The other issue is, making the whole "we have to follow the Founding Fathers" argument is actually a betrayal of what those men stood for. Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, Hamilton and the others were revolutionaries. They didn't blindly follow what had gone before. They didn't say, "what would the writers of the Magna Carta have wanted"? They created something entirely new, based on the principles they believed in, not on the policies of the past. They looked at governments and philosophies that had been around for centuries before them, and they saw elements they liked, but nothing that captured the kind of country they wanted to create, so they wrote a Declaration of Independence, and a Constitution that would help them create it. And they didn't get it right the first time, so they had to go back and add a Declaration of Independence.
That's what America is about- reinvention and revolution. The only way to keep true to the spirit of the Founding Fathers is to be willing to depart from what's come before. And I don't think that we necessarily betray the spirit of the Founding Fathers by having a strong presidency and a highly capable military. Where we betray them is when we abuse that power. With Bush's invasion of Iraq, we saw America acting like an imperial power, which is what we fought to be free of. And when Obama has a 'kill list' and people are consigned to death by drone strike without any sort of legal process or check on this power, he starts to sound less like the president of a republic and more like the king of an empire, which again is what we fought to be free of. That's where we're going astray- the issue isn't having a standing army, the issue is the principles that guide us in using that army.
Still it must be pointed out that even though we always had at least some standing Federal force, it is historical that there was great distrust of standing armies at the time of the founding of the US
Arguing about the intent of the Founding Fathers is a bullshit argument. Maybe it was the intent of the Founding Fathers not to have a large standing army. So what? It was also the intent of the Founding Fathers that women not be allowed to vote, that black people could be bought and sold as property and counted as 3/5 of a human being, and Indians should be evicted from their lands.
There are certain core principles that are timeless- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, government with the consent of the governed, freedom of speech and religion. But precisely how we promote those things has to change with the times and the technology. We can't all run around in tricorns with muskets, trading negroes and telling our wives to stay home, just because that's how the Founding Fathers would have done it.
I know it's all trendy to hate on Apple these days, but this is a pretty impressive piece of engineering. They've managed to increase the screen resolution, decrease the weight of the computer, and give the thing a 7-hour battery life, and keep it reasonably affordable. And some of the design decisions- getting rid of the DVD drive, moving to flash storage instead of a hard disk drive- say a lot about where Apple sees laptops heading. Although the MacBook Air already made that leap, this is the first time we've seen these things in a laptop that isn't designed as an ultraportable.
It's true that this is more an evolutionary piece of technology than a revolutionary one. It's using existing technology (retina display) and design approaches (dropping the DVD and HDD) we've seen in other devices (iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air). But that doesn't mean it's not an impressive piece of engineering. You could make the same argument about the Boeing 777. At first glance, it's not all that different from the first jetliner that flew in 1949, but the details are different- subtle refinements to the wing sections, carbon fiber materials, different manufacturing processes, major upgrades to the electronics. The end result is a plane that carries a lot of people a very long distance, very efficiently. Ditto for a technology like the bicycle. A modern road bike looks fundamentally a lot like a 10-speed from 50 years ago, but major advances in manufacturing and materials (carbon fiber, plastic, and aluminum) mean that you're getting better performance with a far lighter bike.
This kind of engineering- refining an existing technology to get better characteristics like weight while improving performance, all while keeping costs down- is really, really tough. If it was easy, everybody would be making something like the new Macbook or the 777. It doesn't have the same glamor as inventing something wholly new, like the lightbulb or the helicopter, for example, but it's really a vital part of engineering, and ultimately it's what enables radical new technologies. Years of pushing down the size of components while increasing their power made smartphones and tablet computers possible. Years of pushing down the size of engines while increasing their power made aircraft possible. And so on.
Bottom line- maybe you don't like Apple machines, or the software, or the company. But the guys who put this thing together have to be some of the best engineers in the business.
Gladwell has written some interesting stuff, but on this one, he's dead wrong. Gladwell might have a point if he'd argued that we *should* admire Gates more, because of his charitable contributions. But if he's arguing about who we *will* remember, he's missing the point entirely. I mean, think about it. Everybody knows who Genghis Khan is, and this is not because he and his horde started the largest charitable organization in the ancient world.
Steve Jobs helped lead, by my count, five of the major revolutions in personal computing over the past generation- personal computers (Apple II), the GUI (Macintosh), the MP3 player (iPod), the smartphone (iPhone) and the tablet computer (iPad). Apple wasn't necessarily first in all of these- for example Xerox PARC invented the GUI- but they played a leading role in refining and mainstreaming these technologies; no other company in recent memory has been as consistently innovative. Jobs also brought a unique philosophy to the industry- he believed in making machines that were intuitively easy to use, and he brought an aesthetic sensibility to technology- the idea that technology should be something not just functional, but beautiful and enjoyable to use- treating his machines almost as a form of art.
Was Steve Jobs an asshole? Unquestionably. Watching him give his talks, he came across as an arrogant, self-centered jerk. But I think history will remember him despite that, maybe even because of it. He was a complicated person. He was an adopted child brought up in a middle-class family, he dropped out of college, he dropped acid, he travelled to India, he abandoned his own daughter, he started an amazingly successful company and was kicked out, he came back and delivered the company from ruin. Not only did he save Apple, he turns it from the technology underdog into the largest company in the world, and then he's diagnosed with cancer... it's an amazing story, like something out a movie.
So what about the charity angle? Bill Gates became the richest man in the world by developing and marketing a mediocre operating system. And at some point, he said, "you know what... there's more to life than this. If I died tomorrow, would I be satisfied with what I've done with my life? No. I think I should give something back." And that's great. What's telling about Steve Jobs, however, is that when he was faced with the same question in a much more concrete way- when he developed cancer, and realized he didn't have forever- he kept doing exactly what he was doing, right up until he died. He kept developing innovative technology. He never turned his back on Apple the way Gates turned his back on Microsoft, because Jobs always believed in it. I think he felt he could do more good in the world pushing technology forwards than distributing vaccines, and I think he was probably right on that front. That's why the Reality Distortion Field was so powerful- he truly believed, in a way that very few people believe in anything anymore, and there's something very appealing about the force of that. There are parts of Steve Jobs we shouldn't try to imitate, but I think his life shows what you are willing to live a life that doesn't follow society's conventions, but does follow your own convictions.
if the benefits of increased efficiency do not accrue to the entire economy, that's a problem with the economic system, not the increased efficiency. Ideally, increased efficiency should abolish the need for some work allowing us to spend more of our time doing things we want. The fact that it actually ends up enriching the rich and leaving the working classes (and now the thinking classes) destitute is a fundamental problem with capitalism.
