And sadly that is EXACTLY what we are gonna get. No more open Windows platform to build on, you have the Apple walled garden or the Ersatz Apple walled garden...wonderful.
I have never more openly and fervently hoped a company would fail like I want MSFT to fail now, maybe if Ballmer shits enough money down the toilet we'll get lucky and the board will revolt and bring someone in who can do something other than ape Apple poorly, as that seems to be the ONLY strategy Ballmer knows. How pathetic and sad.
I'm sorry but that's bullshit. Can I have my networks shares when i return from sleep? yep. Can I listen to music or watch video while transferring files? yep. Does Win 7 have "senior moments" where the whole OS just freezes for a few seconds? Nope. Does Win 7 thrash the living fuck out of the hard drive? Nope.
So sorry, but I call bullshit. UAC was NEVER the problem, it was annoying but could be easily turned off and with Win 7 there isn't even a point turning it off. No the problem with Vista was it was rushed out the door with several problems in the kernel and I/O subsystems that never did get fixed. I can place Win 7 and Vista side by side on this nice hexacore machine and the difference is like night and day, 7 is smooth as butter and runs great, Vista is a thrashy buggy POS.
That ain't the problem friend, as someone who builds AMD exclusively I'll be HAPPY to tell you what the problem is, the problem is they FIRED all their engineers for computer layouts and tried to push a server chip onto the consumer market!
Here are some facts, FACT.-1- The AMD Bobcat was selling as fast as they could crank them suckers out, they were great for netbooks and even average user laptops and the OEMs were all ready to slap the new quad bobcats into tons of units, what happened? they canceled it. FACT.-2- The morons at AMD didn't bother to actually tell MSFT what they were doing so now ALL versions of Windows except for Windows 8 will tie a boat anchor to any Faildozer "half core" design" because the OS doesn't realize each module only has one FP unit so it'll slap two FP heavy threads on one module, just killing performance. FACT.-3- They KNEW before it came out that Faildozer was too hot, too power sucking, and didn't have the performance of the Thuban and Zosma chips, what did they do? they priced it against the fricking Core i5 2500K, a fricking monster of a chip, and to add insult to injury canceled the Thubans! They were getting damned near 100% yields on the Thubans, because one or two bad cores? Make it a Zosma quad. 3 bad cores? Phenom Triple. Bad cache? Athlon. And because they were having near 100% yields they could sell them cheap and still make good money, whereas the BD/PD design is expensive to make, hard to get decent yields on, and to make a profit they have to price them against chips that curbstomp them, what idiots!
Hell I could go on all day but why bother? AMD's biggest problem is NOT Intel, its frankly piss poor management. their only real hope now is the head chip designer they lured away from Apple recently, if he can come up with a design that replaces faildozer and puts them back in the game they'll have a shot. Hell let ME run that company and they'd be doing better! I'd kill the socket mess they are in now, settle on just two LGA sockets, one for server and one for desktop, I'd keep the integer heavy BD/PD design for servers ONLY and I'd be pushing $120 Thubans unlocked and $100 Lianos while I'd be riding the shit out of the engineers to give me a quad core Bobcat yesterday. Finally I'd tell my new Apple guy he had free reign, just make me a damned good low power chip, whatever you gotta do to make it happen? DO IT.
They HAD a damned good niche carved out. To steal a line from Steve Jobs "Intel doesn't have to lose for AMD to win" as there is a LOT of money that could be made by owning the low end to midrange market, but AMD has been pissing it away with bad designs, chips like Faildozer that cost too damned much to make while giving the consumer too little performance, and not cranking out sequels to the excellent low power Bobcats. Picture a next gen Bobcat Transformer style tablet, all your windows apps and all day battery life when hooked into the keyboard cradle and all for less than $550, who wouldn't want that? Hell with the price they were able to get the C series Bobcats cranked out for they could have the tablets start at $299 and make good money and again ALL your Windows programs would run...easy sale.
Go to Tigerdirect, they have the SystemMax line where you pick what you want (including with or without OS) and they build it for you. of course if you want a desktop I'd just buy one of their kits, building a modern desktop PC is so simple they come with picture than any kid could follow, but for laptops I'd look at SystemMax.
Like they did with Vista? Oh wait, nobody bought it so they had to go back to the drawing board and give the people what they wanted with Windows 7.
This is actually an advantage that proprietary has over FOSS, if you don't like Win 8? Don't buy it and if enough agree with you and don't buy it they'll have to go back to the drawing board or watch the company go down the shitter. Don't like Gnome Shell or Unity? Tough fucking shit, they don't owe you a damned thing and don't give a shit WHAT you think. its their personal playtoy and if you don't like it you can go piss off.
So if you hate Win 8 join us that aren't gonna buy it, or machines running it, we'll see Win 7 rushed out by the OEMs who'll just drop a Win 8 DVD nobody will use in the bottom of the box to give Ballmer some bullshit numbers and everything will go back to normal. Hopefully the board gets tired of Bill's little buddy and punts his ass like a 30 yard field return and the next guy actually listens to the customers, that's how it works. All you can do in FOSS is play the distro shuffle and hope the part you have a problem with isn't a core component everyone uses because again, they don't owe you a damned thing, its free, like it or lump it.
Personally I'll stick with the OS where I can skip 2 major releases (XP and Vista) and still be supported with updates until I decide they put out a product I liked with Win 7. You could go straight from 2K to 7 if you wanted and been under patch support the entire time, you just can't do that in FOSS land unless you have the money for a major support contract.
Nooo..what MSFT hasn't fucking learned and what I would just LOVE to dress up in a suit of armor with a large flounder and Monty Python style beat into their thick skulls is THERE IS NO POINT TO HAVING A WINDOWS THAT DOESN'T RUN WINDOWS SOFTWARE!!! Which you think would be so fucking obvious you wouldn't even have to point this out but apparently Steve Ballmer thinks he has the other Steve's product and can sell people on look and feel. No you can't Ballmer as NOBODY wants Windows, what they WANT is to RUN THEIR SOFTWARE which requires your platform moron!
Why is that so God damned hard to understand? what MSFT should be doing is royally kissing the ass of AMD and Intel and begging on bended knee for them to get the new Atoms and Bobcats out and into tablets, THAT is what people would actually want Windows for. With those you could then have a Transformer style design, where you pop it into a keyboard cradle with an extra battery and tada! You have a 9-12 hour laptop, pop it out the cradle and you have a 3-5 hour tablet and in both forms it will run your Windows software which is the ONLY reason people want Windows for in the first place!
Sheesh, maybe when WinRT and Win 8 goes the way of WinCE and Vista somebody there will get bitchslapped with the clue bat but until then me and many of the retailers will just sit back shaking their heads and wondering WTF they are thinking. I'm just glad I've switched my customers and family over to Win 7 so I can just avoid the disaster as I have a feeling I'm gonna have a lot of pissed off people bringing me tablets they bought in other stores going "It SAYS its Windows, why won't my software run?" and then having to tell them they got fucked and the only thing it'll run is cell phone crap.
The only positive? I missed getting a Touchpad and i have a feeling Woot! will have WinPads in 6 months at firesale prices, for $100 I'll take a nice dual core pad to play with,but unlike the public I'll know what ARM is and know that its worthless for anything but browsing and playing Angry Birds.
