of liberty.
In the case of the USG, many of the things it stood for that were respectable, it clearly does not stand for now. Personally speaking, I no longer feel any respect for it. And I'm not inclined to sycophancy. I associate that with politicians and lawyers... and I would consider it a tragedy if I was honestly mistaken for one of them.
I only deal with meta-chicken. Not a metaphor, but instead, meta-fried.
Once, there was a murder of crows who were harassing some horses in the paddock near my barn. I yelled at them, told them that corral-ation wasn't caws-ation, but apparently they thought I was simply winging it.
Also:
Linux is forking good
And Windows is forking not.
I'm speaking of course
Of a call in the source
Just one of them has got
If you need your code
To go down both roads
When choice becomes a Y
Then Linux is better
The one to get her
Forking day and night
Who said anything about innocent? If the other side isn't playing fair, you either play dirty or lose.
Right. Well, since the USG is, and has been, playing VERY dirty with the privacy of others, including its own citizens, looks like Julian is doing exactly the right thing, doesn't it?
Fine. but if the USG expects its privacy to be respected, it needs to respect the privacy of others. A nice place to start would be with its own citizens. Until then, it has no leg to stand on to complain. It set the precedent (reading other people's private stuff just because they want to), now it reaps the whirlwind. And I simply laugh at their protestations. Hypocritical clue-tards.
It is NOT expected that it will fall into the hands of someone like Assange who will release it to the world.
Well, you know, when I wrote my emails, I didn't expect them to be read by the government. But they did it anyway. Since they violated my trust and privacy and the 4th amendment without any legitimate authorization, I'm for pulling their pants down around their ankles in public and laughing at their shrunken little parts. Respect is not given, it is earned. And the USG has not been earning in this regard, it has been spending.
So three cheers for Julian, and here's hoping for some real embarrassments in the cables. I mean, besides the ones already known, like the idiocy about trading Guantanamo prisoners for an audience with El Presidente.
Yes, but two eyes and two kneecaps for an eye, and the enemy is screwed, and you aren't. This is the argument for never aggress, but deal out overwhelming responses that are financially affordable. It is the justification for 99.99% of the sentences passed out by the US justice system as well. The harm done by years in prison far exceeds the harm done by most crimes. Not all, but most.
No one has demonstrated that our country needs "protection" in the modern sense. We don't need to be in Iraq or Afghanistan; we don't need military bases in any country but the US itself; our navy doesn't need to be anywhere outside of 50 miles from our coast with the exception of Hawaii.
If someone crosses our borders, they are our concern. If they don't, they aren't.
Also, we should definitely stop attempting to be the world's "daddy."
I agree, and also note this has the attractive feature of also hitting their interests.
leave Israel to fend for itself.
Israel is fully capable of defending itself. It is a military nuclear power with significant conventional forces and a fairly realistic government. Our relationship with them these days should be buying their oranges and selling them other things -- including weapons -- at a profit.
I'm sure they can deal with any Arab threats, and furthermore, if they can't, well, maybe it wasn't such a great idea to try and carve a new country out of land that was already spoken for anyway. Either way, it's not our business.
Well, this same institution managed to fight and win a World War. I have a hard time accepting that 60 years has made that much difference.
I don't. The will of the current administration is entirely bogged down by political correctness and business concerns, when the defense of the country is its job. In 1942, no one got to masturbating about how many poor Japanese would be killed or what business interests would be sundered if we responded to Pearl Harbor; but in 2001, we couldn't even THINK of hitting the Saudi Islamists, even though it was very clear they were the money and brains behind all this... and that's because of the oil connection. You still see that right here -- people are aghast at the idea of attacking the theist crazies. We're not the country we were in 1942, nor is the government what it was in 1942. And mostly, that's a bad thing in this particular sense.
Though I think the mortar would be comparably fast: drop it, drop the round, drop your eyepiece, target it, and get out of there -- round hasn't even landed. You can watch the results while you run if you like -- the video will be there until the round hits. And you don't have to break cover with the mortar, because you don't need LOS.
Overhead cover is certainly an issue -- I was responding to the "behind a wall" scenario. reload weight - no doubt what I'm describing would be larger, and perhaps heavier, though if they're designed for the same damage, I'm not sure why that would have to be so. I'm not saying traditional mortar here (which should be clear), I'm describing a delivery system that is a lot simpler than a 30k rifle-analog.
The tube and plate, not really. The plate isn't required here because the aim is done post-firing; you'd be better off with a tube that went to a point on the bottom. Likewise, it definitely doesn't need to be heavy -- sounds like they're simply building them out of the wrong materials.
