It has also been hypothesized, based on open sources, that the Permissive Action Links for some types of nuclear weapons may involve the use of encoded secret timing offsets for the explosives and lenses needed to create a unified focus for the shockfront as would occur during functional detonation.
So the official detonator knows the timing. But it would be non trivial to work it out from the warhead, which you'd need to do if you wanted to make a new detonator. The official detonator could be rigged to destroy the circuits which know the timing if it were tampered too. So it's not necessarily easy to bypass the launch codes.
You realise that means that personal injury lawyers save lives? Lawsuit settlements increase the estimated dollar value of human life, so it's easier to justify spending money of engineering work that marginally increases safety. It's probably disproportionate too - one well publicised multi million dollar settlement could make companies engineer things more cautiously even if they risk they are reducing is in an unrelated area.
It's a bit like evolution really, it's a process that improves things without having any idea what it's doing.
But Don Sadoway, a professor of Materials Chemistry at MIT who is an expert in advanced battery technologies, worries about off-shoring of a chemistry he asserts "needs to be treated with respect."
"I have 100% confidence in the Japanese battery manufacturers," he says. "And my guess is that they never had the problems theyre seeing now when the same batteries were manufactured from start to finish in Japan."
He notes that one of the challenges with Li-ion batteries in particular is that it is very difficult to verify that the manufacturing and assembly is being performed according to specifications. Thats because once its assembled into a battery pack, the device cannot be inspected from the outside nor can it be easily tested.
Sadoway points to the separator material between the electrodes as an example. Acting like a kind of fuse, it is designed to soften and collapse at a specific temperature, causing the battery to essentially go into an open circuit condition and die.
In fact, he wonders why that didnt happen in the case of the Dell laptop that burst into flames last year.
"You could think you are specifying a porous polypropylene material for the separator, but once the thing is packaged up you would have no way of knowing what you actually got. Even under the best of circumstances, you can get screwed by your own job shop. What if the workers took a short cut and substituted the original material with cardboard?"
Even better there's a link to that article in the writeup! Pretty handy.
I suspect if you want cost effective ethanol as a fuel, you'll need to produce it in Brazil and other places and cut import duties so it can be imported and sold at a usable price. In which you can say goodbye to any chance to have it produced in an environmentally correct way.
Actually my pet idea for biofuels is to cut farming subsidies which act to increase food prices in the rich world, which should cause people to diversify and grow fuel and other non traditional crops. And get rid of import duties too.
E.g. the EU the CAP is something like half the budget -
It consists of import duties, price fixing - the EU will buy agricultural produce if the price drops beneath a certain level, and subsidies for specific crops. Or even subsidies for growing nothing at all - set aside was to stop 'overproduction' of cereals.
The US is almost as bad as far as I can tell - otherwise imported ethanol would drive the US pump price down to the point where it might be viable give or take few tax breaks.
Ericsson is a Swedish company, founded by Lars Magnus Ericsson. Erlang was developed by Swedes at Ericsson but is named after Erlang who was unfortunately Danish. It is possible some Danes sneaked in and did this naming before the security guards could throw them out.
Does anyone else think this thinking seems a bit Marxist? We have a plan "OpenDocument" decided on by scientifically by experts. The only opponents are class enemies like Microsoft and their paid lackeys who support a far inferior rival standard OOXML. This is not a mere slur, it is a scientific fact proved by statistics.
Now, I couldn't give a toss about standards quite frankly. MS Office works fine and is installed on every machine I use. But the logic of these conspiracy theories is that class enemies should be somehow silenced, otherwise open debate will be sabotaged by them. Maybe I have false consciousness since I don't care and thus the choice should be taken away from me and made by experts. And I don't like the way that people are abusing science to make their loony political opinions 'objectively true' - this seems close to sacrilege to me.
