There are many steps to development, so it's hard to say if they have a case or not. Some of these things go from the most basic research all the way to final engineering. So if you're at the stage where you're trying to get it to "Hello World" and somebody tests your security, you might have a fair complaint. Or if you've got a working prototype as a technology demonstrator so you can try out different components like sensors or smart munitions or propulsion systems to see if they operate in the kinds of conditions the system will have to operate in, or to see which one gives you the best trade-off between weight and performance or whatever, then it seems fair that you wouldn't have the security working right yet because you're still picking out core hardware pieces that you'll have to integrate with everything else.
>while slipshod security has roughly a 1 in 10 chance of showing its head during a manager's actual reign
Systems that handle classified information are usually (perhaps always; only got involved in a few) validated by another, 3-letter, government agency outside the service. So if your system sucks, I would think there's a good chance the 3-letter agency would find it.
>It is worse in the military, because communication is inherently unidirectional, and they can go years between real world validations (i.e. wars).
This is not as true, if true at all, on the R&D side. I work in one R&D command and we have almost 14,000 people and fewer than 200 military personnel. So you don't see the classic military structure you see in uniform. Also, in the Army, at least, if you're working on an actual system you're probably working for a Program Manager. PMs can have whoever they want do their engineering for them, buy technology from Army labs, Federal labs, industry or international entities. So again, it's not a military structure as the rest of the Army understands it (I'm a retired NCO, so I've been around a pair chunk of the Army).
And the Army Futures Command is going to change a lot of these relationships.
The conservatives know demographics are running against them, that's why they're dropping all pretense of playing ball and doing things like this. Gorsuch gives them decades of a reliable conservative vote on the supreme court, which they need because during those decades the power of the old, white conservative party will be fading. Despite the cat-bird seat they find themselves in now, they lost seats in both houses last time and only stomach the guy in the white house so he can do things like bump up the defense budget and nominate guys like Gorsuch. It's been a good strategy. Take state houses, gerrymander, be the ultimate party of obstruction. But it's breaking down because they empowered the wacko right, which is making them unable to govern and they really don't want to deliver what the voters want anyway. So they had some of the people some of the time, but they need to do something new.
If you look at government reports of this you'll usually see the word "declared" in there. He gave up his "declared" chemical weapons stockpiles, which the Army demilitarized aboard a Navy ship at sea.
I don't see how you can say we're crying about terrorists when obviously we're killing them all the time. In fact, the real problem is we're killing too many people around them. We take over other countries at will, level them, build them back up and then level them again. The only problem we have is we don't know how to quit and go home. You've got to learn to understand the difference between people who are saying things and making noise for a reason -- to get a vote or a donation -- and reality.
I've lived in and visited a lot of places in the world, and we're as safe and free as any major country. You give up some freedom to get orderliness and predictability so you can call the police when somebody tries to make a might vs right argument with you, and trust that your doctor has been to a school that teaches doctoring, etc. They might be freer in some parts of Somalia or something, but they pay a high price for that freedom. Despite all the BS on the internet things haven't changed for people on the ground unless you're an immigrant or you share a few habits that criminals are known to have.
I won't get into whether the government neutered the second amendment, because even if you're right there, your next statement is wrong. The U.S. has, for a lot of various and obvious historical reasons, decided that it had to outpace the rest of the world with military technology. It spends billions on R&D every year and tens of billions on acquiring equipment. The result is weaponry that civilians couldn't hope to own even if it were legal to do so, and equipment that demands highly trained crews and highly trained repair and other support personnel to operate successfully even once in a while, much less keep running and keep current -- which adds up to tens or hundreds of billions more. In other words, in order to keep ahead of -- name your adversary of choice -- the U.S. built a military that no civilian or group of civilians could keep up with no matter what happened with the second amendment. And if you look at the history of how technological advancement is connected to war and military spending, you might come to the conclusion that it was inevitable that it would eventually turn out that way.
And if it hadn't happened that way the most likely result is that we'd be a second- or third-rate power getting pushed around by the Soviet Union or China or whoever, and our lives would be a lot worse and you'd be bitching about how our politicians didn't keep us ahead of our adversaries so we could stay safe and free and so on.