You obviously know a bit about traditional mortars. Imagine the insight you could have provided if you'd actually read my post!
o Aim is by eye tracking, not trig. Any math is done by the projectile
o Accuracy is obtained post-firing, incoming
o It, and the shooter, uses video to acquire the target
o If you don't acquire, it isn't armed
I suggested this as a simple technical solution in response to the problem of very quickly dealing with someone behind a wall. It doesn't directly (meaning, w/o penetrating rounds) address situations where they have significant top cover, as several commenters have pointed out.
Slashdot Mirror
So use paper. Don't expose the rest of us to a shitty format in order to excuse further legal excess. I find my sympathy level for doctors, litigants, judges and lawyers is approximately equal: zero. That green stuff you see when you look up? That's pond scum.
Of course, if you had simply used HTML as your only target, no one anywhere would have a problem, and the job would be enormously simplifed. You should be asking yourself, "Why is PDF even used?" And the answer is, "No good reason." All PDF does is lock the display format, offer the opportunity to make the document read-only and less accessible, all of which are *entirely* bad things.
There isn't one good reason in the entire world to make sure a document "looks the same everywhere."
What we need is that the document is (1) readable, (2) orderly, and (3) conforms to the reader's needs.
When you have someone with poor vision, you don't want some tiny font used for anything, and zooming the page blows the context right out the window. The reader needs to be able to set the font, and the color(s), and the link colors, if any, and the document width, and quite a few other things.
PDF is unfriendly and the very idea that the author has to set the absolute look of the document reeks of elitism, misplaced "artistic" intent at the expense of readability and usability.
And then there is editing -- a document you can't edit and/or annotate is crippled -- and PDF encourages this unfriendly behavior.
The ideal solution at this point in time is, has been, and is likely to remain, HTML, which resolves every one of those critical problems.
Vanilla HTML is a much better answer. Let the reader control the format - separate the markup from the content, let the reader control the fonts, how emphasis displays, even link colors. Or move one step forward and use (basic!) CSS. PDF is overweight, slow, seriously buggy, can lock content, and is not available for all platforms. HTML readers are ubiquitous, fast, highly compressible and wide open. Heck, I can display and edit a basic HTML file, formatted nicely according to the HTML, on my 1970's-era 64k 6809 machine using a text-based terminal. Now that is good compatibility! And it didn't take long to write, either. Try supporting PDF in a 64k environment. Good luck.
I have never allowed PDF to be used as any form of outgoing documentation for our products; and I've never regretted that decision.
Yes, yes, but now they've charged him with SEXUAL crimes, you see, so none of that matters. Once tarred with the SEXUAL brush, one is pretty well finished as a public figure in society, because people get really, really stupid when the word sex is brought up. So don't worry about the treason thing. They're beyond that already. He must be brought to (cough) "justice" FOR THE CHILDREN!
Also, he has announced that his next target is the banks. I'm thinking that will raise the hysteria level a bit.
My suggestion would be to (1) fire the entire current congress and the judiciary and cancel their retirement benefits for cause (breaking the oaths required to accept their jobs) and (2) instantly repeal every law that violates the letter of the constitution, which would include the patriot act, just about every weapons possession/carry law on the books (probably every, but there might be some exceptions even if I can't think of any), all the ex post facto laws, all the intrastate commerce laws (anything that even looks like it depends on indirect reasoning re interstate), all the search and seizure laws that apply to citizens and try to get around warrants and/or probable cause and/or affirmation, stop printing money that has religious slogans, change the national motto, remove the religious nonsense from congressional sessions, etc.
Then the first thing we need to do after that is establish a real punishment for congresscritters and judges and the executive if they are found to have violated that oath in the future. mandatory fines, prison, loss of benefits.
The next time someone gets the idea that "shall make no law" means "hey, bubba, let's make a law!", or "shall not infringe" means "let's infringe!", and it can be shown in court that they tried to translate these errors into law or regulation, they're done.
From there, if the government feels it needs additional powers to those enumerated as granted to it, they follow article V, as was intended from day one.
As near as I can tell, there is no other path to recovery -- we're well into the establishment of a wealth and power based oligarchy, and very, very far from our legitimately authorized constitutional roots. If it isn't fixed, and fixed soon, we will devolve into this permanently, where rights and freedoms are at the whim of corporations and the rich who dictate all conditions to the government. I repeat: We are very close to this condition now.
$20. Unless you want something unusual.
Marx makes sense because he's mostly right. Some of his observations are so obviously true that they stand almost shoulder to shoulder with natural law: "It [religion] is the opium of the people", for instance, is only untrue in the sense that it understates the case.
One key problem with Marx (and democracy, and republics, and communism, and socialism, and just about every other -ology, -ism, and -cracy) is that the implementations are very poor. Our republic in particular is an example of great intentions gone horribly wrong over time, instead of correcting towards the ideal implementation.