The only encouraging thing is that 99.99% of the population of the world will never even hear their arguments, and probably wouldn't be interested in them if they did. But still it's annoying to see obviously intelligent people behaving like this when historically this sort of thinking has proved to be disastrous.
I dunno, I think the fact that he's censored even on slashdot shows how powerful Microsoft really is and how important his one man campaign to get the facts out really is.
You go twitter, remember the Nazis tried to censor their opponents too!
Why is it that the opinion of the majority is group think when you don't agree with it.
I didn't say that. Groupthink is a sort of self reinforcing majority. Almost every group has it to some extent, since people tend to leave groups where they are in a minority and join ones where they agree with most people. You just only notice it when you're in the minority.
The self deprecating stuff also gets a bit repetitive after a while, whilst posting on/. try substituting 'I' or 'my' for/. and reread your post.
I disagree with the slashdot consensus on most issues actually judging by the way posts are moderated, but because of that it's an interesting place to talk about stuff. Certainly more interesting than somewhere where I agreed with most of what's posted, even assuming such a place exists.
Personally I think that it's OK to harass political groups but not ethnic ones. Now Islamists are clearly a group with political goals. IMO their goals are totalitarian and designed to dismantle liberal, secular society but that's not the point - their goals are political and so they should not therfore be protected from criticism. And they're not an ethic group, and that's another sign that they shouldn't be protected. Frankly it's chutzpah (a word which I'm sure would annoy them) for them to claim hostility to them is in some way equivalent to racism and liberals should tolerate them when they show absolutely non tolerance for people which do not do exactly as they say.
And I note I said "Islamists" rather than "Muslims". I don't agree with Islam as a religion or with Christianity, but private religion is not something the state should interfere in. Provided religious people don't interfere with people who's lifestyles they disapprove of that is. But still you shouldn't be allowed to say "Kill all Muslims" - incitement to violence should not be allowed.
Of course subtlety like this is hard to capture in a law, let alone a commercial TOS. In fact companies like Facebook should be allowed to steer clear of hosting anything that falls into the grey area between criticism of political group's ideas and incitement to violence against that group.
If you're a whiner who just quit Facebook, I'd like to point that there will always be place for you on LiveJournal.
We have these features
* Auto sockpuppet scripts. You don't need the bother of maintaining human friends, even online ones. Our Perl scripts will flame your enemies when they become too numerous for you to do it manually. * One click Delete Freakin' Everything(tm) and Restart Under An Alias. Our killer feature. Drama never had less consequences.
Slashdot groupthink believes the exact opposite of whatever Middle America believes. Which is fine some of the time, since in those cases Middle American beliefs are over simplified to the point of being flat out wrong. The rest of the time they're simplistic but mostly right and it's a problem.
Mindless heterodoxy it turns out is just as bad as mindless orthodoxy. Damn, it's a trickier world than I expected.
Yeah, it's remarkable on slashdot how you can talk about [DELETED BY CMDR TACO]. I'm very much a free speech advocated but it seems to me that somethings go way beyond the line, and I don't think if I were CmdrTaco I'd let people post about my private life on forum my wife may read, or even the animal rights people who just can't accept that [DELETED BY CMDR TACO]. He paid for the bunnies, what he does to them in private should be his business alone.
But the fact is that China was much more likely to start a war when it was much weaker under Mao than it is now. Why? Globalization. War with Taiwan would have a catastrophic effect on their economy.
Before WWI people said the same thing about European countries - since a war would cause economic chaos and the economies were intertwined, it was irrational to do it. Actually it happened anyway and most of Europe was levelled to the ground - the damage was far more severe than economic chaos. But war isn't really about economics or individual self interest. It's about much more religious things like the sacred unity of the nation, especially if you're Chinese.
And in retrospect, it was inevitable that the two competing pre WWI alliances would fight over something. And now Taiwan is pretty much committed to independence, and China is committed to invading if they do so. And the US is committed to defending Taiwan.
