That is still a fitting description of the vast majority of light airplanes today, as most of the fleet is rather old and hasn't changed much since the 70s. Newer (read expensive) light aircraft often have fancy avionics and instruments, but the engines and most other systems are still generally at a 1930s or 1940s tech level.
The biggest cause is liability and lawyers; manufacturers have been burned too many times by stupid lawsuits, like the one where a non-instrument-rated pilot knowingly took off into IMC (low visibility), got disoriented, and crashed; family sued the manufacturer (and won several millions) on the grounds that said manufacturer failed to train the pilot for that--even though it's not their responsibility, and more to the point, as just a private pilot without an IR, he has been specifically instructed and trained to not fly into such weather! The rough equivalent would be a freshly-licensed teenager driving a new Accord off the lot in the middle of a thunderstorm, losing control, and crashing... then saying that it's Honda's fault because they didn't teach him to drive in bad weather.
They've also been sued for "faulty designs" after an improperly-maintained engine fails due to poor maintenance or improper operation. Older designs have been around a while (proving themselves, at least to the public), and some were exempted from liability suits. Ergo, manufacturers are very hesitant to introduce something new for light airplanes because it exposes them to frivolous lawsuits.
It doesn't help that the light aircraft market is small and certification standards are overly strict (requiring lots of paperwork, which means time manpower and money), being geared for corporate jets and airliners instead of light piston singles. You wind up with a market where an "affordable" day VFR airplane costs as much as a house, and a decent traveling one as much as two houses.
Plus, people are stupid, especially when faced with panic situations that they haven't trained for. Drivers reacting suddenly to a safety threat (like a person pulling out in front of them, road debris, etc.) will often distract themselves trying to save their drink or cellphone from flying off/out of whatever they're in rather than put both hands on the wheel and focus completely on the driving. People will run back into burning buildings or other dangerous areas to save common things. Airline passengers have been known to hold on to things or try and get their carryons with them during an evacuation.
You don't want anything distracting people when they're trying to evacuate, whether it's keeping them from hearing instructions or putting something into their hands that they'll worry about when they shouldn't. And as others mentioned, having objects flying about in the cabin is a Bad Thing during turbulence or hard/"unplanned" landings. If the devices are off and put away, they can't do that.
I don't think the "I signed a piece of paper" solution will do much good. Here's what I suggest:
Two independent DNA tests disproving paternity are absolute cause to end child support payments and refund any money paid. No more getting stuck paying for a kid you didn't provide DNA for.
Child support payments are no longer a check to be used for anything. The money goes on a debit card and all expenditures are recorded and audited. Spending on things not for the kids earns very harsh penalties. Payment amounts are to be adjusted every year and must provide a reasonable estimate of costs and be adjusted for the payer's income.
Remarriage triggers new assessment of child support payments, and payments are only to be made if the new marriage cannot fully support the children.
Custody of children is no longer to be automatically biased towards the mother. The court shall give a true and honest assessment of both parents' abilities and use that as a major factor in awarding custody.
1. Hard to know without some performance figures... and those are probably classified, which means we won't see them. A little careful google usage could probably give you rough estimates for proposed designs, or at least the numbers from which to calculate it.
2. That was the plan for the X-30 at some point, but that never made it to the hardware stage. I would guess the answer would be no. Did a little research on scramjets as an undergrad, and I believe Mach 12-14 seemed to be the uppper limit.
3. The trick is in radiating that heat faster than it's being added. I would guess that they're using some kind of hot-structure approach with high-temperature materials on things like leading edges and all. The idea is to conduct the heat from the hottest parts of the airframe and conduct it into the rest of the structure. You have more mass to absorb the thermal energy, and more surface area to radiate from. This is the approach used by the SR-71 and X-15, and proposed for the X-20 and early space shuttle concepts.
Something like a GE90-115 might put out a heck of a lot more thrust at sea level than a J58 (and do it with less fuel to boot), but it isn't going to keep happily chugging along at Mach 3. There's more to comparing turbine engines than just looking at raw thrust at one specific condition.
It would be interesting, though, to see what a new engine meeting the J58 mission profile would look like. Of course, we'd have to spend a few years relearning/reinventing capabilities we pissed away^W^Wlost, but the end result would be pretty.
Testing scramjets on the ground is really, really hard, and you can only do it for a very short time (much less than a second).
Testing scramjets in flight is really, really expensive. And when your funds are limited, you can only build subscale air-dropped missile-sized vehicles instead of full-sized, self-launching, reusable ones (in part because of the "cheaper now and more expensive long-term" being prefereable to "more expensive now and cheaper in the long run" thinking that brought us the Space Shuttle).
Making things even more difficult is that we pissed away a huge amount of research (from both the US and UK) on scramjets and high-speed flight a couple decades ago. Companies like Marquardt basically specialized in ramjet-style engines, and were hard at work developing scramjets and other neat high-speed propulsion 40+ years ago. They were very close to having flying hardware. But now, all of the hardware, most of the documentation, pretty much all of the institutional/unwritten knowledge, and most of the personnel are gone. We're having to reinvent the high-speed flight wheel almost from scratch, just like we're doing with heavy-lift launch vehicles, manned lunar flight, and ballistic missile defense, all of which we had operational in the 70s.
It's disgraceful, really, how we piss away useful technology and other exceptional things. There must be some kind of relationship to crabs in the human psyche that's responsible for this self-loathing anti-achievement personality trait.
Hmm, let's see. WWII wasn't worth it, you see, because a genocidal madman taking over half the world and executing everyone he thought of as subhuman is a better outcome. Ending slavery in the United States was bad, too, because things were better off for the slaves. And every single violent felon that the police forcibly take down should have rather been left alone to keep running around and doing as he pleases.
