Yeah, I didn't remember the exact details, but it made me laugh when that the Swedes actually lost features going over Link 16 so in that sense it was a downgrade.

The Gripen is also designed to interface with the compact Ericsson Erieye AWAC system which is often mounted on either a Saab 2000 turbo-prop airliner to cuts costs and eases maintenance but you can also build the Erieye into a small jet like the Brazilian EMB-145. I remember reading somewhere that the Swedish air force actually had to downgrade it's data-links in order to become NATO compatible so this combination is a good force multiplier. The one caveat with the Gripen is that Brazil had better keep a stockpile of Gripen spares. If they ever get into involved in a shooting war the parts supply from Sweden will dry up faster than you can say 'embargo'.

... and easier to maintain as well. The Saab Gripen is an awesome aircraft and a good choice. On the other hand the Gripens do still have lots of US parts in them so it's not as if US companies don't stand to gain, they'll just gain less. Theoretically the USA can even veto the sale because of the US parts in the Gripen if they want to be really petty about this and piss the Brazilians off even more. The most delicious part of this development (from the point of view of Airbus, EADS, Sukhoi, Dassault et al) is that Boeing, a long time beneficiary of US government sponsored industrial espionage, has been hosted by it's own petard for a change.

Yeah, thats what I thought too... $ 300 million? Seriously?? This report must be an exaggeration or a misrepresentation of some sort, either that or there was an astounding amount of corruption involved. How the hell can anybody manage to spend $300 million on a website? Just to put this into perspective, in Iowa they are building a 14 floor, 480,000 square foot university children's hospital and are renovating 56.000 square feet of existing space as well. It is projected to cost just under $300 million when completed.

http://www.uichildrens.org/buildingupdate/

...and the fun really starts when that system misfires.

No I don't but then that's not what I was trying to point out. I said the Soviets did a whole lot of invaluable pioneer work in the field of unmanned space probes and that Lunokhod pointed the way to the future. Or do you really think thtat the future of deep space exporation is in grandiose Apollo program like manned missions to remote corners of the solar system? What has been the focus of space exploration since Apollo? Wait... let me think... Oh yes it's been unmanned probes, even NASA acknowledges that. It will _always_ be more cost effective to send robot probes and that includes sample return missions. That writing has been on the wall since Apollo and it has only become more true as we have gotten better at AI and robotics.

Dunno about that. IMHO the Soviets did every bit as much good pioneering work with the Lunokhod program and Mir as the US did with the entire Apollo program and the space shuttle program. Apollo was a spectacular propaganda Lunokhod represented a way of doing the same amount of scientific work the Apollo missions did with less risk and at a fraction of the price. Lunokhod set the pattern for the way space exploration is done today and Mir yielded a mountain of data on the problems of really long term missions in space. In my book it is rather uninteresting who gets there first, what counts is the scientific work you do once you get there and the what technologies you pioneer in the process. I also respect anybody who turns a profit in the space industry, especially people who manage that without any government subsidies in any form (direct or indirect) since that's not an easy thing to do by any means.

If you had read TFA you linked to you'd have noticed that the '...D-21B program was canceled, due to the poor success rate...'. These Vietnam period UAVs were just enough steps up the evolutionary ladder from a from a V-1 to make the potential of UAVs clear but they generated relatively little worth while reconnaissance on long range 'autonomous' missions. They did not have the AI capabilities that would make them 'autonomous' in the sense that drone designers and computer scientists put into that word. Modern UAVs owe much of their existence to the Ryan Firebee that was much more successful operationally than the D-21 since the Firebee system was very modular and flexible. Some of the Firebees were remote controlled but only on relatively short range missions (this being the AQM-34L the most successful Firebee variant by far), on long range missions they they followed pre-programmed routes and relied on simple sensors for major obstacle avoidance. Just one measure of how 'stupid' these things were in 'autonomous mode' is the story of a Ryan Firebee that was badly programmed for a recon mission to Kep Air Base and ended up flying along the entire airstrip at very low altitude. It returned with a sequence of pictures that showed every detail of the runway surface interrupted only by a single picture (or so legend has it) that featured a terrified NVAF MiG-17 pilot whose aircraft almost collided with the drone during landing. For those that are interested you can read more here I particularly recommend the picture of the MiG-21 whizzing past that Firebees TV remote camera.

That's still better than being a Windows error because they don't even know who they are.

These guys are amateurs compared to the Mexican scrappers who sold hospital equipment containing 6,000 pellets of cobalt-60 for scrap. The machinery was then processed into rebar which was in turn was used in god knows how many homes in Mexico and the USA as well as metal furniture that ended ups as far away as Canada. The Mexicans even found pellets of cobalt-60 embedded into the asphalt surface of roads in Sinaloa and 109 houses had to be torn down and disposed of as radioactive waste. All in all some 5000 metric tons of steel were contaminated ... as far as is known. According to a documentary I watched about this incident there is a good possibility that there are still contaminated houses and furniture out there. The incident only came to light when a truck with a load of contaminated rebar drove past a Los Alamos laboratories radiation checkpoint and set of a whole bunch of alarms. One person died of bone cancer, another 4 were injured and least 10 individuals received significant exposures and some scrapyard workers became sterile. There is also a good chance that many more people either will, or already have, developed cancer since it took about a year to discover this snafu and even longer to track down all the contaminated material already in use. This story made me think about how US Homeland security worries about 'dirty bombs'. The only thing that still amazes me about that particular contingency is that it hasn't happened yet because highly radioactive material is apparently very easy to come by. The Juarez incident caused radiation sensors to be installed at all major border crossings but one wonders if this has been extended to every single crossing along the US/Mexican border. Either way, I'd be worried.

... just remember that you have to empty a at least one 10 round pistol clip into the guy before you've hosed off five dollars worth of ammo.

I'm no music industry insider but you have made me curious and since you dispense that advice so freely and with such unshakable authority you must know ... Where can people put their music and make bags of money without being ripped off by middle men and gate keepers like Spotify? I have a couple of indie musician friends who do own the distribution rights to their music and who'd be thrilled to know how to easily make bags of money without having to deal with parasites.

I like reading regular books because I can arrange several of them on my desk or sit on the floor, arrange them around me and easy to flip back and forth inside any individual book or instantly context switch between books. With e-books flipping and switching from book to book is way more clumsy to do. However, e-books can be searched which is a huge bonus and I can even search for all books that contain a certain word of phrase using Spotlight on OS X/iOS. The biggest plus with e-books IMHO is portability. I have been converting my printed library to digital by a combination of buying ebooks versions of paper books that I own and scanning my old out-of-print paper books or downloading scanned books from projects like Gutenberg. Recently I put a stack of these paper books on a bathroom scale and measured the real-world weight of the library I keep on my iPad, it was well over 20kg. Basically I would not want to be without paper books but grabbing the iPad and knowing that you are carrying the contents of an entire 2m high bookshelf in your hand is undeniably cool and very convenient.

If these bozos are forced to show that documentary chalk up a win for environmenalism because the film may make a few more people think abut climate change, if they put up a fight chalk up an even bigger win for environmentalims because the publicity raises awareness about global warming. If we get really lucky Fox News will contribute to that publicity by reporting on this before they realize they may actually have caused a few of their viewers to watch the film to see what all the hullablaloo is about (irony, irony...).

A carbine? There are also numerous folding hunting rifles freely available that can be concealed under a coat. Needless to say they are very popular with poachers and have been for at least the last two centuries.