At some point in the US, liberals became enamored of the use of state power to achieve equality, even at the expense of individual freedom
Not equality, egalitarianism. Everyone winds up close to the same, with little or no regard to how much or how little they've worked or contributed. It's the "Robin Hood" approach of taking stuff from the people that those in charge have determined have too much ("the rich"), and giving it to those they think don't have enough ("the poor"), or the "if it can't be had by everyone, than it won't be had by anyone" model.
And an important component of American 'conservatism' is the preservation of American liberal values against the encroachments of the state.
An important component of modern US "conservatism" seems to consist of doing everything that can be gotten away with to make everyone else act in accordance to a strict, literal interpretation of the Christian Bible. I once had such a "conservative" tell me that "we can make the government religious and it's not a violation of the First Amendment as long as we don't force you to convert or participate." That's hardly preservation of the classical liberal position of freedom of religion.
As you can maybe tell, I have a thorough hate and disgust for the two major US parties, the one-dimensional left-right scale, those who blindly follow said scale or parties, and all attempts to classify me accordingly.
but besides them who else really wants it? 2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better - in fact it can make them downright hard to see, so why do I need it?
I would love a monitor with that high a resolution. I do a lot of high-detail CAD stuff with Catia at work; on a normal LCD monitor it looks like crap. Fortunately, I have a monster CRT running at some kind of ridiculous resolution, and the images look clear and clean without horrible jaggies. The higher the resolution is, the better for something like this.
the solid section of lane markings leading up to the stop line is supposed to be painted to such a length that when you are going the speed limit, if you are within the solid section of line as the light turns yellow, you will have time to clear the intersection before red.
That system is f'ing brilliant. I've never heard of it before, but you've already sold me on it. With proper light timing and proper, realistic speed limits, that system would be incredible.
But no, it just makes too much sense. Gotta stick other people with tickets so we don't have to pay for stuff we want. Never gonna happen.
Of course, there's also the tendency of the government to be fickle and spend all the money to get everything working, build a handful at best, and then cancel the program after most of the hard part is done. Or the "reduce the number you buy, so the amortized cost goes up, which you again use to justify purchase reductions, which makes the amortized cost go up even more..." BS.
Yeah, my drill instructor comment was a bit over the top... you're right, they wouldn't be the best people for this job. I was just letting the cranky old guy in me come out for a bit.
Though, I will add that my grandmother never had discipline problems in her classes, and her students always turned out very well. She had been in the army for several years, got out as a sergeant (outranking my grandfather at the time, who stayed in), and was known for having her students salute her:)
Also I think GP is implying that the "counselor" positions he mentioned are entirely superfluous, not merely overpaid.
That is precisely what I meant. From everything I've seen, counselors spend most of their time drinking coffee and pushing papers around. In high school, they also help you choose your electives, but I don't think that's a job that requires a graduate degree.
...then they don't need another year of high school. Off to college with them.
Simply dumping more money into education does not make it better.
Buying all this "technology" stuff is a waste of money if it's not implemented right. You don't need a computer to learn basic subjects.
Paying bad teachers more doesn't make them teach better. There are good teachers out there who deserve more for what they put into their jobs, and plenty more people who would make great teachers but won't take that big a pay cut from their current jobs in science, engineering, etc.
Similarly, elementary schools don't need two "counselors" each making $70k+. High schools don't need "career counselors" making $90k. And the school board doesn't need six figures (hell, no elected official does). Stop wasting money on administration and get some better teachers.
Hire some former drill instructors to fix discipline problems. Yes, your little deviant brat who "would never do anything bad" might get his feelings hurt a little bit, but maybe he'll finally get his shit straight and go on to be a decent member of society.
Spend some money and get some real scientists and engineers to teach. Teach hard science and math to the kids. Let's try to stop the reverence for idiocy while we can.
First, nukes were generally not thought of the same way they are now. Essentially, they were just really big bombs, and did not have the reputation they do today.
Second, the bombs were actually targeted on military targets. Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had large military and/or industrial facilities, and the bombs were intended for those. That a bunch of civilians lived within the lethal radius didn't really matter, and was seen as just bad luck for them at best, and "well, you started it, so tough shit" at worst.
Third, back then there wasn't much of a concept of collateral damage because there wasn't much of any way to avoid it. It wasn't until fairly recently that it was possible to bomb with enough accuracy to make avoiding civilian casualties possible. The US/Western obsession with trying to avoid civilian casualties through very restrictive ROE and precision weapons is unprecedented in history. Doesn't mean it's wrong, just that nobody else really cared much before.
Fourth, Japan very nearly didn't surrender after the two bombs. Several high-ranking officers tried what was basically a coup or end-run around the Emperor in an attempt to prevent his surrender message from getting out. They failed, but it was close.
Fifth, the alternative to not using nukes was invasion, which would have certainly cost far more lives than the bombing. If the Japanese had held to their behavior on other Pacific islands of fighting to the last man, it would have been a very long, nasty struggle with several millions dead. It's likely that the civilian population would have been involved, too.
Frankly, bombing some barren island in the middle of nowhere wouldn't have had the same effect. You might have a few witnesses seeing a big fireball and a bright flash, but I don't think the power of the weapon would have hit home, so to speak, without actually seeing the majority of a city simply wiped off the map. Without such a demonstration, all the bomb's destructive power is basically just a bunch of numbers too big for the human mind to make sense of.