That's the killer question, all right. In Germany they pay just under half. They get health care and pension at 55, iirc. And they bitch about taxes and how expensive everything is just like we do in the U.S. But they basically have no homeless people and have seemingly solved a few other problems I see every day on the way to work (their highways are excellent, for example). And yet they still turn our BMWs and Mercedes that do well in a capitalist marketplace. So, I don't know if 46% or 47% is the number, but I know it's possible to be doing a lot better than we are if you just act like an adult, tally up the shit you really want and then pay for it.
There are only three line items over $500B a year: pensions (including SS), health care (including Medicaid and Medicare) and defense. Your "half a trillion" is a fairy tale. I didn't watch your video, because there's always a conspiracy theory to back up any contention. If we were spending almost as much on welfare for immigrants as we spend on Defense everyone would know it, not just the people who watch certain YouTube videos.
First, you are the government's master, or can be if you want to be. Pay attention when public opinion really swings against something. They jump through their asses like their anuses are on fire. Second, you owe an amount that covers how you benefit. And there's the rub. People want a one-to-one direct correlation they can follow, like a lunch bill. They don't consider what they don't see or don't see directly connected. But, for example, the state department and the defense department make the world safe for American business. They -- and their counterparts in other countries -- make global corporations possible. So the people who benefit more from what the government provides should pay more taxes. People like to look at a person getting $12K or $24K in entitlements and say they're making more from government. Meanwhile, Wal Mart can only sell cheap Chinese goods as inexpensively as they can because the Navy and the Coast Guard make sure the shipping lanes are open and free of pirates. Imagine how costs would soar if our ports looked like the coast off Somalia and the corporations had to pay for their own security, didn't have the State department making treaties and solving problems so they could do business overseas as easily as they can, etc. Wal Mart would go under about three months after their current stock ran out. So the Walton family should pay not only more taxes, but a higher percentage of taxes.
They have to work the public relations side just like those who want less taxes did when some of their economic peers weren't asking for a tax cut. Why invent a new standard now? While most people see any tax cut as an unalloyed good, there are always those who point out that something will have to go away for this to happen. If you pay attention or check the history tax cuts that don't come right after a war are followed fee hikes and new/higher taxes in other areas, as well as budget cuts and decay that happens too slowly to notice. It's expensive to run a modern country.
You need money to move around, whatever else is going on. As current events show, there's essentially no bottom to people's greed, and without some mechanism to force some money out of people they would hoard all the money while their workers lived in the dumpster behind the store and ate cast-off flour and rotting olives. There's no benefit to society there. I've lived in a (former-ish) banana republic like that. Nothing new or innovative happens there, because it all falls into nepotism or crony capitalism. Money has to circulate and people have to be able to create enough of a cushion to take a chance, go to school at night, etc. If we don't have that, we'll be out-competed by societies that do. If you look at our history we did best when the tax structure, minimum wage laws, the GI Bill and union numbers did not favor the rich, they moved money around to people who wouldn't get it in a purely capitalist society.
Pretty sure fluxbox (admittedly a WM, not a DE) does. From the wiki:
"It is possible to force an application to always have the same dimensions, position, and other settings when it is first launched. These settings are saved in the ‘apps’ file.
Most simple settings can be saved using the “Remember” submenu of the window menu, which can usually be opened with a right-click on the titlebar."
I work in the parent organization for the lab in Edgewood Maryland. The lab in Utah belongs to a different command. I'm going to say what you probably expect me to say, which is that we've got really good people. We have people whose work was used in Africa against Ebola, who are working on bar-coding spores, synthetic biology, scanning suspicious mail for the White House and the UN, etc. If you remember the mission during which the U.S. neutralized the Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles, all the actual scientists and engineers but one or two came from our labs, and they also designed the equipment and went to sea to do the de-mil. You may remember it as the Cape Ray mission, but it should probably have been called the Edgewood mission.
One non-obvious reason people work for the Army is that we do things nobody else needs to do. So, for example, Edgewood lab is the only place in the country certified to remove level 4 hazards from explosives. You can't get that kind of excitement just anywhere.
