The Lightning is no replacement for the Raptor
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
The f-35 Lightening is half the size and has less than a third the weapons payload of the Raptor. It is a multimission fighter intended for all services except army, but you'd need three-four of them to replace one Raptor and remember the single most expensive component in a modern fighter jet is the pilot. 3-4 pilots instead of one and the saving don't add up real fast.
The Lightning is seriously cool but it simple cannot replace the Raptor - and it was never meant to, except, it appears, in the minds of Democrats. Let's face it, they aren't going to buy any extra Lightnings because of the reduction in the Raptor fleet. In point of fact, they'll cut the ones they have already committed to.
I predict. And I've been dead right about every prediction I've made about Obama and his lunatic lefties.
...that most UK residents won't get the treatment for years while their sight degenerates as they sit on the waiting list. Unless they get it done in the United States...oh, that's right - they won't be able to once Obama is done with health care.
Our society has reached the point where it criminalizes things not because they are Bad, Wrong, or Evil, but simply because it makes things easier for the police. In this case, a photoshopped picture cannot be illegal since it depicts something that never happened. Nevertheless, we still criminalize sexualized sketches of children, cgi images of sexualized children, or even written pornography that talks about sexualized children, and all for the same reason: so police don't have to prove an actual crime occurred in court. Of course it violates the 1st Amendment! Like anyone pays attention to that any more. This is part and parcel with modern "law enforcement". Photocop and red light cameras seldom produce pictures that can identify the driver, so states using them (for revenue) always change the law to hold the registrar of the vehicle responsible for the moving violation, thereby eliminating the need to identify the actual perpetrator, and neatly bypassing the law about one spouse testifying against another, since 90% of the time it's one of the two spouses. It also changes the remaining 10% to a score since either the registrar doesn't know who it was, or is forced to testify against a friend.
Like 24x7 tracking of citizens, no-warrant searches and wiretaps, the fiction that just because email may pass through someone else's computer it cannot have an expectation of privacy, all these are designed to eliminate work for police, so they are free to do what society hires them for - generating revenue. That is what is really meant by "law enforcement".
Cynical? Oh, yes. But I come by it honestly. Yes, I would rather live in anarchy, since as near as I can tell, the only difference between what we have now and anarchy is the fact that one of the biggest lawbreakers is the government and its agents. Anarchy would at least remove that source of crime.
...the gov't ever got rid of a tax that was "replaced" by another.
Continuous tracking of all motor vehicles, and thereby of most citizens. Oh, well, they do that already with cell phones. It won't be abused. Sssuuurrreee it won't.
"The Chevy volt won't pay a penny of fuel tax..." - not on gasoline, but it does pay the same tax we all pay on electricity. It will also pay the VAT when, not if, that is imposed by the Obamacists. It was supposed to be freer of taxes in order to encourage transitioning to "less polluting" (again, AS IF) technology.
Hey, "infringement without financial gain", people. That's a half million dollars. And, I am assured, over and over and friggin' over again in an unskippable notice at the beginning of every fracking dvd ever burned, this infringement is "investigated by the FBI". The law isn't just for Sony and Disney. Let it work for the little guys.
No one who actually studied the positions of the Democrats elected to high office would be even the least bit surprised at this. With nearly all Hollywood pushing Obama you can look at this and realize that it's just for starters.
Remember folks. YOU elected them. You should have listened to what they were saying instead of screaming "Yeah!" every time they dissed Bush.
Let's see...cutting the military down to next-to-nothing and letting Iraq twist in the wind until some religious maniac makes it a dictatership again is next on the agenda, I believe. Following that will be beefing up the DMCA and stiffening the penalties. Don't ever say you were surprised. No one who voted for Obama should be allowed to even say that.
As for the minority of people out there who voted for someone - ANYone - but Obama, the above does not, of course, apply. The rest of you are morons who were asking for it. I mean that quite literally and, yeah, I'm bitter about it. As someone once observed, "I can see why they should suffer for their foolishness, I just can't see why I should as well."
After that, you might want to consider that you don't actually care that much about your performance, and that you are living an act of collectivist desperation.
