In the United States, the bulk of public education is paid for by taxation at the State level, not Federal, per the US Constitution. Only a tiny minority of defense spending happens at the State level or lower, being essentially a Federal function. In theory, education is purely a State matter, though the Federal government throws in a little money as well. Using your naive analysis, there was a time when public education was universal but the US spent "zero" dollars. Because of how taxes and budgetary jurisdictions work in the US, you have to aggregate all levels to get a true picture of total expenditure. So aggregating budgets at all levels gives you:
Defense: ~430B
Education: ~600B
The numbers are imprecise depending on how you classify some funding at different levels, but that is the ballpark figure. Education spending does outstrip defense spending, but it is almost entirely done at the State level (or lower).
This is a very common way of creating bullshit statistics about US spending, by conflating Federal spending with US spending, when in the US many of these items are funded primarily at the State (e.g. Education), Local (e.g. Police), or Private (e.g. Foreign Aid) levels. Hence why it is a "common misconception" as to how much the US spends on education and defense respectively. Federal != US.
The US already spends more on education per student than essentially any other industrialized nation. If there is a problem with education, it is not in how much money is spent. What you said makes a trite soundbite, but neither identifies a real problem nor suggests a useful solution.
Contrary to popular belief, the Americans spend a lot more on public education (~$600B) than on defense. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is at historical lows and declining even with the military misadventures (3.x% of GDP currently versus an average of 7% for the 20th century).
and our spending more money on defense than all other countries on the planet
And spending less as a percentage of GDP than at any time during the previous administration. The US is currently spending half of its 20th century average on defense. Many other countries have let their militaries rot due to Pax Americana and have severely slashed funding -- the US has been cutting expenditure, but everyone else is cutting it faster (except for a few like China). And when you consider how much of the world GDP is the US, it should not be surprising that the historically paltry percentage makes up a big chunk of that. The historical rule of thumb for peacetime military expenditures required to maintain basic security was 5% of GDP. The US currently spends far less than 5% even with the cost of the current misadventures.
combined and doubled while our education and healthcare go down the toilet
The US spends a lot more on education (~$600B) than on defense. That it has been getting worse has nothing to do with the amount of money spent on it, which already exceeds most other industrialized countries by about any relative measure. Ironically, the DoD is one of the few organizations in government that actually returns relatively good results for the investment even as it continues to shrink (i.e. the military competently does what it is supposed to do).
The problem with that concept is that there is no where for the plutonium to go to.
In practice, they have been reprocessing the fissile material. Some of it goes into replacement warheads, the rest of it gets degraded into reactor fuel that can be sold. You are correct though that the plutonium doesn't go away. It is a pity we don't have more reactors to burn the stuff in.
...in case anyone missed it, is to reduce the plutonium stockpiles and make the weapons safer (such as they can be). Not to increase production. The US has dramatically reduced its own nuclear arsenal since the end of the Cold War per treaty obligations, and has been essentially paying for Russia to dismantle their Cold War arsenal which is currently far larger and pretty far behind on treaty obligations. The object is to dismantle the big old inefficient designs and to start producing a new generation of very clean and efficient low-yield fission devices. More and more of the "weapons" in the US nuclear arsenal are nothing more than plutonium triggers that are not currently mated to a proper warhead.
Bottom line: much less plutonium lying around, smaller yields, cleaner designs, and reduced risk profile. They are not expanding the arsenal, just cleaning it up. Since the US is going to have nukes regardless, I do not have a problem with this.
If you trust Fox News, then everything you think you know is wrong. CNN is really no better. Those initials should stand for Certainly Not News. It is a shame we don't have something like BBC in the US.
The BBC is not unbiased either, just differently biased.
The real problem is the very assumption that there are unbiased news sources. If you think a news source is "unbiased", all it usually means is that the news source just happens to share your bias. Conflating shared bias with lack of bias is a very common failure of critical thinking. When people on every side of the political spectrum accuse news sources of being biased, they are all correct.
A news organization's purpose is to inform, not to proffer an opinion. In the area of informing, NPR does better than Fox. For example, more than 60% of Fox News listeners thought the US found WMD's in Iraq, less than 20% of NPR's listeners thought the same. Since Washington has admitted that no WMDs were found, which news organization did a better job of informing its listeners?
You are illustrating something else instead.
There have been chemical weapons found Iraq by the US, mostly Sarin and mustard gas, a fact that is not in dispute. Not the vast stockpiles as claimed by the US government, but chemical weapons loaded into weapon systems nonetheless.
On Fox News, these minor finds of WMDs got heavy exposure and so its audience would correctly believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. On NPR, they essentially ignore WMDs unless they were in the form of a vast stockpile, and so they would correctly believe that no vast stockpiles of WMDs were found. People who think the US never found WMDs in Iraq are ignorant. People who think the US found vast stockpiles of WMDs are also ignorant. The difference in coverage of the facts between NPR and Fox News, combined with the biases of both audiences, makes the previously mentioned survey all but meaningless. The questions asked presumed certain facts that make the questions ambiguous, making people fill in additional context that would change their response depending on their exposure to specific factual assertions.
