My post is not hyperbole, but actual personal observation.



You also have to factor in cost+ funding.

On one hand, it's necessary. Because you don't know how much something truly new will cost - you haven't done it before. You'll discover as you go.
It would be unfair to bind a company to a fixed cost, when nobody knows what the cost will be. It's mathematically unreasonable to entertain a fixed cost on new technologies.

(Granted, everyone gives silly lowballed best-case estimates when bidding. Anyone that injects a sense of reality into their bid is too costly and doesn't get the contract).

On the other hand, cost+ means that you make more money by spending more money. So hiring hordes of nobodies for every little task, making 89347589374 different position titles, is only gonna make you more money. There's no incentive to save.



F35 wise, like I said, it's not designed for any war we fight now.
It's designed for a war we could fight in the future.
Because you don't start designing weapons when you're in a war, you give your best effort to have them already deployed, tested, and iterated into a good sustainable state, before the onset of a conflict that could require them.

F35 variations are not complicated. The VTOL variation is the only one with any complexity. The others are no more complex than historical variations from early to late blocks of any given airframe.

The splitting of manufacturing isn't in itself a complication ridden approach. It's rather normal for different companies to work on unrelated systems. Airframe will go somewhere, avionics elsewhere, engine elsewhere, etc. That's basically a given, because different companies specialize in different things.

Keep in mind that the large prime contracts (Lockheed/GD/etc) don't actually "make" many things. They are systems integrators. They farm out the actual development for most pieces (be it in house contractors or external contractors - because they are easy to let go after the main dev is over), and they themselves specialize in stitching the pieces together. Connecting things is not difficult when they are designed with specified ICDs from the get-go. The black boxes just plug up to each other and go.

The issues that arise are often a matter of playing telephone. With one sub needing to coordinate with another sub, but they have to go through the prime, and the prime is filtering everything through a bunch of non-technical managers. Most problems are solved in a day or two when two subs physically get their engineers together and sort out any miscommunications (granted, contracts and process might not allow them the then fix the problem in a timely and affordable manner).

The F22 and F35 issues are not major insurmountable tasks. The hardest flaws are things that can be fixed in a couple months tops on the engineering side. What takes time is the politics. Engineers can't "just fix it". There's no path forward for that kind of work.

Sure, in a magic wonderland you could tell them "here, grab the credit card, buy what you need, make any changes you need, and let us know when you're done" - and a little while later you'd have a collection of non-approved, non-reviewed, non-traceable, non-contractually-covered changes that "just fix the damn thing"... and you'd also have to incur the wrath of entire departments who were denied the opportunity to validate their existence. The 'high paid welfare' system would be all over your ass.

-scheherazade

Your video, Stanley Steemer Variations (by Mia), has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

People always talk about the traditions of the rich to hold big charity fundraisers. I've always maintained that those are nothing more than a variation of conspicuous consumption. Certainly there are people like Gates and Buffett who seem sincere, but the average 1%er is simply showing up to be seen throwing cash away with their heart displayed proudly on their sleeve. And carefully preserving the receipt for tax time.

Since we are sharing stories of our use of illegal drug paraphernalia, here's one of mine. When I was in high school ( all these stories should start with a variation of this opening), my friends and I took a cardboard shipping tube about 4 inches in diameter and 4 or 5 feet long and made a bong out of it. It took three good pulls to get the smoke up to our lungs . All that lung work followed by a great big bong hit was VERY effective. We named it the BONGZOOKA. It was a big hit (pun intended). We kept that thing around our whole junior year. I too grew up and quit smoking the weed, ...but.. I miss the 70s and the bongzooka.

I meant to answer this point...

One thing that I've found interesting, after watching a vid here on regional variations within the U.S., is that a lot of times there will be one part of the U.S. that says things the same way we do, even if the majority don't.

Simply from observing the U.S. via tv and movies, and even after visiting NYC, that was completely non-obvious.

lucky760's reasoning is sound.