Probably by living in an anarcho-syndicalist commune, taking it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for each week, with all the decisions of that officer having to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority vote in the case of affairs with external ramifications.
> This highly explosive space/time-bending device > isn't just the prized jewel of the show's mad > scientist, professor Farnsworth. It also > destroys anyone/anything not wearing a > 'Doom-proof Platinum Vest.'"
Damn! I heard that in Professor Farnsworth's own voice. On the first read-through!
> Saying that 2008 is cooler than the last seven or > eight years is like standing on a beach watching > the waves wash up and down the shore, and at one > particular low point between waves commenting that > this is the lowest water level in the last 4 > minutes, and claiming that that wipes out all > evidence of the rising tide.
No, I said 2008 brings the running average of temperatures for the last century so close to flat that global warming believers haven't a leg to stand on. That is the equivalent of watching the waves come and go for 50 years and finding that the long-term trend high tides running higher has just been wiped out when the high tides trended down very quickly.
You're not only poor with statistics, your metaphors aren't any better.
>> we really don't understand how global climate works
> Yes we do.
No, you only think you do, your evidence just doesn't add up. Sorry, but facts are facts.
> El Nino years
Why the drop occurred, be it El Nino, Santa Claus, or Reptile men from the Crab nebula, is not relevant. The tiny, modest, little trend that was all the evidence you had for global warming just went phththth. Maybe El Nino did it, I might even agree with you that certainly El Nino did it. But your evidence is still gone. If the global temps start to rise again in the coming decades - and if future El Nino don't wipe those out too - then I will concede that global warming is happening.
Of course, even if you manage to get that far you have still to prove that a) humans did it and that b) it isn't a good thing. Archeology shows that, historically, warm was always better for humans.
Oh, and one more thing: > Not to mention the fact that the expect the > freaking NORTH POLE to melt down to open ocean > this year.
Sorry to burst your balloon but changes in the atlantic conveyor do occur and have occurred and that can, and does, affect the north polar ice cap. We have no evidence that "global warming" is the prime mover in that change. Personally, I think we need look no further than increased vulcanism in the north atlantic to explain that.
You are doing the simplistic equivalent of seeing an ice cube melt and claiming it's the heat in the room - totally ignoring the fact that the room is a freezer but the ice cube is sitting in water you boiled to begin with.
We. Don't. Know. Enough. About. Climate. Change. We just don't, no matter how much you wish we did. We do know it's a chaotic system, so we might never truly know. And all of the foregoing shows that we don't have enough information to base trillions of dollars worth of public policy on it.
Wouldn't it be just ducky if we actually did what you wanted to do and succeeded - thereby consigning our progeny to another ice age. Be careful what you wish for.
> Please enlighten us about what evidence was wiped > out by this piece of news, because as far as I > know noone has ever said that global warming means > continually rising temperatures. Because that is > not how things work.
#1: "Global warming" does mean "continuously rising temperatures - on average - or else the globe is not warming.
#2: The "evidence" for global warming is two fold. First is a running average temperature, which has, in fact, shown a rise over the last 75 years or so. Not a huge rise, but a rise. Add 2008 to that running average comes out nearly dead flat, and therefore stands as evidence that, statistically, global temperatures are remaining close to their historical curve.
#3: The other "evidence" for global warming is projections of climate models, none of which could correctly determine the past century of data when fed with 19th century data. Since Britain released several centuries worth of daily weather reports from every ship log in that time, not one, single, solitary climate model can take that data and predict the climate we actually have. To the contrary, they indicate a cooling trend.
And that is how things work. To those of us who look at "global warming" with science, we find no conclusive proof, and since 2007-2008 we don't even see enough evidence to consider the hypothesis. If you cannot see that then you are not a scientist, you are a member of the International Church of Global Warming, and the proof is written in your Bible, so why argue about it?
Not entirely. Uranium 235 is, indeed, heating rocks even as it sits in the ground, but U-238 does not, and something like 93% of all terrestrial uranium is U-238. Of course, breeder reactors stuffed with both convert U-238 to Pu-239, plutonium. So U-238 will always be with us until we decide to turn it into plutonium for power.