It's probably because so many USians don't know or care about world geography. It would sound weird/inaccurate to hear news about "San Francisco, USA" without mentioning California. But this is exactly how it sounds when US news mention a city in another country and ignore the state/province/region/department where it's located.
The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states (each with the size and economy to match), and saying "Foo City, US" would be like saying "Foo City, EU" (though Europe has the advantage of many languages to broaden the name space). Geographical namespaces in the US are only unique at the State level, just like in Europe, and there are many, many naming collisions between cities, towns, and other geographical identifiers in the US across states. There are a few city names in the US that seem to be used in a significant fraction of all the States, so specifying which State things are in is useful. I do not think EU-ians would be happy if we used the naming convention for the EU that you are suggesting is a good idea for the US. Apparently you don't know or care about world geography.
Won't more critical technologies limit how fast we can transmit data, such as switch fabrics? To effectively use incredibly fast end-user technologies, some absolutely incredible switches and routers would need to be designed, otherwise all this is for nothing. I mean 2.5 Gb per port on a 24-port switch would require a 60 Gb backplane - way higher than anything available today.
No offense, but what the hell are you talking about? The low-end managed switch fabrics have as much bandwidth as you are discussing. High-end switch fabrics can exceed that by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
You are possibly the first person I've seen in the networking industry to suggest that the switch fabric is the bottleneck for networking. There are a few real bottlenecks (typically related to CPU and bus limits e.g. computers or routers), but switch fabric bandwidth is not generally considered to be one of them.
When Finland bought F/A-18's from USA they were the top-of-the-line planes back then (and they are very, very good even today). Now, fighter-aircraft have a system which transmits data between the plane and the ground and integrates the plane in to the greater whole, and the Hornet is no exception. One of the first things we did was to rip the US-designed system out, and replaced it with a Finnish design, for the sole reason that the US system was just plain inferior.
Not suprising at all. There is a thriving vibrant market in aftermarket avionics for US warplanes, primarily because the US is rarely willing to sell really capable avionics with their aircraft. The US sells really nice combat jets with somewhat substandard avionics, which are then replaced with third-party avionics immediately after the sale. It is a very, very common story. It is also why we will happily sell combat aircraft to unfriendly countries; they may get something that looks like a US warplane, but the avionics are likely obsolete and grossly inferior.
I think few people doubt the quality and capability of US avionics, it is just that those systems almost never leave the US military. In fact, there are several different tiers of avionics that the US will sell with its aircraft depending on the buyer, none of which have the full capabilities of a top-line US military avionics. In this day and age, avionics are the soul of a combat aircraft.
This whole stealth thing is rendered fairly useless by using multiple ground receivers in ones radar system anyway.
Very true, for first generation stealth technologies. By most accounts, the US is currently using a third generation stealth technology that bears little resemblance to early capabilities and shares little engineering -- arguably apples and oranges. It is easy to dismiss US stealth capability, but the US has an unparalleled amount of (highly classified) institutional knowledge on stealthy design that spans many decades which continues to evolve rapidly. In practice, US military design tends to prove competent and with very few weaknesses that did not occur to the designers.
A few different countries are producing UWB radars of a type similar to current versions common on existing US aircraft, which have a lot of really nice characteristics. I expect the F-35 will use a similar type of radar, at least on the export versions, and I would assume the US has a lot of capability for dealing with this type of radar given their experience with it. The F-22 is rumored to have a radar that is a generation ahead of these systems which has some spectacular properties, a nearly ideal implementation of the concept.
Time after time in aviation history has shown that every time "dogfighting" was supposed to be dead, and designs were advanced, that it wasn't quite as dead as they thought, and people died because of the mistake.
I do not disagree with this in general; the demise of many things have been prematurely anticipated. However, most of those things *did* eventually meet their demise, albeit not on the timelines of the prognosticators. The analog to this is armor. The US is field-testing several weapon systems now that will obsolete all types of mobile armor for the foreseeable future -- the operating parameters are such that no normal molecular material of any type can withstand the weapons as a matter of physics. Armor/anti-armor has been an arms race for a very long time, but it looks like it will be settled shortly. The US military research is dealing with the situation by switching strategies: rather than carrying armor that is worthless anyway, develop active defenses that can intercept incoming weapons so that you do not get touched. And so it goes on.
The reality for combat aircraft is that beyond-visual-range (BVR) weapon systems have become so advanced and so effective today that dogfighting really is largely dead when using these systems. Note that the US has very advanced BVR capability, most other countries are still seriously limited in this regard and so would be dogfighting quite a bit in their conflicts. The US saw the future as it developed the first effective BVR guided missile systems, but the platforms at the time could in no way deliver the future that they were seeing. Several decades later that future is actually here as originally envisioned, as the lethality and effectiveness have incrementally improved. Slow evolutionary steps.