Look, I'm talking about the theory of "just war" and the general expectation that society (and individuals) sometimes have to use force for survival and the common benefit. The police use force (up to and including deadly, if necessary) to stop criminals from hurting others. Individuals use force to protect themselves when their lives (or those of their family) are in immediate danger. Nations and groups thereof sometimes use force when their people (and more recently, other people) are faced with major threats; this would be things like genocidal dictators and severe oppression. Are you going to tell me that all this is wrong, too?
I don't know where you got out of my statement that I supported going to war for an individual's personal benefit or just to get one's jollies off. I just take a very dim view of those who think any use of force is wrong for any reason, and those who claim to do so but actually don't, as explained here. In short, there are some things worth fighting for, but that certainly doesn't make "hey, let's have a war!" the first go-to option or the best one in most cases.
As long as your physical performance on the job isn't affected
But that's exactly what she indicated. She indicated that she uses illegal substances that most definitely affect her job performance, and discussed defeating the tests performed to see if she's not using them. And when your job isn't just pushing paper around, but working situations where peoples' lives are at stake (law enforcement, fire/EMS, airline pilot, air traffic control, medicine, etc), making comments like this basically indicates that you don't take seriously the lives of those you are responsible for, even if you add a "lol j/k" to the end.
Agreements not to do stupid stuff like this are standard when working at said safety-critial places. I signed one both for my employer (aircraft manufacturer) and for the fire department (even though I'm just a volunteer there), because in both cases my behavior outside those places reflects not just on me but their commitments to customers'/the public's lives. If you don't want to be held to this kind of standard, pick another career field.
A true pacifist is opposed to the use of force for any reason, under any circumstance, no matter what is at stake. He backs down and cowers from any physical confrontation and lets himself be pushed around by all, no matter what. He does not call the police or rely on others for protection because that is sanctioning the use of force by others, especially when it is on his own behalf. This person disgusts me because they will let the Hitlers and Stalins and KKKs and common thugs and rapists run around doing as they please, even to the detriment of humanity as a whole.
Then you have the fake "pacifists", who fly that status as a flag of convenience. They try to claim some supposed moral high ground by not hurting others, but let fly the jolly roger when they feel threatened enough (with either bodily harm to themselves or loved ones, or until someone does something they don't like). Alternatively, he will sit and refuse to use force himself, even in defense of his own life or of innocents and/or family... but then turn around and ask--nay, demand that someone else like the police use force on his own behalf, and do his "dirty work" for him so he can pretend to keep his conscience clean and "pacifist".
So in short, either they're terminal evolutionary dead-ends for the human race, or they're hypocrites who stand for nothing higher than themselves.
Note that this expressly does not condone war and violence out of hurt feelings, wanting someone else's stuff, general amusement, as a distraction, etc. The use of force is not something to be taken lightly, but it is usually justified when used in self-defense or the prevention of far greater evil.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I can give you a list of many problems that "liberal Americans" are responsible for causing, too;) I just bagged on so-called "conservatives" this time around because that was the subject at hand and one of the moralist/religious ones pissed me off earlier today.
If he really meant "probably", then he should have spelled it out like he did the rest of the post, instead of making himself look like an eight-year-old.
How is it unjust? If you join the military (at least in the US), you did so voluntarily. You chose, of your own free will, to sign over your time (and if need be, your health and/or life) to the military to be used as the leadership sees fit. Part of being in the military means that you are on call all the time, and on the hook be called up at any moment and sent into combat. Going and doing stupid things like getting in trouble with the law impairs your readiness to deploy, hence the additional charges.
Don't like it? Don't sign up. And don't get me started with my take on pacifists.
"Conservative Americans" are the problem behind many things wrong in this country (though not all of them), and the "war on drugs" in many cases is one of those things. But there's a very big difference between telling Sally Paper Pusher not to use certain substances because "God says it's wrong", and telling Nancy EMS Dispatcher that she can't use certain substances because they could impair her performance in her public safety job and get others killed.
Working in public safety (or in other jobs like airline pilot, air traffic controller, medicine, etc.) comes with the extra responsibility to not do things that can impair your performance on the job. Taking drugs is one of those things you don't do. Don't like it? Choose another job.
Y'all are missing the point. The woman in question wasn't some paper-pusher at a private company. She was a police dispatcher. Impaired performance from a paper-pusher causes a little lost productivity and money; impaired performance in public safety jobs (police, fire, EMS, and their dispatchers; even military in a sense) gets people killed. That's one of those tradeoffs you make for working such jobs. It's one thing to make jokes among close friends or your coworkers (you pretty much have to in these fields to stay sane), but posting a comment on facebook like she did, essentially holding up a sign saying "I work in public safety, helping protect and save your life in an emergency, and I use mind-altering substances! Haha I'm j/k honest" doesn't just make the company look bad and cause lost money. It casts doubt on the competence of the entire department and the city, and tells the entire population that "we don't take your tax dollars or your lives seriously".
I've never worked on the dispatch side of things, but there is a huge difference between a good dispatcher and a bad one. The good ones are true multitaskers; they not only know what goes on during a fire/EMS call, but can tell what's happening just by the sound of someone's voice, and can manage to keep track of five or six separate incidents at one time. Many of them are former fire/EMS/law enforcement who either retired or had to quit for medical reasons.
Most dispatchers pull 12-hour shifts, often overnight. It's a stressful job where you're sitting at a desk all day trying to help coordinate a response to life-threatening situations solely by radio. I'd imagine it's a little like air traffic control, actually.
We (the West, and the US in particular) have thrown away (either through direct cancellation or just severe restriction of funds) a whole bunch of technology that we had in advanced development, working as prototypes, or even operational. We threw it all away, and now decades later, we're trying to reinvent the wheel while critics sit around saying "oh, it's so hard, it'll never work", etc.
Rather than see things through, we hem and haw and wring our hands and cry "it's impossible!" when confronted with the smallest hitch or setback in a program. We happily and consistently cut costs today even when it will drastically increase them in the future.