I love how so many people clearly and definitively state that there's no way anything could have been mistaken for a hostile act, that everyone was definitively unarmed, etc. and state unequivocally that they would have made the "proper" decision. And they say this sitting in the comfort of their chair, in a climate-controlled room, with the luxury of zoom, rewind, image enhancement, and the little detail of not having to constantly wonder if someone is going to pop out from around the corner and send a couple pounds of RPG your way. 99% of them have probably never been in combat or had some kind of active role in any other life-or-death, make-a-decision-right-the-hell-now situation (police and fire/EMS, for example).
Was it ever confirmed that the non-reporters were, in fact, unarmed? That nobody really had an RPG or three? Or is it just people stating what they want to see and making absolute statements with only a single grainy image feed from one source, in much the same way that a soldier in a combat zone and under those conditions will tend to interpret many things (whether actually threatening or not) as threats, and react accordingly? Are they the ones actually making the mistake that they're accusing the troops of doing?
If SCOTUS can justify overturning the DC handgun ban without citing precedence or any case law
It's because there effectively wasn't any precedent, at least at the Supreme Court level. Miller was the only previous SC case to deal with the 2nd, and essentially only ruled that arms which did not have a "legitimate" militia/military/sporting purpose could be restricted or banned (in this case, a short-barreled shotgun)*. Notable is that Miller in itself is a rather sketchy example; Miller himself died before the case was heard by the SC, and nobody even showed up to argue his side of it. I'm not sure if any briefs were even submitted on his behalf.
The Heller decision followed this ruling. And to paraphrase an observation by Mr. Alan Gura during oral arguments of McDonald, cities and legislatures may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of the people, "but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional".
I'm happy to see Heller come out as it did, and I'm confident McDonald will turn out the same. But I'm still quite displeased with the court's reluctance to support individual rights when it comes to search and seizure, eminent domain protection, consenting relations between adults, etc.
Don't fool yourself thinking "Democratic control"** of two branches will protect you from violations; neither Rs or Ds will do that. Each party is quite willing to uphold the rights it sees as harmless^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsacred, but is quite willing to trash the ones they think of as a threat.
*It'll be interesting to see if a suit by someone trying to buy/build an M4 makes it to the court; I'll enjoy watching the verbal gymnastics of someone trying to argue that the standard-issue infantry rifle of the army and national guard has no military purpose...
**Assuming you mean "controlled by Democrats". If you mean "these offices are elected rather than appointed", then the statement applies in general, not specifically to you.
The trick is finding that door in the first place. All the precision-guided bombs in the world do you no good if you can't find a target for them to hit. Even in the age of spy satellites, skillful camouflage still works.
If the major powers had just a handful of nukes it would be enough for mutually assured destruction,
Umm, no. Not even close. Nukes are terrible, powerful things... but not that powerful. You don't lob one into the center of a city and see everything within fifty miles vanish. In fact, it was put out more than once that dropping a 1MT device on the center of London would leave about 90% of the "stuff" (infrastructure, assets, other details of modern civilization) and 80% or so of the population basically intact.
The point of MAD (really, nuclear deterrence in general) isn't "ooh, we killed a bunch of people, you lose!". Countries have recovered from having cities nearly wiped off the map before.
When you set up a plan like this, a full-blown SIOP-style working over of a major industrialized society, you're talking about literally bombing them back to a few centuries ago. You're hitting pretty much every bit of modern infrastructure that you can. You're hitting military bases, installations, and stockpiles to keep him from fighting back. You're hitting logistics centers like shipping hubs, railyards, ports, airports, and depots. You're hitting communications centers like satellite control centers and launch facilities, internet nodes, etc. You're hitting industrial facilities like power plants, factories, mines, etc. The idea is to destroy all of the things that make industrialized modern society possible and set him back to the 17th century. Some of those things are "soft" and close together, and can be hit by one warhead; other things like airports and railyards pretty much need a direct groundburst hit with a large warhead to kill. Naturally (and unfortunately), many of these things are located near population centers, which (being comparatively soft) take a lot of damage themselves, but they aren't the primary targets. Completely wiping out a large country as described above takes at least a thousand warheads or so, and that's before you account for misses, interceptions, duds and other failures, etc.
Well, then there was Saddam not using chemical weapons in 1991. Remember, Iraq had more operational experience with CWs than anyone else since 1918. Given how he used it against his own countrymen, it was likely he would have done the same in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. That is, except for the little under-the-table notice from the US that there were nuclear-armed F-111s sitting on alert just in case he tried something stupid (and likely something similar from the Israelis).
Nukes are oddly stabilizing, in a way. They deter others from doing things like invading you and conquering your cities, but they also keep you from doing the same out of fear they'll be used on you. It's likely Saddam wouldn't have invaded Kuwait if he'd had nukes.
By the way, do you have any info about how missile defenses work (in any meaningfull way)? For as far as i know current systems have limited succes even taking out a scud, never mind a rain of MIRVs from several ICBMs
A few things to note, 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. 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. 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, 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. 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 a proper ABM like the 1970's-era LIM-49 Spartan mentioned above can do that), you've killed all the warheads. And it doesn't take much to mess up a warhead bus.