Also, one interesting thing about the Chinese military is that, unlike in the US, they don't really have a military industrial complex. What I mean is, most R&D and even manufacturing is done by the government, not private contractors.
You don't attack people who provide your economy with millions of jobs.
So on the one hand the military is not part of the normal economy, on the other they won't attack the Taiwanese because they provide jobs? Seems like a contradiction to me. And historically there have been loads of cases of large but poor countries using their army to do a sort of military version of a hostile takeover, usually justified by some nationalist rhetoric.
I've actually met Chinese people, and they all say China should invade if Taiwan refuses to reunify. I've never met anyone from China who sees things the way you do.
GPS would never have gone commercial if it had been developed by China's military.
GPS would never have been developed China's military.
Yeah but if civilisation falls to the machines and he's sat in nuked out wasteland googling for ways to bring those metal bastards down at least he knows his web browser is working for him and not for the damn robots.
Everything we know, they know in that area. They are making them in the first place.
If you're right then of course we can put the design of subs in the public domain and it would make no difference. But if you're wrong then it means you're helping a vicious totalitarian country achieve technical parity with the US. And I don't think you are right, because otherwise they would already have done it.
I think that non free countries are basically bad at engineering stuff, particularly military stuff. I knew some German guy who pointed out that the Germans built the V2 in a few months 60 years ago whilst the RAF and USAF were carpet bombing Germany and destroying German industry. Since then, a bunch of third world tyrannies have spent a fortune trying to improve V2 like missiles and have only managed a few percent. Or if you look at the Roman empire, technology stagnated pretty much totally once the Emperors were secure. As did everything else of course.
And as I mentioned the Russians fell pretty far behind. Now China is different, but I still suspect that the productive parts tend to be be private and often foreign owned. Even then there are limits as to what technology can be exported to China. But the military is neither private not foreign owned and is not at all productive - technologically they seemed to get stuck around 1950. Considering that the 50's stuff is mostly Russian imports that means that their R&D be awful. In fact on a a par with North Korea, a country that has basically failed to build 50's ICBMs and nukes given 60 years and the same 50's Russian imports the Chinese got.
George Orwell wrote a gloomy essay about totalitarianism. Initially, writers get stomped but engineers get some freedom, since the state needs weapons. But once the state has no mortal threats, even the engineers get rewarded for being politically correct rather than good and technology thus stagnates just like novels. And I think he's right.
Truly our weapons and missle tech are further along than them and is built/developed in the US, but to see how far they have come in just the past 40 years is more than a little scary. Couple that with this "1 child policy" in a country that aborts females in the name of a male preferred society and what we have is an entire generation of males with no brothers and sisters that could act as an army. Given the sheer numbers over there you have to wonder if that is the plan.
There is no plan, just that Mao got taken in my Malthusian scare mongerers. If they'd left things alone and got rich then the Chinese population would level off, but by doing what they did they will get old before they get rich, which will weaken them. If you look at the Japan there is a chronic problem with too many old people and not enough young ones to support them. In 50 years time China will get the same problems as Japan but at a far lower GDP per capita. The sort of war which could fix this would destroy the country.
Military tech advantages against those kind of huge numbers may not matter without nukes. A war against China would ruin the U.S.
I agree, but that's not the point. Back when Clinton was in power he was able to protect Taiwan with a few aircraft carriers because China was so weak. If they had a decent military, there's far more risk of them getting into a war with the US over Taiwan.
People said the same things about the USSR. But once the Cold War ended it was pretty clear that Russian military technology lagged far behind the US - it's almost as if it stagnated somewhere in the late 60's/early 70's. And because of COCOM and secrecy they weren't able to buy the things they couldn't make, or find out how to make them.
Lenin said that "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them", but luckily for the world that wasn't the case.
I guess you're being sarcastic, but it is a win-win situation just not for the slightly paranoid reasons you came up with.
The problem with free societies is that they don't have a well defined boundary. So if you and I know what a silent submarine propeller looks like, the Chinese navy knows too. So it seems to me to be not unreasonable to keep that information secret.