Anyone that has researched and/or trained on weapon on weapon defense, in this case knife vs. firearm knows the Tueller's Drill. It has been a standard for over thirty years. Basically,

The Tueller Drill is a self-defense training exercise to prepare against a short-range knife attack when armed only with a holstered handgun.
Sergeant Dennis Tueller, of the Salt Lake City, Utah Police Department wondered how quickly an attacker with a knife could cover 21 feet (6.4 m), so he timed volunteers as they raced to stab the target. He determined that it could be done in 1.5 seconds. These results were first published as an article in SWAT magazine in 1983 and in a police training video by the same title, "How Close is Too Close?"[1]
A defender with a gun has a dilemma. If he shoots too early, he risks being charged with murder. If he waits until the attacker is definitely within striking range so there is no question about motives, he risks injury and even death. The Tueller experiments quantified a "danger zone" where an attacker presented a clear threat.[2]
The Tueller Drill combines both parts of the original time trials by Tueller. There are several ways it can be conducted:[3]
The "attacker and shooter are positioned back-to-back. At the signal, the attacker sprints away from the shooter, and the shooter unholsters his gun and shoots at the target 21 feet (6.4 m) in front of him. The attacker stops as soon as the shot is fired. The shooter is successful only if his shot is good and if the runner did not cover 21 feet (6.4 m).
A more stressful arrangement is to have the attacker begin 21 feet (6.4 m) behind the shooter and run towards the shooter. The shooter is successful only if he was able take a good shot before he is tapped on the back by the attacker.
If the shooter is armed with only a training replica gun, a full-contact drill may be done with the attacker running towards the shooter. In this variation, the shooter should practice side-stepping the attacker while he is drawing the gun.
Mythbusters covered the drill in the 2012 episode "Duel Dilemmas". At 20 feet the gun wielder was able to shoot the charging knife attacker just as he reached the shooter. At shorter distances the knife wielder was always able to stab prior to being shot. (Wikipedia)

That a firearm, particularly a handgun, will instantly incapacitate an individual is not a working concept and is fallacious. Variables such as adrenaline and drugs are attributable. Shot placement is trumps. Anything but a CNS. central nervous system, shot is not efficacious in safely stopping the threat. Not an easy or sure target sans movement, stress, etc.

Law enforcement put their lives and safety in harm's way every day. They are not there to die needlessly. An individual with suicide by cop or a LEO's death in mind is a serious threat to be dealt with with prejudice.

By the way, research knife wounds vs. handgun wounds. There is much data, ER, medical examiner, law enforcement. The deadly seriousness of knife wounds are well documented.

Tasers...I would not want to risk my life behind one or anyone about whom I care.

If it were done as a single nerve in a direct route, it would be subject to damage from a jerking head motion

That doesn;t make much sense as all nerves start as large bundles and get smaller as they subdivide. In humans the course of the left recurrent nerve is a minor curiosity but when you make the vertebra that much taller and add another 6 feet of nerves going back up the neck then it supports the idea that giraffes and ourselves are from a common mammalian or even more distant species. Clearly the existence of the recurrent laryngeal nerve doesn't seem to cause a discernible weakness that's susceptible to being selected against, however it is ODD because if there are any arguments for supporting the course of the nerve for structural reasons then you would have to ask why are none of the other important structure of the neck supplied recurrently.

As someone who has done plenty of human dissection. I've seen enormous variation in structure. The anatomy books are a general map but by no means applicable to individuals. The coronary arteries of the heart and the cerebral arterial flow of the circle of willis are examples of anatomy that's well illustrated in idealised form but seldom matches up to the textbook on an angiogram.

imperfection is the norm but a lot of it won't cause disease. The idea that you can pick and choose which part of biology a designer intervenes baffles me.

In Sweden they do a variation on the hazard lights: blink once left, right, left (or similar). It looks nice.

Hi Notarobot, your argument is unfortunately based on a very common misunderstanding of the chemistry of water and salt.

I can assure you that it is an established scientific fact that pure water has the highest heat capacity per unit of its mass compared to any water solutions. The less water there is in a water solution, the less heat capacity that solution has. This is because the temperature of pure water is more proportional to the amount of energy contained within it, which is due to the flexibility of its molecular structure. The more salt you add to water, the less structural flexibility (i.e. purity) there is to distribute and contain energy as the temperature increases. To put it another way, the salt molecules weigh down and restrict the water molecules from moving as freely, which is why salt water has a higher boiling point.

So in fact the more fresh water that is introduced to the oceans, the higher heat capacity and heat conduction there will be.