Actually, it's more like drama and conflict. A lot of these stories are neither sensational nor sensationalized. But they're little vignettes of drama and conflict that, taken together, make people think the world is a mass of horrors. Sensationalism does happen, but it's usually a reporter (or often headline writer) who wants to sharpen the focus or drive a point home. That pulls things out of context or balance and when people who know about the story see the article/video, they say it's sensationalized. Really, it's just been made more dramatic.
I know: a distinction without a difference. But this is what I do.
>Only a pittance of it compared to the massive payouts made to other entities. And even then, it was only a small start, while the rest has snowballed on its own.
That's by design to promote U.S. industry. The military does R&D that's so expensive or risky -- or so military-specific -- that industry can't or doesn't want to do it. Then it turns the technology over to industry to use it and eventually build what the DoD needs and then the DoD gives them a bunch of money for what they build. The government doesn't want to compete with industry, it just wants them to build what it needs. The rest, for example most of the technology in the iPhone, is gravy for the industry and the country.
Full disclosure: I work in the clanking heart of the military-industrial complex.
Because 369 of them are to repeal Obamacare and the other one is stupid for different reasons.
Remember, the government was set up so that the various parts could check and balance each other. One Senator can stop a bill if he wants to badly enough. The House, because it controls the money, can stops things as well. And if those two agree the president can veto it. And if all three agree, the courts can still kill it. The founders did that on purpose.
It's not that the Democrats are afraid (I don't think), but that this agreement has become how the Senate does business. They used to force the guy to get up and talk for however long, but now they just take it as a given and move on (except for the pre-arranged show Cruz put on).
It doesn't matter what Reagan's situation was. The parts of government compromised back then. Now they don't. McConnell said it up front: our job is to make sure Obama is a one-term president. The whole tea party movement was predicated on stopping Obama. They did everything they could to ensure that and failed, but they've doubled down ever since.
The other reason it doesn't matter what Reagan did is that we ought to look at successes, not failures.
Because fiscal bills have to come from the House and the Senate kills anything any single senator mentions in the same sentence as the word filibuster, the Republicans have had the power since 2010. Check Senate confirmations. Check budgets. Check government shut downs. So what is there to tell the Democratic Party to shut up about? And really, look at the news, the Repugnicants make all the best noise anyway. It's like watching morons channeling sociopaths in a shouting match.
I keep bringing this up to my "you can get a job if you want one" friends and their eyes glaze over. It's inevitable, and at the same time unthinkable. Even my more liberal friends respond with the more of the same of what they think we should be doing now. The only person who seems to understand is a brother of mine who believes the "elites are going to depopulate the world" theory. I think guaranteed income is a start, and cutting the hours in a work week is a good step. But in this climate (in the U.S.) that's a laughable pipe dream. I think we should go to a freemium concept. You get a 3D printed house and a certain amount of food grown by agricultural robots on federal land. And maybe basic TV and ubiquitous wifi. Anything above that and you have to get a job and pay for it. There are a certain number of people who will just spend their time lying about doing nothing, but I think the majority of people will want something enough to get a job. Also, people who don't have to slave away at something crappy will have the freedom to try something creative. I think a world full of boutique shops -- like etsy but on carts or store fronts -- would spring up.
I bought one of the 11.6" Samsungs last Christmas. It's the machine I take to work/on travel, etc. I also use it like my wife does her iPad -- downstairs in front of the TV, up in the bedroom before bed, etc. For me, it's small, decent to type on and has no fans. I had an iPad at work and a hand-me-down Kindle Fire, but tablets are useless without a keyboard, and then you've essentially got a chromebook.
I have a desktop running Slackware 14.1, and until a few weeks ago a big ol' Dell Precision laptop running Crunchbang. I could put something else on the chromebook, but why? I'm all-in on the google services. At $250 it was a convenience I could afford.
This is even more true this year, when the departments were trying to save every dollar to cut the summer furlough as short as possible. If you're in the war business, you want to save some until the end of the year in case you need to, I don't know, bomb Syria just before year's end.
Full disclosure: I work for one of the commands in this business.