Except they won't NEED railguns to sink your ships, they can just spam you with Mach 2 sea skimmers which they buy from someone like China in bulk.
As Stalin said in WWII "Quantity has a quality all its own" and with those you can literally fire a half a dozen off the back of a semi and be gone before the last one has even left you sight, that will make it DAMN hard to take out before launch and with the hit or miss (mostly miss) record of the Phalanx and the fact that it has a max of 15 bursts it really wouldn't take too many shots of sea skimmer before your sailors are doing the backstroke.
Nice to see I'm not the only one that sees the big "uh oh" here Crosshair84, as you noted the Phalanx has always been a hit or miss weapon in terms of reliability, sadly like most of the shit we've made since the 80s when defense contractors could pad the living hell out of the bill.
In the end though just picturing a likely battle scenario would show how worthless the Phalanx would be in that situation. You have 8-12 skimmers coming in hard and fast, 10-20 feet off the water, multiple vectors. these things are going at over Mach, possibly Mach 2 or even 3, they are small, and because they are coming AT you you have an even smaller area to aim at. The odds of the Phalanx winning, even if it worked 100% as intended which again is iffy, is virtually nil because there would simply be too many targets at too fast a speed coming in. The Phalanx is more of a Cold War "here comes a scud" style weapon where you hit this large slow moving target which is what they always used in the tests, slow moving drones and the like, not mach speed tiny fast movers. Then finally you have to remember that WHILE the carrier is looking at this threat you'll have cruisers and destroyers being slammed by skimmers of their own, explosions, ships on fire and sinking, total chaos.
So I just don't see how its supposed to work. The Phalanx just was not designed for that type of threat and the big blue blanket likewise was designed for conventional targets, not insanely fast small missiles coming in from multiple directions. As you pointed out we couldn't guarantee a kill when the carriers were hitting slow lumbering planes piloted by kids that had no training over Okinawa, what are the odds they'll be able to pull it off when the enemy can just keep pushing the button until there are dozens of targets from all directions all skimming at high speed from every direction, probably in the middle of the night just to add to the chaos and confusion? I have a feeling the Mach+ skimmer is gonna do to the carrier what the airplane did to the battleship, make it obsolete. Maybe if you mounted electric guns in sponsons...maybe, even then you're gonna have the problem of keeping enough ammo in the things to keep them effective. Short of some sort or reliable laser weapon i just don't see how you can hit THAT many targets coming from THAT many directions with THAT much speed with conventional weapons and not end up getting hit, i just don't.
And I have NO problem with that, in fact I'd say that they deserve to make every cent of that back and then some. but drugs that end up with 8000% profits? Give me a fucking break. I have a relative on a drug that is costing medicare $117,000 a year, if he went across EITHER border the cost? $12,700. And you KNOW they ain't selling that shit at a loss in those countries, they are literally making 10 times more profits here than there, its bullshit and why our medical system is so fucked. Know how much it costs now to have a baby in Dallas with NO complications? $86,000, no shit, they have jacked the living fuck out of the drugs normally given to keep births from having complications THAT damned much.
That is why this cartoon totally nails the "Apple experience" because what they sell is just the perfect everything, size, form factor, screen...until the sales go down then the NEXT version is the perfect everything. Other companies have tried this and failed but this is why I always gave Jobs and his RDF credit, that man could take the same spin that countless others had tried and he could turn it into pure gold. I mean give the man credit, he could sell AC units at the north pole and end up with a waiting list, the man had serious skills.
Of course it don't look like Cook is gonna be able to keep it up, even reviewers that glossed over the "Ur holding it wrong" iPhone 4 mess were just "meh" about iPhone 5 so we'll have to see if Cook can get a Jobs style buzz going but frankly Steve Jobs was so damned good at his job they can probably coast for the next 5 years and still make a mint, just on the buzz and branding Jobs built. He was THAT good.
But that brings up an interesting question...would ANY pad have sold if Apple didn't have their legion of fans hyping pads? I mean there were tablets before that but they were called what they were "large cell phones that can't make calls" yet when Apple puts out a large cell phone that can't make calls their fans go totally apeshit, I mean lines like its a fucking rock concert apeshit.
So the question becomes 'Would ANY tablet, no matter how well designed, have had a chance if it wasn't for the rabid Apple fan base hyping the form?" and I honestly don't think they would. Remember that this is a fanbase that refused to abandon Apple even when what they were putting out was SHHHHHIIITTTT, we are talking overpriced underpowered pizza boxes, yet they stayed. When the first Jobs blessed good products came out, like the candy colored iMacs they went completely apeshit and hyped the living hell out of them. I remember mac head reviewers talking about these things like they were the second coming! And then came the iPod, which I'll be the first to admit previous MP3 players were too damned menu happy but c'mon, the way the fans, especially the fanboys in the press wrote up the thing you'd think it was the greatest invention since the lightbulb!
And now all are gonna get to see this before their very eyes, as Apple puts out a form factor that Jobs himself said was stupid... I predict it will be a massive hit, because the fanbase will tirelessly blog and review and post and blather on TV about how wonderful a form factor that even Jobs thought was stupid so it'll sell. I mean you had Stewart and Colbert practically dancing with their new iPads, that kind of fanboy loving you just can't buy. While many of the rest of us will still think the same thing when we first saw the tablets...an oversized cell phone that doesn't make phone calls...okay.
Not to mention there are plenty of us who sit outside the whole "Us VS Them" niche and just laugh at the spectacle of it all. that is one of the fun things of the internet, you find out that there are fans and then there are the "ZOMFG you've got to be shitting me? is this the Onion?" type of fans, like The Bronies or the guy with the Tron suit or the nut that went around collecting DNA from every major Star Trek character.
Hell even here we have those that simply like an OS because it suits our needs, be it Linux, OSX, Windows, BSD, whatever, then you get the batshit types that think its ALL a conspiracy to keep "their OS" from achieving world domination, you're Twitters and Robert Pogsons of the world, funny as hell to watch the insane hoop jumps like how you could take ANY world event and Twitter could 6 degrees it back to Bill Gates.
As for why that's all we get in politics? Uhhh...because like pro wrestling its fixed? You have only two parties, both of whom cash the same checks from the same people, control the debates, its all just a show for the masses. At the end of the day the megacorps that write the laws really don't give a rat's ass who wins as they'll cash the check just like the last guy did but if the masses actually woke up and realized it was pro wrestling and the whole thing was kayfabe they'd be pissed, so we have our little soundbites and fake battles every so many years.
Is it depressing? Yep but hell you still have people that believe in pro wrestling or that we didn't land on the moon so its really not surprising how well it works. In the end though I have found this video explains better than I ever could why in the end you are just wasting your time, you can't change a corrupt system by trying to follow the rules of that system, as they'll simply change the rules. Look up the video they have up at Alex Jones of the RNC where they changed the rules to shut up the Ron Paul supporters, they did a voice vote but the results were on the teleprompter before the vote was cast showing it was going their way no matter what.
Its just pro wrestling folks, in the end whether its Nobama or Mittens the same lobbyists will write the same checks to the same congressmen and get the same laws passed, giving more for them and less for you, and there is nothing you can do about it except watch the spectacle.