The fundamental problem is that increased efficiency is likely to result in a situation where you have a surplus of labor and a shortage of talent. The people who end up replaced by machines will be the people who are easily replaced by machines because their job isn't that hard- it doesn't require much training, experience, or ability. You might be able to throw together a voice recognition system, a crude AI, and a robotic arm and replace the teenager working at the McDonald's drive-thru window. But you can't replace someone like a Steve Jobs, a Mark Zuckerberg, or a Sergei Brin with a computer, you can't even easily replace them with another person, because they are exceptionally good at doing an exceptionally hard job. That's why CEOs are paid millions of dollars to run major corporations- because when the difference between the right person and the almost-right person is billions of dollars in profit, paying a CEO tens of millions of dollars is a sound investment in the success of the company. Their talent is worth that much. The difference between Steve Jobs and pretty much anyone else on the planet was Apple failing, versus Apple turning into the largest company in the world, and that's worth a lot of money.
So when those drive-through employees end up unemployed, it doesn't mean that the CEO gets to do less work. It's not like drive-through guy could be hired to come in and run Facebook for a few hours a day so that Zuckerberg can go and have some downtime. The result is that instead of everybody working less, we may end up with more people poor and unemployed, and a few people overworked and rich. We may already be seeing this happening, as pay for a handful of elite performers- the CEOs, hedge fund managers, rock stars, professional athletes, blockbuster novelists, movie producers, etc. has gone up, while overall wages have stagnated or gone down.
Something tells me that this wasn't designed by a teenager.
There are a limited number of possible suspects. First off, not many parties have the means to create this. The consensus is that Flame is one of the largest and most advanced pieces of malware ever created- it's 20 megabytes of code- which strongly implies that it was developed by a nation with an advanced cyber-warfare capability. That list is pretty short, and would include countries like the United States, China, Russia, Israel, and North Korea.
Second, let's look at the targets. The Flame malware hit Iran, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, in that order. Roughly half of the infections are in Iran. So whoever created Flame is worried about the Middle East, but really, really worried about Iran. More worried about Iran than any other country. The Iran fixation suggests two possible suspects- Israel and the United States.
The focus on Iran is consistent with Flame coming from the U.S., but Flame also targets several U.S. allies, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The other thing is, Flame doesn't target anything outside of the Middle East. If it was produced by the U.S., you'd expect Flame to be found in other countries- North Korea and Pakistan, for example- where the U.S. has security interests. But whoever created Flame doesn't really care what happens in North Korea or Pakistan. Whoever created Flame is primarily concerned with countries that are either enemies or potential enemies of Israel- Iran, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon. That strongly suggests Israel as the culprit.
The 80,000 kg estimate has long been thought to be wildly inflated, and that estimate comes from a study published in 1962. A more recent estimate, published in 1997, gave a mass of 31500 for the Berlin brachiosaur, and a study published in 2009 estimated the mass of this specimen at 23000 kg... just 300 kg more than this study. So they haven't actually shaved off much weight with this latest version. It is an interesting new technique, if you have a skeleton to work with. But it's not terribly practical. Only a handful of dinosaurs are complete enough to make skeletal mounts and have actually been mounted. And we already have ways to estimate their mass- either make a model and dunk it in water to figure out the displacement (a method that's been around since the time of Archimedes) or use the diameters of the limb bones to estimate mass (as load-bearing structures, limb bone dimensions are very tightly correlated to total mass). It's nice to see previous estimates verified, and to have some constraints on how much meat to add onto the skeleton, but I don't think this technique is as big an advance as the authors claim.
On the plus side, if the caffeine is the causative agent, supplementation would be pretty easy.
Possibly, but perhaps caffeine doesn't have anything to do with it. I think the phrase "correlation does not equal causation" is something of a cliche, but it's a cliche for a good reason. We know that there's an association, but because this isn't an experiment with a control and a treatment, we don't know why that association exists.
For an example of how this logic can break down, consider a recent study of coffee (again) that found that nurses drinking lots of coffee suffered lower rates of depression. So coffee has antidepressant effects, right? Well, that's one possible explanation. Here's another possible explanation: symptoms of depression include anxiety and trouble sleeping. So if you're anxious and can't sleep at night, the last thing on earth you want is 4-5 cups of coffee a day making you wired, twitchy, and wakeful. So yes, one reading is "coffee drinking reduces depression" but an equally plausible reading of the data is "depression reduces coffee drinking." The only way to tease it apart is with an experiment: take a population, give half of them coffee, give half of them decaf (to control for placebo effect), and see whether the incidence of depression varies between the two. So what's the answer? Nobody knows.
Likewise, we have to look at the possibility that decreased coffee consumption is caused by Alzheimer's. If coffee is part of your morning ritual and social functioning, then as you become less functional, you might forget to make that morning cup and have trouble interacting with people at the coffee shop. So perhaps Alzheimer's causes people to drink less coffee. The only way to figure it out is to take a population and give half of them coffee, and half of them decaf, and see how they do.
Those 450 pounds won't be flowers and kittens, right?
Close. The payload will be the new eco-friendly AGM-115 Flowerkitten laser-guided missile. It's just like the Hellfire, only made out of recycled materials.
Facebook is probably one of the most well known brands in the world. A facebook branded phone would get lots of sales regardless of how well the phone performed.
It's unquestionably a well-known brand, but a key part of branding is creating an identity that customers feel positively towards. And in terms of being trusted and liked by customers, Facebook is probably one of the worst brands in the world. The reason that Facebook can be successful despite this is because the company has a monopoly in this market. You can't easily leave and join a different social networking site, unless you could somehow figure out how to convince all your friends to join that site at the same time. So Facebook can act with complete disregard to consumer demands for privacy, because the customer really doesn't have the choice. In short, a lot of people use Facebook only because they like their friends more than they dislike Facebook. Or think of it as Zuckerberg throwing a party on a Saturday night- maybe he's an obnoxious jerk you wouldn't want to hang out with, but if he got all your friends to agree to go, then that's still gonna be the party you go to.
Facebook will continue to thrive, simply because people will continue to join and stay with the social network that has all their friends. But once customers actually have a choice between the Facebook brand and another brand- say, in choosing a smartphone- I think Facebook's brand will hurt them.
"The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News -- the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.