If it comes to a war between China and the US, the technological difference between the US and Chinese navies is what will keep you alive if you're from the US. I'm not from the US, but I'd still rather the US prevailed in any conflict. Or more to the point that conventional wisdom predicted that they would prevail and so the world could skip actually fighting.
It seems like if we had open source submarine propeller design that technological difference would disappear - unlike the Soviet Union China would have no problem manufacturing silent submarines, or advanced ICBMs if they had the designs. To mix metaphors a little, it's analogous to a computer system where both the legitimate users and any malware both have root access.
But hopefully like the Soviet Union, Chinese weapons designers are hampered by working in poor totalitarian society and are thus a bit behind on actually designing modern weapons themselves. Certainly Chinese weapons design hasn't been impressive since 1949. Of course they will get better as the society gets richer and freer, but I'm hoping it will get so free that it ceases to be a threat before they are able to build the sort of military which would be able to fight the US. The Pentagon believes that it will take 20 to 40 years before the Chinese could attack Taiwan, and it's likely that China will change dramatically for the better in that time.
And keeping things classified shouldn't necessarily affect US weapons designers - if the classification was something which people can opt into by signing the Official Secrets act a la the UK, once they have opted in they should be able to get whatever information they want. Of course opting out later is seriously illegal, but it has to be that way.
Security through obscurity works rather well for the US at this point in history, since the US's freer and richer society has built a military that could take on pretty much anyone and win. Allowing a country like China access to US military technology before they are able to invent it for themselves would be grossly irresponsible.
Clearly, the citizenry's desire to be on equal terms with its rightfully appointed overseers is misguided.
Actually if you believe in this, and I do, then you should work to make sure that democracies like the US preserve their technological edge over non democracies like China.
If I'd found the picture I'd have tipped off the US Navy. But then I guess you've never been to Taiwan and China and noticed that Taiwan is quite obviously a more free country. And Taiwan is still free mostly because the US has a technical edge over China, and the Chinese are deterred from invading which they threaten to do every couple of years.
Slashdot Mirror
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_desig
But
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_desig
So the official detonator knows the timing. But it would be non trivial to work it out from the warhead, which you'd need to do if you wanted to make a new detonator. The official detonator could be rigged to destroy the circuits which know the timing if it were tampered too. So it's not necessarily easy to bypass the launch codes.
That was a very erudite post. Don't you have something more productive to do than post here?
You realise that means that personal injury lawyers save lives? Lawsuit settlements increase the estimated dollar value of human life, so it's easier to justify spending money of engineering work that marginally increases safety. It's probably disproportionate too - one well publicised multi million dollar settlement could make companies engineer things more cautiously even if they risk they are reducing is in an unrelated area.
It's a bit like evolution really, it's a process that improves things without having any idea what it's doing.
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/engineerin
Even better there's a link to that article in the writeup! Pretty handy.
I suspect if you want cost effective ethanol as a fuel, you'll need to produce it in Brazil and other places and cut import duties so it can be imported and sold at a usable price. In which you can say goodbye to any chance to have it produced in an environmentally correct way.
P olicy
Actually my pet idea for biofuels is to cut farming subsidies which act to increase food prices in the rich world, which should cause people to diversify and grow fuel and other non traditional crops. And get rid of import duties too.
E.g. the EU the CAP is something like half the budget -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Agricultural_
It consists of import duties, price fixing - the EU will buy agricultural produce if the price drops beneath a certain level, and subsidies for specific crops. Or even subsidies for growing nothing at all - set aside was to stop 'overproduction' of cereals.
The US is almost as bad as far as I can tell - otherwise imported ethanol would drive the US pump price down to the point where it might be viable give or take few tax breaks.
If it's not true then why aren't we up to our asses in velociraptors?