...perhaps the fact that 2008 virtually wiped out any direct evidence for global warming should give us pause to reflect that we really don't understand how global climate works and that a multi-trillion dollar plan to combat it might help, hurt, or, most likely, do nothing but eat up so much tax money that if and when we finally do know what to do we will no longer be able to afford it.
...what you can accomplish against a population under constant surveillance and no human rights left at all. Consider: http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/16/1730221 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/20/2318220 http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/1457253 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1344200 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/10/1846241 http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/04/1750246 http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-details/Tens+of+thousands+of+CCTV+cameras%2C+yet+80%25+of+crime+unsolved/article.do
and, my personal favorite: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6524495.stm
Oh, I'm sure the UK government has the very best of intentions. We all know what is paved with those. And the UK has already arrived.
> A junk food tax sounds like an INCREDIBLY good idea.
I think a tax on thin people is an INCREDIBLY good idea. They don't buy as much food as fat people thereby losing revenue for the farmers to grow the food, the truckers to move the food, the chains that sell the food. It's obvious that they are just not generating enough economic revenue. Tax 'em for it. That'll learn 'em!
>studies from cigarette taxes show that increases costs > decrease consumption of even highly desirable things.
The studies also showed that the higher the tax goes, the more active the black market becomes. Raise the cigarette tax and people start buying from Indians. Want to see the reductio ad absurdum of this mindset? Look at the War on (Some) Drugs. Now picture gang members shooting themselves and innocents to keep anyone from hawking black market cigarettes but them.
I know we like to forget the past, but must we do so every generation?! Can we not see that horrible price we pay for the Drug Vendetta, do we not remember what happened with Prohibition? Are we really so incapable of learning?!
Judging by wonkavader, I guess so.
> A small tax (in stores, vending machines[...]
There are no small taxes. There are only taxes that have not been raised yet. And handing the government a new source of tax money is like handing an addict some crack and a pistol.
You want to see health insurance reform? Easy. One pool: US citizen. No smoking/nonsmoking, no fat/thin, no good genes/bad genes, no cherrypicking people with low medical needs and no shunning people with high medical needs. Average over the entire country and the extra cost is small. Much smaller than your it-will-only-start-small tax.
1 - Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with?
No. As a rabid libertarian, I used to, before RMS's arguments convinced me - although if he had not, I suspect the RIAA, MPAA, and Disney would have anyway.
The fact is simple: you cannot, and should not, lay claim to own something in someone else's mind. It's as simple as that. Intellectual "property" is nothing of the sort. The moment you introduce the idea that an idea itself can be "property" you automatically bring to bear the social mechanisms of enforcement of something already in the mind of another person. In other and simpler words: Thought Police. That is no definition of "liberty" that makes sense to me.
The idea of "property" was invented as a means to control access to and use of scarce resources. Intellect, despite the example of politicians all over the world, is simply not scarce.
Reasonable people can talk about the problem of compensating creators of new intellectual "property" - but only after they have rid themselves of the destructive meme of forcing it into the real estate mold.
It is no accident that as newspapers turn more and more liberal in their slant, people find them less and less trustworthy as an unbiased source. If you want biased reporting, you go to moveon.org. If you don't, where can you go? The Manchester Union Leader? No, the newspapers got down into the same pig trough as broadcast news, and none of them really understand that people do not like to read shit.
Slashdot Mirror
The f-35 Lightening is half the size and has less than a third the weapons payload of the Raptor. It is a multimission fighter intended for all services except army, but you'd need three-four of them to replace one Raptor and remember the single most expensive component in a modern fighter jet is the pilot. 3-4 pilots instead of one and the saving don't add up real fast.
The Lightning is seriously cool but it simple cannot replace the Raptor - and it was never meant to, except, it appears, in the minds of Democrats. Let's face it, they aren't going to buy any extra Lightnings because of the reduction in the Raptor fleet. In point of fact, they'll cut the ones they have already committed to.