LUA is favored by game programmers because it’s easy to use and easy to embed. Flame is described as enormously powerful and large, containing some 250,000 lines of code, making it far larger than other such cyberweapons. Yet it was built with gamer code, said Cedric Leighton, a retired Air Force Intelligence officer who now consults in the national security arena.
“The people who developed the malware found an ingenious way to use a code not part and parcel of a hacker’s normal arsenal, and that made it harder to detect,” he told Fox News.
It goes on like that. I hate to say anything nice about Fox News, but this is actually a well-written and informative piece of journalism. The problem is the title of the article, which is idiotic and sensationalistic. Given that the article itself is a decent piece of work and the title seems like it was written by someone who likes to stick crayons up their nose, my guess is that the writer did a careful job on the piece and their editor wanted a title that would get people's attention, and changed the title. Of course, given that we're all discussing the article now, a cynic could argue that this was the right call...
How does admitting to Stuxnet change anything? Check out the history of Stuxnet on Wikipedia- Stuxnet escaped into the wild and started running free on the internet in June 2010. People noticed it, took it apart, and put the story together from there. It became apparent that it was an extremely sophisticated piece of malware put together by a nation-state to attack industrial equipment, and meanwhile Iran's centrifuges were blowing up... so by September 2010 it was already being reported in the media that (a) Stuxnet was designed to attack the Natanz uranium enrichment facility, and (b) that the only people with both the means and motives to do so were the Israelis and the Americans. Analyses of the software suggested two different countries worked together, so by 2011 the consensus was that Stuxnet was a joint American-Israeli operation, and a year ago, Iran actually came out and accused the U.S. and Israel of being behind Stuxnet. And the U.S. has never denied responsibility, either.
Anyway, from reading the article it's clear the guy has talked to Obama administration people, and had the administration's help in producing this book. So he clearly does have the real scoop- or at least, he's got the version that the Obama administration would like him to have.
This entire fucking reveal is nothing but a campaign stunt by Obama. What sort of ratfucking moron admits to intelligence ops just for a campaign boost. Oh wait, it's the chicago politician in the white house.
I think you're being a bit of a troll here, but I actually agree with your take on things. The level of detail in the article is really striking, and suggests that the author talked to people who were closely involved in the decision-making process. To release this kind of information about a classified intelligence project without authorization would be a serious breach of security, if not treason. Given that the Obama Administration hasn't made a huge deal about this article, or gone on a witch-hunt looking for the leaker, it seems safe to say that this story was released with the blessing of the White House, and that this was done for political purposes.
As for the political angle, I can think of two possibilities. One is that taking credit for this (the article goes out of the way to minimize the role of the Israelis) is a way of showing off U.S. power and threatening Iran and other nations who pursue W.M.D. They're saying, "it doesn't matter how clever you are in burying your program, we can still shut it down". That threat could come in handy in future negotiations with Iran and North Korea.
The other angle, as you note, is the election year angle. The article goes out of the way to emphasize Obama's role here. The key line here is "'From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,' a senior administration official said". Biden is depicted as "fuming", while the president is cool and collected and making tough calls. It paints a very flattering picture, which is hardly surprising given that it's a bunch of Obama Administration guys speaking to a New York Times reporter. However, as the article describes it, the program was actually begun during the Bush Administration and was well underway by the time Obama took office. All Obama did was continue with Bush's program, but it sounds like he's trying to take a lot of the credit, which doesn't quite seem fair. I think Bush was a disaster as a President. But still, you can't have it both ways, and claim that you inherited a bad economy from Bush, but then turn around and take credit for a program that he started and put into action.
You can tell a lot about who made this thing by looking at who it's targeting: Iran, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Eygpt, Saudi Arabia... it's practically a Who's Who of Israel's enemies and potential enemies. If you look at the map in the article, you can see all the infected countries in red, and smack dab in the middle of all of them is Israel. Israel also has some of the most advanced cyberwarfare capabilities in the world, so when you see an extremely sophisticated piece of malware, they should be at the top of your list of suspects. In short, the only way you could possibly make this malware look more Israeli is to circumcise it and put a yarmulke on top.
The graphs in the article are just jaw-dropping. This one shows how the cost per genome should drop if sequencing followed Moore's Law, versus how the cost per genome actually scales ahref=http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_per_genome.jpgrel=url2html-18366http://www.genome.gov/images/content/cost_per_genome.jpg>.
With the introduction of next-generation sequencing, the costs have actually dropped much faster than you'd predict if it followed Moore's Law. If it's possible to keep that pace up, then we can expect a $1000 genome in 2014-2015, and a $100 dollar genome two or three years later. My guess is that within 10-20 years we could see the widespread use of genetic screening of embryos for genetic diseases. Right now, this all seems very sci-fi. Like something out of Brave New World, Gattaca, or the Eugenics Wars in Star Trek. But unlike a lot of sci-fi, this stuff isn't fictional because it's technologically difficult/impossible, like a faster than light drive, or a flying car. It's sci-fi because it's too expensive to do right now, but that's going to change rapidly within our lifetimes. The development of tests for Down's Syndrome has already led to a dramatic reduction in the number of children born with the condition, it only follows that the development of new tests will have similar effects with other disorders.
This raises a lot of very thorny questions. Say a fetus tests positive for a mutation that is strongly associated with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. What's the moral choice? Is it moral to abort the fetus and spare them and their loved ones the suffering of Alzheimer's? Or would having that life be better than never being born at all? Or would you be willing to take the bet that in the next 30 to 60 years, they develop the therapies to cure or prevent the disease?
It gets more complicated. What if the fetus tested positive for a gene associated with schizophrenia? It might seem cruel to bring someone into the world knowing that's what they had to face. But this is where the story of genetic determinism put forward by modern medicine breaks down. Schizophrenia has a genetic component, true. What's remarkable is that among identical twins (100% shared DNA) the disease is found in both twins less than 50% of the time. Clearly, there's a very strong environmental component (another striking thing that backs this up is that schizophrenia rates are significantly higher in developed countries than in developing countries). Getting these genes makes you vulnerable, true, but there's a better-than-even chance you won't develop the disease at all. Is a less than 50% chance of developing schizophrenia enough to abort a fetus over?
The issues raised by gene sequencing have been pretty hypothetical up until now. It was too expensive and difficult to look at what genetic cards you'd been dealt. But that's going to change.
NPR's Planet Money podcast had a show about the Facebook IPO (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/22/153300390/facebook-now-what).