Ericsson is a Swedish company, founded by Lars Magnus Ericsson. Erlang was developed by Swedes at Ericsson but is named after Erlang who was unfortunately Danish. It is possible some Danes sneaked in and did this naming before the security guards could throw them out.
Screw that! I want my movies, warez and MP3s. Can I still sue Comcast for stopping me?
Does anyone else think this thinking seems a bit Marxist? We have a plan "OpenDocument" decided on by scientifically by experts. The only opponents are class enemies like Microsoft and their paid lackeys who support a far inferior rival standard OOXML. This is not a mere slur, it is a scientific fact proved by statistics.
Now, I couldn't give a toss about standards quite frankly. MS Office works fine and is installed on every machine I use. But the logic of these conspiracy theories is that class enemies should be somehow silenced, otherwise open debate will be sabotaged by them. Maybe I have false consciousness since I don't care and thus the choice should be taken away from me and made by experts. And I don't like the way that people are abusing science to make their loony political opinions 'objectively true' - this seems close to sacrilege to me.
The only encouraging thing is that 99.99% of the population of the world will never even hear their arguments, and probably wouldn't be interested in them if they did. But still it's annoying to see obviously intelligent people behaving like this when historically this sort of thinking has proved to be disastrous.
That's odd. Slashdot seems to have an issue with non ascii URLs in Plain Old Text mode e.g
l eteness_theorems">test</a>
m pleteness_theorems">test2</a>
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel's_incomp
gives
test
i.e. it's broken because the ö gets removed.
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%F6del's_inco
test2
is ok (I URL encoded it here
How did you get it to work?
I was joking - it's a parody of twitter's conspiratorial world view that explains why he keeps posting even he's consistently modded down.
I dunno, I think the fact that he's censored even on slashdot shows how powerful Microsoft really is and how important his one man campaign to get the facts out really is.
You go twitter, remember the Nazis tried to censor their opponents too!
Why is it that the opinion of the majority is group think when you don't agree with it.
/. try substituting 'I' or 'my' for /. and reread your post.
I didn't say that. Groupthink is a sort of self reinforcing majority. Almost every group has it to some extent, since people tend to leave groups where they are in a minority and join ones where they agree with most people. You just only notice it when you're in the minority.
The self deprecating stuff also gets a bit repetitive after a while, whilst posting on
I disagree with the slashdot consensus on most issues actually judging by the way posts are moderated, but because of that it's an interesting place to talk about stuff. Certainly more interesting than somewhere where I agreed with most of what's posted, even assuming such a place exists.
Personally I think that it's OK to harass political groups but not ethnic ones. Now Islamists are clearly a group with political goals. IMO their goals are totalitarian and designed to dismantle liberal, secular society but that's not the point - their goals are political and so they should not therfore be protected from criticism. And they're not an ethic group, and that's another sign that they shouldn't be protected. Frankly it's chutzpah (a word which I'm sure would annoy them) for them to claim hostility to them is in some way equivalent to racism and liberals should tolerate them when they show absolutely non tolerance for people which do not do exactly as they say.
And I note I said "Islamists" rather than "Muslims". I don't agree with Islam as a religion or with Christianity, but private religion is not something the state should interfere in. Provided religious people don't interfere with people who's lifestyles they disapprove of that is. But still you shouldn't be allowed to say "Kill all Muslims" - incitement to violence should not be allowed.
Of course subtlety like this is hard to capture in a law, let alone a commercial TOS. In fact companies like Facebook should be allowed to steer clear of hosting anything that falls into the grey area between criticism of political group's ideas and incitement to violence against that group.
If you're a whiner who just quit Facebook, I'd like to point that there will always be place for you on LiveJournal.
We have these features
* Auto sockpuppet scripts. You don't need the bother of maintaining human friends, even online ones. Our Perl scripts will flame your enemies when they become too numerous for you to do it manually.
* One click Delete Freakin' Everything(tm) and Restart Under An Alias. Our killer feature. Drama never had less consequences.