Again, ballistic targets don't maneuver. We could hit them in the 70's from the ground, and the US had working, hit-to-kill, fighter-launched antisatellite missiles in the 80s. It's not like this is some incredibly hard thing to do. At least some of the failures of recent GMD testing stem from failures of the decoy launcher or the interceptor rocket; it's hardly fair to say the seeker system failed when the target blew up of its own accord well before intercept. Rockets still blow up even under closely-controlled and optimal circumstances, and it's expected that many ballistic missiles will fail during boost.
Decoys are of relatively little use. 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.
The real value of an ABM system isn't that it creates some sort of invulnerable shield. Rather, it gives you the chance of stopping a small launch (like a handful of missiles) before something bigger develops. See, if you have no ABM system, and you detect even a single launch, you don't have many choices. You can wait to see where the missile is going, but by the time it burns out and you know for sure, you may not have enough time left to hit back. You can wait it out and decide not to launch yourself, but at best you now have a few million dead citizens on your hands won
Do you actually know anything about nuclear targeting? Or do you just assume that you can toss a nuke in the general vicinity of a target and everything within fifty miles is toast?
During the Cold War (and maybe to this day), the entire UK nuclear arsenal was about enough to hit Moscow and give it a decent working-over, because rather than lobbing one device at the middle of a city, you actually have to target things. Railyards, runways, etc. need pretty much a direct hit with a groundburst to really take them out, and those are the kinds of things that would be targeted in a full-blown plan, not "just drop it in the city somewhere".
Actually, it would probably be better to assume a good portion of your warheads will not make it to the target. Whether they're get destroyed before use, fail to launch, get shot down before use (on an aircraft), get intercepted by defenses (yes, missile defense systems are real, and contrary to popular "knowledge", they do work and have worked since the 70's), fail to initiate, etc. Remember, many of the latest warheads have never been actually tested, and neither they nor their delivery systems (in the case of ballistic missiles) have been tested under realistic conditions. It's entirely possible that a significant fraction will simply not make it to their targets or work as intended.
I'm in a similar boat. Been a fan of flight simulations for a very long time; started with Falcon 3.0 on a 486 way back when. I was very involved with database hacking and editing in Jane's Fighters Anthology and Falcon 4.
But now, it's all lost the appeal. Falcon still has an active third-party development effort (both on the database and the leaked source code), and the real-time unscripted campaign engine is still unmatched by anything else, but it's still all being done on a 12-year-old game and graphics engine, with all the limitations that entails. And said dev community has gotten much more of a "you'll take what we give you and like it" attitude. And having spent so long messing with the internals, I know all of the limitations. Suspension of disbelief is gone now; all I end up doing is gaming the system, so to speak, and all of the faults and known inconsistencies with Real Life (flight model simplifications, hacks, etc) kill the rest of the enjoyment off. Civil flight sims aren't any better; the super-rigid ATC and AI aircraft behavior in MSFS is laughable to anyone with real-world aviation experience, and the flight dynamics can get pretty silly. Orbiter does a beautiful job with handling orbital mechanics, but its aero, systems, and terrain handling are far behind, there's no "feel" of really flying anything, and making any kind of decent addon requires coding knowledge. X-plane is fun to mess with and do "what-ifs", but its ATC sucks and it still doesn't do supersonic aero very well. And the limited weapons implementation isn't that spectacular.
The problem with getting good flight sims is that they have a limited market. Not too many people are willing to put in the time and effort to learn a complex, high-fidelity sim, especially if they don't have real-world aviation experience. Also, gettting this level of accuracy is a lot of work; flight models are hard to get right even with good data, and you're not likely to find much of that on anything remotely close to contemporary (especially WRT military aircraft and weapons). You need developers who also have a solid aviation background, too. And getting good wide-area maps (especially worldwide) is a HUGE database effort.
There are a few open-source flight sim development efforts underway, but they've been in development for years without much visible progress. There simply aren't enough people with the coding ability, aviation experience, and time to work on them, and the market simply isn't there for a company to take them on.
My dream is for a comprehensive flight simulation--civil air, military air, and at least earth-orbit space. Good worldwide maps, intelligent AI (with links to real-world airline schedules and such), dynamic military campaign engine, believable bomb and missile effects, etc. I know something like this will never happen, at least not in the forseeable future. But I can dream, can't I?
There's little reason to send people into space until we work out the enormous difficulties of colonizing other worlds and have the means and a plan that has good odds of working.
And just how do you think we're going to get to that point? Do you think long-duration spaceflight and routine space access just happen? That we can just sit on our asses and wait for that tech to develop out of thin air?
I've got some news for you: Paper studies are not hardware. Reports and analysis do not equal experience. Powerpoint presentations do not get metal (or plastic, glass, flesh, etc) off the ground. In order to gain experience, to learn, to be able to come up with a spacecraft that we can use for colonization... we have to fly. You need practical, real-world, hands-on experience building and flying spacecraft. And you need successive generations of spacecraft, each one building on the last, to incorporate what you've learned and try out new things.