It's worth a listen, but to sum up, the assessment was that Facebook has a 100:1 price/earnings ratio (valued at 100 billion on 1 billion in profit) which is astronomical (by comparison, Apple's stock price has soared in the past year and is still worth just 13 times earnings). To justify that kind of value, over the next few years Facebook's profits would have to double, and then double again, and then maybe double again. But one of their commentators said that to sustain that kind of growth, Facebook would have to pull in 10% of all advertising dollars on earth.
Meanwhile, their growth seems to have slowed, and businesses just aren't seeing Facebook make a difference. The podcast followed a small pizza shop trying to stir up business with Facebook and found little evidence that it made a difference in their business, and GM recently yanked their Facebook ads because they didn't feel they were effective.
The Wall Street Journal's take on the IPO was to the point: "Facebook shows there's a sucker born every minute" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304065704577422643666002940.html).
Facebook is actually a profitable business, but selling it at the price they did is just Wall Street and Zuckerberg trying to fuck over investors.
don't we have much bigger things to worry about? This isn't a common case....well, it might be if things continue the way they are going.
Yeah, the "Ex-PATRIOT Act" sounds like just a bunch of bullshit political theater. In the case of Saverin, the U.S. will lose an estimated $67 million dollars in tax revenue. Now consider that this $67 million wouldn't even pay for a single F-35 fighter ($195 million), or 6 hours of fighting in Afghanistan ($300 million per day). It's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall defense budget ($700 billion) or entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid ($1.5 trillion).
Schumer is just posturing, this bill won't do a damn thing to address the real issues- a poor economy, excessive government spending, and low tax rates- it just seems to be an attempt to distract from the deep problems we face by stirring up popular resentment against one filthy-rich individual.
Here's the situation. Most economists agree that it's not going to be possible to get the deficit under control by either just increasing taxes, or just cutting spending- we're going to have to do both. The question is whether it's going to be possible to raise enough money by just going after the 1%. The 1% do make a ton of money, but there's just not that many of them- only 1% of the population, after all- so even if you taxed them all at 100% it wouldn't balance the budget. That means tax increases on the middle class, who are responsible for the bulk of U.S. federal tax dollars.
We're gonna spend a lot more than a trillion dollars on the F-35. We are insanely rich, and we have a ton of money to waste on stuff like this.
Little fact check here. Yes, we are going to spend a trillion dollars on the F-35 over the lifetime of the project. That is, if we're lucky and there aren't additional cost overruns. But no, we do not have tons of money to waste. Right now the U.S. national debt is almost 16 trillion dollars, which comes to about $50,000 for every man, woman, and child. Building this dude's fantasy, assuming it was even doable, would require an additional $3,000 dollars from every person in the country.
Using the F-35 isn't really a very good example. That's like saying, "all the other kids in the school are doing it!" Just because we're wasting insane amounts of money on military toys that aren't necessary and will probably be hopelessly obsolete within 15-20 years doesn't mean that we can and should waste money elsewhere.
I'd agree to that after we get the unproductive members of society off of the government teat. Get those welfare bitches in the ghettos and trailer parks to work or let their dead beat asses starve. Then we can talk about fair taxation.
If we want to talk about who's leeching off the federal government, let's start by looking at it on a state-by-state level. The states that are most heavily subsidized by the government- the states that receive more federal dollars than they pay in income taxes- are almost entirely Republican-leaning states. So we have Democratic-leaning states like California, New York, and Massachussetts subsidizing Republican-leaning states like Alabama, Alaska, and West Virginia.
In effect, the Republicans seem to have been able to engineer things so that there's a redistribution of wealth from high-earning Democratic states to low-earning Republican states. Sounds a lot like socialism to me. It seems like the Republicans are, when you get down to it, perfectly fine with receiving government handouts, they just don't like to see other people get any help.
Basically they are just a way to baboozle 55 billion dollars out of the US treasury with whispers in the dark of the yellow terror. With stealth cruise missiles that can be fired from land, ships, submarines and aircraft, why the hell would you stuff around with a 550 million dollar bomber whose only real purpose is to cost 550 million dollars.
The reality is that there are going to be wars, so we might as well be prepared to win them, but we have to find a way to cut the fat from the defense budget. The Long Range Strike bomber program is one attempt to do that. $550 million represents a dramatic decrease in costs compared to the B-2 Spirit, which cost $3 billion per plane, or the Next Generation Bomber project, begun under Donald Rumsfeld, which was projected to cost about the same. This is actually part of a series of efforts to make the U.S. military leaner and smarter. In addition to cancelling the Next Generation Bomber, former Defense Secretary Gates announced cuts to the number of F-22s and to the number of active duty personnel in the Army and Marines, and a decision to extend the use of the U-2 instead of buying new Global Hawks. At the same time, there's a plan to increase the number of soldiers in the Special Forces.
The other issue is that cruise missiles carry a limited amount of ordnance, so they're not going to be effective against heavily fortified targets. The Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow is buried under 200 feet of mountain and heavily reinforced with concrete. To destroy a hardened target like that, you need heavy-duty weapons like the 30,000 lb. Massive Ordnance Penetrator. And to drop an MOP, you need a bomber. Right now the B-2 is the only aircraft the U.S. has that is capable of both penetrating air defenses and carrying that kind of payload, and the B-2 fleet consists of a total of 20 aircraft.
A model is only as good as its assumptions, and their assumptions about population density seem difficult to believe. Tens of sauropods per square kilometer? A quick Google search shows that population densities for African elephants are on the order of.1-4 individuals per square kilometer. Even assuming sauropods had a somewhat lower metabolism than an elephant, it's difficult to believe that you could take sauropods, which are several times the size of an elephant, and pack them in at ten times the population density; they'd just strip all the leaves off the trees and then starve to death. That's ignoring the fact that the plants may have been less productive, which would limit the amount of food available. The dominant trees in the Mesozoic are conifers, which grow more slowly than modern flowering plants, so there's just not as much forage being produced by the environment.
shows he is perpetually fighting the LAST war, and never thinking about what might happen next. These aircraft were never intended for Afghanistan or Iraq.
That's exactly McCain's point. The aircraft aren't intended for Afghanistan, or Iraq, or any of the wars we've actually been in for the past 10 years, they're intended for a war against Soviet Union. Back in 1981 when the Air Force began looking for an F-15 successor, this probably made sense, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the question becomes, why do we need these planes?