Speed, range, situational awareness, and seeing the other guy before he sees you are crucial capabilities. The F-35 primarily exploits US capabilities in the last two categories for its advantage, which provides a huge amount of bang for the buck in modern warfare. Systems like the F-22 have a remarkable array of really excellent capabilities, but it costs a lot of money to produce a combat aircraft that is that good in so many dimensions that may be effectively preempted by other capabilities in practice.
The F-35 just got downrated in it's stealth capabilities [google.com] & now countries (UK, Aussies and others) are saying "WTF, why should we buy that when it can't even compete with the Sukhoi Flankers.
The F-35 was designed from inception as an exportable combat aircraft. It is the replacement for the F16/F18, does not have all the features and capabilities of the F-22, and is intended to be "strippable". On the other hand, it is a lot cheaper than the F-22. It can properly be placed somewhere in between Cold War era combat jets (F14/F15/F16/F18) and the current state-of-the-art (F22).
As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication in the high-end electronics/software/sensors that pretty much make or break a combat aircraft today. The Russians are not producing anything better than western Europe these days, and are slipping further behind because they cannot afford to spend the kind of money required to keep up. A Sukhoi Flanker would be dead right around the time it even knew it was being engaged. The only comparable jet to the F-35 is the Eurofighter platform, though the capability mix is different.
While I understand why the F-35 was developed, it is kind of an ugly and unremarkable jet. It is still very capable, particularly with the smashing avionics/software the US can put in the thing, but was never designed to be the "ultimate" anything. Of course, the F16 has a similar history but turned out to be an extremely successful combat aircraft.
Probably because the US has an aggressive R&D program that routinely produces superior combat aircraft systems. In the case of Australia specifically, they also get access (being old steady allies) to really fancy avionics and electronics packages which have no peer in the world of weaponry. The airframes and powerplants are extremely good too.
The airframe and powerplant is only modestly important in modern combat aircraft, though the US is very good at this type of design. The real selling point to countries like Australia is that they get more advanced versions of the software, electronics, and sensors -- the parts responsible for lethality and survivability to a very large extent -- which are one of the real strengths of US military R&D. The US will sell stripped down fighter jets to just about anyone, but they are very selective about the avionics as that is where the real capability lies in modern combat aviation. JSF is being sold with some very slick capabilities built-in; not quite F-22 level, but pretty close in many respects. Nobody else is selling anything comparable, and the closest competitor is the Eurofighter.
Australia buys US aircraft because the US is willing to sell it very advanced avionics and electronics for those aircraft. The US has no competitor at the very high-end of the quality/effectiveness market, which for military purposes is pretty important, particularly if you are a non-populous country like Australia that cannot rely on quantity to make up the difference.
These claims that the technology will work are unsubstantiated by any test results that have been published, as far as I know.
One has to follow the development more closely than reading headlines to stay on top of what systems are working and what aren't and why. It used to be my business a long time ago.
The military heavily reuses core systems. They are independently tested and verified as well as in complete system configurations. The new ABM systems use the same broad spectrum infrared imaging based terminal guidance and discrimination package that is used in a number of other deployed systems, including just about all current air defense missile systems that do not use radar for terminal guidance. The exact kill rate of this terminal guidance package is classified, but it is known to be well in excess of 90% against even the most difficult targets in its many other applications and is limited primarily by the rocket motor it is attached to. It is the terminal guidance package of choice for guided kinetic intercept weapons generally because it is so reliable and effective.
Every other weapon system that is using the new rocket platform is having similar issues in testing, so it is not just the ABM but tactical battlefield stuff as well. (There are other practical problems as well with the rocket motors that have shown up in testing; they tear the crap out of things in their immediate vicinity when launched, far more so than current rocket platforms.)
In short, the guidance package works everywhere it is tried including ABM on old rockets, and the rocket motor has engineering problems everywhere it is tried. ABM is not a particularly special weapon design case in terms of intercept, and there are many other weapon systems that are expected to face far more complicated intercept environments.
And they have made huge strides in the reliability of those rockets since I remember them first testing them in the early '90s. It looks like they are finally starting to iron out enough of the bugs in the rockets to have usably deployable systems in other applications, so I expect the ABM system to be coming along shortly.
Incidentally, it is hard to make a meaningful criticism of the tests if one is unfamiliar with the designed capabilities of the system or the engineering components that are being isolated in the tests -- the media has been slow to grok that fact. The reason the targets have been "simple" and unrealistic with respect to the guidance package is because they know that the guidance package works as it has been thoroughly tested and verified in many other contexts. The problem has been getting the new rocket platform to respond correctly in flight to the guidance control system. In such a case, any old target will do.
The only reasonable economic justification is that we have to get this rocket platform working in any case even if we never deploy an ABM system (which I would agree would largely be a waste). It is one of multiple systems they are using to debug the rocket technology. The guidance package is already paid for and proven, and many of the next generation weapon systems are being designed for the new rocket motors and so that money to debug them will be spent regardless.
Some research was done in the 1980s on placing junk in the path of incoming warheads but was scrapped. The problem is that it is damn hard to generate a screen of junk of sufficient density that you will be guaranteed a high probability of a kill without making the screen footprint so small that it becomes a precision terminal guidance problem again.