Sincerely Yours,
Brad Fitzpatrick
Look trolls! We've found the Gödel sentence! Spread the word, we can bring the whole system down!
Slashdot groupthink believes the exact opposite of whatever Middle America believes. Which is fine some of the time, since in those cases Middle American beliefs are over simplified to the point of being flat out wrong. The rest of the time they're simplistic but mostly right and it's a problem.
Mindless heterodoxy it turns out is just as bad as mindless orthodoxy. Damn, it's a trickier world than I expected.
Yeah, it's remarkable on slashdot how you can talk about [DELETED BY CMDR TACO]. I'm very much a free speech advocated but it seems to me that somethings go way beyond the line, and I don't think if I were CmdrTaco I'd let people post about my private life on forum my wife may read, or even the animal rights people who just can't accept that [DELETED BY CMDR TACO]. He paid for the bunnies, what he does to them in private should be his business alone.
Excuse me, as a National Socialist I find the term "spelling Nazi" offensive. Couldn't you say "spelling Jew" instead?
But the fact is that China was much more likely to start a war when it was much weaker under Mao than it is now. Why? Globalization. War with Taiwan would have a catastrophic effect on their economy.
Before WWI people said the same thing about European countries - since a war would cause economic chaos and the economies were intertwined, it was irrational to do it. Actually it happened anyway and most of Europe was levelled to the ground - the damage was far more severe than economic chaos. But war isn't really about economics or individual self interest. It's about much more religious things like the sacred unity of the nation, especially if you're Chinese.
And in retrospect, it was inevitable that the two competing pre WWI alliances would fight over something. And now Taiwan is pretty much committed to independence, and China is committed to invading if they do so. And the US is committed to defending Taiwan.
Also, one interesting thing about the Chinese military is that, unlike in the US, they don't really have a military industrial complex. What I mean is, most R&D and even manufacturing is done by the government, not private contractors.
You don't attack people who provide your economy with millions of jobs.
So on the one hand the military is not part of the normal economy, on the other they won't attack the Taiwanese because they provide jobs? Seems like a contradiction to me. And historically there have been loads of cases of large but poor countries using their army to do a sort of military version of a hostile takeover, usually justified by some nationalist rhetoric.
I've actually met Chinese people, and they all say China should invade if Taiwan refuses to reunify. I've never met anyone from China who sees things the way you do.
GPS would never have gone commercial if it had been developed by China's military.
GPS would never have been developed China's military.
Yeah but if civilisation falls to the machines and he's sat in nuked out wasteland googling for ways to bring those metal bastards down at least he knows his web browser is working for him and not for the damn robots.
Everything we know, they know in that area. They are making them in the first place.
If you're right then of course we can put the design of subs in the public domain and it would make no difference. But if you're wrong then it means you're helping a vicious totalitarian country achieve technical parity with the US. And I don't think you are right, because otherwise they would already have done it.
I think that non free countries are basically bad at engineering stuff, particularly military stuff. I knew some German guy who pointed out that the Germans built the V2 in a few months 60 years ago whilst the RAF and USAF were carpet bombing Germany and destroying German industry. Since then, a bunch of third world tyrannies have spent a fortune trying to improve V2 like missiles and have only managed a few percent. Or if you look at the Roman empire, technology stagnated pretty much totally once the Emperors were secure. As did everything else of course.
And as I mentioned the Russians fell pretty far behind. Now China is different, but I still suspect that the productive parts tend to be be private and often foreign owned. Even then there are limits as to what technology can be exported to China. But the military is neither private not foreign owned and is not at all productive - technologically they seemed to get stuck around 1950. Considering that the 50's stuff is mostly Russian imports that means that their R&D be awful. In fact on a a par with North Korea, a country that has basically failed to build 50's ICBMs and nukes given 60 years and the same 50's Russian imports the Chinese got.