The only countries currently pursuing fifth-generation fighters are China and Russia. At this point, the idea of war with China seems like a remote possibility. The U.S. can't live without iPads and China can't live without U.S. money. Russia's military fell apart after the collapse of the USSR and it would take a long time to rebuild it to the point where it would be a serious threat. At any rate, war with either country is extremely unlikely given this little thing called "mutually assured destruction". Because of that, the U.S. hasn't gone to war with a major power in 60 years, when we fought against China in Korea.
So it's a fair guess that the wars of the next 50 years will look like the wars of the past 50 years- Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Wars against enemies with inferior air forces, and guerrilla wars. In that sense, the Obama administration's move to cut the F-22 program while expanding the role of drones and increasing the size of Special Forces looks like the right move.
In fact, the F-35A was designed for the Air Force as a replacement for the F-16, which is a multirole fighter designed to attack both air and ground targets. Since the Air Force will have about half as many F-22s as originally planned, the assumption is presumably that F-35As can fill the air superiority role reasonably well, if not as well as the F-22.
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That's what America is about- reinvention and revolution. The only way to keep true to the spirit of the Founding Fathers is to be willing to depart from what's come before. And I don't think that we necessarily betray the spirit of the Founding Fathers by having a strong presidency and a highly capable military. Where we betray them is when we abuse that power. With Bush's invasion of Iraq, we saw America acting like an imperial power, which is what we fought to be free of. And when Obama has a 'kill list' and people are consigned to death by drone strike without any sort of legal process or check on this power, he starts to sound less like the president of a republic and more like the king of an empire, which again is what we fought to be free of. That's where we're going astray- the issue isn't having a standing army, the issue is the principles that guide us in using that army.
Still it must be pointed out that even though we always had at least some standing Federal force, it is historical that there was great distrust of standing armies at the time of the founding of the US
Arguing about the intent of the Founding Fathers is a bullshit argument. Maybe it was the intent of the Founding Fathers not to have a large standing army. So what? It was also the intent of the Founding Fathers that women not be allowed to vote, that black people could be bought and sold as property and counted as 3/5 of a human being, and Indians should be evicted from their lands.
There are certain core principles that are timeless- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, government with the consent of the governed, freedom of speech and religion. But precisely how we promote those things has to change with the times and the technology. We can't all run around in tricorns with muskets, trading negroes and telling our wives to stay home, just because that's how the Founding Fathers would have done it.
It's true that this is more an evolutionary piece of technology than a revolutionary one. It's using existing technology (retina display) and design approaches (dropping the DVD and HDD) we've seen in other devices (iPad, iPhone, MacBook Air). But that doesn't mean it's not an impressive piece of engineering. You could make the same argument about the Boeing 777. At first glance, it's not all that different from the first jetliner that flew in 1949, but the details are different- subtle refinements to the wing sections, carbon fiber materials, different manufacturing processes, major upgrades to the electronics. The end result is a plane that carries a lot of people a very long distance, very efficiently. Ditto for a technology like the bicycle. A modern road bike looks fundamentally a lot like a 10-speed from 50 years ago, but major advances in manufacturing and materials (carbon fiber, plastic, and aluminum) mean that you're getting better performance with a far lighter bike.
This kind of engineering- refining an existing technology to get better characteristics like weight while improving performance, all while keeping costs down- is really, really tough. If it was easy, everybody would be making something like the new Macbook or the 777. It doesn't have the same glamor as inventing something wholly new, like the lightbulb or the helicopter, for example, but it's really a vital part of engineering, and ultimately it's what enables radical new technologies. Years of pushing down the size of components while increasing their power made smartphones and tablet computers possible. Years of pushing down the size of engines while increasing their power made aircraft possible. And so on.
Bottom line- maybe you don't like Apple machines, or the software, or the company. But the guys who put this thing together have to be some of the best engineers in the business.
Steve Jobs helped lead, by my count, five of the major revolutions in personal computing over the past generation- personal computers (Apple II), the GUI (Macintosh), the MP3 player (iPod), the smartphone (iPhone) and the tablet computer (iPad). Apple wasn't necessarily first in all of these- for example Xerox PARC invented the GUI- but they played a leading role in refining and mainstreaming these technologies; no other company in recent memory has been as consistently innovative. Jobs also brought a unique philosophy to the industry- he believed in making machines that were intuitively easy to use, and he brought an aesthetic sensibility to technology- the idea that technology should be something not just functional, but beautiful and enjoyable to use- treating his machines almost as a form of art.
Was Steve Jobs an asshole? Unquestionably. Watching him give his talks, he came across as an arrogant, self-centered jerk. But I think history will remember him despite that, maybe even because of it. He was a complicated person. He was an adopted child brought up in a middle-class family, he dropped out of college, he dropped acid, he travelled to India, he abandoned his own daughter, he started an amazingly successful company and was kicked out, he came back and delivered the company from ruin. Not only did he save Apple, he turns it from the technology underdog into the largest company in the world, and then he's diagnosed with cancer... it's an amazing story, like something out a movie.
So what about the charity angle? Bill Gates became the richest man in the world by developing and marketing a mediocre operating system. And at some point, he said, "you know what... there's more to life than this. If I died tomorrow, would I be satisfied with what I've done with my life? No. I think I should give something back." And that's great. What's telling about Steve Jobs, however, is that when he was faced with the same question in a much more concrete way- when he developed cancer, and realized he didn't have forever- he kept doing exactly what he was doing, right up until he died. He kept developing innovative technology. He never turned his back on Apple the way Gates turned his back on Microsoft, because Jobs always believed in it. I think he felt he could do more good in the world pushing technology forwards than distributing vaccines, and I think he was probably right on that front. That's why the Reality Distortion Field was so powerful- he truly believed, in a way that very few people believe in anything anymore, and there's something very appealing about the force of that. There are parts of Steve Jobs we shouldn't try to imitate, but I think his life shows what you are willing to live a life that doesn't follow society's conventions, but does follow your own convictions.
if the benefits of increased efficiency do not accrue to the entire economy, that's a problem with the economic system, not the increased efficiency. Ideally, increased efficiency should abolish the need for some work allowing us to spend more of our time doing things we want. The fact that it actually ends up enriching the rich and leaving the working classes (and now the thinking classes) destitute is a fundamental problem with capitalism.