See, the tech needed for spaceflight isn't that common. In other fields, you can sometimes sit back and wait without having to do the basic research and prototyping for yourself because someone else is doing it for their purposes. If you need faster processors, for example, you don't have to sit there and build processors yourself--there is enough demand from other fields that the work is getting done. But you don't see that going on with high-efficiency rockets, electric thrusters, vacuum-rated hardware, long-term closed-cycle enviornmental control, etc.
What you're advocating is the equivalent of sitting back in 1905 and declaring that airplanes are useless, that nobody should worry about messing with them or using them until they could bring people across oceans in air-conditioned comfort, with a movie to entertain them.
The problem is the current focus of non-commercial spaceflight--science. That is, pure science for its own sake. We spend billions of dollars on flights (manned and not) for the sake of "Doing Science and Research". Now, I like science as much as the next guy--its a great thing. But spending our billions of spaceflight dollars to launch a mission just so we can watch worms wriggle around in zero gravity is a waste. It's one thing to run such experiments in the course of something larger, but as an end in themselves, they're a terrible idea.
We need to drop all the BS about "science" and "exploration" and "discoveries". The only goal of the public space program should be establishing as many permanent, self-sustaining stations and settlements as we can. Moon, Mars, asteroids, Jovian moons, 2001-style "wheel" stations, generation ships. Either we expand, or we die.
The efforts to support this should be national level, right up there with fixing the national infrastructure and transitioning to nuclear/renewable power. I'm talking bigger than Apollo, bigger than the bailouts or the stimulus package. These ought to be the national domestic priorities, not shoveling billions of dollars down the drain for useless, ineffective social programs we've already wasted trillions on, only to pay trillions more because the first 20 years of payments were pissed away.
The first goal should be the development of a high flight rate, low-cost, robust orbital launch vehicle, because without affordable space access, you can't do anything else up there. This is what the shuttle was supposed to be, but wound up failing miserably at. Yes, it will be expensive to develop. It will probably take a few generations of vehicles and two or three decades to get it right. We're certainly going to see a couple of designs that turn out to be failures, or at least more expensive to operate than we thought. But that's how you learn, by doing not by making endless paper studies. Offer it out to Lockheed, Boeing, EADS, N-G, SpaceX, Scaled, Dassault, even Sukhoi, to get some competition going.
Supporting this and the future goals will take lots of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Add funding to existing educational money so that school systems can afford to hire existing engineers, scientists, and mathematicians at wages they will be willing to work for, and have them teach. Cut administrative and school board positions (and their pay) by at least two thirds, get rid of the do-nothing, know-nothing "education" majors that merely pretend to teach, and hire some retired drill sargeants to straighten up the schools with discipline problems. Give the kids a chance to work towards something worthwhile instead of glamorizing entertainers.
Once the reliable launch vehicle is in service, then you start the colonization and utilization push. Mine some asteroids, put bases on the moon and Mars, build thousand-person stations in low orbit. Set up space-based solar collectors and beam energy down to remote areas.
It comes down to this: we can sit here staring at our belly button lint for the next fifty years, or we can actually go and do something worthwhile with our lives. Doing it will be hard, it will be expensive... but sitting on our collective ass waiting for things to happen just leaves us sitting on our collective ass. New technology doesn't jsut materialize out of thin air; someone needs to work on it. Pure science can be done on the side, as leftover funds allow.
But, for some reason, having international partners on the critical path of an international mission is just too ego shaking for NASA.
It's not an issue of ego, it's one of reliability. The US and Russia aren't exactly the best of friends; Russian aftermarket/product support is, well, less than notable; and the incorporation of Russia into the current ISS program was less a matter of needing them there than an effort to essentially bribe their rocket engineers and keep them busy on civil applications instead of military ones. I'd be extremely reluctant to put anyone outside of my own group on the critical path to one of my projects unless I absolutely had to. I wouldn't even consider a Russian company, frankly. Oh, and go ask the Indians how their Russian-built carrier is coming along.
Also, consider the wider economic picture. Do you want to send money outside your country to a potentially-unreliable partner and completely depend on them, or would you rather invest a little more in your own country and retain that technical knowledge yourself, helping out your own citizens and enabling yourself to build on that platform rather than giving it up to someone else?
Yeah, I'm using a 20" 1:9 barrel. 25.5gr Varget gave me a group I could cover with a dime at 50 yards. We'll see how these work this fall, assuming I can find somewhere to go hunt.
Require accurate speedometers and realistic speed limits (instead of blanket universal limits, arbitrarily-set ones, multiple changes in short distances, all of which are intended to generate revenue) and we might agree. And take the money from the fines away from local governments to remove the incentive to pull such stunts.
Good luck getting any kind of accuracy out at that range from a handgun round (even out of a long barrel). The number you quoted is more of a "randomly fired shots can still kill you this far away" than "you can hit a target this far away"--ie, why discharging firearms into the air is a bad idea.
Stop quoting numbers from games and wikipedia. Learn about ballistics, and go to the range.
Slashdot Mirror
At some point in the US, liberals became enamored of the use of state power to achieve equality, even at the expense of individual freedom
Not equality, egalitarianism. Everyone winds up close to the same, with little or no regard to how much or how little they've worked or contributed. It's the "Robin Hood" approach of taking stuff from the people that those in charge have determined have too much ("the rich"), and giving it to those they think don't have enough ("the poor"), or the "if it can't be had by everyone, than it won't be had by anyone" model.