People also need to remember this isn't pure pie-in-the-sky stuff. The Aegis Combat System is quite capable of anti-missile capabilities. It can track and engage anti-ship missiles quite well. Now of course ICBMs are a whole different problem, not in the least of which because of their speed, but it is the same "track and engage" idea and there is working hardware.
People also need to remember (or learn) that this is not new technology. We had an OPERATIONAL, DEPLOYED, IN-SERVICE ABM system in 1975--that's thirty-five years ago. It worked very well. But then we killed the program and pissed away all that hard-earned knowledge just like we did with the Saturn-Apollo program. Now we're having to start all over again from the beginning, just like NASA had to do with the current moon-Mars program.
Also note that the Soviets had a comparable system, but they didn't cancel theirs. Instead, the Russians upgraded and replaced it in 1995, and it is still operational.
and probably never working in the face of vastly cheaper countermeasures
Countermeasures may be cheap, but they just don't work. A decent decoy will need to have the same shape, radar and infrared signatures, and mass of a real warhead. But at that point, you'd be better off fitting a real warhead or improving the performance of your missile. Incidentally, the same holds with chaff, flares, and even towed decoys against newer SAMs and AAMs--those missiles are "smart" enough to just ignore the decoys. Or, torpedoes against decoys from ships and subs--one person I know in "the business" told of decoy makers coming up with a new design, only to find that said design was already obsolete against torpedoes a decade or more old.
Besides, any ABM system worth its salt will be capable of hitting the MIRV bus before it starts popping off warheads. Hit the bus, you've killed the whole system. And believe it or not, we had that working in the 70's. Deployed, on alert, operational. The Soviets had a system like that too, and like Patriot, their bigger SAMs are capable as a third-layer defense. Only difference is, they didn't piss away that capability and cancel it. Their now-upgraded and updated system is still operational, yet they have the balls to complain about us trying to build one! And sadly, many of us are quite willing to give in.
The biggest benefit of ABM isn't in a real attack scenario, or even a "crazy dictator one", because even a crazy dictator knows he isn't going to have anything left to dictate if he launches. The benefit is for those "oops" situations, where for whatever reason a missile gets launched accidentally--it's almost happend before. I'd rather the President have the option of shooting down that stray missile or two before things get out of hand than have to sit there trying to decide whether or not to launch and whether or not he can trust the guy on the other end of the line saying "it's not armed, I *promise*"--even if it costs a hundred billion a year.
Meanwhile, the only happenings in the Falcon community have been from Open Falcon, which is based on an older exe and so is pretty unstable, and fails to run properly with most nVidia cards.
So basically if you want a stable game that runs on modern systems, you're stuck with F4: Allied Force, which is around 5 years old now with the most recent patch being released in January 2008. Maybe the BMS people are up to something, but that rumour seems to have surfaced periodically for the last couple of years so it's hard to get excited about it.
FreeFalcon is still making releases, too; I think there's another update with new theaters and code changes. I was a database editor and tester during the lead-up to FF5, and a short while after that. Eventually just got tired of dealing with a program that was then 11 years old, and all of its limitations. Suspension of disbelief ended, as I knew a lot about the internals of the sim and was playing to/working around those weaknesses instead of trying to simulate.
They're against it because of their basic, underlying, maybe even subconscious submissive belief that the best way to keep anyone from hurting you is to apppear weak and defenseless. Or, that we (US and/or western society in general) is the root cause of all bad things in the world, that other people only do bad things because we were mean and bad and made them do it, and that if we were just nice to people and made ourselves non-threatening, that rainbow-farting unicorns would fly across the sky and everyone would be happy and nice to each other.
I assure you, the Russians have no compunction about having an ABM system themselves; after all, they already have one, and their long-range SAMS are kinematically capable of acting as a second-layer defense. I don't doubt that this capability is enabled.
The thing is, critics just plain don't like the very idea of a system like this. Somehow they think a limited, purely-defensive system is somehow an aggressive move that will goad Russia or China into attacking us. They're free to make claims about how it's "so hard to do", or how "easily" a simple technology can render the entire system impotent, because those with the data--ie, engineers, technicians, and operators on the program who actually do know what they're talking about--can't release specifics because those are classified.
And like any other discussion regarding a complex technical matter, a single failure in development gets blown into a tale of doom. Missile fails? Obviously the entire program is a failure, intercepting warheads is impossible, and we will never be able to do it. Boeing has to make a design change to their latest airliner because a problem was found? Obviously the program is doomed and the plane will be a flying deathtrap because they don't know what they're doing.
How many rockets did we blow up before getting anything close to a reliable launch vehicle? How many airplanes crashed before flying became a routine, safe activity?
Nothing works perfectly the first time it's tried. Anyone who has actually worked on a complex program will know that. Part of the problem we're running into is that we deliberately threw away everything we'd learned about intercepting ballistic missiles in the 70s (ie, when we had an operational system), and we're having to relearn the unwritten stuff all over again, just like the moon program. Our government (hell, the country in general) has a nasty habit of developing things just until they start to work, and then discarding them like an ADD 3-year-old who's bored with his toys, especially when it saves a little bit of money now but winds up costing a crap-ton more down the road.
You mean the YAL-1 Airborne Laser, which just recently conducted its first successful test against a ballistic missile? Nope, guess that doesn't exist.
1) Basic geometry -- you have to station a slew of defensive missiles every 20 miles along your borders. That's because you are not going to hit anything going Mach 12 across your path-- you need a close to head-on intercept angle.
Every 20 miles? Did you sit down and figure that out, or did you just pull a number out of your ass? And you certainly can hit a Mach 12+ target at right angles, provided you have an accurate track early enough. See the cruiser that shot down a satellite a couple years ago--that was a target moving a good bit faster than Mach 12, and nowhere near head-on.