The fundamental problem is that increased efficiency is likely to result in a situation where you have a surplus of labor and a shortage of talent. The people who end up replaced by machines will be the people who are easily replaced by machines because their job isn't that hard- it doesn't require much training, experience, or ability. You might be able to throw together a voice recognition system, a crude AI, and a robotic arm and replace the teenager working at the McDonald's drive-thru window. But you can't replace someone like a Steve Jobs, a Mark Zuckerberg, or a Sergei Brin with a computer, you can't even easily replace them with another person, because they are exceptionally good at doing an exceptionally hard job. That's why CEOs are paid millions of dollars to run major corporations- because when the difference between the right person and the almost-right person is billions of dollars in profit, paying a CEO tens of millions of dollars is a sound investment in the success of the company. Their talent is worth that much. The difference between Steve Jobs and pretty much anyone else on the planet was Apple failing, versus Apple turning into the largest company in the world, and that's worth a lot of money.
So when those drive-through employees end up unemployed, it doesn't mean that the CEO gets to do less work. It's not like drive-through guy could be hired to come in and run Facebook for a few hours a day so that Zuckerberg can go and have some downtime. The result is that instead of everybody working less, we may end up with more people poor and unemployed, and a few people overworked and rich. We may already be seeing this happening, as pay for a handful of elite performers- the CEOs, hedge fund managers, rock stars, professional athletes, blockbuster novelists, movie producers, etc. has gone up, while overall wages have stagnated or gone down.
Something tells me that this wasn't designed by a teenager.
There are a limited number of possible suspects. First off, not many parties have the means to create this. The consensus is that Flame is one of the largest and most advanced pieces of malware ever created- it's 20 megabytes of code- which strongly implies that it was developed by a nation with an advanced cyber-warfare capability. That list is pretty short, and would include countries like the United States, China, Russia, Israel, and North Korea.
Second, let's look at the targets. The Flame malware hit Iran, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, in that order. Roughly half of the infections are in Iran. So whoever created Flame is worried about the Middle East, but really, really worried about Iran. More worried about Iran than any other country. The Iran fixation suggests two possible suspects- Israel and the United States.
The focus on Iran is consistent with Flame coming from the U.S., but Flame also targets several U.S. allies, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The other thing is, Flame doesn't target anything outside of the Middle East. If it was produced by the U.S., you'd expect Flame to be found in other countries- North Korea and Pakistan, for example- where the U.S. has security interests. But whoever created Flame doesn't really care what happens in North Korea or Pakistan. Whoever created Flame is primarily concerned with countries that are either enemies or potential enemies of Israel- Iran, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon. That strongly suggests Israel as the culprit.
The 80,000 kg estimate has long been thought to be wildly inflated, and that estimate comes from a study published in 1962. A more recent estimate, published in 1997, gave a mass of 31500 for the Berlin brachiosaur, and a study published in 2009 estimated the mass of this specimen at 23000 kg... just 300 kg more than this study. So they haven't actually shaved off much weight with this latest version. It is an interesting new technique, if you have a skeleton to work with. But it's not terribly practical. Only a handful of dinosaurs are complete enough to make skeletal mounts and have actually been mounted. And we already have ways to estimate their mass- either make a model and dunk it in water to figure out the displacement (a method that's been around since the time of Archimedes) or use the diameters of the limb bones to estimate mass (as load-bearing structures, limb bone dimensions are very tightly correlated to total mass). It's nice to see previous estimates verified, and to have some constraints on how much meat to add onto the skeleton, but I don't think this technique is as big an advance as the authors claim.
On the plus side, if the caffeine is the causative agent, supplementation would be pretty easy.
Possibly, but perhaps caffeine doesn't have anything to do with it. I think the phrase "correlation does not equal causation" is something of a cliche, but it's a cliche for a good reason. We know that there's an association, but because this isn't an experiment with a control and a treatment, we don't know why that association exists.
For an example of how this logic can break down, consider a recent study of coffee (again) that found that nurses drinking lots of coffee suffered lower rates of depression. So coffee has antidepressant effects, right? Well, that's one possible explanation. Here's another possible explanation: symptoms of depression include anxiety and trouble sleeping. So if you're anxious and can't sleep at night, the last thing on earth you want is 4-5 cups of coffee a day making you wired, twitchy, and wakeful. So yes, one reading is "coffee drinking reduces depression" but an equally plausible reading of the data is "depression reduces coffee drinking." The only way to tease it apart is with an experiment: take a population, give half of them coffee, give half of them decaf (to control for placebo effect), and see whether the incidence of depression varies between the two. So what's the answer? Nobody knows.
Likewise, we have to look at the possibility that decreased coffee consumption is caused by Alzheimer's. If coffee is part of your morning ritual and social functioning, then as you become less functional, you might forget to make that morning cup and have trouble interacting with people at the coffee shop. So perhaps Alzheimer's causes people to drink less coffee. The only way to figure it out is to take a population and give half of them coffee, and half of them decaf, and see how they do.
Those 450 pounds won't be flowers and kittens, right?
Close. The payload will be the new eco-friendly AGM-115 Flowerkitten laser-guided missile. It's just like the Hellfire, only made out of recycled materials.
Facebook is probably one of the most well known brands in the world. A facebook branded phone would get lots of sales regardless of how well the phone performed.
It's unquestionably a well-known brand, but a key part of branding is creating an identity that customers feel positively towards. And in terms of being trusted and liked by customers, Facebook is probably one of the worst brands in the world. The reason that Facebook can be successful despite this is because the company has a monopoly in this market. You can't easily leave and join a different social networking site, unless you could somehow figure out how to convince all your friends to join that site at the same time. So Facebook can act with complete disregard to consumer demands for privacy, because the customer really doesn't have the choice. In short, a lot of people use Facebook only because they like their friends more than they dislike Facebook. Or think of it as Zuckerberg throwing a party on a Saturday night- maybe he's an obnoxious jerk you wouldn't want to hang out with, but if he got all your friends to agree to go, then that's still gonna be the party you go to.
Facebook will continue to thrive, simply because people will continue to join and stay with the social network that has all their friends. But once customers actually have a choice between the Facebook brand and another brand- say, in choosing a smartphone- I think Facebook's brand will hurt them.
"The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language, cyber security experts tell Fox News -- the same one used to make the incredibly popular Angry Birds game.
LUA is favored by game programmers because it’s easy to use and easy to embed. Flame is described as enormously powerful and large, containing some 250,000 lines of code, making it far larger than other such cyberweapons. Yet it was built with gamer code, said Cedric Leighton, a retired Air Force Intelligence officer who now consults in the national security arena.
“The people who developed the malware found an ingenious way to use a code not part and parcel of a hacker’s normal arsenal, and that made it harder to detect,” he told Fox News.