Really? Not using any night vision? No tanks? No radios, no sensors, no gas masks or MREs or uniforms or tents or mortars or... You get the idea. They all come from military R&D. Look up RDECOM (where I work) and i's subordinate RD&E centers and labs.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many steps to development, so it's hard to say if they have a case or not. Some of these things go from the most basic research all the way to final engineering. So if you're at the stage where you're trying to get it to "Hello World" and somebody tests your security, you might have a fair complaint. Or if you've got a working prototype as a technology demonstrator so you can try out different components like sensors or smart munitions or propulsion systems to see if they operate in the kinds of conditions the system will have to operate in, or to see which one gives you the best trade-off between weight and performance or whatever, then it seems fair that you wouldn't have the security working right yet because you're still picking out core hardware pieces that you'll have to integrate with everything else.
>while slipshod security has roughly a 1 in 10 chance of showing its head during a manager's actual reign Systems that handle classified information are usually (perhaps always; only got involved in a few) validated by another, 3-letter, government agency outside the service. So if your system sucks, I would think there's a good chance the 3-letter agency would find it.
>It is worse in the military, because communication is inherently unidirectional, and they can go years between real world validations (i.e. wars). This is not as true, if true at all, on the R&D side. I work in one R&D command and we have almost 14,000 people and fewer than 200 military personnel. So you don't see the classic military structure you see in uniform. Also, in the Army, at least, if you're working on an actual system you're probably working for a Program Manager. PMs can have whoever they want do their engineering for them, buy technology from Army labs, Federal labs, industry or international entities. So again, it's not a military structure as the rest of the Army understands it (I'm a retired NCO, so I've been around a pair chunk of the Army). And the Army Futures Command is going to change a lot of these relationships.
The conservatives know demographics are running against them, that's why they're dropping all pretense of playing ball and doing things like this. Gorsuch gives them decades of a reliable conservative vote on the supreme court, which they need because during those decades the power of the old, white conservative party will be fading. Despite the cat-bird seat they find themselves in now, they lost seats in both houses last time and only stomach the guy in the white house so he can do things like bump up the defense budget and nominate guys like Gorsuch. It's been a good strategy. Take state houses, gerrymander, be the ultimate party of obstruction. But it's breaking down because they empowered the wacko right, which is making them unable to govern and they really don't want to deliver what the voters want anyway. So they had some of the people some of the time, but they need to do something new.
If you look at government reports of this you'll usually see the word "declared" in there. He gave up his "declared" chemical weapons stockpiles, which the Army demilitarized aboard a Navy ship at sea.
Spoken like someone who has never spent time around tanks.
I don't see how you can say we're crying about terrorists when obviously we're killing them all the time. In fact, the real problem is we're killing too many people around them. We take over other countries at will, level them, build them back up and then level them again. The only problem we have is we don't know how to quit and go home. You've got to learn to understand the difference between people who are saying things and making noise for a reason -- to get a vote or a donation -- and reality.
I've lived in and visited a lot of places in the world, and we're as safe and free as any major country. You give up some freedom to get orderliness and predictability so you can call the police when somebody tries to make a might vs right argument with you, and trust that your doctor has been to a school that teaches doctoring, etc. They might be freer in some parts of Somalia or something, but they pay a high price for that freedom. Despite all the BS on the internet things haven't changed for people on the ground unless you're an immigrant or you share a few habits that criminals are known to have.
I won't get into whether the government neutered the second amendment, because even if you're right there, your next statement is wrong. The U.S. has, for a lot of various and obvious historical reasons, decided that it had to outpace the rest of the world with military technology. It spends billions on R&D every year and tens of billions on acquiring equipment. The result is weaponry that civilians couldn't hope to own even if it were legal to do so, and equipment that demands highly trained crews and highly trained repair and other support personnel to operate successfully even once in a while, much less keep running and keep current -- which adds up to tens or hundreds of billions more. In other words, in order to keep ahead of -- name your adversary of choice -- the U.S. built a military that no civilian or group of civilians could keep up with no matter what happened with the second amendment. And if you look at the history of how technological advancement is connected to war and military spending, you might come to the conclusion that it was inevitable that it would eventually turn out that way.
And if it hadn't happened that way the most likely result is that we'd be a second- or third-rate power getting pushed around by the Soviet Union or China or whoever, and our lives would be a lot worse and you'd be bitching about how our politicians didn't keep us ahead of our adversaries so we could stay safe and free and so on.