Cheap and easy countermeasures.
Decoys are of relatively little use, and haven't really worked since the 70s. In order to stand a chance at working, they need to have a good approximation of the infrared and radar signatures of a warhead, and (to continue decoying into the reentry phase) have the same ballistic behavior. You wind up with a decoy pretty much identical to a warhead in size, shape, and weight. And at that point, you might as well use that space and weight for a real warhead or better missile performance.
JR Oppenheimer did this math in his head in 1952 as he was testifying to a govt comittee. Nothing has changed since then.
So one guy, a specialist in nuclear physics, pulled numbers out of his ass regarding missile dynamics, seekers, and integrated air/space defenses almost 60 years ago, where nothing has changed but the introduction of ICBMs, better radars, incredibly more powerful calculating and computing resources, better infrared seekers, worldwide near-instantaneous data connections, miniaturization, and so on? Yep, nothing's changed, all right.
A few things y'all need to be aware of, not in any particular order and all from unclassified sources...
When the Patriot SAM system (of Desert Storm fame) was developed, it had hardware and software limitations intentionally added to restrict its ability to act against ballistic missiles and warheads.
The US had an OPERATIONAL ABM system 35 years ago. Not "in development", not "conceptual", not "being tested", but operational, deployed, active. And it worked quite well. Yes, the missiles themselves had small nuclear warheads, but the intercepts took place at very high altitude (essentially in space) so blast and radiation weren't much of a concern, and were much more likely to achieve a kill. Better a small friendly nuke going off 80 miles up than a much bigger hostile one at 10,000ft. But even then, the missiles were accurate enough to sometimes make "skin-to-skin" hits.
Many of the larger Soviet/Russian SAM systems (SA-5/SA-10 in particular) have the kinematic ability to act in an ABM role (just like late-model Patriot and Standard systems), since they were designed to hit fast, maneuvering high-altitude targets. Fitting them with a small nuclear warhead was already reasonable given the only threat they were defending against was NATO bombers carrying nukes themselves; the ABM capability really just required a relatively simple software change and a radar good enough to track the incoming warheads. It's very likely this was done in practice, given how many of the missiles were set up in the air defense network already, ABM treaty or not.
Remember, missile warheads are ballistic weapons. They don't maneuver, and until they hit sensible atmosphere, their flight path is very predictable. The USAF already tracks things like stray bolts in orbit, to a pretty high precision. Also, like any ballistic weapon, accuracy gets worse as distance increases. On a missile with multiple warheads, the "bus" (basically a spacecraft with thrusters and very sensitive navigation systems that carries the warheads) does all the maneuvering and targeting for the warheads, releasing them one at a time. For accuracy, it needs to do this pretty close to the target. If you can hit the bus before it starts dispensing (and
would love to see a history class about the atomic bombing where they actually tried to teach the students to understand why Truman thought dropping the bomb was a good idea. What information he had and what was going on at the time.
That's what's missing... we (in the collective, as-a-whole sense) tend to look at past events from a modern perspective. It's glaringly obvious in this case.
First, one must realize that in 1945, there was no "ZOMG NUKES ARE TEH DEBBIL!!1!11ONE!" reaction. We didn't know about fallout, widespread radiation sickness, and all the rest. The attitude was more "hey, it's just a big bomb that lets us do with a single airplane that which used to take a thousand airplanes".
Second, the targets were not selected on the basis of "let's kill as many civilians as we can". It may surprise some, but the current obsession with avoiding collateral damage and civilian casualties is very, very recent, and only even possible with the advent of precision-guided weapons. In WWII, it was "total war". Civilians working in factories were considered legitimate targets as they were helping out with the war effort. Collateral damage was just bad luck, and the attitude was more "it's just too bad you were living near a prime military target, and besides, you guys started the war". Hiroshima and Nagasaki had significant military and industrial facilities that just happened to be located in a way that made them relatively easy to hit with a single atomic device. That many civilians would also be killed was, again, seen as just bad luck on their part.
Third, Japan was not "going to surrender anyways". Preparations were underway to use every last fishing boat and airplane for suicide attacks. Suicide frogmen were being trained, and civilians were being prepared for charges with (literally) pitchforks and torches. There's no reason to believe the fanatical, resist-to-the-death-of-the-last-man defenses on other Pacific islands wouldn't have happened in the home islands. A military coup even tried (and failed) to override the emperor's decision to surrender after the bombings. And whether by a direct invasion or siege to starvation, it's pretty much certain that far more Japanese would have died than actually did with the bombings.
Finally, US war plans called for the invasion of the islands (as referenced above). Not only would the Japanese death toll been catastrophic, but US casualties were also estimated to exceed one million KIA, and millions more wounded. (side note: We're still using the stock of purple heart medals that were made in anticipation of this.). The US was tired of the war, just wanted it over, and neither the public nor the leaders looked favorably on a long, bloody invasion when it could be neatly (from their perspective anyway) ended with a couple of bombs and a handful of airplanes.
Again, you have to look at the action of historical figures through their own perspective. They didn't have the advantage of hindsight.
1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
What I want to know is this: how did so-called "progressives" get a lock on the term, and who exactly declared their ideas to actually be progress?
I'm willing to bet that it went something like "Well, if we call ourselves progressive, then that means we stand for progress. Everyone likes progress and thinks it's a good thing, so we'll say that we're for progress and anyone who opposes us opposes progress and is therefore bad! Yay!"
Slashdot Mirror
fuel management system... fuel gauge... mechanical carb
That is still a fitting description of the vast majority of light airplanes today, as most of the fleet is rather old and hasn't changed much since the 70s. Newer (read expensive) light aircraft often have fancy avionics and instruments, but the engines and most other systems are still generally at a 1930s or 1940s tech level.