Kinetic kill is the simplest and most reliable mechanism, and as it turns out it is not too hard either. Chasing down a slippery target is something that the we have almost half a century of research on, and many other precision weapon systems that work very well are required to track and impact evasive and agile targets. The primary difficulty is having the rocket do precisely what the computer tells it to. Building a rocket that is both extremely fast and which responds precisely to guidance commands is a non-trivial problem because the materials tend to start to lose their precision at the outer edges of their performance envelope or simply fail in unpredictable ways.
When the new ABM system was specified, it was also specified to use a new research rocket technology that has matured much more slowly than expected. In many ways it is a marvel of exotic materials science that it can do what it does, and they have had a hard time making it reliable. There are good technical reasons to use the new rocket system for ABM, but it has hindered the ABM program; the guidance package was basically finished more than a decade ago.
"What I've never been able to figure out, is why are we trying to get a missle that can hit another missle? That is HARD."
Not that hard actually; the US has had the capability to do that reliably for at least 15 years. Computers are much faster than the physics we can drive with the materials we can fabricate. The design problem is very much a material one.
The REASON they do it is a simple point of engineering that most people overlook: the typical terminal closing speed exceeds even the detonation velocity of the best military explosives. In other words, compared to the missiles, an explosion is moving in slow motion -- the target will outrun the blast wave with ease. The reality is even worse in that mechanically coupling the detonation to the target (which is hardened) is very substantially slower than the detonation itself. One could very precisely time and place an explosion in the path of the incoming missile, but that is a much more complicated scheme than just hitting the bloody thing directly. If you think about it, terminal guidance has been able to get very close to targets for a long time, and reliably hitting the target is nothing more than reducing the error a bit -- an evolutionary engineering problem.
Therefore, the only good choice is to directly couple the missiles by physical contact, and at those velocities, the energy of an explosive falls below the noise floor anyway. Kinetic kills are not just a design choice, at those velocities it is almost a design necessity. Beam weapons are the other option, but those have other issues.
This all makes a lot of assumptions about the nature of the new ABM systems that are incorrect. First, the "zig-zag" trajectory is definitely NOT a problem for the terminal guidance package, which was designed to track and destroy agile and evasive targets and is currently deployed in other very successful weapon systems. A ballistic missile has nowhere near the maneuverability and agility of other types of targets this guidance package has a 90+% kill rate on. The primary failure in the ABM tests is in a brand spanking new rocket design that has had numerous problems getting the guidance system where it wants to go due in large part to its extreme performance envelope. It is worth noting that the sensor and discrimination characteristics of the terminal guidance package are much, much better than most people are assuming and is largely impervious to spoofing and decoys. Again, this is well-tested in other weapon systems that use the same underlying terminal guidance technology (e.g. AIM-9X), or in anti-ballistic missile tests on more reliable rockets.
Regardless of whether it is a good idea to have an effective ABM system in place, the technology will work. The rocket problems (which are a decade past due) are eventually being worked out, as several unrelated weapon systems are dependent on the same rocket technology working correctly. The question is not whether it can work (it can) but whether or not deploying and maintaining a comprehensive ABM system is worth the expenditure, which it may not be. The money spent on the guidance package is widely reused, and the rocket technology is slated to replace many existing rocket powered systems, once they work out the kinks. In that respect, the military research has not been a waste as the primary components are or will be used in many other places. The new ABM systems they are testing have very little relation, either in design or technology, to the old existing systems; most of current "ABM missiles" like the Patriot are anti-aircraft systems where they hacked the software to hopefully hit missiles outside the original design envelope.
This really should be a policy and fiscal argument, not a technology argument, as the technology will eventually work as originally designed. The argument that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design is a loser and poorly informed, but a much stronger argument can be made about the mission of such a weapon system.
Something similar is done in Nevada, which is generally regarded as being clueful about preventing fraud in electronic machines thanks to many years of dealing with elaborate attempts at electronic gambling machine fraud. Much of the value of electronic voting machines are that they are inexpensive, fast, and theoretically less error-prone to manage compared to pre-printed paper ballots and other older methods.
While no voting system is fool-proof, the Nevada method is something like this: Electronic voting with a voter-verified paper receipt to ensure that what is on the paper is what was selected electronically by voter. The paper receipts are collected and a few percent of the total paper records are randomly and independently audited to verify the electronic records. The important thing that happens here is that the verification and authentication of the vote is distributed among multiple authorities, providing strong statistical evidence that an election was indeed counted as it was voted while providing no single point of failure or manipulation that is likely to go unnoticed. It also does not have the overhead of manually counting every single paper ballot.
This is actually a more robust voting protocol in many ways than the paper ballots it replaces. I do not know if Wisconsin is doing things precisely this way, but I imagine that they would use some variation of the Nevada protocol.
I am fortunate enough (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) to have full exposure to the accounting for my wages here in California. The last time I checked a few months ago, of the money that gets paid out to cover my paycheck, 52% goes directly to the government at various levels, and 48% goes to me.