That's the killer question, all right. In Germany they pay just under half. They get health care and pension at 55, iirc. And they bitch about taxes and how expensive everything is just like we do in the U.S. But they basically have no homeless people and have seemingly solved a few other problems I see every day on the way to work (their highways are excellent, for example). And yet they still turn our BMWs and Mercedes that do well in a capitalist marketplace. So, I don't know if 46% or 47% is the number, but I know it's possible to be doing a lot better than we are if you just act like an adult, tally up the shit you really want and then pay for it.
There are only three line items over $500B a year: pensions (including SS), health care (including Medicaid and Medicare) and defense. Your "half a trillion" is a fairy tale. I didn't watch your video, because there's always a conspiracy theory to back up any contention. If we were spending almost as much on welfare for immigrants as we spend on Defense everyone would know it, not just the people who watch certain YouTube videos.
First, you are the government's master, or can be if you want to be. Pay attention when public opinion really swings against something. They jump through their asses like their anuses are on fire. Second, you owe an amount that covers how you benefit. And there's the rub. People want a one-to-one direct correlation they can follow, like a lunch bill. They don't consider what they don't see or don't see directly connected. But, for example, the state department and the defense department make the world safe for American business. They -- and their counterparts in other countries -- make global corporations possible. So the people who benefit more from what the government provides should pay more taxes. People like to look at a person getting $12K or $24K in entitlements and say they're making more from government. Meanwhile, Wal Mart can only sell cheap Chinese goods as inexpensively as they can because the Navy and the Coast Guard make sure the shipping lanes are open and free of pirates. Imagine how costs would soar if our ports looked like the coast off Somalia and the corporations had to pay for their own security, didn't have the State department making treaties and solving problems so they could do business overseas as easily as they can, etc. Wal Mart would go under about three months after their current stock ran out. So the Walton family should pay not only more taxes, but a higher percentage of taxes.
They have to work the public relations side just like those who want less taxes did when some of their economic peers weren't asking for a tax cut. Why invent a new standard now? While most people see any tax cut as an unalloyed good, there are always those who point out that something will have to go away for this to happen. If you pay attention or check the history tax cuts that don't come right after a war are followed fee hikes and new/higher taxes in other areas, as well as budget cuts and decay that happens too slowly to notice. It's expensive to run a modern country.
You need money to move around, whatever else is going on. As current events show, there's essentially no bottom to people's greed, and without some mechanism to force some money out of people they would hoard all the money while their workers lived in the dumpster behind the store and ate cast-off flour and rotting olives. There's no benefit to society there. I've lived in a (former-ish) banana republic like that. Nothing new or innovative happens there, because it all falls into nepotism or crony capitalism. Money has to circulate and people have to be able to create enough of a cushion to take a chance, go to school at night, etc. If we don't have that, we'll be out-competed by societies that do. If you look at our history we did best when the tax structure, minimum wage laws, the GI Bill and union numbers did not favor the rich, they moved money around to people who wouldn't get it in a purely capitalist society.
Pretty sure fluxbox (admittedly a WM, not a DE) does. From the wiki: "It is possible to force an application to always have the same dimensions, position, and other settings when it is first launched. These settings are saved in the ‘apps’ file. Most simple settings can be saved using the “Remember” submenu of the window menu, which can usually be opened with a right-click on the titlebar."
I work in the parent organization for the lab in Edgewood Maryland. The lab in Utah belongs to a different command. I'm going to say what you probably expect me to say, which is that we've got really good people. We have people whose work was used in Africa against Ebola, who are working on bar-coding spores, synthetic biology, scanning suspicious mail for the White House and the UN, etc. If you remember the mission during which the U.S. neutralized the Syrian chemical weapons stockpiles, all the actual scientists and engineers but one or two came from our labs, and they also designed the equipment and went to sea to do the de-mil. You may remember it as the Cape Ray mission, but it should probably have been called the Edgewood mission.
One non-obvious reason people work for the Army is that we do things nobody else needs to do. So, for example, Edgewood lab is the only place in the country certified to remove level 4 hazards from explosives. You can't get that kind of excitement just anywhere.