And an important component of American 'conservatism' is the preservation of American liberal values against the encroachments of the state.
An important component of modern US "conservatism" seems to consist of doing everything that can be gotten away with to make everyone else act in accordance to a strict, literal interpretation of the Christian Bible. I once had such a "conservative" tell me that "we can make the government religious and it's not a violation of the First Amendment as long as we don't force you to convert or participate." That's hardly preservation of the classical liberal position of freedom of religion.
As you can maybe tell, I have a thorough hate and disgust for the two major US parties, the one-dimensional left-right scale, those who blindly follow said scale or parties, and all attempts to classify me accordingly.
but besides them who else really wants it? 2560x2048 resolution doesn't exactly help me see my web pages or documents any better - in fact it can make them downright hard to see, so why do I need it?
I would love a monitor with that high a resolution. I do a lot of high-detail CAD stuff with Catia at work; on a normal LCD monitor it looks like crap. Fortunately, I have a monster CRT running at some kind of ridiculous resolution, and the images look clear and clean without horrible jaggies. The higher the resolution is, the better for something like this.
the solid section of lane markings leading up to the stop line is supposed to be painted to such a length that when you are going the speed limit, if you are within the solid section of line as the light turns yellow, you will have time to clear the intersection before red.
That system is f'ing brilliant. I've never heard of it before, but you've already sold me on it. With proper light timing and proper, realistic speed limits, that system would be incredible.
But no, it just makes too much sense. Gotta stick other people with tickets so we don't have to pay for stuff we want. Never gonna happen.
Of course, there's also the tendency of the government to be fickle and spend all the money to get everything working, build a handful at best, and then cancel the program after most of the hard part is done. Or the "reduce the number you buy, so the amortized cost goes up, which you again use to justify purchase reductions, which makes the amortized cost go up even more..." BS.
Yeah, my drill instructor comment was a bit over the top... you're right, they wouldn't be the best people for this job. I was just letting the cranky old guy in me come out for a bit.
Though, I will add that my grandmother never had discipline problems in her classes, and her students always turned out very well. She had been in the army for several years, got out as a sergeant (outranking my grandfather at the time, who stayed in), and was known for having her students salute her :)
Also I think GP is implying that the "counselor" positions he mentioned are entirely superfluous, not merely overpaid.
That is precisely what I meant. From everything I've seen, counselors spend most of their time drinking coffee and pushing papers around. In high school, they also help you choose your electives, but I don't think that's a job that requires a graduate degree.
...then they don't need another year of high school. Off to college with them.
Simply dumping more money into education does not make it better.
Buying all this "technology" stuff is a waste of money if it's not implemented right. You don't need a computer to learn basic subjects.
Paying bad teachers more doesn't make them teach better. There are good teachers out there who deserve more for what they put into their jobs, and plenty more people who would make great teachers but won't take that big a pay cut from their current jobs in science, engineering, etc.
Similarly, elementary schools don't need two "counselors" each making $70k+. High schools don't need "career counselors" making $90k. And the school board doesn't need six figures (hell, no elected official does). Stop wasting money on administration and get some better teachers.
Hire some former drill instructors to fix discipline problems. Yes, your little deviant brat who "would never do anything bad" might get his feelings hurt a little bit, but maybe he'll finally get his shit straight and go on to be a decent member of society.
Spend some money and get some real scientists and engineers to teach. Teach hard science and math to the kids. Let's try to stop the reverence for idiocy while we can.
Bear in mind a few things from 65 years ago...
First, nukes were generally not thought of the same way they are now. Essentially, they were just really big bombs, and did not have the reputation they do today.
Second, the bombs were actually targeted on military targets. Hiroshima and Nagasaki both had large military and/or industrial facilities, and the bombs were intended for those. That a bunch of civilians lived within the lethal radius didn't really matter, and was seen as just bad luck for them at best, and "well, you started it, so tough shit" at worst.
Third, back then there wasn't much of a concept of collateral damage because there wasn't much of any way to avoid it. It wasn't until fairly recently that it was possible to bomb with enough accuracy to make avoiding civilian casualties possible. The US/Western obsession with trying to avoid civilian casualties through very restrictive ROE and precision weapons is unprecedented in history. Doesn't mean it's wrong, just that nobody else really cared much before.
Fourth, Japan very nearly didn't surrender after the two bombs. Several high-ranking officers tried what was basically a coup or end-run around the Emperor in an attempt to prevent his surrender message from getting out. They failed, but it was close.
Fifth, the alternative to not using nukes was invasion, which would have certainly cost far more lives than the bombing. If the Japanese had held to their behavior on other Pacific islands of fighting to the last man, it would have been a very long, nasty struggle with several millions dead. It's likely that the civilian population would have been involved, too.
Frankly, bombing some barren island in the middle of nowhere wouldn't have had the same effect. You might have a few witnesses seeing a big fireball and a bright flash, but I don't think the power of the weapon would have hit home, so to speak, without actually seeing the majority of a city simply wiped off the map. Without such a demonstration, all the bomb's destructive power is basically just a bunch of numbers too big for the human mind to make sense of.