It goes on like that. I hate to say anything nice about Fox News, but this is actually a well-written and informative piece of journalism. The problem is the title of the article, which is idiotic and sensationalistic. Given that the article itself is a decent piece of work and the title seems like it was written by someone who likes to stick crayons up their nose, my guess is that the writer did a careful job on the piece and their editor wanted a title that would get people's attention, and changed the title. Of course, given that we're all discussing the article now, a cynic could argue that this was the right call...
Anyway, from reading the article it's clear the guy has talked to Obama administration people, and had the administration's help in producing this book. So he clearly does have the real scoop- or at least, he's got the version that the Obama administration would like him to have.
Given that, it absolutely has to be authorized from the big O himself. Specifically, the content of the article is from a book http://www.randomhouse.com/book/202541/confront-and-conceal-by-david-e-sanger
This entire fucking reveal is nothing but a campaign stunt by Obama. What sort of ratfucking moron admits to intelligence ops just for a campaign boost. Oh wait, it's the chicago politician in the white house.
I think you're being a bit of a troll here, but I actually agree with your take on things. The level of detail in the article is really striking, and suggests that the author talked to people who were closely involved in the decision-making process. To release this kind of information about a classified intelligence project without authorization would be a serious breach of security, if not treason. Given that the Obama Administration hasn't made a huge deal about this article, or gone on a witch-hunt looking for the leaker, it seems safe to say that this story was released with the blessing of the White House, and that this was done for political purposes.
As for the political angle, I can think of two possibilities. One is that taking credit for this (the article goes out of the way to minimize the role of the Israelis) is a way of showing off U.S. power and threatening Iran and other nations who pursue W.M.D. They're saying, "it doesn't matter how clever you are in burying your program, we can still shut it down". That threat could come in handy in future negotiations with Iran and North Korea.
The other angle, as you note, is the election year angle. The article goes out of the way to emphasize Obama's role here. The key line here is "'From his first days in office, he was deep into every step in slowing the Iranian program — the diplomacy, the sanctions, every major decision,' a senior administration official said". Biden is depicted as "fuming", while the president is cool and collected and making tough calls. It paints a very flattering picture, which is hardly surprising given that it's a bunch of Obama Administration guys speaking to a New York Times reporter. However, as the article describes it, the program was actually begun during the Bush Administration and was well underway by the time Obama took office. All Obama did was continue with Bush's program, but it sounds like he's trying to take a lot of the credit, which doesn't quite seem fair. I think Bush was a disaster as a President. But still, you can't have it both ways, and claim that you inherited a bad economy from Bush, but then turn around and take credit for a program that he started and put into action.
You can tell a lot about who made this thing by looking at who it's targeting: Iran, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, Eygpt, Saudi Arabia... it's practically a Who's Who of Israel's enemies and potential enemies. If you look at the map in the article, you can see all the infected countries in red, and smack dab in the middle of all of them is Israel. Israel also has some of the most advanced cyberwarfare capabilities in the world, so when you see an extremely sophisticated piece of malware, they should be at the top of your list of suspects. In short, the only way you could possibly make this malware look more Israeli is to circumcise it and put a yarmulke on top.
With the introduction of next-generation sequencing, the costs have actually dropped much faster than you'd predict if it followed Moore's Law. If it's possible to keep that pace up, then we can expect a $1000 genome in 2014-2015, and a $100 dollar genome two or three years later. My guess is that within 10-20 years we could see the widespread use of genetic screening of embryos for genetic diseases. Right now, this all seems very sci-fi. Like something out of Brave New World, Gattaca, or the Eugenics Wars in Star Trek. But unlike a lot of sci-fi, this stuff isn't fictional because it's technologically difficult/impossible, like a faster than light drive, or a flying car. It's sci-fi because it's too expensive to do right now, but that's going to change rapidly within our lifetimes. The development of tests for Down's Syndrome has already led to a dramatic reduction in the number of children born with the condition, it only follows that the development of new tests will have similar effects with other disorders.
This raises a lot of very thorny questions. Say a fetus tests positive for a mutation that is strongly associated with early-onset Alzheimer's disease. What's the moral choice? Is it moral to abort the fetus and spare them and their loved ones the suffering of Alzheimer's? Or would having that life be better than never being born at all? Or would you be willing to take the bet that in the next 30 to 60 years, they develop the therapies to cure or prevent the disease?
It gets more complicated. What if the fetus tested positive for a gene associated with schizophrenia? It might seem cruel to bring someone into the world knowing that's what they had to face. But this is where the story of genetic determinism put forward by modern medicine breaks down. Schizophrenia has a genetic component, true. What's remarkable is that among identical twins (100% shared DNA) the disease is found in both twins less than 50% of the time. Clearly, there's a very strong environmental component (another striking thing that backs this up is that schizophrenia rates are significantly higher in developed countries than in developing countries). Getting these genes makes you vulnerable, true, but there's a better-than-even chance you won't develop the disease at all. Is a less than 50% chance of developing schizophrenia enough to abort a fetus over?
The issues raised by gene sequencing have been pretty hypothetical up until now. It was too expensive and difficult to look at what genetic cards you'd been dealt. But that's going to change.
NPR's Planet Money podcast had a show about the Facebook IPO (http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/05/22/153300390/facebook-now-what).
It's worth a listen, but to sum up, the assessment was that Facebook has a 100:1 price/earnings ratio (valued at 100 billion on 1 billion in profit) which is astronomical (by comparison, Apple's stock price has soared in the past year and is still worth just 13 times earnings). To justify that kind of value, over the next few years Facebook's profits would have to double, and then double again, and then maybe double again. But one of their commentators said that to sustain that kind of growth, Facebook would have to pull in 10% of all advertising dollars on earth.
Meanwhile, their growth seems to have slowed, and businesses just aren't seeing Facebook make a difference. The podcast followed a small pizza shop trying to stir up business with Facebook and found little evidence that it made a difference in their business, and GM recently yanked their Facebook ads because they didn't feel they were effective.
The Wall Street Journal's take on the IPO was to the point: "Facebook shows there's a sucker born every minute" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304065704577422643666002940.html).
Facebook is actually a profitable business, but selling it at the price they did is just Wall Street and Zuckerberg trying to fuck over investors.
don't we have much bigger things to worry about? This isn't a common case....well, it might be if things continue the way they are going.