Actually, it's more like drama and conflict. A lot of these stories are neither sensational nor sensationalized. But they're little vignettes of drama and conflict that, taken together, make people think the world is a mass of horrors. Sensationalism does happen, but it's usually a reporter (or often headline writer) who wants to sharpen the focus or drive a point home. That pulls things out of context or balance and when people who know about the story see the article/video, they say it's sensationalized. Really, it's just been made more dramatic. I know: a distinction without a difference. But this is what I do.
>Only a pittance of it compared to the massive payouts made to other entities. And even then, it was only a small start, while the rest has snowballed on its own. That's by design to promote U.S. industry. The military does R&D that's so expensive or risky -- or so military-specific -- that industry can't or doesn't want to do it. Then it turns the technology over to industry to use it and eventually build what the DoD needs and then the DoD gives them a bunch of money for what they build. The government doesn't want to compete with industry, it just wants them to build what it needs. The rest, for example most of the technology in the iPhone, is gravy for the industry and the country. Full disclosure: I work in the clanking heart of the military-industrial complex.
Because 369 of them are to repeal Obamacare and the other one is stupid for different reasons. Remember, the government was set up so that the various parts could check and balance each other. One Senator can stop a bill if he wants to badly enough. The House, because it controls the money, can stops things as well. And if those two agree the president can veto it. And if all three agree, the courts can still kill it. The founders did that on purpose.
It's not that the Democrats are afraid (I don't think), but that this agreement has become how the Senate does business. They used to force the guy to get up and talk for however long, but now they just take it as a given and move on (except for the pre-arranged show Cruz put on). It doesn't matter what Reagan's situation was. The parts of government compromised back then. Now they don't. McConnell said it up front: our job is to make sure Obama is a one-term president. The whole tea party movement was predicated on stopping Obama. They did everything they could to ensure that and failed, but they've doubled down ever since. The other reason it doesn't matter what Reagan did is that we ought to look at successes, not failures.
Because fiscal bills have to come from the House and the Senate kills anything any single senator mentions in the same sentence as the word filibuster, the Republicans have had the power since 2010. Check Senate confirmations. Check budgets. Check government shut downs. So what is there to tell the Democratic Party to shut up about? And really, look at the news, the Repugnicants make all the best noise anyway. It's like watching morons channeling sociopaths in a shouting match.
The Army has conducted several successful tests of this. Video of one is here.
I keep bringing this up to my "you can get a job if you want one" friends and their eyes glaze over. It's inevitable, and at the same time unthinkable. Even my more liberal friends respond with the more of the same of what they think we should be doing now. The only person who seems to understand is a brother of mine who believes the "elites are going to depopulate the world" theory. I think guaranteed income is a start, and cutting the hours in a work week is a good step. But in this climate (in the U.S.) that's a laughable pipe dream. I think we should go to a freemium concept. You get a 3D printed house and a certain amount of food grown by agricultural robots on federal land. And maybe basic TV and ubiquitous wifi. Anything above that and you have to get a job and pay for it. There are a certain number of people who will just spend their time lying about doing nothing, but I think the majority of people will want something enough to get a job. Also, people who don't have to slave away at something crappy will have the freedom to try something creative. I think a world full of boutique shops -- like etsy but on carts or store fronts -- would spring up.
I bought one of the 11.6" Samsungs last Christmas. It's the machine I take to work/on travel, etc. I also use it like my wife does her iPad -- downstairs in front of the TV, up in the bedroom before bed, etc. For me, it's small, decent to type on and has no fans. I had an iPad at work and a hand-me-down Kindle Fire, but tablets are useless without a keyboard, and then you've essentially got a chromebook. I have a desktop running Slackware 14.1, and until a few weeks ago a big ol' Dell Precision laptop running Crunchbang. I could put something else on the chromebook, but why? I'm all-in on the google services. At $250 it was a convenience I could afford.
This is even more true this year, when the departments were trying to save every dollar to cut the summer furlough as short as possible. If you're in the war business, you want to save some until the end of the year in case you need to, I don't know, bomb Syria just before year's end. Full disclosure: I work for one of the commands in this business.
Really? Not using any night vision? No tanks? No radios, no sensors, no gas masks or MREs or uniforms or tents or mortars or... You get the idea. They all come from military R&D. Look up RDECOM (where I work) and i's subordinate RD&E centers and labs.