The biggest cause is liability and lawyers; manufacturers have been burned too many times by stupid lawsuits, like the one where a non-instrument-rated pilot knowingly took off into IMC (low visibility), got disoriented, and crashed; family sued the manufacturer (and won several millions) on the grounds that said manufacturer failed to train the pilot for that--even though it's not their responsibility, and more to the point, as just a private pilot without an IR, he has been specifically instructed and trained to not fly into such weather! The rough equivalent would be a freshly-licensed teenager driving a new Accord off the lot in the middle of a thunderstorm, losing control, and crashing... then saying that it's Honda's fault because they didn't teach him to drive in bad weather.
They've also been sued for "faulty designs" after an improperly-maintained engine fails due to poor maintenance or improper operation. Older designs have been around a while (proving themselves, at least to the public), and some were exempted from liability suits. Ergo, manufacturers are very hesitant to introduce something new for light airplanes because it exposes them to frivolous lawsuits.
It doesn't help that the light aircraft market is small and certification standards are overly strict (requiring lots of paperwork, which means time manpower and money), being geared for corporate jets and airliners instead of light piston singles. You wind up with a market where an "affordable" day VFR airplane costs as much as a house, and a decent traveling one as much as two houses.
Plus, people are stupid, especially when faced with panic situations that they haven't trained for. Drivers reacting suddenly to a safety threat (like a person pulling out in front of them, road debris, etc.) will often distract themselves trying to save their drink or cellphone from flying off/out of whatever they're in rather than put both hands on the wheel and focus completely on the driving. People will run back into burning buildings or other dangerous areas to save common things. Airline passengers have been known to hold on to things or try and get their carryons with them during an evacuation.
You don't want anything distracting people when they're trying to evacuate, whether it's keeping them from hearing instructions or putting something into their hands that they'll worry about when they shouldn't. And as others mentioned, having objects flying about in the cabin is a Bad Thing during turbulence or hard/"unplanned" landings. If the devices are off and put away, they can't do that.
That's what I'm saying. When you marry someone with kids, you're taking their kids in, too. That would be part of the deal.
I don't think the "I signed a piece of paper" solution will do much good. Here's what I suggest:
Two independent DNA tests disproving paternity are absolute cause to end child support payments and refund any money paid. No more getting stuck paying for a kid you didn't provide DNA for.
Child support payments are no longer a check to be used for anything. The money goes on a debit card and all expenditures are recorded and audited. Spending on things not for the kids earns very harsh penalties. Payment amounts are to be adjusted every year and must provide a reasonable estimate of costs and be adjusted for the payer's income.
Remarriage triggers new assessment of child support payments, and payments are only to be made if the new marriage cannot fully support the children.
Custody of children is no longer to be automatically biased towards the mother. The court shall give a true and honest assessment of both parents' abilities and use that as a major factor in awarding custody.
1. Hard to know without some performance figures... and those are probably classified, which means we won't see them. A little careful google usage could probably give you rough estimates for proposed designs, or at least the numbers from which to calculate it.
2. That was the plan for the X-30 at some point, but that never made it to the hardware stage. I would guess the answer would be no. Did a little research on scramjets as an undergrad, and I believe Mach 12-14 seemed to be the uppper limit.
3. The trick is in radiating that heat faster than it's being added. I would guess that they're using some kind of hot-structure approach with high-temperature materials on things like leading edges and all. The idea is to conduct the heat from the hottest parts of the airframe and conduct it into the rest of the structure. You have more mass to absorb the thermal energy, and more surface area to radiate from. This is the approach used by the SR-71 and X-15, and proposed for the X-20 and early space shuttle concepts.
Something like a GE90-115 might put out a heck of a lot more thrust at sea level than a J58 (and do it with less fuel to boot), but it isn't going to keep happily chugging along at Mach 3. There's more to comparing turbine engines than just looking at raw thrust at one specific condition.
It would be interesting, though, to see what a new engine meeting the J58 mission profile would look like. Of course, we'd have to spend a few years relearning/reinventing capabilities we pissed away^W^Wlost, but the end result would be pretty.
A couple reasons:
Testing scramjets on the ground is really, really hard, and you can only do it for a very short time (much less than a second).
Testing scramjets in flight is really, really expensive. And when your funds are limited, you can only build subscale air-dropped missile-sized vehicles instead of full-sized, self-launching, reusable ones (in part because of the "cheaper now and more expensive long-term" being prefereable to "more expensive now and cheaper in the long run" thinking that brought us the Space Shuttle).
Making things even more difficult is that we pissed away a huge amount of research (from both the US and UK) on scramjets and high-speed flight a couple decades ago. Companies like Marquardt basically specialized in ramjet-style engines, and were hard at work developing scramjets and other neat high-speed propulsion 40+ years ago. They were very close to having flying hardware. But now, all of the hardware, most of the documentation, pretty much all of the institutional/unwritten knowledge, and most of the personnel are gone. We're having to reinvent the high-speed flight wheel almost from scratch, just like we're doing with heavy-lift launch vehicles, manned lunar flight, and ballistic missile defense, all of which we had operational in the 70s.
It's disgraceful, really, how we piss away useful technology and other exceptional things. There must be some kind of relationship to crabs in the human psyche that's responsible for this self-loathing anti-achievement personality trait.
Hmm, let's see. WWII wasn't worth it, you see, because a genocidal madman taking over half the world and executing everyone he thought of as subhuman is a better outcome. Ending slavery in the United States was bad, too, because things were better off for the slaves. And every single violent felon that the police forcibly take down should have rather been left alone to keep running around and doing as he pleases.
Look, I'm talking about the theory of "just war" and the general expectation that society (and individuals) sometimes have to use force for survival and the common benefit. The police use force (up to and including deadly, if necessary) to stop criminals from hurting others. Individuals use force to protect themselves when their lives (or those of their family) are in immediate danger. Nations and groups thereof sometimes use force when their people (and more recently, other people) are faced with major threats; this would be things like genocidal dictators and severe oppression. Are you going to tell me that all this is wrong, too?