When I was a young man, "papers, please" was a joke, a straightforward mocking of the idiocy of the Nazis, to be delivered in a German accent because only the Germans would be so evil. Today it's the law of the land within 150 miles of the border, as are warrentless searches and detainment without probable cause, taking of personal property and funds with no recourse and no recompense, secret "no-fly" and "no-buy" lists, direct invasion of private communications, banking information, and more; ex post facto laws, forbidden to both federal and state governments, are on the books everywhere; the commerce clause has been literally inverted; the judiciary has usurped article V powers; it's like a caricature of "everything that can go wrong, will go wrong."
So don't confuse a scholarly description of a system, or even a constitution, with the flaws of the people and systems which implement it poorly. Personally, I much prefer a religion-free constitutional republic with an underpinning of capitalism, which in turn is buffered by treating corporations via regulation like the dangerous psychopaths they generally are; but I don't get to get my way, and that's the end of it.
It doesn't make my ideas religion, or unworthy of speech or consideration. It just makes them goals to aspire to, and all the more important to put, and keep, on the table.
Yes, I'd very much like that. I'm all for trade. I'm not for military pacts. You want to buy weapons, maybe we'll sell them to you, if we like you. Maybe we won't. You don't want to buy what we have to offer? Fine. You want to buy non-weapons (wheat, for example), we'll sell it to you no matter who you are, presuming we have it to spare and your price is adequate. That kind of thing. Likewise, when we buy stuff, we should pick and choose our vendors carefully. This is the *most* pressure we should be putting on anyone at this point in time, unless, of course, they attempt to cross our borders or directly attack our military, in which case that's why we have a military in the first place, to deal with such events. I'm not against bombing he living hell out of someone if they attack us, either, but I do think that land wars are a very bad idea, and the only land that is worth such an effort to us is this land right here.
I don't want to "go" anywhere. I want our service people to come home and defend the lands we now own. I don't want them defending Taiwan or Japan or Iraq or Sudan or Kuwait. Those countries need to come to terms with others on their own merits, or lack thereof. You can make the point that China is *really* not happy with Taiwan. In return, I would make the point that I *really* don't care. We need to get our own house in order, and spending the enormous amount of money we do on foreign military support and aggression, as well as foreign aid, is not helping. The more isolationist we are, the more jobs we'll generate; the more jobs we generate, the healthier our economy will become; the healthier the economy becomes, the healthier, wealthier and better educated the citizens will become. That's the USG's only valid job aside from border defense: seeing to it that this country, not other countries, is run as well as possible.
I think that we should try to extract ourselves, that's all, secrecy not really being an issue in that regard. I think that as long as we don't try, the country is operating in a highly immoral and unethical fashion. But my primary concern is that we are operating in a way that is severely disadvantageous to our citizens, particularly with regard to the constitutional basis for government and liberty. My general point about secrecy is that since the USG doesn't respect the privacy of its citizens, I am only amused when it characterizes a breach of its own privacy as an "attack." I always think it's funny when deep hypocrisy is so blatantly exposed.
From a criminal's viewpoint, the cop is the enemy. And in that sense, yes, Julian is the enemy of the USG. Because he's exposing its criminal activities, like bartering away the lives of people detained in Guantanamo, torturing people, and so on. The USG he is "attacking" is not the one that was described to you in grade school. The USG he is attacking is the one that has, via the persons in the house, the senate, the executive, and the judiciary, broken explicit oaths to defend and obey the constitution and is now running amuck, trampling its own citizen's liberties.
Yes, we do have traitors in our midst. Of particular note are those people in congress and the judiciary that have broken their oaths to defend and obey the constitution. In this particular instance, with regard to the 4th amendment -- but that's just the tip of the iceberg. That's the privacy I refer to. Not gathering information of other nations.
If you think you "give" respect, you don't understand what it is. Respect arises internally as a consequence of your preconceptions, manifesting as an opinion of what another entity has done; it's not something you choose, it's something another entity engenders. This is what is meant by saying respect is "earned."
Demonstrating respect is something else; but it's still tied to this: If your feelings are as I describe above, then you are, in fact, demonstrating respect. If your feelings are other, but you go through the motions of demonstrating respect anyway, you are engaging in sycophancy. Sometimes sycophancy may be forced upon you, as in a courtroom, where failing to display respect may result in violence against your person in the form of loss of liberty.
In the case of the USG, many of the things it stood for that were respectable, it clearly does not stand for now. Personally speaking, I no longer feel any respect for it. And I'm not inclined to sycophancy. I associate that with politicians and lawyers... and I would consider it a tragedy if I was honestly mistaken for one of them.