Because The Core didn't have Liv Tyler looking like a walking Barbie doll while her and Affleck gave the most contrived unbelievable "romance" since Anakin and Padame?
Hell don't feel bad as I'm in the center of a college town with over 30k when the classes are in and even in the center of town with all that college money that's the best you can get.
The simple fact is thanks to crony capitalism we're gonna end up on the short bus to the information superhighway because the megacorps are taking every dime they make and either pocketing it or spending it on more cell phone towers where they can gouge by the minute. In my own area AT&T hasn't moved a single foot nor boosted their speeds in many years, half the town is "if you are on this side you can get cable or DSL, that side of the street can't" and my mom can see both junction boxes and can't get anybody to run it the whole block and a half. Hell I offered to just pay for the damned cable and they wanted $50,000 AND a 5 year contract to run a single block!
So while supposedly "backwoods" countries like Romania get 50Mbps+ we'll be lucky if we get more than 6Mbps anywhere but one of the megacities like NYC, we're just being royally fucked by the ISPs.
Well while some people may not be able to see the downsides I can and more importantly I'll be happy to point them out, even with my own gear. I went with AMD Thuban for myself and my boys and sell only AMD in the shop but I'll be the first to admit that their IPC isn't anywhere near Intel's latest Core chips. I use AMD because the bang for the buck is high and I've found for nearly every task AMD's "good enough" cores do every job I need them to do so paying higher prices for Intel simply doesn't make sense, although I've been sticking to AM3+ over Bulldozer/Piledriver because I've found the "half core" design to be a worse solution than Thuban on anything but server loads.
And again I have NO problem with people buying Apple, if you don't mind the walled garden approach or find that a plus? If you don't mind paying a price premium for often outdated hardware or just like Apple's designs? Then I'm happy for you, I really am. I just don't see any point in making insane logic hoops to jump through to try to make something that isn't true is, like that $1500 Macbook being a "better value" than a $899 laptop with better specs, warranty, and features.
So just find what works for you and be happy, that's my motto. I like Asrock and Gigabyte boards, Asus and Samsung laptops, and AMD CPUs and GPUs, but you'll never see me say that one is "better" than everything else. It may fit a particular use case better than other choices, I may believe you get a better price/performance ratio, but all that is debatable. In the end it comes down to what works best for you and if that is Apple? Go right ahead and use Apple. Oh and as for grandma I have several grandma customers on Win 7, no problems there. Both OSX and Windows has been "grandma friendly" for quite awhile now and for grandma as long as its plug and play and they can get to a browser? They're usually pretty easy to please.
Not to mention the latest reports at places like defense tech have the new Chinese missiles being designed as "skimmers" which is literally a few feet off the top of the water when it gets within visual range of its target. All our missile defense is designed for the classic arc of a Scud style missile using a terminal trajectory hit the target NOT a skimmer. With the height of your average carrier they would be hard pressed to even point the weapons low enough to fire over the head of a Mach 2 skimmer, much less point low enough to hit it.
So I don't see how the "big blue blanket" we've used since WWII, with large groups of cruisers and destroyers surrounding the carrier, is supposed to work if the enemy can just fire off 40 to 50 skimmers and call it a day. At the cost of the cruisers and destroyers per unit even if they don't hit the carriers you're dealing with horrific loss of life and billions sent to the bottom, and if they launch 30 or more at a time I doubt a big blue blanket would have a prayer of stopping the carriers from getting hit as they are just too large a target and too slow to turn.
I have a feeling the cruise skimmer is gonna do to large carrier groups what air power did to the battleship, make it an obsolete sitting duck. All I can think of is the IJN sending Yamato to fight the USN without air cover and how the planes were able to just slam into it in waves, bomb after bomb and torpedo after torpedo until it went to the bottom. With the cruise skimmer it won't cost the enemy a single soldier or sailor and they can just send waves from different directions and overwhelm the task force, doing to the USN what the USN did to Yamato.
Ironically I see the USA making the same mistakes the Axis did in WWII, like Germany we are building insanely expensive and hard to build and maintain aircraft while the enemy builds cheap, reliable, and easy to maintain aircraft. As we saw in WWII having a few quality planes really doesn't help when your enemy can put 8 to 1 odds against and unlike WWII the F-22 and F-35 really aren't that much better than the MiG 29 and SU 35, not 8 to 1 better, and like the IJN we are relying on old tactics like the big blue blanket that with modern tech is REALLY outdated. We've basically gotten a free pass so far as we've only gone against technologically inferior enemies, but if we face a modern high tech military we would probably be in serious trouble.
Actually I'd say his remarks on big pharma show his common sense? Really not that great. Do you know who pays for the research for most new drugs? YOU DO, as the majority are being found by universities who then sell the patents to big pharma. The biggest cost to big pharma? ADVERTISING, we are talking 8 to 1 last figures i saw.
So no having crazy patents laws isn't required for ANY industry, it just lets a handful rake in insane profits (such as the often noted 8000% profit drugs that are causing our medical costs to spiral out of control) while shafting the consumer. I'm all for sane patents and copyrights, along with a maximum profit limit for big pharma (lets face it if they can't make money with 100% profit per sale? they probably shouldn't be in business) but unless/until we can get the blatant bribery out of government copyrights and patents will remain a joke, a way for those that got big to maintain their hold on the market by setting up tollbooths.
I think we agree but see different ways of fixing the problem. you think the ISPs should just start rolling it out which will give more people training, I don't think it will because they'll be too busy screening the calls from pissed off customers with broken connections. I think the/8s should be re-allocated but THEN the government should put timetables with SEVERE penalties upon the ISPs, block ALL sales of equipment that isn't IPV6 ready, and maybe even have an incentive program like we did where people got low cost converters when the analog TV went, only if you showed your ISP bill you could get a lowered cost router that was IPV6 capable in return for you handing in your old units for recycling. Finally incentives to get students into IT and specifically networking, perhaps letting them get their degrees for little to no cost, because with all the lowballing and H1-Bs we've just about killed any incentive to go into networking and we just don't have the manpower we need.
We BOTH agree that its gonna have to happen, I simply think letting the ISPs handle it will be a clusterfuck as they are more concerned about their quarterly stock earnings than the national infrastructure. traditionally infrastructure has been handled by the government and if there was ever a time when they needed to put their foot down and set an end date NOW would be the time, but its still gonna take time and that is what reallocating all those currently wasted/8s would do, let us have a couple of years while the clock runs down and people and equipment are put into place for the final pulling of the switch.
Because I can tell you myself and a lot of the greybeards have already decided we aren't gonna deal with IPV6, in my area nobody offers it and by the time they roll it out I'd have to cram like mad and just trial and error the damned thing, and with the malware guys sitting on the sidelines like jackals with bibs on just waiting to fuck every system that isn't set up perfectly its gonna be a mess that i just don't want to deal with.
Hell did you see that article recently where everything from routers to finished PCs coming from China were found to have malware? All they have to do is wait for the greedy stupid Americans to put some of their cheap hardware in the right place and then help themselves.
Uhhh...you DO realize the reported range of the new Chinese missiles is 700 miles...yes? Its not like they need to be able to see the boat to actually hit you, all they need is a spotter or even a sat and they can sit back in their nice AC cooled trailer and smack your ass.
