Three words for you: Long term thinking. Replacement of TCP/IP will happen, just not now or in the near future. Tech companies/consortia and academia are simply paving the way. Thank God that not everyone subscribe to the notion of doing something only if it is bound to a near-term execution plan.

A few radicals =/= an entire country/culture. But don't let that get in the way of a good old generalization.

Nothing kills an embarrassingly obvious joke more than a TBU (true-but-useless) tidbit.

Here, read this to celebrate your technically correct moment of glory :) http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html

As a person whose first language is not English, I thank you for your gratuitous lecture.

Oh uhmmm, m'kay?

Everything you suggest is possible to implement, but herein lies the fault of engineering thinking: logistics. The logistics of maintaining such a system in a manner that is sufficiently secure are just too damned complex to consider them as practical.

If the equipment stole by ISIS could be disabled by default by not receiving the *good-to-go* signal then every other equipment with similar protection is open to jamming. ISIS fighters (and most fighting forces for that matter) are technically savvy enough to constantly jam signals - eventually, they will jam one piece of equipment operated by us or one of our allies.

With such "enabling" equipment in place, then such an incident (jamming one of our own) is probabilistic-ally bound to happen. And that will most likely mean death.

Another option would be to use dongles that activate such equipment, but then again, logistics. How do you procure them? How do you rotate them? What do you do if you lost the dongle, or if the dongle (and/or whoever that carries it) is blown to bits?

The only realistic solution would be to wire equipment sold/transferred to some (not all) allies with electronic keypads that are possibly redundant (multiple interfaces within a tank for example), with multiple paths and fault-tolerant. Such keypads would be on rotation with operating crews knowing the combinations.

But then again, what happens if the operating crew is killed or incapacitated? Another crew would be unable to deploy the equipment. Multiple equipment/crew sets could share a keypad combination schedule, but then, all you have to do is capture and torture enough crew operators to spit the combinations.

Then there is training and the logistics of adding and removing such contraptions (because you do not want such contraptions in *our* equipment).

Logistics and the realities of war make it hardly unlikely to see any such contraptions in the field, me thinks.

20%? More like 2% maybe (6 channels)? Most people I know only watch less than a dozen channels regularly.

In our case at home, when we used to have cable, we had to sign for one of the uber-packages to get a NHK Japanese programming channel. My brother-in-law has to do the same thing to get his Arab-language TV programming. And pretty much every South/South East Asian acquaintance of mine do the same to get their Hindi/Vietnamese/Filipino programming. So that is one channel.

Add one or two channels for your favorite TV shows (say, AMC, H2, the Food Channel, TNT, maybe Nickelodeon for the kids) and boom, that's all there is to it. I really have a hard time visualizing an average household truly watching more than a dozen channels.

I'm not sure if I would pay $50 for 50 channels, but I would pay $20 for a dozen (and I would tolerate commercials, it is what it is.)

But we are no longer on cable. We are on Netflix and over-the-air programming. We are mostly watching V-Me (Spanish version of public TV programming) and QUBO for my kids, Create, and World Channel for our neurons, ION for Law & Order on Friday and Saturday nights, and NBC for the morning news. Amazon VOD every other blue moon.

Not missing cable at all, sans for NHK's Japanese language TV.

6 over the air channels for free + Netflix. Only an ala carte option might beat that, just maybe.

MIL SPEC 2167, iirc, deals with documentation and deliverables. The actual software development process was "guidelined" by some other MIL SPEC. With that said, those were supposed to act as guidelines for a waterfall methodology (which surprisingly, it can actually be used in some contexts, or subverted into a spiral/iterative process.)

I worked at a defense contractor not long ago, and alas, the software projects were horribly run. But I always saw that it was the execution, not the specs per say that was the culprit for each and every single snafu/fubar hybrid I encountered. That and management, and life-long-career jockeys from the punch-card era dictating how to write software, and department infighting.

It's just like CMM/CMMI - A CMMI level X or Y only indicates that, to some degree, an organization a) has a formal process, and b) follows such process.

It doesn't indicate that the process is good - it doesn't even guarantee that *it is not shit*.

What it does, is that it helps an organization guarantee that its constituent parts know what activities to do under what circumstances and tasks in a business lifecycle. And that helps an organization improve things (assuming said organization has the necessary technical wherewithal and culture.)

In private business and with defense contractors, it is the companies who fail to execute (let's think of how many companies ditch source control to become *agile*!) particular practices. Defense contractors have a lot of leeway in negotiating and tailoring the actual execution of a process. Typically, they do not do it because they suck (and for a lot of other political and financial motivation$.)

Uh, no. It would be Struts/Tomcat architectural vulnerabilities. Not various versions of the Java Runtime have/had vulnerabilities, but in these particular cases, the vulnerabilities were within the software systems, not on the language they were written or the runtime that hosted them.

^^^ Pure logical win.

Try condom delivery services. That would be an even worse time for a midair malfunction.

No. Atmospheric pressure is not simply a function of gravity. It is more a function of how much stuff there is in the atmosphere.

Consider that Venus' surface gravity is 0.904g wrt to Earth's (1g). And yet Venus's atmospheric pressure at the surface is 9.2 Megapascals whereas Earth's atmospheric pressure is 101.325 kilo-pascals (or 0.101325 Megapascals).

That is, even though Venus gravity is 90.4% that of Earth, its atmospheric pressure is 92 times that of Earth.

And we need to scout what is out there with telescopes and probes before/while we work on our FTL capabilities.

Before we spend resources trying to build FTL tech, don't we want to know a bit more in detail what is out there using relatively cheaper tech (telescopes and probes)? In fact, I don't see how these two are mutually exclusive. Doing both, or the cheaper first is good, sound science.