You do know that the missile used has a flight altitude of 14,000 m or 46,000 ft so I don't think that 35,000 ft or even 33,000 ft would make much of a difference on a missile system that has a 95% plus chance of hitting especially if that aircraft that is sub sonic and has no countermeasures. As to who is to blame "I don't know" but a weapon is pretty much useless unless there is a human pulling the trigger or pressing the button.

Does this help . Look for IFF (Identification Friend or Foe).

You do "tune ups" on your personal automobile?

I have a 4-cyl gas engine grass cutting tractor that requires a tune up inasmuch as it has breaker-point ignition. That tractor dates from the early 1980s, though.

How old is your car that it needs a "tune up"?

The BAS has always been on this tear "oh, noes, missile defense" because they have always been ideologically against any side breaking out of the Cold War Mutually Assured Destruction stand-off. There are always engineering trades in what these defense systems or what defensive systems could do or couldn't do back to the days of walled cities in Mesopotamia (Iraq).

I remember in the "run up" to the First Iraq War (the "Gulf War') about an interview with some high-ranking Saudi dude being concern-trolled "what about Iraq attacking the oil fields (with Scuds)?" The Saudi official smiled somewhat patronizingly at the news dude and responded, "We are equipped with the Patriot" at the time when the US public didn't know a Patriot from a Tory or that anyone was mad enough to use an ack-ack missile against a Scud rocket.

War is always about PR (i.e. deception). Everyone knew the Scud couldn't hit anything (except in some lucky for the enemy, unlucky for us shots). The Saudi leaders were just too happy to go along with "the Patriot is a Scud defense shield" because they knew that strategically, the Scud was of no consequence and this way they could tell their people to "just chill, bro, the Americans shared with us the Patriot" as the Scuds rained down. The US hurredly gave the Israelis the Patriot to get them to "just chill, bro", but everyone was coming out of the woodwork about how the Patriot was just a sham defense against an incoming missile not aimed at anything.

The "Patriot works" fit Saudi propaganda interests, but went against the Israeli propaganda at the time because they Israelis were itchy to get into the fight of "Scud hunting", where air attacks against this mobile platform that couldn't hit anything in the first place were regarded as futile by the U.S.. The Israelis argued that their pilots would press futile attacks against the Scud more aggressively because they were defending their women and children against the largely ineffective Scud attacks, but the US argued this was Saddam Hussein al-Tikriti's war aim, to lob Scuds to draw the Israelis in to fracture the coalition.

As for Palestinians and the war fighting power they have, suicide bombing are perhaps the most effective thing they have to inflict Israeli casualties, but it really works against them propaganda wise. The singularly most effective thing they had going was the First Intifida, where they were using rock-throwing young people as rubber-bullet sponges. From a propaganda standpoint, that was devastating in its effectiveness of portraying the Israeli troops as hateful goons, whether this was true or not, but the optics on TV were rapidly undermining Israel as a just cause. Why the PLO gave up on a tactic that was working I have no idea, but this may speak to why the conflict has dragged on so long when the Palestinians have demographics and world sympathy in their corner. The Palestinians may simply have bad leaders.

The rocket attacks are a kind of middle ground tactic in sacrificing your own guys. It is not the casualties inflicted by the rocket attacks, it is the 100:1 casualties of your own people that is a feature-not-a-bug, of rallying your own people and of getting Americans to pray in their Christian churches "for an end to the violence."

As to why the Israelis are playing along be inflicting so many casualties, maybe that is a feature-not-a-bug. For one thing, they are targeting "the leaders" and trying to be creative in a tactical sense with their tech for giving telephone warnings. Maybe the Israeli calculus is "the leaders talk tough but they are not that keen on being blown up themselves."

Also, on one hand, Israel is a "Western" country where people get all hand-wringy about the "violence" (I use scare quotes because what is taking place is a war between two sides with irreconcilable national interests and not some unexplained "violence"). On the other hand, Israel is a Middle Eastern country with a substantial Oriental Jewish population displaced from Cairo, Baghdad, Tehran, etc., where the heavy hand of a punative military campaign, responding with a sledgehammer blow to a slap from a fly swatter, is standard procedure in Middle Eastern governance.

If one's sympathies are with the Palestinian side and against the Israeli side, those are your beliefs, but I don't have much respect for the intellectual honesty of the BAS. As for the Palestinians, my advice is "there are people like you among the German-speaking peoples of Eastern Europe. I know of this because these were my parents and grandparents. Whether it is just or unjust, there are consequences to losing a war. My mom's legacy is the most productive farmland on the planet, but there is no getting that back or ever resettling there. There are times when one has to make peace and move on."

into the alien net from a Mac Book.