And don't EVEN get me started on the F-35, its a trillion dollar turkey and between that and the F-22 we are making the same dumbass mistake that Germany made in WWII, going for high tech over quantity. The problem is you can get a MiG 29 for less than 60 mil fully loaded, a SU-35 for around half that so any nation that goes against us would be able to spam our asses and the MiG and SU? Really not bad aircraft and at 6 to 1 I'll take the guy with 6 over the guy with 1, especially when that 1 is gonna be a technical PITA that is gonna need insane amounts of work between missions. if it were up to me I'd scrap the F-35, buy more F-15s and F-16s and then put out a proposal like we did in WWII where we say 'We want a plane that does X, most we will spend per plane is Y" and then they don't get a dime until we have a flight ready prototype in our hands.
But I really think you are underestimating the new anti-ship missiles coming down the pipe, China is hoping to have one with 1000 mile range within the next 3 years and even with just a 400-500 mile range they can still cause a world of pain and you won't even know where the hell they are coming from until its too damned late.
Well the bitch is once in awhile...and its rare, its like a planetary alignment, he will say something that actually make sense. hell I even agreed with him twice, crazy i know.
The first time was a few years back when they caught that NYC guy with a failed bomb and while the right wing wanted to go "enemy combatant" and take away his rights Beck said "You don't trash the constitution to get the bad guys, we're supposed to be better than that"..I can't find any fault with that statement, you really shouldn't trash the constitution just to get the bad guy. The second time was when there was talk of the US going into Iran and Libya and he said it was "time for the USA to be Switzerland and get the hell out of there"...again, can't find fault with that statement, between the military and the CIA we've been stirring shit all over the planet and it IS time to be Switzerland and stay the fuck out of everyone else's business.
So while I think Beck and Alex Jones and the other "Its all a conspiracy!" nuts are just that every once in a while they actually say something that is true. I guess its like a broken clock being right twice a day, who knows. Most of the time though? Crazy as a loon.
Not to mention the amount of power you can get on the low end of the PC scale is just insane now. I mean you can choose an i3 office laptop or an AMD quad if you want more gaming capable graphics for around $400 now and we are talking 4-8Gb of RAM, DVD burner, 500Gb HDD, nice 17 inch screen, its just nuts. And the build quality on a lot of those are...actually quite nice. I've had no complaints from those who've had me get them one of the new Samsung or Asus quad AMDs and I'm quite happy with my EEE netbook, had it nearly 2 years now without a problem and even the battery is holding up pretty well with over 5 hours on a charge.
So I find it funny that people talk of a "Microsoft tax" when on basic and home thanks to trialware its actually a "Microsoft tax break" as the trialware actually covers Windows and lets them sell the units for lower prices, while Apple units will be priced at a premium even when the hardware that is in them is frankly old hat compared to the latest Intel and AMD offerings.
But if you like Apple's sense of fashion, if you need Unix support for some reason, or just perfer OSX and don't mind paying the extra money for the privilege? Then I'm happy for you and hope you enjoy your purchase, I really do. But don't make these crazy logic hoops to jump through to try to justify your choice as its just silly. I mean do you see Ferrari owners jumping through hoops to claim that Ferrari is a "better value" than a Mustang or Corvette? Of course not, so don't jump through hoops Apple users, the only opinion that should matter is your own.
Of course I have a theory that the reason why they feel they need to jump through hoops is there is a little niggling doubt sitting on their shoulder that keeps whispering "You paid too much" in their ear and the only way they can shut the niggler up is to get people to agree with them, but that's just a theory.
The problem this is gonna have, is the same problem all sci-fi weapons have, and that is power.
To feed these things at a decent enough size to take the place of our old battleships in the shore bombardment role you are gonna need nuclear powered ships to feed it and nuclear powered ships are naturally rather large. The question, which is gonna become even bigger as time goes on, is whether building large ships will be logical in the wake of anti-ship missiles becoming cheap and powerful. Just as the carrier made the battleship obsolete so too may we see a day when the large carriers, cruisers, and destroyers become obsolete because your enemy can just launch anti-ship missiles at you until your ship sinks.
With our large bombers we can launch those from halfway around the world and hit a target but with a nuclear powered boat other than a sub you have a pretty large target that can't really move or dodge very well against missiles that can go insanely fast, be launched from just about anywhere, and are becoming cheaper by the day.
So while this is cool tech I have to wonder if like the age of the battleship its a tech whose time will be passed before the first ship sets sail. Unless we can find a way to make anti-ship missiles a non threat, which may be possible, after all we have seen those "electric guns" put out insane sheets of explosive rounds that could conceivably just grind the missiles up before they hit the ship, then frankly this tech won't be useful except in attacking your tech poor "jihadist with an AK" type. And if that is the ones you are gonna target why not just use what we have now? Its not like they can do anything against an F-18 at 35k feet with a smart bomb as it is.
Must be nice...if you can get it. The elephant in the room of course is most of us have NO choice and since we can't just abandon our families and move the duopolies pretty much have you by the balls.
In my area your "choices" are AT&T, which hasn't moved an inch in over a decade and you'll pay $45 a month for a top speed of 3.5Mbps down and a pathetic 700k up, and that is if you are lucky and the planets align, otherwise you are looking at 2Mbps down and as low as 200k up. Then there is Cablelynx which I believe is a subsidiary of Cox, where you get anywhere from 12Mbps down to 20Mbps down but you have a cap of just 36Gb for residential and 76Gb business (although those of us that were grandfathered in seem to have a LOT of leeway while those that came after don't) with prices of $65 for just bare cable and $120 a month for the bundle. Both of those are with 2 year contracts, no contracts you are looking at $90 and $150 respectively so your ass damned well better sign on the dotted line. Finally the newest is a WISP which I predict like the last 2 WISP attempts won't last long because they have a top speed of 2Mbps down and charge $90 a month for that on top of a $175 installation fee and their service is hit or miss with a LOT more miss than hit.
So as you can see the plans pretty much cut out the poor, not that anybody other than the WISP provides them service at all because the cable and DSL both end before you get even halfway across town and neither have ANY plans to upgrade shit or move a single inch, for example my mother can literally see both the cable and DSL junction from her porch but neither will run the whole block and a half to her home so she's stuck on the shitty WISP.
What we need is to open up the lines to competition, just as we did when we broke up AT&T and allowed dialup companies to compete on those lines. if they want a monopoly? We'll be happy to give it to them for running fiber to the neighborhood and hooking up those houses they've ignored for years. We even have a reason to grab those lines as we already paid over 200 billion in tax breaks and incentives to get the ISPs to run national broadband but all we got for all that money was a low res Goatse as they instead spent the money on more cell towers so they can gouge more money with cell plans than they can gouge out of home users. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to see corps like AT&T get out of DSL entirely as they can make so much more money charging for every SMS and minute of usage whereas they would actually have to spend money to upgrade their aging lines to compete with cable.
Bah! You are simply uninformed brother as all that know the truth know the future is recycling and renewables! To avert this disaster we need to recycle all that FORTRAN and C code to to more number efficient formats with higher letter to number ratios such as Java and.NET, just as replacing all those piggish P4s with energy efficient low power chips saves energy so too can replacing number sucking code with more letter heavy code can save TONS of ones and zeroes a year and is better for the environment to boot!