Most people have no idea just how much in taxes they actually pay.
No, you cannot defend a high-power laser by making a shiny missile. The whole point of using lasers of sufficient power is that even if you had a missile that was 90% reflective in infrared (which is at the upper end of what one could reasonably do for a missile), the power level is high enough that the last 10% of absorption is enough to ablate that lovely mirror finish and eat the missile. Note also, that most missiles guidance systems operate in the same part of the spectrum as the laser, which would make the pointy end have a very low reflectance by definition.
The reason for using very high-power lasers is the same they prefer to use hyper-kinetic missiles: at some energy density, no plausible molecular material has sufficient bond strength to withstand it, effectively obsoleting armor.
You can't copyright chemical processes, that's the difference.
Yes you can. You can copyright the recipe -- it does not describe implementation except in abstract terms. Just like real software patents. And you can own the copyright on an implementation of software when someone else owns a patent on the underlying algorithm. My description of a chemical process implementation is most certainly copyrighted, and the underlying process can be patented as well. So try again.
And "one-click" patents are not really software patents, and asserting as much is clouding the issue. If you want real software patents, look at something more like RSA et al.
Software shouldn't be *patented* because you're patenting an algorithm.
Newsflash: ALL patents are algorithms. Stop acting like this unique to computers. Chemical process patents, for example, are structurally and functionally indistinguishable and very obviously map into the same space as "software algorithms" and yet those are not considered controversial.
And computer code is a completely logical process. It'd be very similar to patenting a mathematical formula.
This is not an argument against anything. Everything machine is reducible to software, and every software is reducible to machine. It is a distinction without a difference. To reuse my example above, chemical process patents are not generally considered controversial here, yet every argument against software patents can be used against them because they are the exact same kind of thing.
Everyone needs to stop pretending that software patents are a special aberration. The reason this is controversial at all is that many people are trying to assert an arbitrary distinction where none exists. We either need to decide that patents are good, or patents are bad. Quibbling over meaningless distinctions between identical classes of things is completely missing the point. All it does is make it an argument purely from politics i.e. who does and does not get special protections for their particularly flavor of Kool-Aid.
Seriously, if people are so concerned about investing in the stock market, there is nothing to prevent them from investing all the money in their private accounts in US Treasury debt like it is now. They could simulate their own private Social Security Administration, only better.
No additional risk, and with some obvious added benefits. I'd welcome any extra freedom the government threw my way, even if I did not take advantage of it. Not that I personally would invest in US Treasury debt.
It might also relate to the different parameters that a different set of people are interested in e.g. size and rotation rate versus distance. The current margin of error on size is huge and the rotation rate (needed for precise orbits) is anyone's guess.
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Defense: ~430B
Education: ~600B
The numbers are imprecise depending on how you classify some funding at different levels, but that is the ballpark figure. Education spending does outstrip defense spending, but it is almost entirely done at the State level (or lower).
This is a very common way of creating bullshit statistics about US spending, by conflating Federal spending with US spending, when in the US many of these items are funded primarily at the State (e.g. Education), Local (e.g. Police), or Private (e.g. Foreign Aid) levels. Hence why it is a "common misconception" as to how much the US spends on education and defense respectively. Federal != US.
Contrary to popular belief, the Americans spend a lot more on public education (~$600B) than on defense. Defense spending as a percentage of GDP is at historical lows and declining even with the military misadventures (3.x% of GDP currently versus an average of 7% for the 20th century).
And spending less as a percentage of GDP than at any time during the previous administration. The US is currently spending half of its 20th century average on defense. Many other countries have let their militaries rot due to Pax Americana and have severely slashed funding -- the US has been cutting expenditure, but everyone else is cutting it faster (except for a few like China). And when you consider how much of the world GDP is the US, it should not be surprising that the historically paltry percentage makes up a big chunk of that. The historical rule of thumb for peacetime military expenditures required to maintain basic security was 5% of GDP. The US currently spends far less than 5% even with the cost of the current misadventures.
combined and doubled while our education and healthcare go down the toilet
The US spends a lot more on education (~$600B) than on defense. That it has been getting worse has nothing to do with the amount of money spent on it, which already exceeds most other industrialized countries by about any relative measure. Ironically, the DoD is one of the few organizations in government that actually returns relatively good results for the investment even as it continues to shrink (i.e. the military competently does what it is supposed to do).
In practice, they have been reprocessing the fissile material. Some of it goes into replacement warheads, the rest of it gets degraded into reactor fuel that can be sold. You are correct though that the plutonium doesn't go away. It is a pity we don't have more reactors to burn the stuff in.
Bottom line: much less plutonium lying around, smaller yields, cleaner designs, and reduced risk profile. They are not expanding the arsenal, just cleaning it up. Since the US is going to have nukes regardless, I do not have a problem with this.
The BBC is not unbiased either, just differently biased.
The real problem is the very assumption that there are unbiased news sources. If you think a news source is "unbiased", all it usually means is that the news source just happens to share your bias. Conflating shared bias with lack of bias is a very common failure of critical thinking. When people on every side of the political spectrum accuse news sources of being biased, they are all correct.
