Comment Re:It's not about ownership (Score 2) 109
It's about personal independence. People will never give it up, and rightly so.
"You'll own nothing, and love it"
The people that want you to give up that independence will never give up, either.
It's about personal independence. People will never give it up, and rightly so.
"You'll own nothing, and love it"
The people that want you to give up that independence will never give up, either.
What 'trusted civic leaders'?
The ones that the writers of the piece liked.
There's a continuing narrative that we hate journalists because of "malign influence" or some bullshit. That people are rubes, easily manipulated, and if political leaders would just take charge and prevent the "wrong" media, people would love journalists, politicians, etc. But people came by their distrust honestly. For much of my adult life, journalists have talked down to their audience (when it was a mass audience, anyway, before it fractured into pieces). I still remember Peter Jennings, in 1994, sourly lecturing viewers on how they voted the wrong way. The tone was very much Just what do you people think you're doing, anyway?.
Trust in these institutions is gone, and probably will never return in my lifetime. And it's entirely the fault of the people in those institutions. No one else.
Russian influence helped give us Brexit by a very narrow margin
Arrogance gave you Brexit. Your side wouldn't listen to voters, and you and the entire political class that you align yourself with called them oafs, and fools, and generally discounted their concerns and told them to know their place. THAT got you Brexit. And that fact that you still haven't learned this... that you still can't admit defeat, that you still look down on "them" as dirty, unwashed masses that should conform to their betters' wishes, that you continue to blame your loss on sinister outside forces instead of your own shortcomings... means that you'll almost certainly make the same mistakes again.
With satellite based visual, and IR mode (if cloudy), stealth is obsolete. The US has enough low earth orbiting satellites ( called StarShield ) to provide multiple overlap coverage of the Earth's surface. Any large object (bigger than say a car) traveling at hundreds of miles per hour in the air will be easily identifiable.
Submarines that can carry drones and hypersonic missiles are the future.
And what happens when the enemy kills your satellites?
Now, I completely agree that stealth is overemphasized, but stealth is just part of a larger problem. The US military, particularly the Air Force, has a seriously bad tendency to rely on "magic bullet" solutions... a hyper-expensive technology that they think will win wars in a single blow.... instead of taking a layered approach that mixes new solutions with old. Which is important, because, war after war, we have to relearn the painful lesson that magic bullets tend to fail.
I know it is easy to rag on the F-35, but in the last 75 years, has any high performance aircraft been "on time and on budget and on mission"?
The F-4 Phantom not only met expectations, but far exceeded them, to the point that the USAF adopted it (even though it hurt their pride being a Navy program). McDonnell started the design in 1955, the prototype rolled out in 1958, and it entered USN and USMC service in 1960. After it was bloody obvious that the F-4 was far better than anything the USAF had in it's so-called Century Series of fighters, USAF adopted it in 1962 and their initial version... the F-4C... entered frontline service in 1963. It would dominate USAF's tactical fighter wings, with F-4's making up 16 of their 24 wings at one time. All on time, and on budget, with multiple versions being developed along the way (notably the RF-4 photo reconnaissance aircraft, and USAF's ant-surface to air missile "Wild Weasel" F-4G versions).
America's challenge in any peer conflict won't be satellites. It will be drones
Take away the satellites, and you effectively take away the drones. Don't kid yourself. The destruction of comms satellites will cripple nations, as we've largely gotten rid of backup terrestrial navigation aids like LORAN in the West, while both Russian and China kept legacy nav and com systems as backups, and are even expanding them. The first day of the war, satellites will be the very first thing to go, because you go after your enemies communications first.
Yup. And I've got my USB (A) to DB9 serial adapter handy.
Which is unreliable in many situations. I worked on several projects that had issues involving intermittent data loss on a DB9 port, and every time the culprit turned out to be a USB/DB9 adapter. When we'd install dedicated RS232 cards, the problem went away.
For laptops, the answer to this kind of thing should be a standard space where a customer can specify what ports he wants... you get X number of standard ports, and then you can choose what goes into one or two available spaces. But you're just not going to see that happen with manufacturers, even if the customer is willing to pay a greater cost.
It asks the question why don't kids play outside anymore and then in the next frame there's a picture of a pretty typical American city with absolutely no sidewalks let alone Parks or anything and the subtitle "the outside".
You give up a portion of your life in exchange for cars and a car centric civilization. And I guess for most people they think it's worth it.
Except that I spent some years growing up in dense, street-centric areas, and kids simply played in the streets. Every day. Our substitute for baseball (so as not to damage cars or windows) was "whiffle ball", with hollow plastic balls and bats. In the summers especially, we spent literally all day outside. In the streets. For kids who did this too much, the criticism was literally that "you let your kids run the streets".
Being car-centric has nothing to do with kids activity. The spread of video games and Internet connected culture had everything to do with the modern dearth of outdoor activity by kids. All of my youngest's friends are online in distant places. There are other kids in the neighborhood, but very few of them play outside that I can see. Online is where all the action is. Maybe the answer is for parents to literally kick kids out of the house, they way they used to do ("out, and I don't want to see you back inside until lunch" was a common summer refrain from parents). Maybe if all the kids are turned out, they'll start doing the natural thing, and make their own fun, which is all "outside" is.
Tipping culture is absurd top to bottom, people should be paid a decent wage.
Tipping is great in good service jobs. You tend to make good money in mid-to-nicer restaurants as a waiter or waitress. Where tipping sucks is when you work in cheap joints with cheap customers. Or delivering pizza, like you did in college, where your customers tend to be either poor or cheapskates. Poor people can't afford to tip, and cheapskates simply won't. And then there are the groups that simply refuse to tip because they don't see labor or service as a value at all. "If I can't hold it in my hand, I ain't payin' for it".
Calling someone a "dickhead" is merely pointing out that you find someone's behaviour disagreeable.
Is it bad language? Sure, but that is acceptable in some environments more than others.
Calling your superiors in the workplace a vulgar name is a fire-able offense pretty much any place else. It's not just the word, but also the fact that using it is a type of insubordination. If your boss is a jerk, then you need to find work elsewhere. But every workplace has discipline and conduct standards. You simply can't let subordinates openly insult their chain of command or you won't have much command.
There is freedom of expression in the UK.
It's a right under the European Convention on Human Rights, of which the UK is a signatory.
You've just charged a comedian with a criminal offense because his Tweet might hurt feelings. Any freedom of expression Brits had is meaningless empty symbolism at this point.
I'm glad you got to have kids and watch them grow from birth. I never got to do that; I married a gal and the boys were already ten and eleven years old when I entered their life.
I agree. I think a second benefit could be that interested high school (or college) students now get a data source that doesn't change locations from administration to administration. It is mildly frustrating to me that many government websites simply change where things are each year. Worse is when a department goes through the amazingly beneficial operation of name change.
Apparently this was a new test, essentially A B testing. The only difference in the two sets of email were that one set had links to ActBlue and the other set had links to WinRed. The complaint is that the WinRed linking emails were marked as spam but the ActBlue linking emails were not.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.