I don't know where you got out of my statement that I supported going to war for an individual's personal benefit or just to get one's jollies off. I just take a very dim view of those who think any use of force is wrong for any reason, and those who claim to do so but actually don't, as explained here. In short, there are some things worth fighting for, but that certainly doesn't make "hey, let's have a war!" the first go-to option or the best one in most cases.
As long as your physical performance on the job isn't affected
But that's exactly what she indicated. She indicated that she uses illegal substances that most definitely affect her job performance, and discussed defeating the tests performed to see if she's not using them. And when your job isn't just pushing paper around, but working situations where peoples' lives are at stake (law enforcement, fire/EMS, airline pilot, air traffic control, medicine, etc), making comments like this basically indicates that you don't take seriously the lives of those you are responsible for, even if you add a "lol j/k" to the end.
Agreements not to do stupid stuff like this are standard when working at said safety-critial places. I signed one both for my employer (aircraft manufacturer) and for the fire department (even though I'm just a volunteer there), because in both cases my behavior outside those places reflects not just on me but their commitments to customers'/the public's lives. If you don't want to be held to this kind of standard, pick another career field.
It's simple, really.
A true pacifist is opposed to the use of force for any reason, under any circumstance, no matter what is at stake. He backs down and cowers from any physical confrontation and lets himself be pushed around by all, no matter what. He does not call the police or rely on others for protection because that is sanctioning the use of force by others, especially when it is on his own behalf. This person disgusts me because they will let the Hitlers and Stalins and KKKs and common thugs and rapists run around doing as they please, even to the detriment of humanity as a whole.
Then you have the fake "pacifists", who fly that status as a flag of convenience. They try to claim some supposed moral high ground by not hurting others, but let fly the jolly roger when they feel threatened enough (with either bodily harm to themselves or loved ones, or until someone does something they don't like). Alternatively, he will sit and refuse to use force himself, even in defense of his own life or of innocents and/or family... but then turn around and ask--nay, demand that someone else like the police use force on his own behalf, and do his "dirty work" for him so he can pretend to keep his conscience clean and "pacifist".
So in short, either they're terminal evolutionary dead-ends for the human race, or they're hypocrites who stand for nothing higher than themselves.
Note that this expressly does not condone war and violence out of hurt feelings, wanting someone else's stuff, general amusement, as a distraction, etc. The use of force is not something to be taken lightly, but it is usually justified when used in self-defense or the prevention of far greater evil.
Well, if it makes you feel any better, I can give you a list of many problems that "liberal Americans" are responsible for causing, too ;) I just bagged on so-called "conservatives" this time around because that was the subject at hand and one of the moralist/religious ones pissed me off earlier today.
If he really meant "probably", then he should have spelled it out like he did the rest of the post, instead of making himself look like an eight-year-old.
How is it unjust? If you join the military (at least in the US), you did so voluntarily. You chose, of your own free will, to sign over your time (and if need be, your health and/or life) to the military to be used as the leadership sees fit. Part of being in the military means that you are on call all the time, and on the hook be called up at any moment and sent into combat. Going and doing stupid things like getting in trouble with the law impairs your readiness to deploy, hence the additional charges.
Don't like it? Don't sign up. And don't get me started with my take on pacifists.
"Conservative Americans" are the problem behind many things wrong in this country (though not all of them), and the "war on drugs" in many cases is one of those things. But there's a very big difference between telling Sally Paper Pusher not to use certain substances because "God says it's wrong", and telling Nancy EMS Dispatcher that she can't use certain substances because they could impair her performance in her public safety job and get others killed.
Working in public safety (or in other jobs like airline pilot, air traffic controller, medicine, etc.) comes with the extra responsibility to not do things that can impair your performance on the job. Taking drugs is one of those things you don't do. Don't like it? Choose another job.
Y'all are missing the point. The woman in question wasn't some paper-pusher at a private company. She was a police dispatcher. Impaired performance from a paper-pusher causes a little lost productivity and money; impaired performance in public safety jobs (police, fire, EMS, and their dispatchers; even military in a sense) gets people killed. That's one of those tradeoffs you make for working such jobs. It's one thing to make jokes among close friends or your coworkers (you pretty much have to in these fields to stay sane), but posting a comment on facebook like she did, essentially holding up a sign saying "I work in public safety, helping protect and save your life in an emergency, and I use mind-altering substances! Haha I'm j/k honest" doesn't just make the company look bad and cause lost money. It casts doubt on the competence of the entire department and the city, and tells the entire population that "we don't take your tax dollars or your lives seriously".
I've never worked on the dispatch side of things, but there is a huge difference between a good dispatcher and a bad one. The good ones are true multitaskers; they not only know what goes on during a fire/EMS call, but can tell what's happening just by the sound of someone's voice, and can manage to keep track of five or six separate incidents at one time. Many of them are former fire/EMS/law enforcement who either retired or had to quit for medical reasons.
Most dispatchers pull 12-hour shifts, often overnight. It's a stressful job where you're sitting at a desk all day trying to help coordinate a response to life-threatening situations solely by radio. I'd imagine it's a little like air traffic control, actually.
We (the West, and the US in particular) have thrown away (either through direct cancellation or just severe restriction of funds) a whole bunch of technology that we had in advanced development, working as prototypes, or even operational. We threw it all away, and now decades later, we're trying to reinvent the wheel while critics sit around saying "oh, it's so hard, it'll never work", etc.