You are illustrating something else instead.
There have been chemical weapons found Iraq by the US, mostly Sarin and mustard gas, a fact that is not in dispute. Not the vast stockpiles as claimed by the US government, but chemical weapons loaded into weapon systems nonetheless.
On Fox News, these minor finds of WMDs got heavy exposure and so its audience would correctly believe that WMDs were found in Iraq. On NPR, they essentially ignore WMDs unless they were in the form of a vast stockpile, and so they would correctly believe that no vast stockpiles of WMDs were found. People who think the US never found WMDs in Iraq are ignorant. People who think the US found vast stockpiles of WMDs are also ignorant. The difference in coverage of the facts between NPR and Fox News, combined with the biases of both audiences, makes the previously mentioned survey all but meaningless. The questions asked presumed certain facts that make the questions ambiguous, making people fill in additional context that would change their response depending on their exposure to specific factual assertions.
The US is a federation of 50 sovereign states (each with the size and economy to match), and saying "Foo City, US" would be like saying "Foo City, EU" (though Europe has the advantage of many languages to broaden the name space). Geographical namespaces in the US are only unique at the State level, just like in Europe, and there are many, many naming collisions between cities, towns, and other geographical identifiers in the US across states. There are a few city names in the US that seem to be used in a significant fraction of all the States, so specifying which State things are in is useful. I do not think EU-ians would be happy if we used the naming convention for the EU that you are suggesting is a good idea for the US. Apparently you don't know or care about world geography.
No offense, but what the hell are you talking about? The low-end managed switch fabrics have as much bandwidth as you are discussing. High-end switch fabrics can exceed that by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
You are possibly the first person I've seen in the networking industry to suggest that the switch fabric is the bottleneck for networking. There are a few real bottlenecks (typically related to CPU and bus limits e.g. computers or routers), but switch fabric bandwidth is not generally considered to be one of them.
Not suprising at all. There is a thriving vibrant market in aftermarket avionics for US warplanes, primarily because the US is rarely willing to sell really capable avionics with their aircraft. The US sells really nice combat jets with somewhat substandard avionics, which are then replaced with third-party avionics immediately after the sale. It is a very, very common story. It is also why we will happily sell combat aircraft to unfriendly countries; they may get something that looks like a US warplane, but the avionics are likely obsolete and grossly inferior.
I think few people doubt the quality and capability of US avionics, it is just that those systems almost never leave the US military. In fact, there are several different tiers of avionics that the US will sell with its aircraft depending on the buyer, none of which have the full capabilities of a top-line US military avionics. In this day and age, avionics are the soul of a combat aircraft.
Very true, for first generation stealth technologies. By most accounts, the US is currently using a third generation stealth technology that bears little resemblance to early capabilities and shares little engineering -- arguably apples and oranges. It is easy to dismiss US stealth capability, but the US has an unparalleled amount of (highly classified) institutional knowledge on stealthy design that spans many decades which continues to evolve rapidly. In practice, US military design tends to prove competent and with very few weaknesses that did not occur to the designers.
A few different countries are producing UWB radars of a type similar to current versions common on existing US aircraft, which have a lot of really nice characteristics. I expect the F-35 will use a similar type of radar, at least on the export versions, and I would assume the US has a lot of capability for dealing with this type of radar given their experience with it. The F-22 is rumored to have a radar that is a generation ahead of these systems which has some spectacular properties, a nearly ideal implementation of the concept.
I do not disagree with this in general; the demise of many things have been prematurely anticipated. However, most of those things *did* eventually meet their demise, albeit not on the timelines of the prognosticators. The analog to this is armor. The US is field-testing several weapon systems now that will obsolete all types of mobile armor for the foreseeable future -- the operating parameters are such that no normal molecular material of any type can withstand the weapons as a matter of physics. Armor/anti-armor has been an arms race for a very long time, but it looks like it will be settled shortly. The US military research is dealing with the situation by switching strategies: rather than carrying armor that is worthless anyway, develop active defenses that can intercept incoming weapons so that you do not get touched. And so it goes on.
The reality for combat aircraft is that beyond-visual-range (BVR) weapon systems have become so advanced and so effective today that dogfighting really is largely dead when using these systems. Note that the US has very advanced BVR capability, most other countries are still seriously limited in this regard and so would be dogfighting quite a bit in their conflicts. The US saw the future as it developed the first effective BVR guided missile systems, but the platforms at the time could in no way deliver the future that they were seeing. Several decades later that future is actually here as originally envisioned, as the lethality and effectiveness have incrementally improved. Slow evolutionary steps.
Speed, range, situational awareness, and seeing the other guy before he sees you are crucial capabilities. The F-35 primarily exploits US capabilities in the last two categories for its advantage, which provides a huge amount of bang for the buck in modern warfare. Systems like the F-22 have a remarkable array of really excellent capabilities, but it costs a lot of money to produce a combat aircraft that is that good in so many dimensions that may be effectively preempted by other capabilities in practice.