What you have to realize is that Brent Spiner (the "mad scientist" in Area 51 who related "we don't get out much") had been hacking the alien tech since the early 1950s so Goldblum didn't have to do that much.

Getting back on topic, the Rebels in St/ar Wars smuggled the plans to the Death Star, which the Grand Moff/Toff/Dufus thought would do the rebels no good because the Death Star was properly engineered.

The Rebel engineers studied those plans and found a weakness in that reactor exhaust port thingy. Maybe there were her flaws, but this is what they were able to find.

As to the WW-II style anti-aircraft, the whole attack on the Death Star was supposed to be the Battle of Midway and Waldron's Lost Squadron running their suicidal torpedo attack down to the last man with the tide of the battle reversing at the last minute (the dive bombers sinking the carriers of Kido Butai at Midway, Luke using The Force to guide his last blaster shot to the exhaust port after Han Solo drove off his pursuers in "Star Wars").

This telling of the tale resonanted with the audience in the late 70's, whose parents of The Greatest Generation told the stories of the WW-II battles. When I first told a friend at work "The whole Star Wars ending scene is just the Battle of Midway", there was this recognition on his part, where he related his father being a Navy submarine combat veteran. Stories of how WW-II was fought from different vantage points was what our generation grew up with.

In what way does PC gaming make more sense? I have a gaming PC that actually runs Linux (ie. Fedora) as my primary and only OS although I do have virtual machines which I hardly every run. Normally a Linux distribution will not run "Games for Windows" without an emulator which in my case I could not be bothered to do, however if the game is web based I normally can run it. I can even run EMU games such as NES, SNES, Megadrive etc. Having said that I actually prefer console games over PC games.

IMHO the gamer has to make the choice of which gaming system they prefer. If you like PC gaming then fine, if you prefer consoles then that is fine also and if you like both then that is fine as well.

Flame wars here we come. :)

Actually the best way to get console fanboys (yes there are girls as well), who are normally at each others throats to actually agree together is when PC fanboys criticize consoles. Still a high end (and more expensive) PC will always beat a console in terms of performance, however most PC's are not high end (as per the article) so the so called elitist criticism is rather childish.

. . . we loaded programs by flipping toggle switches for the binary op-codes until our finger bled. And we liked it!

Providing the source code for Microsoft software to governments, sounds like a PR exercise. You would need the appropriate government representatives to be able to understand the source code for starters as well as being able to test it and to certify that a specific build and updates are actually from that source code. Personally I can't see that actually happening especially if said representatives have to sign a None Disclosure Contract.

Still I am quite sure Microsoft PR will state that this is our source code and "Trust Us" this compiles to make the binaries you are using and I am quite sure many government representatives will will be quite satisfied with this since they are effectively "locked in" to using Microsoft products anyway and it (to them) is a better alternative to using that "Communist" Linux thingy :)

When considering solar power, wind farming is quite practical for large scale production (not for the residential home) however you still need some sort of storage or alternative power generation to offset the hours or even days when there is little or no wind (hence a survey).

Actually no matter what methods are used for large scale energy production it will always be "consumer pays", so if you as a home owner want to offset your electricity bill then solar panels are the way to go, but only after you have done your homework and by that you need to work out the initial costs verses the longs term benefits. Unfortunately it is so easy for so called "experts" to rip people off since most people have no idea how to work out what really is best for themselves in regard to energy utilisation.

I hope you realise that Redhat 6.2 release/update came out on the 6th Dec 2011, which IMHO is fairly recent since 6.2 is still under "Production 1" support. Will it run on older hardware well yes it will providing you have checked what hardware is supported. I have actually upgraded (well reinstalled) from Redhat 3.1 to 6.1 on Proliant hardware with graphics support without issues.

I never have recommend upgrading (not just Redhat but all version of Linux/Unix) from one major release to another, preferring a fresh install. In fact I have found this to be far quicker with less problems.

As far as VM's go I have always used VirtualBox and have never had issues with Redhat. CentOS, Ubunto, Fedora and even Solaris.

I agree, it sort of reminds me of the alcohol Prohibition from 1920 to 1933. While I would assume that was brought in by well meaning people, however they did not think it through and that led to "boot-legging" and organised crime. Even today alcohol abuse actually kills more adults than smoking which in itself can cause all sorts of health issues.

Banning so called recreation drugs including unhealthy food and drink is not really the way to go. The best solution is unbiased education but even then you are always going to get abusers who will ignore all the facts and do what they want since it is really their choice. Personally if people wish to abuse themselves and as long as they don't hurt others which is easier said than done then let them.

http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/ki...

Halfway there wasn't really any way there. The Fairchild Planar Process was the real breakthrough but Kilby had the broad patent claims on something commercially unworkable.

you mean X86? (ba-doom boom!)