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And sadly that is EXACTLY what we are gonna get. No more open Windows platform to build on, you have the Apple walled garden or the Ersatz Apple walled garden...wonderful.
I have never more openly and fervently hoped a company would fail like I want MSFT to fail now, maybe if Ballmer shits enough money down the toilet we'll get lucky and the board will revolt and bring someone in who can do something other than ape Apple poorly, as that seems to be the ONLY strategy Ballmer knows. How pathetic and sad.
I'm sorry but that's bullshit. Can I have my networks shares when i return from sleep? yep. Can I listen to music or watch video while transferring files? yep. Does Win 7 have "senior moments" where the whole OS just freezes for a few seconds? Nope. Does Win 7 thrash the living fuck out of the hard drive? Nope.
So sorry, but I call bullshit. UAC was NEVER the problem, it was annoying but could be easily turned off and with Win 7 there isn't even a point turning it off. No the problem with Vista was it was rushed out the door with several problems in the kernel and I/O subsystems that never did get fixed. I can place Win 7 and Vista side by side on this nice hexacore machine and the difference is like night and day, 7 is smooth as butter and runs great, Vista is a thrashy buggy POS.
That ain't the problem friend, as someone who builds AMD exclusively I'll be HAPPY to tell you what the problem is, the problem is they FIRED all their engineers for computer layouts and tried to push a server chip onto the consumer market!
Here are some facts, FACT.-1- The AMD Bobcat was selling as fast as they could crank them suckers out, they were great for netbooks and even average user laptops and the OEMs were all ready to slap the new quad bobcats into tons of units, what happened? they canceled it. FACT.-2- The morons at AMD didn't bother to actually tell MSFT what they were doing so now ALL versions of Windows except for Windows 8 will tie a boat anchor to any Faildozer "half core" design" because the OS doesn't realize each module only has one FP unit so it'll slap two FP heavy threads on one module, just killing performance. FACT.-3- They KNEW before it came out that Faildozer was too hot, too power sucking, and didn't have the performance of the Thuban and Zosma chips, what did they do? they priced it against the fricking Core i5 2500K, a fricking monster of a chip, and to add insult to injury canceled the Thubans! They were getting damned near 100% yields on the Thubans, because one or two bad cores? Make it a Zosma quad. 3 bad cores? Phenom Triple. Bad cache? Athlon. And because they were having near 100% yields they could sell them cheap and still make good money, whereas the BD/PD design is expensive to make, hard to get decent yields on, and to make a profit they have to price them against chips that curbstomp them, what idiots!
Hell I could go on all day but why bother? AMD's biggest problem is NOT Intel, its frankly piss poor management. their only real hope now is the head chip designer they lured away from Apple recently, if he can come up with a design that replaces faildozer and puts them back in the game they'll have a shot. Hell let ME run that company and they'd be doing better! I'd kill the socket mess they are in now, settle on just two LGA sockets, one for server and one for desktop, I'd keep the integer heavy BD/PD design for servers ONLY and I'd be pushing $120 Thubans unlocked and $100 Lianos while I'd be riding the shit out of the engineers to give me a quad core Bobcat yesterday. Finally I'd tell my new Apple guy he had free reign, just make me a damned good low power chip, whatever you gotta do to make it happen? DO IT.
They HAD a damned good niche carved out. To steal a line from Steve Jobs "Intel doesn't have to lose for AMD to win" as there is a LOT of money that could be made by owning the low end to midrange market, but AMD has been pissing it away with bad designs, chips like Faildozer that cost too damned much to make while giving the consumer too little performance, and not cranking out sequels to the excellent low power Bobcats. Picture a next gen Bobcat Transformer style tablet, all your windows apps and all day battery life when hooked into the keyboard cradle and all for less than $550, who wouldn't want that? Hell with the price they were able to get the C series Bobcats cranked out for they could have the tablets start at $299 and make good money and again ALL your Windows programs would run...easy sale.
Go to Tigerdirect, they have the SystemMax line where you pick what you want (including with or without OS) and they build it for you. of course if you want a desktop I'd just buy one of their kits, building a modern desktop PC is so simple they come with picture than any kid could follow, but for laptops I'd look at SystemMax.
Like they did with Vista? Oh wait, nobody bought it so they had to go back to the drawing board and give the people what they wanted with Windows 7.
This is actually an advantage that proprietary has over FOSS, if you don't like Win 8? Don't buy it and if enough agree with you and don't buy it they'll have to go back to the drawing board or watch the company go down the shitter. Don't like Gnome Shell or Unity? Tough fucking shit, they don't owe you a damned thing and don't give a shit WHAT you think. its their personal playtoy and if you don't like it you can go piss off.
So if you hate Win 8 join us that aren't gonna buy it, or machines running it, we'll see Win 7 rushed out by the OEMs who'll just drop a Win 8 DVD nobody will use in the bottom of the box to give Ballmer some bullshit numbers and everything will go back to normal. Hopefully the board gets tired of Bill's little buddy and punts his ass like a 30 yard field return and the next guy actually listens to the customers, that's how it works. All you can do in FOSS is play the distro shuffle and hope the part you have a problem with isn't a core component everyone uses because again, they don't owe you a damned thing, its free, like it or lump it.
Personally I'll stick with the OS where I can skip 2 major releases (XP and Vista) and still be supported with updates until I decide they put out a product I liked with Win 7. You could go straight from 2K to 7 if you wanted and been under patch support the entire time, you just can't do that in FOSS land unless you have the money for a major support contract.
Nooo..what MSFT hasn't fucking learned and what I would just LOVE to dress up in a suit of armor with a large flounder and Monty Python style beat into their thick skulls is THERE IS NO POINT TO HAVING A WINDOWS THAT DOESN'T RUN WINDOWS SOFTWARE!!! Which you think would be so fucking obvious you wouldn't even have to point this out but apparently Steve Ballmer thinks he has the other Steve's product and can sell people on look and feel. No you can't Ballmer as NOBODY wants Windows, what they WANT is to RUN THEIR SOFTWARE which requires your platform moron!
Why is that so God damned hard to understand? what MSFT should be doing is royally kissing the ass of AMD and Intel and begging on bended knee for them to get the new Atoms and Bobcats out and into tablets, THAT is what people would actually want Windows for. With those you could then have a Transformer style design, where you pop it into a keyboard cradle with an extra battery and tada! You have a 9-12 hour laptop, pop it out the cradle and you have a 3-5 hour tablet and in both forms it will run your Windows software which is the ONLY reason people want Windows for in the first place!
Sheesh, maybe when WinRT and Win 8 goes the way of WinCE and Vista somebody there will get bitchslapped with the clue bat but until then me and many of the retailers will just sit back shaking their heads and wondering WTF they are thinking. I'm just glad I've switched my customers and family over to Win 7 so I can just avoid the disaster as I have a feeling I'm gonna have a lot of pissed off people bringing me tablets they bought in other stores going "It SAYS its Windows, why won't my software run?" and then having to tell them they got fucked and the only thing it'll run is cell phone crap.
The only positive? I missed getting a Touchpad and i have a feeling Woot! will have WinPads in 6 months at firesale prices, for $100 I'll take a nice dual core pad to play with,but unlike the public I'll know what ARM is and know that its worthless for anything but browsing and playing Angry Birds.