Examples:
Scramjets (advanced development/nearly ready to test)
Mach 3+ supercruising aircraft (SR-71 operational, B-70 prototype)
Anti-ballistic missile system (operational, Spartan/Sprint)
Lunar landing (operational, Apollo/Saturn)
Heavy lift launch vehicles (operational, Saturn)
VTVL SSTO launch vehicles (prototype, DC-X)
Rather than see things through, we hem and haw and wring our hands and cry "it's impossible!" when confronted with the smallest hitch or setback in a program. We happily and consistently cut costs today even when it will drastically increase them in the future.
People also need to remember this isn't pure pie-in-the-sky stuff. The Aegis Combat System is quite capable of anti-missile capabilities. It can track and engage anti-ship missiles quite well. Now of course ICBMs are a whole different problem, not in the least of which because of their speed, but it is the same "track and engage" idea and there is working hardware.
People also need to remember (or learn) that this is not new technology. We had an OPERATIONAL, DEPLOYED, IN-SERVICE ABM system in 1975--that's thirty-five years ago. It worked very well. But then we killed the program and pissed away all that hard-earned knowledge just like we did with the Saturn-Apollo program. Now we're having to start all over again from the beginning, just like NASA had to do with the current moon-Mars program.
Also note that the Soviets had a comparable system, but they didn't cancel theirs. Instead, the Russians upgraded and replaced it in 1995, and it is still operational.
and probably never working in the face of vastly cheaper countermeasures
Countermeasures may be cheap, but they just don't work. A decent decoy will need to have the same shape, radar and infrared signatures, and mass of a real warhead. But at that point, you'd be better off fitting a real warhead or improving the performance of your missile. Incidentally, the same holds with chaff, flares, and even towed decoys against newer SAMs and AAMs--those missiles are "smart" enough to just ignore the decoys. Or, torpedoes against decoys from ships and subs--one person I know in "the business" told of decoy makers coming up with a new design, only to find that said design was already obsolete against torpedoes a decade or more old.
Besides, any ABM system worth its salt will be capable of hitting the MIRV bus before it starts popping off warheads. Hit the bus, you've killed the whole system. And believe it or not, we had that working in the 70's. Deployed, on alert, operational. The Soviets had a system like that too, and like Patriot, their bigger SAMs are capable as a third-layer defense. Only difference is, they didn't piss away that capability and cancel it. Their now-upgraded and updated system is still operational, yet they have the balls to complain about us trying to build one! And sadly, many of us are quite willing to give in.
The biggest benefit of ABM isn't in a real attack scenario, or even a "crazy dictator one", because even a crazy dictator knows he isn't going to have anything left to dictate if he launches. The benefit is for those "oops" situations, where for whatever reason a missile gets launched accidentally--it's almost happend before. I'd rather the President have the option of shooting down that stray missile or two before things get out of hand than have to sit there trying to decide whether or not to launch and whether or not he can trust the guy on the other end of the line saying "it's not armed, I *promise*"--even if it costs a hundred billion a year.
Meanwhile, the only happenings in the Falcon community have been from Open Falcon, which is based on an older exe and so is pretty unstable, and fails to run properly with most nVidia cards.
So basically if you want a stable game that runs on modern systems, you're stuck with F4: Allied Force, which is around 5 years old now with the most recent patch being released in January 2008. Maybe the BMS people are up to something, but that rumour seems to have surfaced periodically for the last couple of years so it's hard to get excited about it.
FreeFalcon is still making releases, too; I think there's another update with new theaters and code changes. I was a database editor and tester during the lead-up to FF5, and a short while after that. Eventually just got tired of dealing with a program that was then 11 years old, and all of its limitations. Suspension of disbelief ended, as I knew a lot about the internals of the sim and was playing to/working around those weaknesses instead of trying to simulate.
They're against it because of their basic, underlying, maybe even subconscious submissive belief that the best way to keep anyone from hurting you is to apppear weak and defenseless. Or, that we (US and/or western society in general) is the root cause of all bad things in the world, that other people only do bad things because we were mean and bad and made them do it, and that if we were just nice to people and made ourselves non-threatening, that rainbow-farting unicorns would fly across the sky and everyone would be happy and nice to each other.
I assure you, the Russians have no compunction about having an ABM system themselves; after all, they already have one , and their long-range SAMS are kinematically capable of acting as a second-layer defense. I don't doubt that this capability is enabled.
The thing is, critics just plain don't like the very idea of a system like this. Somehow they think a limited, purely-defensive system is somehow an aggressive move that will goad Russia or China into attacking us. They're free to make claims about how it's "so hard to do", or how "easily" a simple technology can render the entire system impotent, because those with the data--ie, engineers, technicians, and operators on the program who actually do know what they're talking about--can't release specifics because those are classified.
And like any other discussion regarding a complex technical matter, a single failure in development gets blown into a tale of doom. Missile fails? Obviously the entire program is a failure, intercepting warheads is impossible, and we will never be able to do it. Boeing has to make a design change to their latest airliner because a problem was found? Obviously the program is doomed and the plane will be a flying deathtrap because they don't know what they're doing.
How many rockets did we blow up before getting anything close to a reliable launch vehicle?
How many airplanes crashed before flying became a routine, safe activity?
Nothing works perfectly the first time it's tried. Anyone who has actually worked on a complex program will know that. Part of the problem we're running into is that we deliberately threw away everything we'd learned about intercepting ballistic missiles in the 70s (ie, when we had an operational system), and we're having to relearn the unwritten stuff all over again, just like the moon program. Our government (hell, the country in general) has a nasty habit of developing things just until they start to work, and then discarding them like an ADD 3-year-old who's bored with his toys, especially when it saves a little bit of money now but winds up costing a crap-ton more down the road.
You mean the YAL-1 Airborne Laser, which just recently conducted its first successful test against a ballistic missile? Nope, guess that doesn't exist.
1) Basic geometry -- you have to station a slew of defensive missiles every 20 miles along your borders. That's because you are not going to hit anything going Mach 12 across your path-- you need a close to head-on intercept angle.
