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The Military

Test Pilot: the F-35 Can't Dogfight 843

schwit1 sends this report from the War Is Boring column: A test pilot has some very, very bad news about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The pricey new stealth jet can't turn or climb fast enough to hit an enemy plane during a dogfight or to dodge the enemy's own gunfire, the pilot reported following a day of mock air battles back in January. And to add insult to injury, the JSF flier discovered he couldn't even comfortably move his head inside the radar-evading jet's cramped cockpit. "The helmet was too large for the space inside the canopy to adequately see behind the aircraft." That allowed the F-16 to sneak up on him. The test pilot's report is the latest evidence of fundamental problems with the design of the F-35 — which, at a total program cost of more than a trillion dollars, is history's most expensive weapon. Your tax dollars at work.

Comment This seems appropriate (Score 1) 163

http://www.thewizardsmanse.com/congress-for-sale/

Congress extends copyright every time Disney throws money at them.

The Senate killed patent reform because trial lawyers threw money at them.

Congress is rushing through a bill to kill Net Neutrality because Comcast et al. threw money at them.

The smartest thing they did was to create lobbying loopholes in the bribery laws so they could accept bribes with impunity. The only way to "fix" the system is to outlaw lobbying and pass an amendment overruling SCOTUS' decision that corporations and PACs can spend as much as they want on reelection campaigns.

Unfortunately, the Senate has to approve both of those and when they figure out it means they can't accept bribes any more, they will kill it faster than patent reform.

Comment Controversy Manufactured by Republican Sore Losers (Score 1) 609

So, when Colon Powell did it it was no big deal, but Hillary does it and it's the end of the world? Also, no notices the irony of saying she should have used the State Department's server so her e-mails could be archived when the State Department admitted that they lost ALL the e-mails from her term due to a server upgrade. So if she had used their server all her e-mails would have been lost. Because she used her own they exist. How about a hearty "thank you" and STFU from all the repubs trying to contrive a controversy so they stand a chance against her in 2016...

Submission + - Undersea Link from Finland to Estonia Visioned (yle.fi) 1

jones_supa writes: A train link between Finland and continental Europe could become a reality 15 or 20 years from now. A study carried out by Sweco Consulting recommends moving ahead with negotiations on building a railway tunnel between the capital cities Helsinki and Tallinn. According to a preliminary report out Wednesday, an undersea link would shorten the travel time between the two capitals from the current minimum 90 minutes by ship to around 30 minutes by rail. Estimated ticket cost is about 40 euros. The study, commissioned by the two cities, estimates that the undersea route could be completed after 2030 and would cost somewhere between 9 and 13 billion euros.

Submission + - Doctors Warn Against 'Measle Parties'

HughPickens.com writes: The San Francisco Chronicle reports that it's hard to know if the “measles party,” a relic of pre-vaccination times, is really making a comeback. But after a report out of Marin showed that some parents might indeed be thinking about hosting one to infect their children in a more “natural” way, the health department decided not to take chances. Marin County Public Health Officer Matt Willis says that although his office has received no reports of such parties, officials have fielded several calls from parents asking about the benefits of "natural immunity," or the idea that immunity gained from contracting a disease is superior to immunity conferred through vaccination. Measles is a serious illness that can cause brain swelling, long-term neurological effects and even death, Willis says. Plus, he added, there is no evidence that immunity gained through becoming sick with measles is any better than vaccine-imparted immunity. "Any parents who are considering this, they should have a look at a child who’s really sick with measles, and I think they’d change their minds."

Willis and other health officials suspect the concept of a measles party may have grown out of "pox parties," which were popular in the 1980s, before the chickenpox vaccine was widely available. Some parents, reports said, even arranged to pay strangers for licked lollipops, saliva or other items from infected children. Willis says he still hears reports of “pox parties” occurring in Marin today, even though a chickenpox vaccine has been available for more than two decades. "It was not a good idea then, and it's still not a good idea," says Wilbert Mason.

Comment net neutrality isn't protocol agnosticism (Score 5, Insightful) 200

Net Neutrality means you don't favor one host over another for the same protocol, not that you treat all protocols exactly the same. In the case of the ISPs vs. Netflix, the ISP's are trying to slow or block streaming videos from Netflix while allowing or prioritizing streaming videos from providers who pay the ISP's fees. This is non-neutral prioritization.

Neutral prioritization is giving priority to streaming video/music/gaming over other types of data like e-mail without regard to the hosts providing the services.

This critical distinction seems to be ignored by the poster.

Net Neutrality doesn't demand that no network optimization by the ISP's ever occur, it states that the host should not be a factor in the ISP's optimizations. If the host does factor into the optimizations, then the ISP's begin extorting hosts to pay for priority service which the ISP's customers have already paid for. Additionally, hosts that can't afford to pay for priority distribution by the IPS's soon find that users can't access their services.

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