Except they won't NEED railguns to sink your ships, they can just spam you with Mach 2 sea skimmers which they buy from someone like China in bulk.
As Stalin said in WWII "Quantity has a quality all its own" and with those you can literally fire a half a dozen off the back of a semi and be gone before the last one has even left you sight, that will make it DAMN hard to take out before launch and with the hit or miss (mostly miss) record of the Phalanx and the fact that it has a max of 15 bursts it really wouldn't take too many shots of sea skimmer before your sailors are doing the backstroke.
Nice to see I'm not the only one that sees the big "uh oh" here Crosshair84, as you noted the Phalanx has always been a hit or miss weapon in terms of reliability, sadly like most of the shit we've made since the 80s when defense contractors could pad the living hell out of the bill.
In the end though just picturing a likely battle scenario would show how worthless the Phalanx would be in that situation. You have 8-12 skimmers coming in hard and fast, 10-20 feet off the water, multiple vectors. these things are going at over Mach, possibly Mach 2 or even 3, they are small, and because they are coming AT you you have an even smaller area to aim at. The odds of the Phalanx winning, even if it worked 100% as intended which again is iffy, is virtually nil because there would simply be too many targets at too fast a speed coming in. The Phalanx is more of a Cold War "here comes a scud" style weapon where you hit this large slow moving target which is what they always used in the tests, slow moving drones and the like, not mach speed tiny fast movers. Then finally you have to remember that WHILE the carrier is looking at this threat you'll have cruisers and destroyers being slammed by skimmers of their own, explosions, ships on fire and sinking, total chaos.
So I just don't see how its supposed to work. The Phalanx just was not designed for that type of threat and the big blue blanket likewise was designed for conventional targets, not insanely fast small missiles coming in from multiple directions. As you pointed out we couldn't guarantee a kill when the carriers were hitting slow lumbering planes piloted by kids that had no training over Okinawa, what are the odds they'll be able to pull it off when the enemy can just keep pushing the button until there are dozens of targets from all directions all skimming at high speed from every direction, probably in the middle of the night just to add to the chaos and confusion? I have a feeling the Mach+ skimmer is gonna do to the carrier what the airplane did to the battleship, make it obsolete. Maybe if you mounted electric guns in sponsons...maybe, even then you're gonna have the problem of keeping enough ammo in the things to keep them effective. Short of some sort or reliable laser weapon i just don't see how you can hit THAT many targets coming from THAT many directions with THAT much speed with conventional weapons and not end up getting hit, i just don't.
And I have NO problem with that, in fact I'd say that they deserve to make every cent of that back and then some. but drugs that end up with 8000% profits? Give me a fucking break. I have a relative on a drug that is costing medicare $117,000 a year, if he went across EITHER border the cost? $12,700. And you KNOW they ain't selling that shit at a loss in those countries, they are literally making 10 times more profits here than there, its bullshit and why our medical system is so fucked. Know how much it costs now to have a baby in Dallas with NO complications? $86,000, no shit, they have jacked the living fuck out of the drugs normally given to keep births from having complications THAT damned much.
That is why this cartoon totally nails the "Apple experience" because what they sell is just the perfect everything, size, form factor, screen...until the sales go down then the NEXT version is the perfect everything. Other companies have tried this and failed but this is why I always gave Jobs and his RDF credit, that man could take the same spin that countless others had tried and he could turn it into pure gold. I mean give the man credit, he could sell AC units at the north pole and end up with a waiting list, the man had serious skills.
Of course it don't look like Cook is gonna be able to keep it up, even reviewers that glossed over the "Ur holding it wrong" iPhone 4 mess were just "meh" about iPhone 5 so we'll have to see if Cook can get a Jobs style buzz going but frankly Steve Jobs was so damned good at his job they can probably coast for the next 5 years and still make a mint, just on the buzz and branding Jobs built. He was THAT good.
But that brings up an interesting question...would ANY pad have sold if Apple didn't have their legion of fans hyping pads? I mean there were tablets before that but they were called what they were "large cell phones that can't make calls" yet when Apple puts out a large cell phone that can't make calls their fans go totally apeshit, I mean lines like its a fucking rock concert apeshit.
So the question becomes 'Would ANY tablet, no matter how well designed, have had a chance if it wasn't for the rabid Apple fan base hyping the form?" and I honestly don't think they would. Remember that this is a fanbase that refused to abandon Apple even when what they were putting out was SHHHHHIIITTTT, we are talking overpriced underpowered pizza boxes, yet they stayed. When the first Jobs blessed good products came out, like the candy colored iMacs they went completely apeshit and hyped the living hell out of them. I remember mac head reviewers talking about these things like they were the second coming! And then came the iPod, which I'll be the first to admit previous MP3 players were too damned menu happy but c'mon, the way the fans, especially the fanboys in the press wrote up the thing you'd think it was the greatest invention since the lightbulb!
And now all are gonna get to see this before their very eyes, as Apple puts out a form factor that Jobs himself said was stupid... I predict it will be a massive hit, because the fanbase will tirelessly blog and review and post and blather on TV about how wonderful a form factor that even Jobs thought was stupid so it'll sell. I mean you had Stewart and Colbert practically dancing with their new iPads, that kind of fanboy loving you just can't buy. While many of the rest of us will still think the same thing when we first saw the tablets...an oversized cell phone that doesn't make phone calls...okay.
Not to mention there are plenty of us who sit outside the whole "Us VS Them" niche and just laugh at the spectacle of it all. that is one of the fun things of the internet, you find out that there are fans and then there are the "ZOMFG you've got to be shitting me? is this the Onion?" type of fans, like The Bronies or the guy with the Tron suit or the nut that went around collecting DNA from every major Star Trek character.
Hell even here we have those that simply like an OS because it suits our needs, be it Linux, OSX, Windows, BSD, whatever, then you get the batshit types that think its ALL a conspiracy to keep "their OS" from achieving world domination, you're Twitters and Robert Pogsons of the world, funny as hell to watch the insane hoop jumps like how you could take ANY world event and Twitter could 6 degrees it back to Bill Gates.
As for why that's all we get in politics? Uhhh...because like pro wrestling its fixed? You have only two parties, both of whom cash the same checks from the same people, control the debates, its all just a show for the masses. At the end of the day the megacorps that write the laws really don't give a rat's ass who wins as they'll cash the check just like the last guy did but if the masses actually woke up and realized it was pro wrestling and the whole thing was kayfabe they'd be pissed, so we have our little soundbites and fake battles every so many years.
Is it depressing? Yep but hell you still have people that believe in pro wrestling or that we didn't land on the moon so its really not surprising how well it works. In the end though I have found this video explains better than I ever could why in the end you are just wasting your time, you can't change a corrupt system by trying to follow the rules of that system, as they'll simply change the rules. Look up the video they have up at Alex Jones of the RNC where they changed the rules to shut up the Ron Paul supporters, they did a voice vote but the results were on the teleprompter before the vote was cast showing it was going their way no matter what.
Its just pro wrestling folks, in the end whether its Nobama or Mittens the same lobbyists will write the same checks to the same congressmen and get the same laws passed, giving more for them and less for you, and there is nothing you can do about it except watch the spectacle.