I only deal with meta-chicken. Not a metaphor, but instead, meta-fried.
Once, there was a murder of crows who were harassing some horses in the paddock near my barn. I yelled at them, told them that corral-ation wasn't caws-ation, but apparently they thought I was simply winging it.
Also:
Linux is forking good
And Windows is forking not.
I'm speaking of course
Of a call in the source
Just one of them has got
If you need your code
To go down both roads
When choice becomes a Y
Then Linux is better
The one to get her
Forking day and night
Fork, fork, fork, fork
Fork, fork, fork, fork
Forkety-fork
Fork-fork-fork.
Right. Well, since the USG is, and has been, playing VERY dirty with the privacy of others, including its own citizens, looks like Julian is doing exactly the right thing, doesn't it?
Fine. but if the USG expects its privacy to be respected, it needs to respect the privacy of others. A nice place to start would be with its own citizens. Until then, it has no leg to stand on to complain. It set the precedent (reading other people's private stuff just because they want to), now it reaps the whirlwind. And I simply laugh at their protestations. Hypocritical clue-tards.
Well, you know, when I wrote my emails, I didn't expect them to be read by the government. But they did it anyway. Since they violated my trust and privacy and the 4th amendment without any legitimate authorization, I'm for pulling their pants down around their ankles in public and laughing at their shrunken little parts. Respect is not given, it is earned. And the USG has not been earning in this regard, it has been spending.
So three cheers for Julian, and here's hoping for some real embarrassments in the cables. I mean, besides the ones already known, like the idiocy about trading Guantanamo prisoners for an audience with El Presidente.
Yes, but two eyes and two kneecaps for an eye, and the enemy is screwed, and you aren't. This is the argument for never aggress, but deal out overwhelming responses that are financially affordable. It is the justification for 99.99% of the sentences passed out by the US justice system as well. The harm done by years in prison far exceeds the harm done by most crimes. Not all, but most.
No one has demonstrated that our country needs "protection" in the modern sense. We don't need to be in Iraq or Afghanistan; we don't need military bases in any country but the US itself; our navy doesn't need to be anywhere outside of 50 miles from our coast with the exception of Hawaii.
If someone crosses our borders, they are our concern. If they don't, they aren't.
Also, we should definitely stop attempting to be the world's "daddy."
I agree, and also note this has the attractive feature of also hitting their interests.
Israel is fully capable of defending itself. It is a military nuclear power with significant conventional forces and a fairly realistic government. Our relationship with them these days should be buying their oranges and selling them other things -- including weapons -- at a profit.
I'm sure they can deal with any Arab threats, and furthermore, if they can't, well, maybe it wasn't such a great idea to try and carve a new country out of land that was already spoken for anyway. Either way, it's not our business.
I don't. The will of the current administration is entirely bogged down by political correctness and business concerns, when the defense of the country is its job. In 1942, no one got to masturbating about how many poor Japanese would be killed or what business interests would be sundered if we responded to Pearl Harbor; but in 2001, we couldn't even THINK of hitting the Saudi Islamists, even though it was very clear they were the money and brains behind all this... and that's because of the oil connection. You still see that right here -- people are aghast at the idea of attacking the theist crazies. We're not the country we were in 1942, nor is the government what it was in 1942. And mostly, that's a bad thing in this particular sense.
Agreed.
Though I think the mortar would be comparably fast: drop it, drop the round, drop your eyepiece, target it, and get out of there -- round hasn't even landed. You can watch the results while you run if you like -- the video will be there until the round hits. And you don't have to break cover with the mortar, because you don't need LOS.
That seems like a very fair evaluation.
Overhead cover is certainly an issue -- I was responding to the "behind a wall" scenario. reload weight - no doubt what I'm describing would be larger, and perhaps heavier, though if they're designed for the same damage, I'm not sure why that would have to be so. I'm not saying traditional mortar here (which should be clear), I'm describing a delivery system that is a lot simpler than a 30k rifle-analog.
The tube and plate, not really. The plate isn't required here because the aim is done post-firing; you'd be better off with a tube that went to a point on the bottom. Likewise, it definitely doesn't need to be heavy -- sounds like they're simply building them out of the wrong materials.
You obviously know a bit about traditional mortars. Imagine the insight you could have provided if you'd actually read my post!
o Aim is by eye tracking, not trig. Any math is done by the projectile
o Accuracy is obtained post-firing, incoming
o It, and the shooter, uses video to acquire the target
o If you don't acquire, it isn't armed
I suggested this as a simple technical solution in response to the problem of very quickly dealing with someone behind a wall. It doesn't directly (meaning, w/o penetrating rounds) address situations where they have significant top cover, as several commenters have pointed out.