George Orwell wrote a gloomy essay about totalitarianism. Initially, writers get stomped but engineers get some freedom, since the state needs weapons. But once the state has no mortal threats, even the engineers get rewarded for being politically correct rather than good and technology thus stagnates just like novels. And I think he's right.
Truly our weapons and missle tech are further along than them and is built/developed in the US, but to see how far they have come in just the past 40 years is more than a little scary. Couple that with this "1 child policy" in a country that aborts females in the name of a male preferred society and what we have is an entire generation of males with no brothers and sisters that could act as an army. Given the sheer numbers over there you have to wonder if that is the plan.
There is no plan, just that Mao got taken in my Malthusian scare mongerers. If they'd left things alone and got rich then the Chinese population would level off, but by doing what they did they will get old before they get rich, which will weaken them. If you look at the Japan there is a chronic problem with too many old people and not enough young ones to support them. In 50 years time China will get the same problems as Japan but at a far lower GDP per capita. The sort of war which could fix this would destroy the country.
Military tech advantages against those kind of huge numbers may not matter without nukes. A war against China would ruin the U.S.
I agree, but that's not the point. Back when Clinton was in power he was able to protect Taiwan with a few aircraft carriers because China was so weak. If they had a decent military, there's far more risk of them getting into a war with the US over Taiwan.
People said the same things about the USSR. But once the Cold War ended it was pretty clear that Russian military technology lagged far behind the US - it's almost as if it stagnated somewhere in the late 60's/early 70's. And because of COCOM and secrecy they weren't able to buy the things they couldn't make, or find out how to make them.
Lenin said that "The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them", but luckily for the world that wasn't the case.
I guess you're being sarcastic, but it is a win-win situation just not for the slightly paranoid reasons you came up with.
The problem with free societies is that they don't have a well defined boundary. So if you and I know what a silent submarine propeller looks like, the Chinese navy knows too. So it seems to me to be not unreasonable to keep that information secret.
If it comes to a war between China and the US, the technological difference between the US and Chinese navies is what will keep you alive if you're from the US. I'm not from the US, but I'd still rather the US prevailed in any conflict. Or more to the point that conventional wisdom predicted that they would prevail and so the world could skip actually fighting.
It seems like if we had open source submarine propeller design that technological difference would disappear - unlike the Soviet Union China would have no problem manufacturing silent submarines, or advanced ICBMs if they had the designs. To mix metaphors a little, it's analogous to a computer system where both the legitimate users and any malware both have root access.
But hopefully like the Soviet Union, Chinese weapons designers are hampered by working in poor totalitarian society and are thus a bit behind on actually designing modern weapons themselves. Certainly Chinese weapons design hasn't been impressive since 1949. Of course they will get better as the society gets richer and freer, but I'm hoping it will get so free that it ceases to be a threat before they are able to build the sort of military which would be able to fight the US. The Pentagon believes that it will take 20 to 40 years before the Chinese could attack Taiwan, and it's likely that China will change dramatically for the better in that time.
And keeping things classified shouldn't necessarily affect US weapons designers - if the classification was something which people can opt into by signing the Official Secrets act a la the UK, once they have opted in they should be able to get whatever information they want. Of course opting out later is seriously illegal, but it has to be that way.
Security through obscurity works rather well for the US at this point in history, since the US's freer and richer society has built a military that could take on pretty much anyone and win. Allowing a country like China access to US military technology before they are able to invent it for themselves would be grossly irresponsible.
Clearly, the citizenry's desire to be on equal terms with its rightfully appointed overseers is misguided.
Actually if you believe in this, and I do, then you should work to make sure that democracies like the US preserve their technological edge over non democracies like China.
If I'd found the picture I'd have tipped off the US Navy. But then I guess you've never been to Taiwan and China and noticed that Taiwan is quite obviously a more free country. And Taiwan is still free mostly because the US has a technical edge over China, and the Chinese are deterred from invading which they threaten to do every couple of years.