Yeah, the "Ex-PATRIOT Act" sounds like just a bunch of bullshit political theater. In the case of Saverin, the U.S. will lose an estimated $67 million dollars in tax revenue. Now consider that this $67 million wouldn't even pay for a single F-35 fighter ($195 million), or 6 hours of fighting in Afghanistan ($300 million per day). It's a drop in the bucket compared to the overall defense budget ($700 billion) or entitlement programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid ($1.5 trillion).
Schumer is just posturing, this bill won't do a damn thing to address the real issues- a poor economy, excessive government spending, and low tax rates- it just seems to be an attempt to distract from the deep problems we face by stirring up popular resentment against one filthy-rich individual.
Here's the situation. Most economists agree that it's not going to be possible to get the deficit under control by either just increasing taxes, or just cutting spending- we're going to have to do both. The question is whether it's going to be possible to raise enough money by just going after the 1%. The 1% do make a ton of money, but there's just not that many of them- only 1% of the population, after all- so even if you taxed them all at 100% it wouldn't balance the budget. That means tax increases on the middle class, who are responsible for the bulk of U.S. federal tax dollars.
But they will be divided by a contest for power, for whoever takes the head of another shall gain his might.
But where will they find swords small enough to fit into their tiny little mouse paws?
We're gonna spend a lot more than a trillion dollars on the F-35. We are insanely rich, and we have a ton of money to waste on stuff like this.
Little fact check here. Yes, we are going to spend a trillion dollars on the F-35 over the lifetime of the project. That is, if we're lucky and there aren't additional cost overruns. But no, we do not have tons of money to waste. Right now the U.S. national debt is almost 16 trillion dollars, which comes to about $50,000 for every man, woman, and child. Building this dude's fantasy, assuming it was even doable, would require an additional $3,000 dollars from every person in the country.
Using the F-35 isn't really a very good example. That's like saying, "all the other kids in the school are doing it!" Just because we're wasting insane amounts of money on military toys that aren't necessary and will probably be hopelessly obsolete within 15-20 years doesn't mean that we can and should waste money elsewhere.
I'd agree to that after we get the unproductive members of society off of the government teat. Get those welfare bitches in the ghettos and trailer parks to work or let their dead beat asses starve. Then we can talk about fair taxation.
If we want to talk about who's leeching off the federal government, let's start by looking at it on a state-by-state level. The states that are most heavily subsidized by the government- the states that receive more federal dollars than they pay in income taxes- are almost entirely Republican-leaning states. So we have Democratic-leaning states like California, New York, and Massachussetts subsidizing Republican-leaning states like Alabama, Alaska, and West Virginia.
In effect, the Republicans seem to have been able to engineer things so that there's a redistribution of wealth from high-earning Democratic states to low-earning Republican states. Sounds a lot like socialism to me. It seems like the Republicans are, when you get down to it, perfectly fine with receiving government handouts, they just don't like to see other people get any help.
Basically they are just a way to baboozle 55 billion dollars out of the US treasury with whispers in the dark of the yellow terror. With stealth cruise missiles that can be fired from land, ships, submarines and aircraft, why the hell would you stuff around with a 550 million dollar bomber whose only real purpose is to cost 550 million dollars.
The reality is that there are going to be wars, so we might as well be prepared to win them, but we have to find a way to cut the fat from the defense budget. The Long Range Strike bomber program is one attempt to do that. $550 million represents a dramatic decrease in costs compared to the B-2 Spirit, which cost $3 billion per plane, or the Next Generation Bomber project, begun under Donald Rumsfeld, which was projected to cost about the same. This is actually part of a series of efforts to make the U.S. military leaner and smarter. In addition to cancelling the Next Generation Bomber, former Defense Secretary Gates announced cuts to the number of F-22s and to the number of active duty personnel in the Army and Marines, and a decision to extend the use of the U-2 instead of buying new Global Hawks. At the same time, there's a plan to increase the number of soldiers in the Special Forces.
The other issue is that cruise missiles carry a limited amount of ordnance, so they're not going to be effective against heavily fortified targets. The Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow is buried under 200 feet of mountain and heavily reinforced with concrete. To destroy a hardened target like that, you need heavy-duty weapons like the 30,000 lb. Massive Ordnance Penetrator. And to drop an MOP, you need a bomber. Right now the B-2 is the only aircraft the U.S. has that is capable of both penetrating air defenses and carrying that kind of payload, and the B-2 fleet consists of a total of 20 aircraft.
A model is only as good as its assumptions, and their assumptions about population density seem difficult to believe. Tens of sauropods per square kilometer? A quick Google search shows that population densities for African elephants are on the order of .1-4 individuals per square kilometer. Even assuming sauropods had a somewhat lower metabolism than an elephant, it's difficult to believe that you could take sauropods, which are several times the size of an elephant, and pack them in at ten times the population density; they'd just strip all the leaves off the trees and then starve to death. That's ignoring the fact that the plants may have been less productive, which would limit the amount of food available. The dominant trees in the Mesozoic are conifers, which grow more slowly than modern flowering plants, so there's just not as much forage being produced by the environment.
shows he is perpetually fighting the LAST war, and never thinking about what might happen next. These aircraft were never intended for Afghanistan or Iraq.
That's exactly McCain's point. The aircraft aren't intended for Afghanistan, or Iraq, or any of the wars we've actually been in for the past 10 years, they're intended for a war against Soviet Union. Back in 1981 when the Air Force began looking for an F-15 successor, this probably made sense, but since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the question becomes, why do we need these planes?
The only countries currently pursuing fifth-generation fighters are China and Russia. At this point, the idea of war with China seems like a remote possibility. The U.S. can't live without iPads and China can't live without U.S. money. Russia's military fell apart after the collapse of the USSR and it would take a long time to rebuild it to the point where it would be a serious threat. At any rate, war with either country is extremely unlikely given this little thing called "mutually assured destruction". Because of that, the U.S. hasn't gone to war with a major power in 60 years, when we fought against China in Korea.
So it's a fair guess that the wars of the next 50 years will look like the wars of the past 50 years- Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya. Wars against enemies with inferior air forces, and guerrilla wars. In that sense, the Obama administration's move to cut the F-22 program while expanding the role of drones and increasing the size of Special Forces looks like the right move.
In fact, the F-35A was designed for the Air Force as a replacement for the F-16, which is a multirole fighter designed to attack both air and ground targets. Since the Air Force will have about half as many F-22s as originally planned, the assumption is presumably that F-35As can fill the air superiority role reasonably well, if not as well as the F-22.