Because The Core didn't have Liv Tyler looking like a walking Barbie doll while her and Affleck gave the most contrived unbelievable "romance" since Anakin and Padame?
Hell don't feel bad as I'm in the center of a college town with over 30k when the classes are in and even in the center of town with all that college money that's the best you can get.
The simple fact is thanks to crony capitalism we're gonna end up on the short bus to the information superhighway because the megacorps are taking every dime they make and either pocketing it or spending it on more cell phone towers where they can gouge by the minute. In my own area AT&T hasn't moved a single foot nor boosted their speeds in many years, half the town is "if you are on this side you can get cable or DSL, that side of the street can't" and my mom can see both junction boxes and can't get anybody to run it the whole block and a half. Hell I offered to just pay for the damned cable and they wanted $50,000 AND a 5 year contract to run a single block!
So while supposedly "backwoods" countries like Romania get 50Mbps+ we'll be lucky if we get more than 6Mbps anywhere but one of the megacities like NYC, we're just being royally fucked by the ISPs.
Well while some people may not be able to see the downsides I can and more importantly I'll be happy to point them out, even with my own gear. I went with AMD Thuban for myself and my boys and sell only AMD in the shop but I'll be the first to admit that their IPC isn't anywhere near Intel's latest Core chips. I use AMD because the bang for the buck is high and I've found for nearly every task AMD's "good enough" cores do every job I need them to do so paying higher prices for Intel simply doesn't make sense, although I've been sticking to AM3+ over Bulldozer/Piledriver because I've found the "half core" design to be a worse solution than Thuban on anything but server loads.
And again I have NO problem with people buying Apple, if you don't mind the walled garden approach or find that a plus? If you don't mind paying a price premium for often outdated hardware or just like Apple's designs? Then I'm happy for you, I really am. I just don't see any point in making insane logic hoops to jump through to try to make something that isn't true is, like that $1500 Macbook being a "better value" than a $899 laptop with better specs, warranty, and features.
So just find what works for you and be happy, that's my motto. I like Asrock and Gigabyte boards, Asus and Samsung laptops, and AMD CPUs and GPUs, but you'll never see me say that one is "better" than everything else. It may fit a particular use case better than other choices, I may believe you get a better price/performance ratio, but all that is debatable. In the end it comes down to what works best for you and if that is Apple? Go right ahead and use Apple. Oh and as for grandma I have several grandma customers on Win 7, no problems there. Both OSX and Windows has been "grandma friendly" for quite awhile now and for grandma as long as its plug and play and they can get to a browser? They're usually pretty easy to please.
Not to mention the latest reports at places like defense tech have the new Chinese missiles being designed as "skimmers" which is literally a few feet off the top of the water when it gets within visual range of its target. All our missile defense is designed for the classic arc of a Scud style missile using a terminal trajectory hit the target NOT a skimmer. With the height of your average carrier they would be hard pressed to even point the weapons low enough to fire over the head of a Mach 2 skimmer, much less point low enough to hit it.
So I don't see how the "big blue blanket" we've used since WWII, with large groups of cruisers and destroyers surrounding the carrier, is supposed to work if the enemy can just fire off 40 to 50 skimmers and call it a day. At the cost of the cruisers and destroyers per unit even if they don't hit the carriers you're dealing with horrific loss of life and billions sent to the bottom, and if they launch 30 or more at a time I doubt a big blue blanket would have a prayer of stopping the carriers from getting hit as they are just too large a target and too slow to turn.
I have a feeling the cruise skimmer is gonna do to large carrier groups what air power did to the battleship, make it an obsolete sitting duck. All I can think of is the IJN sending Yamato to fight the USN without air cover and how the planes were able to just slam into it in waves, bomb after bomb and torpedo after torpedo until it went to the bottom. With the cruise skimmer it won't cost the enemy a single soldier or sailor and they can just send waves from different directions and overwhelm the task force, doing to the USN what the USN did to Yamato.
Ironically I see the USA making the same mistakes the Axis did in WWII, like Germany we are building insanely expensive and hard to build and maintain aircraft while the enemy builds cheap, reliable, and easy to maintain aircraft. As we saw in WWII having a few quality planes really doesn't help when your enemy can put 8 to 1 odds against and unlike WWII the F-22 and F-35 really aren't that much better than the MiG 29 and SU 35, not 8 to 1 better, and like the IJN we are relying on old tactics like the big blue blanket that with modern tech is REALLY outdated. We've basically gotten a free pass so far as we've only gone against technologically inferior enemies, but if we face a modern high tech military we would probably be in serious trouble.
Actually I'd say his remarks on big pharma show his common sense? Really not that great. Do you know who pays for the research for most new drugs? YOU DO, as the majority are being found by universities who then sell the patents to big pharma. The biggest cost to big pharma? ADVERTISING, we are talking 8 to 1 last figures i saw.
So no having crazy patents laws isn't required for ANY industry, it just lets a handful rake in insane profits (such as the often noted 8000% profit drugs that are causing our medical costs to spiral out of control) while shafting the consumer. I'm all for sane patents and copyrights, along with a maximum profit limit for big pharma (lets face it if they can't make money with 100% profit per sale? they probably shouldn't be in business) but unless/until we can get the blatant bribery out of government copyrights and patents will remain a joke, a way for those that got big to maintain their hold on the market by setting up tollbooths.
I think we agree but see different ways of fixing the problem. you think the ISPs should just start rolling it out which will give more people training, I don't think it will because they'll be too busy screening the calls from pissed off customers with broken connections. I think the /8s should be re-allocated but THEN the government should put timetables with SEVERE penalties upon the ISPs, block ALL sales of equipment that isn't IPV6 ready, and maybe even have an incentive program like we did where people got low cost converters when the analog TV went, only if you showed your ISP bill you could get a lowered cost router that was IPV6 capable in return for you handing in your old units for recycling. Finally incentives to get students into IT and specifically networking, perhaps letting them get their degrees for little to no cost, because with all the lowballing and H1-Bs we've just about killed any incentive to go into networking and we just don't have the manpower we need.
We BOTH agree that its gonna have to happen, I simply think letting the ISPs handle it will be a clusterfuck as they are more concerned about their quarterly stock earnings than the national infrastructure. traditionally infrastructure has been handled by the government and if there was ever a time when they needed to put their foot down and set an end date NOW would be the time, but its still gonna take time and that is what reallocating all those currently wasted /8s would do, let us have a couple of years while the clock runs down and people and equipment are put into place for the final pulling of the switch.
Because I can tell you myself and a lot of the greybeards have already decided we aren't gonna deal with IPV6, in my area nobody offers it and by the time they roll it out I'd have to cram like mad and just trial and error the damned thing, and with the malware guys sitting on the sidelines like jackals with bibs on just waiting to fuck every system that isn't set up perfectly its gonna be a mess that i just don't want to deal with.
Hell did you see that article recently where everything from routers to finished PCs coming from China were found to have malware? All they have to do is wait for the greedy stupid Americans to put some of their cheap hardware in the right place and then help themselves.
Uhhh...you DO realize the reported range of the new Chinese missiles is 700 miles...yes? Its not like they need to be able to see the boat to actually hit you, all they need is a spotter or even a sat and they can sit back in their nice AC cooled trailer and smack your ass.