I predict. And I've been dead right about every prediction I've made about Obama and his lunatic lefties.
...that is one butt-ugly car!
...that most UK residents won't get the treatment for years while their sight degenerates as they sit on the waiting list. Unless they get it done in the United States...oh, that's right - they won't be able to once Obama is done with health care.
Our society has reached the point where it criminalizes things not because they are Bad, Wrong, or Evil, but simply because it makes things easier for the police. In this case, a photoshopped picture cannot be illegal since it depicts something that never happened. Nevertheless, we still criminalize sexualized sketches of children, cgi images of sexualized children, or even written pornography that talks about sexualized children, and all for the same reason: so police don't have to prove an actual crime occurred in court. Of course it violates the 1st Amendment! Like anyone pays attention to that any more. This is part and parcel with modern "law enforcement". Photocop and red light cameras seldom produce pictures that can identify the driver, so states using them (for revenue) always change the law to hold the registrar of the vehicle responsible for the moving violation, thereby eliminating the need to identify the actual perpetrator, and neatly bypassing the law about one spouse testifying against another, since 90% of the time it's one of the two spouses. It also changes the remaining 10% to a score since either the registrar doesn't know who it was, or is forced to testify against a friend.
Like 24x7 tracking of citizens, no-warrant searches and wiretaps, the fiction that just because email may pass through someone else's computer it cannot have an expectation of privacy, all these are designed to eliminate work for police, so they are free to do what society hires them for - generating revenue. That is what is really meant by "law enforcement".
Cynical? Oh, yes. But I come by it honestly. Yes, I would rather live in anarchy, since as near as I can tell, the only difference between what we have now and anarchy is the fact that one of the biggest lawbreakers is the government and its agents. Anarchy would at least remove that source of crime.
Continuous tracking of all motor vehicles, and thereby of most citizens. Oh, well, they do that already with cell phones. It won't be abused. Sssuuurrreee it won't.
"The Chevy volt won't pay a penny of fuel tax..." - not on gasoline, but it does pay the same tax we all pay on electricity. It will also pay the VAT when, not if, that is imposed by the Obamacists. It was supposed to be freer of taxes in order to encourage transitioning to "less polluting" (again, AS IF) technology.
Can the gov't even spell "cross-purposes"?
Hey, "infringement without financial gain", people. That's a half million dollars. And, I am assured, over and over and friggin' over again in an unskippable notice at the beginning of every fracking dvd ever burned, this infringement is "investigated by the FBI". The law isn't just for Sony and Disney. Let it work for the little guys.
> This confirms suspicions that have been around
> since the 1990's, and likely plays havoc with
> global models of climate change.
Not that this will change our country's fixed delusion about global warming...
No one who actually studied the positions of the Democrats elected to high office would be even the least bit surprised at this. With nearly all Hollywood pushing Obama you can look at this and realize that it's just for starters.
Remember folks. YOU elected them. You should have listened to what they were saying instead of screaming "Yeah!" every time they dissed Bush.
Let's see...cutting the military down to next-to-nothing and letting Iraq twist in the wind until some religious maniac makes it a dictatership again is next on the agenda, I believe. Following that will be beefing up the DMCA and stiffening the penalties. Don't ever say you were surprised. No one who voted for Obama should be allowed to even say that.
As for the minority of people out there who voted for someone - ANYone - but Obama, the above does not, of course, apply. The rest of you are morons who were asking for it. I mean that quite literally and, yeah, I'm bitter about it. As someone once observed, "I can see why they should suffer for their foolishness, I just can't see why I should as well."
> The students will essentially own the computers
If that is so then you have no moral right to impose any restrictions.
"a lot of the "older guy's" tend to migrate into roles where they don't need to keep mountains of info bouncing around their head all the time."
Hello! Welcome to Wal-Mart.
Now there's a use for your gun...
After that, you might want to consider that you don't actually care that much about your performance, and that you are living an act of collectivist desperation.
Probably by living in an anarcho-syndicalist commune, taking it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for each week, with all the decisions of that officer having to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs, but by a two-thirds majority vote in the case of affairs with external ramifications.