I love how so many people clearly and definitively state that there's no way anything could have been mistaken for a hostile act, that everyone was definitively unarmed, etc. and state unequivocally that they would have made the "proper" decision. And they say this sitting in the comfort of their chair, in a climate-controlled room, with the luxury of zoom, rewind, image enhancement, and the little detail of not having to constantly wonder if someone is going to pop out from around the corner and send a couple pounds of RPG your way. 99% of them have probably never been in combat or had some kind of active role in any other life-or-death, make-a-decision-right-the-hell-now situation (police and fire/EMS, for example).
Was it ever confirmed that the non-reporters were, in fact, unarmed? That nobody really had an RPG or three? Or is it just people stating what they want to see and making absolute statements with only a single grainy image feed from one source, in much the same way that a soldier in a combat zone and under those conditions will tend to interpret many things (whether actually threatening or not) as threats, and react accordingly? Are they the ones actually making the mistake that they're accusing the troops of doing?
If SCOTUS can justify overturning the DC handgun ban without citing precedence or any case law
It's because there effectively wasn't any precedent, at least at the Supreme Court level. Miller was the only previous SC case to deal with the 2nd, and essentially only ruled that arms which did not have a "legitimate" militia/military/sporting purpose could be restricted or banned (in this case, a short-barreled shotgun)*. Notable is that Miller in itself is a rather sketchy example; Miller himself died before the case was heard by the SC, and nobody even showed up to argue his side of it. I'm not sure if any briefs were even submitted on his behalf.
The Heller decision followed this ruling. And to paraphrase an observation by Mr. Alan Gura during oral arguments of McDonald, cities and legislatures may have grown accustomed to violating the rights of the people, "but that does not bootstrap those violations into something that is constitutional".
I'm happy to see Heller come out as it did, and I'm confident McDonald will turn out the same. But I'm still quite displeased with the court's reluctance to support individual rights when it comes to search and seizure, eminent domain protection, consenting relations between adults, etc.
Don't fool yourself thinking "Democratic control"** of two branches will protect you from violations; neither Rs or Ds will do that. Each party is quite willing to uphold the rights it sees as harmless^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsacred, but is quite willing to trash the ones they think of as a threat.
*It'll be interesting to see if a suit by someone trying to buy/build an M4 makes it to the court; I'll enjoy watching the verbal gymnastics of someone trying to argue that the standard-issue infantry rifle of the army and national guard has no military purpose...
**Assuming you mean "controlled by Democrats". If you mean "these offices are elected rather than appointed", then the statement applies in general, not specifically to you.
The trick is finding that door in the first place. All the precision-guided bombs in the world do you no good if you can't find a target for them to hit. Even in the age of spy satellites, skillful camouflage still works.
If the major powers had just a handful of nukes it would be enough for mutually assured destruction,
Umm, no. Not even close. Nukes are terrible, powerful things... but not that powerful. You don't lob one into the center of a city and see everything within fifty miles vanish. In fact, it was put out more than once that dropping a 1MT device on the center of London would leave about 90% of the "stuff" (infrastructure, assets, other details of modern civilization) and 80% or so of the population basically intact.
The point of MAD (really, nuclear deterrence in general) isn't "ooh, we killed a bunch of people, you lose!". Countries have recovered from having cities nearly wiped off the map before.
When you set up a plan like this, a full-blown SIOP-style working over of a major industrialized society, you're talking about literally bombing them back to a few centuries ago. You're hitting pretty much every bit of modern infrastructure that you can. You're hitting military bases, installations, and stockpiles to keep him from fighting back. You're hitting logistics centers like shipping hubs, railyards, ports, airports, and depots. You're hitting communications centers like satellite control centers and launch facilities, internet nodes, etc. You're hitting industrial facilities like power plants, factories, mines, etc. The idea is to destroy all of the things that make industrialized modern society possible and set him back to the 17th century. Some of those things are "soft" and close together, and can be hit by one warhead; other things like airports and railyards pretty much need a direct groundburst hit with a large warhead to kill. Naturally (and unfortunately), many of these things are located near population centers, which (being comparatively soft) take a lot of damage themselves, but they aren't the primary targets. Completely wiping out a large country as described above takes at least a thousand warheads or so, and that's before you account for misses, interceptions, duds and other failures, etc.
Well, then there was Saddam not using chemical weapons in 1991. Remember, Iraq had more operational experience with CWs than anyone else since 1918. Given how he used it against his own countrymen, it was likely he would have done the same in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. That is, except for the little under-the-table notice from the US that there were nuclear-armed F-111s sitting on alert just in case he tried something stupid (and likely something similar from the Israelis).
Nukes are oddly stabilizing, in a way. They deter others from doing things like invading you and conquering your cities, but they also keep you from doing the same out of fear they'll be used on you. It's likely Saddam wouldn't have invaded Kuwait if he'd had nukes.
By the way, do you have any info about how missile defenses work (in any meaningfull way)? For as far as i know current systems have limited succes even taking out a scud, never mind a rain of MIRVs from several ICBMs
A few things to note, 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. 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. 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, 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. 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 a proper ABM like the 1970's-era LIM-49 Spartan mentioned above can do that), you've killed all the warheads. And it doesn't take much to mess up a warhead bus.