And don't EVEN get me started on the F-35, its a trillion dollar turkey and between that and the F-22 we are making the same dumbass mistake that Germany made in WWII, going for high tech over quantity. The problem is you can get a MiG 29 for less than 60 mil fully loaded, a SU-35 for around half that so any nation that goes against us would be able to spam our asses and the MiG and SU? Really not bad aircraft and at 6 to 1 I'll take the guy with 6 over the guy with 1, especially when that 1 is gonna be a technical PITA that is gonna need insane amounts of work between missions. if it were up to me I'd scrap the F-35, buy more F-15s and F-16s and then put out a proposal like we did in WWII where we say 'We want a plane that does X, most we will spend per plane is Y" and then they don't get a dime until we have a flight ready prototype in our hands.
But I really think you are underestimating the new anti-ship missiles coming down the pipe, China is hoping to have one with 1000 mile range within the next 3 years and even with just a 400-500 mile range they can still cause a world of pain and you won't even know where the hell they are coming from until its too damned late.
Well the bitch is once in awhile...and its rare, its like a planetary alignment, he will say something that actually make sense. hell I even agreed with him twice, crazy i know.
The first time was a few years back when they caught that NYC guy with a failed bomb and while the right wing wanted to go "enemy combatant" and take away his rights Beck said "You don't trash the constitution to get the bad guys, we're supposed to be better than that"..I can't find any fault with that statement, you really shouldn't trash the constitution just to get the bad guy. The second time was when there was talk of the US going into Iran and Libya and he said it was "time for the USA to be Switzerland and get the hell out of there"...again, can't find fault with that statement, between the military and the CIA we've been stirring shit all over the planet and it IS time to be Switzerland and stay the fuck out of everyone else's business.
So while I think Beck and Alex Jones and the other "Its all a conspiracy!" nuts are just that every once in a while they actually say something that is true. I guess its like a broken clock being right twice a day, who knows. Most of the time though? Crazy as a loon.
Not to mention the amount of power you can get on the low end of the PC scale is just insane now. I mean you can choose an i3 office laptop or an AMD quad if you want more gaming capable graphics for around $400 now and we are talking 4-8Gb of RAM, DVD burner, 500Gb HDD, nice 17 inch screen, its just nuts. And the build quality on a lot of those are...actually quite nice. I've had no complaints from those who've had me get them one of the new Samsung or Asus quad AMDs and I'm quite happy with my EEE netbook, had it nearly 2 years now without a problem and even the battery is holding up pretty well with over 5 hours on a charge.
So I find it funny that people talk of a "Microsoft tax" when on basic and home thanks to trialware its actually a "Microsoft tax break" as the trialware actually covers Windows and lets them sell the units for lower prices, while Apple units will be priced at a premium even when the hardware that is in them is frankly old hat compared to the latest Intel and AMD offerings.
But if you like Apple's sense of fashion, if you need Unix support for some reason, or just perfer OSX and don't mind paying the extra money for the privilege? Then I'm happy for you and hope you enjoy your purchase, I really do. But don't make these crazy logic hoops to jump through to try to justify your choice as its just silly. I mean do you see Ferrari owners jumping through hoops to claim that Ferrari is a "better value" than a Mustang or Corvette? Of course not, so don't jump through hoops Apple users, the only opinion that should matter is your own.
Of course I have a theory that the reason why they feel they need to jump through hoops is there is a little niggling doubt sitting on their shoulder that keeps whispering "You paid too much" in their ear and the only way they can shut the niggler up is to get people to agree with them, but that's just a theory.
The problem this is gonna have, is the same problem all sci-fi weapons have, and that is power.
To feed these things at a decent enough size to take the place of our old battleships in the shore bombardment role you are gonna need nuclear powered ships to feed it and nuclear powered ships are naturally rather large. The question, which is gonna become even bigger as time goes on, is whether building large ships will be logical in the wake of anti-ship missiles becoming cheap and powerful. Just as the carrier made the battleship obsolete so too may we see a day when the large carriers, cruisers, and destroyers become obsolete because your enemy can just launch anti-ship missiles at you until your ship sinks.
With our large bombers we can launch those from halfway around the world and hit a target but with a nuclear powered boat other than a sub you have a pretty large target that can't really move or dodge very well against missiles that can go insanely fast, be launched from just about anywhere, and are becoming cheaper by the day.
So while this is cool tech I have to wonder if like the age of the battleship its a tech whose time will be passed before the first ship sets sail. Unless we can find a way to make anti-ship missiles a non threat, which may be possible, after all we have seen those "electric guns" put out insane sheets of explosive rounds that could conceivably just grind the missiles up before they hit the ship, then frankly this tech won't be useful except in attacking your tech poor "jihadist with an AK" type. And if that is the ones you are gonna target why not just use what we have now? Its not like they can do anything against an F-18 at 35k feet with a smart bomb as it is.
Must be nice...if you can get it. The elephant in the room of course is most of us have NO choice and since we can't just abandon our families and move the duopolies pretty much have you by the balls.
In my area your "choices" are AT&T, which hasn't moved an inch in over a decade and you'll pay $45 a month for a top speed of 3.5Mbps down and a pathetic 700k up, and that is if you are lucky and the planets align, otherwise you are looking at 2Mbps down and as low as 200k up. Then there is Cablelynx which I believe is a subsidiary of Cox, where you get anywhere from 12Mbps down to 20Mbps down but you have a cap of just 36Gb for residential and 76Gb business (although those of us that were grandfathered in seem to have a LOT of leeway while those that came after don't) with prices of $65 for just bare cable and $120 a month for the bundle. Both of those are with 2 year contracts, no contracts you are looking at $90 and $150 respectively so your ass damned well better sign on the dotted line. Finally the newest is a WISP which I predict like the last 2 WISP attempts won't last long because they have a top speed of 2Mbps down and charge $90 a month for that on top of a $175 installation fee and their service is hit or miss with a LOT more miss than hit.
So as you can see the plans pretty much cut out the poor, not that anybody other than the WISP provides them service at all because the cable and DSL both end before you get even halfway across town and neither have ANY plans to upgrade shit or move a single inch, for example my mother can literally see both the cable and DSL junction from her porch but neither will run the whole block and a half to her home so she's stuck on the shitty WISP.
What we need is to open up the lines to competition, just as we did when we broke up AT&T and allowed dialup companies to compete on those lines. if they want a monopoly? We'll be happy to give it to them for running fiber to the neighborhood and hooking up those houses they've ignored for years. We even have a reason to grab those lines as we already paid over 200 billion in tax breaks and incentives to get the ISPs to run national broadband but all we got for all that money was a low res Goatse as they instead spent the money on more cell towers so they can gouge more money with cell plans than they can gouge out of home users. Frankly I wouldn't be surprised to see corps like AT&T get out of DSL entirely as they can make so much more money charging for every SMS and minute of usage whereas they would actually have to spend money to upgrade their aging lines to compete with cable.
Bah! You are simply uninformed brother as all that know the truth know the future is recycling and renewables! To avert this disaster we need to recycle all that FORTRAN and C code to to more number efficient formats with higher letter to number ratios such as Java and .NET, just as replacing all those piggish P4s with energy efficient low power chips saves energy so too can replacing number sucking code with more letter heavy code can save TONS of ones and zeroes a year and is better for the environment to boot!