> This highly explosive space/time-bending device
> isn't just the prized jewel of the show's mad
> scientist, professor Farnsworth. It also
> destroys anyone/anything not wearing a
> 'Doom-proof Platinum Vest.'"
Damn! I heard that in Professor Farnsworth's
own voice. On the first read-through!
> Saying that 2008 is cooler than the last seven or
> eight years is like standing on a beach watching
> the waves wash up and down the shore, and at one
> particular low point between waves commenting that
> this is the lowest water level in the last 4
> minutes, and claiming that that wipes out all
> evidence of the rising tide.
No, I said 2008 brings the running average of temperatures for the last century so close to flat that global warming believers haven't a leg to stand on. That is the equivalent of watching the waves come and go for 50 years and finding that the long-term trend high tides running higher has just been wiped out when the high tides trended down very quickly.
You're not only poor with statistics, your metaphors aren't any better.
>> we really don't understand how global climate works
> Yes we do.
No, you only think you do, your evidence just doesn't add up. Sorry, but facts are facts.
> El Nino years
Why the drop occurred, be it El Nino, Santa Claus, or Reptile men from the Crab nebula, is not relevant. The tiny, modest, little trend that was all the evidence you had for global warming just went phththth. Maybe El Nino did it, I might even agree with you that certainly El Nino did it. But your evidence is still gone. If the global temps start to rise again in the coming decades - and if future El Nino don't wipe those out too - then I will concede that global warming is happening.
Of course, even if you manage to get that far you have still to prove that a) humans did it and that b) it isn't a good thing. Archeology shows that, historically, warm was always better for humans.
Oh, and one more thing:
> Not to mention the fact that the expect the
> freaking NORTH POLE to melt down to open ocean
> this year.
Sorry to burst your balloon but changes in the atlantic conveyor do occur and have occurred and that can, and does, affect the north polar ice cap. We have no evidence that "global warming" is the prime mover in that change. Personally, I think we need look no further than increased vulcanism in the north atlantic to explain that.
You are doing the simplistic equivalent of seeing an ice cube melt and claiming it's the heat in the room - totally ignoring the fact that the room is a freezer but the ice cube is sitting in water you boiled to begin with.
We. Don't. Know. Enough. About. Climate. Change. We just don't, no matter how much you wish we did. We do know it's a chaotic system, so we might never truly know. And all of the foregoing shows that we don't have enough information to base trillions of dollars worth of public policy on it.
Wouldn't it be just ducky if we actually did what you wanted to do and succeeded - thereby consigning our progeny to another ice age. Be careful what you wish for.
> Please enlighten us about what evidence was wiped
> out by this piece of news, because as far as I
> know noone has ever said that global warming means
> continually rising temperatures. Because that is
> not how things work.
#1: "Global warming" does mean "continuously rising temperatures - on average - or else the globe is not warming.
#2: The "evidence" for global warming is two fold. First is a running average temperature, which has, in fact, shown a rise over the last 75 years or so. Not a huge rise, but a rise. Add 2008 to that running average comes out nearly dead flat, and therefore stands as evidence that, statistically, global temperatures are remaining close to their historical curve.
#3: The other "evidence" for global warming is projections of climate models, none of which could correctly determine the past century of data when fed with 19th century data. Since Britain released several centuries worth of daily weather reports from every ship log in that time, not one, single, solitary climate model can take that data and predict the climate we actually have. To the contrary, they indicate a cooling trend.
And that is how things work. To those of us who look at "global warming" with science, we find no conclusive proof, and since 2007-2008 we don't even see enough evidence to consider the hypothesis. If you cannot see that then you are not a scientist, you are a member of the International Church of Global Warming, and the proof is written in your Bible, so why argue about it?
Not entirely. Uranium 235 is, indeed, heating rocks even as it sits in the ground, but U-238 does not, and something like 93% of all terrestrial uranium is U-238. Of course, breeder reactors stuffed with both convert U-238 to Pu-239, plutonium. So U-238 will always be with us until we decide to turn it into plutonium for power.