The F-35 was designed from inception as an exportable combat aircraft. It is the replacement for the F16/F18, does not have all the features and capabilities of the F-22, and is intended to be "strippable". On the other hand, it is a lot cheaper than the F-22. It can properly be placed somewhere in between Cold War era combat jets (F14/F15/F16/F18) and the current state-of-the-art (F22).
As for the Russians, they can produce good airframes and decent powerplants, but they lack sophistication in the high-end electronics/software/sensors that pretty much make or break a combat aircraft today. The Russians are not producing anything better than western Europe these days, and are slipping further behind because they cannot afford to spend the kind of money required to keep up. A Sukhoi Flanker would be dead right around the time it even knew it was being engaged. The only comparable jet to the F-35 is the Eurofighter platform, though the capability mix is different.
While I understand why the F-35 was developed, it is kind of an ugly and unremarkable jet. It is still very capable, particularly with the smashing avionics/software the US can put in the thing, but was never designed to be the "ultimate" anything. Of course, the F16 has a similar history but turned out to be an extremely successful combat aircraft.
Probably because the US has an aggressive R&D program that routinely produces superior combat aircraft systems. In the case of Australia specifically, they also get access (being old steady allies) to really fancy avionics and electronics packages which have no peer in the world of weaponry. The airframes and powerplants are extremely good too.
The airframe and powerplant is only modestly important in modern combat aircraft, though the US is very good at this type of design. The real selling point to countries like Australia is that they get more advanced versions of the software, electronics, and sensors -- the parts responsible for lethality and survivability to a very large extent -- which are one of the real strengths of US military R&D. The US will sell stripped down fighter jets to just about anyone, but they are very selective about the avionics as that is where the real capability lies in modern combat aviation. JSF is being sold with some very slick capabilities built-in; not quite F-22 level, but pretty close in many respects. Nobody else is selling anything comparable, and the closest competitor is the Eurofighter.
Australia buys US aircraft because the US is willing to sell it very advanced avionics and electronics for those aircraft. The US has no competitor at the very high-end of the quality/effectiveness market, which for military purposes is pretty important, particularly if you are a non-populous country like Australia that cannot rely on quantity to make up the difference.
One has to follow the development more closely than reading headlines to stay on top of what systems are working and what aren't and why. It used to be my business a long time ago.
The military heavily reuses core systems. They are independently tested and verified as well as in complete system configurations. The new ABM systems use the same broad spectrum infrared imaging based terminal guidance and discrimination package that is used in a number of other deployed systems, including just about all current air defense missile systems that do not use radar for terminal guidance. The exact kill rate of this terminal guidance package is classified, but it is known to be well in excess of 90% against even the most difficult targets in its many other applications and is limited primarily by the rocket motor it is attached to. It is the terminal guidance package of choice for guided kinetic intercept weapons generally because it is so reliable and effective.
Every other weapon system that is using the new rocket platform is having similar issues in testing, so it is not just the ABM but tactical battlefield stuff as well. (There are other practical problems as well with the rocket motors that have shown up in testing; they tear the crap out of things in their immediate vicinity when launched, far more so than current rocket platforms.)
In short, the guidance package works everywhere it is tried including ABM on old rockets, and the rocket motor has engineering problems everywhere it is tried. ABM is not a particularly special weapon design case in terms of intercept, and there are many other weapon systems that are expected to face far more complicated intercept environments.
And they have made huge strides in the reliability of those rockets since I remember them first testing them in the early '90s. It looks like they are finally starting to iron out enough of the bugs in the rockets to have usably deployable systems in other applications, so I expect the ABM system to be coming along shortly.
Incidentally, it is hard to make a meaningful criticism of the tests if one is unfamiliar with the designed capabilities of the system or the engineering components that are being isolated in the tests -- the media has been slow to grok that fact. The reason the targets have been "simple" and unrealistic with respect to the guidance package is because they know that the guidance package works as it has been thoroughly tested and verified in many other contexts. The problem has been getting the new rocket platform to respond correctly in flight to the guidance control system. In such a case, any old target will do.
The only reasonable economic justification is that we have to get this rocket platform working in any case even if we never deploy an ABM system (which I would agree would largely be a waste). It is one of multiple systems they are using to debug the rocket technology. The guidance package is already paid for and proven, and many of the next generation weapon systems are being designed for the new rocket motors and so that money to debug them will be spent regardless.
Kinetic kill is the simplest and most reliable mechanism, and as it turns out it is not too hard either. Chasing down a slippery target is something that the we have almost half a century of research on, and many other precision weapon systems that work very well are required to track and impact evasive and agile targets. The primary difficulty is having the rocket do precisely what the computer tells it to. Building a rocket that is both extremely fast and which responds precisely to guidance commands is a non-trivial problem because the materials tend to start to lose their precision at the outer edges of their performance envelope or simply fail in unpredictable ways.