Again, ballistic targets don't maneuver. We could hit them in the 70's from the ground, and the US had working, hit-to-kill, fighter-launched antisatellite missiles in the 80s. It's not like this is some incredibly hard thing to do. At least some of the failures of recent GMD testing stem from failures of the decoy launcher or the interceptor rocket; it's hardly fair to say the seeker system failed when the target blew up of its own accord well before intercept. Rockets still blow up even under closely-controlled and optimal circumstances, and it's expected that many ballistic missiles will fail during boost.
Decoys are of relatively little use. 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.
The real value of an ABM system isn't that it creates some sort of invulnerable shield. Rather, it gives you the chance of stopping a small launch (like a handful of missiles) before something bigger develops. See, if you have no ABM system, and you detect even a single launch, you don't have many choices. You can wait to see where the missile is going, but by the time it burns out and you know for sure, you may not have enough time left to hit back. You can wait it out and decide not to launch yourself, but at best you now have a few million dead citizens on your hands won
What's Wash's tragic flaw, tho?
His propensity to utter deep-sounding philosophical phrases instead of paying attention to his surroundings.
All kidding aside, I did like the character, and loved the one-liners... but a lot of his acting seemed a bit... forced... compared to the others.
Do you actually know anything about nuclear targeting? Or do you just assume that you can toss a nuke in the general vicinity of a target and everything within fifty miles is toast?
During the Cold War (and maybe to this day), the entire UK nuclear arsenal was about enough to hit Moscow and give it a decent working-over, because rather than lobbing one device at the middle of a city, you actually have to target things. Railyards, runways, etc. need pretty much a direct hit with a groundburst to really take them out, and those are the kinds of things that would be targeted in a full-blown plan, not "just drop it in the city somewhere".
Actually, it would probably be better to assume a good portion of your warheads will not make it to the target. Whether they're get destroyed before use, fail to launch, get shot down before use (on an aircraft), get intercepted by defenses (yes, missile defense systems are real, and contrary to popular "knowledge", they do work and have worked since the 70's), fail to initiate, etc. Remember, many of the latest warheads have never been actually tested, and neither they nor their delivery systems (in the case of ballistic missiles) have been tested under realistic conditions. It's entirely possible that a significant fraction will simply not make it to their targets or work as intended.
I'm in a similar boat. Been a fan of flight simulations for a very long time; started with Falcon 3.0 on a 486 way back when. I was very involved with database hacking and editing in Jane's Fighters Anthology and Falcon 4.
But now, it's all lost the appeal. Falcon still has an active third-party development effort (both on the database and the leaked source code), and the real-time unscripted campaign engine is still unmatched by anything else, but it's still all being done on a 12-year-old game and graphics engine, with all the limitations that entails. And said dev community has gotten much more of a "you'll take what we give you and like it" attitude. And having spent so long messing with the internals, I know all of the limitations. Suspension of disbelief is gone now; all I end up doing is gaming the system, so to speak, and all of the faults and known inconsistencies with Real Life (flight model simplifications, hacks, etc) kill the rest of the enjoyment off. Civil flight sims aren't any better; the super-rigid ATC and AI aircraft behavior in MSFS is laughable to anyone with real-world aviation experience, and the flight dynamics can get pretty silly. Orbiter does a beautiful job with handling orbital mechanics, but its aero, systems, and terrain handling are far behind, there's no "feel" of really flying anything, and making any kind of decent addon requires coding knowledge. X-plane is fun to mess with and do "what-ifs", but its ATC sucks and it still doesn't do supersonic aero very well. And the limited weapons implementation isn't that spectacular.
The problem with getting good flight sims is that they have a limited market. Not too many people are willing to put in the time and effort to learn a complex, high-fidelity sim, especially if they don't have real-world aviation experience. Also, gettting this level of accuracy is a lot of work; flight models are hard to get right even with good data, and you're not likely to find much of that on anything remotely close to contemporary (especially WRT military aircraft and weapons). You need developers who also have a solid aviation background, too. And getting good wide-area maps (especially worldwide) is a HUGE database effort.
There are a few open-source flight sim development efforts underway, but they've been in development for years without much visible progress. There simply aren't enough people with the coding ability, aviation experience, and time to work on them, and the market simply isn't there for a company to take them on.
My dream is for a comprehensive flight simulation--civil air, military air, and at least earth-orbit space. Good worldwide maps, intelligent AI (with links to real-world airline schedules and such), dynamic military campaign engine, believable bomb and missile effects, etc. I know something like this will never happen, at least not in the forseeable future. But I can dream, can't I?
There's little reason to send people into space until we work out the enormous difficulties of colonizing other worlds and have the means and a plan that has good odds of working.
And just how do you think we're going to get to that point? Do you think long-duration spaceflight and routine space access just happen? That we can just sit on our asses and wait for that tech to develop out of thin air?
I've got some news for you: Paper studies are not hardware. Reports and analysis do not equal experience. Powerpoint presentations do not get metal (or plastic, glass, flesh, etc) off the ground. In order to gain experience, to learn, to be able to come up with a spacecraft that we can use for colonization... we have to fly. You need practical, real-world, hands-on experience building and flying spacecraft. And you need successive generations of spacecraft, each one building on the last, to incorporate what you've learned and try out new things.