Furthermore, you grossly oversimplify the problem of climate change by assuming the only change that matters is immediately perceptible to "mammals like us". One of the biggest issues is that even slight variations in temperature can drastically change entire marine ecosystems. If enough ecosystems collapse, it will cause a chain reaction that will be very, very difficult to manage, let alone recover from. Also, even slight variations in salinity can drastically change ocean currents, which in turn affects not just marine ecosystems, but weather patterns throughout the world as well.

I can tell you're an intelligent person, so I hope you'll take me seriously when I say that it's very, very important for all intelligent people to be as diligent as possible when referring to the scientific causes and effects of climate change. Advocate whatever position you'd like as to how we should go about things, but please do your best to validate the information you're using to do so.

Really? It doesn't seem that obvious to me at all.

In one case you're shining a light (laser, actually) and measuring the variations in the surface that light is contacting.

In this case you can simply watch a video and hear what was going on in the room when the video was recorded.

Seems much different and much more powerful to extract audio from nothing more than an existing video rather than capturing audio first-person in real-time with specialized equipment.

Really cool stuff. *promote

Well, sure, he doesn't have a ton of range, but he's a movie star. He doesn't need to have range, nor do we particularly require it of him. Pretty much every movie star in the history of cinema plays some variation on themselves in every role -- people like George Clooney, Will Smith, or Tom Cruise (or going further back, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, or John Wayne) rarely mix it up too much, because they are movie stars and their established persona is part of what makes them so bankable. That doesn't make them bad actors, it just makes them a specific type of actor.

Please do give us a closer look at ISIS is doing. Massacres, torture, rape, collective punishment and on, correct? Maybe killing what, 100 people at a time in the worst instances? That doesn't distinguish them from Saddam. Within Saddam's rule those crimes are what guys like yourself colloquially referred to as Saddam's 'firm' hand. They are his, so to speak, lesser and more routine crimes. I'd left them beneath mention thus far.

If you must insist on parroting your ignorance of Saddams al-Anfal campaign I'll resort to posting excerpts as evidence that the gassing was but a small part of it.

4,500 Kurdish villages were destroyed by Saddam, that's entire villages turned to rubble.
182,000 dead civilians by counts gleaned from Saddam's own records of how many Kurds his forces had succeeded in eliminating.
The concentration camps Saddam ran were pretty clearly modeled after Hitler's:
With only minor variations ... the standard pattern for sorting new arrivals [at Topzawa was as follows]. Men and women were segregated on the spot as soon as the trucks had rolled to a halt in the base's large central courtyard or parade ground. The process was brutal ... A little later, the men were further divided by age, small children were kept with their mothers, and the elderly and infirm were shunted off to separate quarters. Men and teenage boys considered to be of an age to use a weapon were herded together.

The conditions within the camp were terrible and torture, abuse and beatings were routine. The men of fighting age though were sorted for the express purpose to later drive them out into the desert by bus or truck for mass execution. This is how Saddam carried his genocide of the inhabitants of the 4,500 villages he'd destroyed.

Anyone interested in more or questioning the veracity of the above account can find more and endless references and evidence here:
http://www.hrw.org/reports/1993/iraqanfal/index.htm#TopOfPage

As for American policy, I don't quite see where I suddenly bear personal responsibility to clean up the world if I choose to form my opinions on world events independently of it's 'fit' to American policy.

I don't care much if it was Bush or Putin that took Saddam out of power aside from hedging on which would leave a better Iraq, either would be tough not to be an improvement from Saddam. Similarly for Sudan or the Congo, I'd be rather glad if world powers finally cared enough to try and spare the people there suffering under brutal military repression and endless war crimes. I'm not quite sure why you wouldn't share such a view?

This scene is pretty close to how it goes down in the book, save a little variation in how the final blow is administered.

I also completely disagree, I think the director completely nailed it. It plays up to a lifetime of predictable cliché's only to turn them right around and give us a dose of cold hard reality.

Hero's frequently loose, villains frequently win, overconfidence is a weakness and having a just cause is no guarantee of victory.