Every 20 miles? Did you sit down and figure that out, or did you just pull a number out of your ass? And you certainly can hit a Mach 12+ target at right angles, provided you have an accurate track early enough. See the cruiser that shot down a satellite a couple years ago--that was a target moving a good bit faster than Mach 12, and nowhere near head-on.
Cheap and easy countermeasures.
Decoys are of relatively little use, and haven't really worked since the 70s. In order to stand a chance at working, they need to have a good approximation of the infrared and radar signatures of a warhead, and (to continue decoying into the reentry phase) have the same ballistic behavior. You wind up with a decoy pretty much identical to a warhead in size, shape, and weight. And at that point, you might as well use that space and weight for a real warhead or better missile performance.
JR Oppenheimer did this math in his head in 1952 as he was testifying to a govt comittee. Nothing has changed since then.
So one guy, a specialist in nuclear physics, pulled numbers out of his ass regarding missile dynamics, seekers, and integrated air/space defenses almost 60 years ago, where nothing has changed but the introduction of ICBMs, better radars, incredibly more powerful calculating and computing resources, better infrared seekers, worldwide near-instantaneous data connections, miniaturization, and so on? Yep, nothing's changed, all right.
A few things y'all need to be aware of, not in any particular order and all from unclassified sources...
When the Patriot SAM system (of Desert Storm fame) was developed, it had hardware and software limitations intentionally added to restrict its ability to act against ballistic missiles and warheads.
The US had an OPERATIONAL ABM system 35 years ago. Not "in development", not "conceptual", not "being tested", but operational, deployed, active. And it worked quite well. Yes, the missiles themselves had small nuclear warheads, but the intercepts took place at very high altitude (essentially in space) so blast and radiation weren't much of a concern, and were much more likely to achieve a kill. Better a small friendly nuke going off 80 miles up than a much bigger hostile one at 10,000ft. But even then, the missiles were accurate enough to sometimes make "skin-to-skin" hits.
Many of the larger Soviet/Russian SAM systems (SA-5/SA-10 in particular) have the kinematic ability to act in an ABM role (just like late-model Patriot and Standard systems), since they were designed to hit fast, maneuvering high-altitude targets. Fitting them with a small nuclear warhead was already reasonable given the only threat they were defending against was NATO bombers carrying nukes themselves; the ABM capability really just required a relatively simple software change and a radar good enough to track the incoming warheads. It's very likely this was done in practice, given how many of the missiles were set up in the air defense network already, ABM treaty or not.
Remember, missile warheads are ballistic weapons. They don't maneuver, and until they hit sensible atmosphere, their flight path is very predictable. The USAF already tracks things like stray bolts in orbit, to a pretty high precision. Also, like any ballistic weapon, accuracy gets worse as distance increases. On a missile with multiple warheads, the "bus" (basically a spacecraft with thrusters and very sensitive navigation systems that carries the warheads) does all the maneuvering and targeting for the warheads, releasing them one at a time. For accuracy, it needs to do this pretty close to the target. If you can hit the bus before it starts dispensing (and
would love to see a history class about the atomic bombing where they actually tried to teach the students to understand why Truman thought dropping the bomb was a good idea. What information he had and what was going on at the time.
That's what's missing... we (in the collective, as-a-whole sense) tend to look at past events from a modern perspective. It's glaringly obvious in this case.
First, one must realize that in 1945, there was no "ZOMG NUKES ARE TEH DEBBIL!!1!11ONE!" reaction. We didn't know about fallout, widespread radiation sickness, and all the rest. The attitude was more "hey, it's just a big bomb that lets us do with a single airplane that which used to take a thousand airplanes".
Second, the targets were not selected on the basis of "let's kill as many civilians as we can". It may surprise some, but the current obsession with avoiding collateral damage and civilian casualties is very, very recent, and only even possible with the advent of precision-guided weapons.
In WWII, it was "total war". Civilians working in factories were considered legitimate targets as they were helping out with the war effort. Collateral damage was just bad luck, and the attitude was more "it's just too bad you were living near a prime military target, and besides, you guys started the war". Hiroshima and Nagasaki had significant military and industrial facilities that just happened to be located in a way that made them relatively easy to hit with a single atomic device. That many civilians would also be killed was, again, seen as just bad luck on their part.
Third, Japan was not "going to surrender anyways". Preparations were underway to use every last fishing boat and airplane for suicide attacks. Suicide frogmen were being trained, and civilians were being prepared for charges with (literally) pitchforks and torches. There's no reason to believe the fanatical, resist-to-the-death-of-the-last-man defenses on other Pacific islands wouldn't have happened in the home islands. A military coup even tried (and failed) to override the emperor's decision to surrender after the bombings. And whether by a direct invasion or siege to starvation, it's pretty much certain that far more Japanese would have died than actually did with the bombings.
Finally, US war plans called for the invasion of the islands (as referenced above). Not only would the Japanese death toll been catastrophic, but US casualties were also estimated to exceed one million KIA, and millions more wounded. (side note: We're still using the stock of purple heart medals that were made in anticipation of this.). The US was tired of the war, just wanted it over, and neither the public nor the leaders looked favorably on a long, bloody invasion when it could be neatly (from their perspective anyway) ended with a couple of bombs and a handful of airplanes.
Again, you have to look at the action of historical figures through their own perspective. They didn't have the advantage of hindsight.
1. favorable to progress or reform, as in political or religious affairs.
2. (often initial capital letter) noting or pertaining to a political party advocating measures of progressive political reform.
What I want to know is this: how did so-called "progressives" get a lock on the term, and who exactly declared their ideas to actually be progress?
I'm willing to bet that it went something like "Well, if we call ourselves progressive, then that means we stand for progress. Everyone likes progress and thinks it's a good thing, so we'll say that we're for progress and anyone who opposes us opposes progress and is therefore bad! Yay!"