When the new ABM system was specified, it was also specified to use a new research rocket technology that has matured much more slowly than expected. In many ways it is a marvel of exotic materials science that it can do what it does, and they have had a hard time making it reliable. There are good technical reasons to use the new rocket system for ABM, but it has hindered the ABM program; the guidance package was basically finished more than a decade ago.
Not that hard actually; the US has had the capability to do that reliably for at least 15 years. Computers are much faster than the physics we can drive with the materials we can fabricate. The design problem is very much a material one.
The REASON they do it is a simple point of engineering that most people overlook: the typical terminal closing speed exceeds even the detonation velocity of the best military explosives. In other words, compared to the missiles, an explosion is moving in slow motion -- the target will outrun the blast wave with ease. The reality is even worse in that mechanically coupling the detonation to the target (which is hardened) is very substantially slower than the detonation itself. One could very precisely time and place an explosion in the path of the incoming missile, but that is a much more complicated scheme than just hitting the bloody thing directly. If you think about it, terminal guidance has been able to get very close to targets for a long time, and reliably hitting the target is nothing more than reducing the error a bit -- an evolutionary engineering problem.
Therefore, the only good choice is to directly couple the missiles by physical contact, and at those velocities, the energy of an explosive falls below the noise floor anyway. Kinetic kills are not just a design choice, at those velocities it is almost a design necessity. Beam weapons are the other option, but those have other issues.
Regardless of whether it is a good idea to have an effective ABM system in place, the technology will work. The rocket problems (which are a decade past due) are eventually being worked out, as several unrelated weapon systems are dependent on the same rocket technology working correctly. The question is not whether it can work (it can) but whether or not deploying and maintaining a comprehensive ABM system is worth the expenditure, which it may not be. The money spent on the guidance package is widely reused, and the rocket technology is slated to replace many existing rocket powered systems, once they work out the kinks. In that respect, the military research has not been a waste as the primary components are or will be used in many other places. The new ABM systems they are testing have very little relation, either in design or technology, to the old existing systems; most of current "ABM missiles" like the Patriot are anti-aircraft systems where they hacked the software to hopefully hit missiles outside the original design envelope.
This really should be a policy and fiscal argument, not a technology argument, as the technology will eventually work as originally designed. The argument that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design is a loser and poorly informed, but a much stronger argument can be made about the mission of such a weapon system.
While no voting system is fool-proof, the Nevada method is something like this: Electronic voting with a voter-verified paper receipt to ensure that what is on the paper is what was selected electronically by voter. The paper receipts are collected and a few percent of the total paper records are randomly and independently audited to verify the electronic records. The important thing that happens here is that the verification and authentication of the vote is distributed among multiple authorities, providing strong statistical evidence that an election was indeed counted as it was voted while providing no single point of failure or manipulation that is likely to go unnoticed. It also does not have the overhead of manually counting every single paper ballot.
This is actually a more robust voting protocol in many ways than the paper ballots it replaces. I do not know if Wisconsin is doing things precisely this way, but I imagine that they would use some variation of the Nevada protocol.
I am fortunate enough (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) to have full exposure to the accounting for my wages here in California. The last time I checked a few months ago, of the money that gets paid out to cover my paycheck, 52% goes directly to the government at various levels, and 48% goes to me.
Most people have no idea just how much in taxes they actually pay.
The reason for using very high-power lasers is the same they prefer to use hyper-kinetic missiles: at some energy density, no plausible molecular material has sufficient bond strength to withstand it, effectively obsoleting armor.
Yes you can. You can copyright the recipe -- it does not describe implementation except in abstract terms. Just like real software patents. And you can own the copyright on an implementation of software when someone else owns a patent on the underlying algorithm. My description of a chemical process implementation is most certainly copyrighted, and the underlying process can be patented as well. So try again.
And "one-click" patents are not really software patents, and asserting as much is clouding the issue. If you want real software patents, look at something more like RSA et al.
Newsflash: ALL patents are algorithms. Stop acting like this unique to computers. Chemical process patents, for example, are structurally and functionally indistinguishable and very obviously map into the same space as "software algorithms" and yet those are not considered controversial.
And computer code is a completely logical process. It'd be very similar to patenting a mathematical formula.
This is not an argument against anything. Everything machine is reducible to software, and every software is reducible to machine. It is a distinction without a difference. To reuse my example above, chemical process patents are not generally considered controversial here, yet every argument against software patents can be used against them because they are the exact same kind of thing.
Everyone needs to stop pretending that software patents are a special aberration. The reason this is controversial at all is that many people are trying to assert an arbitrary distinction where none exists. We either need to decide that patents are good, or patents are bad. Quibbling over meaningless distinctions between identical classes of things is completely missing the point. All it does is make it an argument purely from politics i.e. who does and does not get special protections for their particularly flavor of Kool-Aid.
No additional risk, and with some obvious added benefits. I'd welcome any extra freedom the government threw my way, even if I did not take advantage of it. Not that I personally would invest in US Treasury debt.
It might also relate to the different parameters that a different set of people are interested in e.g. size and rotation rate versus distance. The current margin of error on size is huge and the rotation rate (needed for precise orbits) is anyone's guess.