Oberyn wins the fight but allows his need for vengeance to cloud his judgement. He starts calm and works himself into more and more of a frenzy over a neurosis he has carried for many years. IMHO this was portrayed pretty authentically, he starts calm (as he has learned to be) but as the fight progresses he allows the guard to drop and the raging emotions to manifest properly.

Now he can afford to let these bottled up feeling out properly, the mountain is right there and soon he will kill him! Throw in some adrenaline and the anticipation of that moment overwhelms the self control that earned him the title red viper.

I also don't see how you can describe the mountain as a "super ninja" here. Everything he does at the end is an exercise in brute strength, let's not forget he's wearing mailed fists, the blow to the mouth need not be especially strong or quick to do the damage. All he does after that is roll on top of him with the last bit of strength and rage he has (spurred on by his "beetle crushing" fuck everything mindset). Subsequently crushing the skull has more to do with his upper body weight as his hands alone.

A massive strong man yanks someone's legs out from under them, punches them in the mouth and then climbs on top (while they are stunned) to finish the job.

Being run through doesn't necessarily stop one's muscles from working until the blood loss kicks in. Doubly so with the adrenaline of a life or death fight (and the anaesthetic effect massive trauma has on the nervous system). There are countless stories of soldiers and criminals being mortally wounded by multiple shots to the chest who continued attacking till the blood loss overcame them. Gregor Clegane is exactly the sort of psycho who might exhibit such bloody minded behaviour.

I might also remind you that the Mountain has one more than one occasion been described as "swifter than might be expected for a man of such stature" i.e. not a lumbering hulk. He gets several blows in on Oberyn during the fight. Many of the swings are extremely heavy but they are calculated moves from an expert fighter who is more than capable of moving quickly when needed.

Oberyn is quicker, but the Mountain is not exactly slow (that's one of the reasons why the Mountain is/was formerly undefeated, he's big but can still move relatively quickly for his size).

I think this is both right and wrong...natural selection CAN be even faster (but is not always) at forcing evolutionary change than 'breeding for traits' is, because breeders are not perfect and may allow unwanted traits or incomplete but wanted traits to continue, but nature is a horrible bitch goddess and if your traits really don't work for her, you simply die. That's certainly not always the case, but when it is nature is better at 'selecting' than humans. The rate of reproduction makes either process move faster.
It's true that humans have artificially created more breeds than nature would likely create alone, because we sometimes like traits that would hinder survival and through breeding amplify them to create a 'new breed'.
Nature forces the one's most suited for their environment to thrive, while humans often allow those less suited to live in their environment to survive for human reasons, erasing natural selection from the equation. Without our 'guiding hand' in their evolution, I think it's likely they would likely have even MORE change in some areas (and less in others) because environments are drastically different and different traits would evolve in different places, creating different 'dogs' such as wild dogs in Africa and/or dingos in Australia, which I think (but may be wrong) have evolved so separately that they can't breed with non-"wild dogs". It may lead to less variation in specific areas/populations, but more variation between those from different areas.

It's a clever rationalization of hypocrisy. If it's going to be taboo to observe patterns in groups of people demarcated by visible characteristics they were born with, be consistent about it. But I'd argue against that taboo.

What makes racism bad is treating people as specimens of a group rather than unique individuals. Group averages may differ slightly but there's tons of overlap. Common usage of the word "racism" unfortunately conflates a moral aspect (how to treat people) with an epistemological aspect (dogma that all groups are created exactly equal in every way). Epistemology shouldn't be moralized. I could give you lots of examples of sociological and psychological research getting muddled on account of an inflexible dogma that there couldn't be any heritable differences between groups other than the obvious superficial ones. I'd rather conceive of the word racism as a verb describing harmful actions towards people due to their group membership, not a noun denoting a thoughtcrime or speechcrime. Like church and state, or science and religion, epistemology and morality don't go together.

A priori based on generation times and mutation rates you should expect there could be 1/10 as much variation between historically isolated groups of humans as there is between breeds of dogs, since the most recent common ancestor of all domestic dogs is half as far back as humans' most recent common ancestor is (or rather was before 16th and 17th century explorers spread their sperm across the globe) but dogs breed a lot faster. Breeds of dogs demonstrably vary in many behavioral and psychological traits. It's not far fetched to suppose that a variety of environments over the past 100,000 years of humanity pushed population means of behavioral traits in various directions.