See, the tech needed for spaceflight isn't that common. In other fields, you can sometimes sit back and wait without having to do the basic research and prototyping for yourself because someone else is doing it for their purposes. If you need faster processors, for example, you don't have to sit there and build processors yourself--there is enough demand from other fields that the work is getting done. But you don't see that going on with high-efficiency rockets, electric thrusters, vacuum-rated hardware, long-term closed-cycle enviornmental control, etc.
What you're advocating is the equivalent of sitting back in 1905 and declaring that airplanes are useless, that nobody should worry about messing with them or using them until they could bring people across oceans in air-conditioned comfort, with a movie to entertain them.
I think you're on to something there.
The problem is the current focus of non-commercial spaceflight--science. That is, pure science for its own sake. We spend billions of dollars on flights (manned and not) for the sake of "Doing Science and Research". Now, I like science as much as the next guy--its a great thing. But spending our billions of spaceflight dollars to launch a mission just so we can watch worms wriggle around in zero gravity is a waste. It's one thing to run such experiments in the course of something larger, but as an end in themselves, they're a terrible idea.
We need to drop all the BS about "science" and "exploration" and "discoveries". The only goal of the public space program should be establishing as many permanent, self-sustaining stations and settlements as we can. Moon, Mars, asteroids, Jovian moons, 2001-style "wheel" stations, generation ships. Either we expand, or we die.
The efforts to support this should be national level, right up there with fixing the national infrastructure and transitioning to nuclear/renewable power. I'm talking bigger than Apollo, bigger than the bailouts or the stimulus package. These ought to be the national domestic priorities, not shoveling billions of dollars down the drain for useless, ineffective social programs we've already wasted trillions on, only to pay trillions more because the first 20 years of payments were pissed away.
The first goal should be the development of a high flight rate, low-cost, robust orbital launch vehicle, because without affordable space access, you can't do anything else up there. This is what the shuttle was supposed to be, but wound up failing miserably at. Yes, it will be expensive to develop. It will probably take a few generations of vehicles and two or three decades to get it right. We're certainly going to see a couple of designs that turn out to be failures, or at least more expensive to operate than we thought. But that's how you learn, by doing not by making endless paper studies. Offer it out to Lockheed, Boeing, EADS, N-G, SpaceX, Scaled, Dassault, even Sukhoi, to get some competition going.
Supporting this and the future goals will take lots of engineers, scientists, and mathematicians. Add funding to existing educational money so that school systems can afford to hire existing engineers, scientists, and mathematicians at wages they will be willing to work for, and have them teach. Cut administrative and school board positions (and their pay) by at least two thirds, get rid of the do-nothing, know-nothing "education" majors that merely pretend to teach, and hire some retired drill sargeants to straighten up the schools with discipline problems. Give the kids a chance to work towards something worthwhile instead of glamorizing entertainers.
Once the reliable launch vehicle is in service, then you start the colonization and utilization push. Mine some asteroids, put bases on the moon and Mars, build thousand-person stations in low orbit. Set up space-based solar collectors and beam energy down to remote areas.
It comes down to this: we can sit here staring at our belly button lint for the next fifty years, or we can actually go and do something worthwhile with our lives. Doing it will be hard, it will be expensive... but sitting on our collective ass waiting for things to happen just leaves us sitting on our collective ass. New technology doesn't jsut materialize out of thin air; someone needs to work on it. Pure science can be done on the side, as leftover funds allow.
But, for some reason, having international partners on the critical path of an international mission is just too ego shaking for NASA.
It's not an issue of ego, it's one of reliability. The US and Russia aren't exactly the best of friends; Russian aftermarket/product support is, well, less than notable; and the incorporation of Russia into the current ISS program was less a matter of needing them there than an effort to essentially bribe their rocket engineers and keep them busy on civil applications instead of military ones. I'd be extremely reluctant to put anyone outside of my own group on the critical path to one of my projects unless I absolutely had to. I wouldn't even consider a Russian company, frankly. Oh, and go ask the Indians how their Russian-built carrier is coming along.
Also, consider the wider economic picture. Do you want to send money outside your country to a potentially-unreliable partner and completely depend on them, or would you rather invest a little more in your own country and retain that technical knowledge yourself, helping out your own citizens and enabling yourself to build on that platform rather than giving it up to someone else?
Be careful what you wish for. We could wind up with another Starship Troopers...
Yeah, I'm using a 20" 1:9 barrel. 25.5gr Varget gave me a group I could cover with a dime at 50 yards. We'll see how these work this fall, assuming I can find somewhere to go hunt.
Require accurate speedometers and realistic speed limits (instead of blanket universal limits, arbitrarily-set ones, multiple changes in short distances, all of which are intended to generate revenue) and we might agree. And take the money from the fines away from local governments to remove the incentive to pull such stunts.
Good luck getting any kind of accuracy out at that range from a handgun round (even out of a long barrel). The number you quoted is more of a "randomly fired shots can still kill you this far away" than "you can hit a target this far away"--ie, why discharging firearms into the air is a bad idea.
Stop quoting numbers from games and wikipedia. Learn about ballistics, and go to the range.