...perhaps the fact that 2008 virtually wiped out any direct evidence for global warming should give us pause to reflect that we really don't understand how global climate works and that a multi-trillion dollar plan to combat it might help, hurt, or, most likely, do nothing but eat up so much tax money that if and when we finally do know what to do we will no longer be able to afford it.
And that is a very inconvenient truth.
The Capitol lunchroom has given up on freedom fries. Now they only have the french. Now there's a sentence that sums up the woes of the world...
...what you can accomplish against a population under constant surveillance and no human rights left at all. Consider:
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/03/16/1730221
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/20/2318220
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/27/1457253
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/20/1344200
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/10/1846241
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/04/1750246
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23412867-details/Tens+of+thousands+of+CCTV+cameras%2C+yet+80%25+of+crime+unsolved/article.do
and, my personal favorite:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6524495.stm
Oh, I'm sure the UK government has the very best of intentions. We all know what is paved with those. And the UK has already arrived.
> A junk food tax sounds like an INCREDIBLY good idea.
I think a tax on thin people is an INCREDIBLY good idea. They don't buy as much food as fat people thereby losing revenue for the farmers to grow the food, the truckers to move the food, the chains that sell the food. It's obvious that they are just not generating enough economic revenue. Tax 'em for it. That'll learn 'em!
>studies from cigarette taxes show that increases costs
> decrease consumption of even highly desirable things.
The studies also showed that the higher the tax goes, the more active the black market becomes. Raise the cigarette tax and people start buying from Indians. Want to see the reductio ad absurdum of this mindset? Look at the War on (Some) Drugs. Now picture gang members shooting themselves and innocents to keep anyone from hawking black market cigarettes but them.
I know we like to forget the past, but must we do so every generation?! Can we not see that horrible price we pay for the Drug Vendetta, do we not remember what happened with Prohibition? Are we really so incapable of learning?!
Judging by wonkavader, I guess so.
> A small tax (in stores, vending machines[...]
There are no small taxes. There are only taxes that have not been raised yet. And handing the government a new source of tax money is like handing an addict some crack and a pistol.
You want to see health insurance reform? Easy. One pool: US citizen. No smoking/nonsmoking, no fat/thin, no good genes/bad genes, no cherrypicking people with low medical needs and no shunning people with high medical needs. Average over the entire country and the extra cost is small. Much smaller than your it-will-only-start-small tax.
> Nothing like a grammar parsing topic to bring out the language Nazis.
Ve have VEYS uff makink you parse...
> I'm thinking about developing a split personality to deal with this paradox.
I think both of you already have. =)
1 - Do you acknowledge the legitimacy of intellectual property to begin with?
No. As a rabid libertarian, I used to, before RMS's arguments convinced me - although if he had not, I suspect the RIAA, MPAA, and Disney would have anyway.
The fact is simple: you cannot, and should not, lay claim to own something in someone else's mind. It's as simple as that. Intellectual "property" is nothing of the sort. The moment you introduce the idea that an idea itself can be "property" you automatically bring to bear the social mechanisms of enforcement of something already in the mind of another person. In other and simpler words: Thought Police. That is no definition of "liberty" that makes sense to me.
The idea of "property" was invented as a means to control access to and use of scarce resources. Intellect, despite the example of politicians all over the world, is simply not scarce.
Reasonable people can talk about the problem of compensating creators of new intellectual "property" - but only after they have rid themselves of the destructive meme of forcing it into the real estate mold.
It is no accident that as newspapers turn more and more liberal in their slant, people find them less and less trustworthy as an unbiased source. If you want biased reporting, you go to moveon.org. If you don't, where can you go? The Manchester Union Leader? No, the newspapers got down into the same pig trough as broadcast news, and none of them really understand that people do not like to read shit.
> Dodele's entry in Megan's Law DB has been removed.
Oh, boy, that's a relief! Now he won't be murdered again.
It's good to know the government always supports the little guy.
> For those of you who have not visited both North & South
> Dakota, I have. They are, in fact, not the same place.
How can you tell?