I agree with you on other aircraft, but I don't really agree about the A-10, whilst the platform is built around the gun you don't bring it to a fight just because of it's gun. You bring it to a fight because it can blow up individual tanks with anti-tank missiles, slaughter multiple LAVs with bombs, and then spend the next 45 minutes gunning the hell out of any remaining troop transports and troops.

Yes, as air defences have improved it's become more reliant on needing support for air defence suppression, but the A-10s advantage is that it can loiter and stay on mission longer than an F-16 in terms of fuel, and longer than a drone in terms of firepower whilst being on target faster than an attack helicopter.

It still does what it was always meant to do well, and those close air support, if you've got ground troops flushing the enemy out of a forest, or a village then the A-10 can hang around long enough to help them do that, and to clean up anything trying to get away, whether it's a few troops, an APC, or a tank. It can also just obliterate any buildings that the enemy refuse to be budged from and are pinning down your ground forces from.

Again, an attack helicopter is ideal for this role, but it can't always get there quick enough, isn't always in range, and is typically more vulnerable. The A-10 is basically a kind of rapid response attack helicopter and is unmatched in that niche role. The fact it is a niche role means it could easily be dismissed as not worth the effort, but unfortunately it's the very niche that we've needed for 15 years now.

Quoting the 18% of sorties in Iraq/Afghanistan is a bit of an abuse of statistics too when you don't mention the fact that the A-10 is fewer in number than the other aircraft in the first place. Given that the US airforce has only 143 A-10s but about 300 F-15Es, 1200 F-16s, the Navy about 500 F-18s, the Marines 300 harriers and the air force/CIA around 500 - 700 Predator drones then I don't think 18% is too bad a figure for A-10s. These figures also don't include other NATO aircraft such as RAF Tornados and Typhoons. It seems likely that the A-10 was actually punching above it's weight numerically - it can't do more CAS missions if there just aren't enough A-10s to go around relative to other aircraft.

"But a) they're only planning on buying 150 (and only 50 by 2020), while we already have 115 and will end up with 2,400+ and b) if the plan works dogfighting is irrelevant."

They're now only planning on buying 12 actually:

https://medium.com/war-is-bori...

Yes. 12.

In practice, it's not much of a stretch to view it as anything other than a cancellation of the programme in everything but name.

Which is good, because given how much smaller an economy Russia has than the US, France, Britain, Germany et. al. meaning there's no way it can both maintain a 5th gen fighter programme, and still manage to afford to keep up the maintenance to the same degree the West does, it'll have far less in the first place.

Once you factor in lower numbers, poorer stealth, general cheaper lower quality design, and higher maintenance requirements the PAK-FA isn't the great money efficient super-fighter many suggest. If it ever sees combat against the West there wont be enough of them flying to make much of an impact. Mostly it's only going to be useful in theatres like Georgia and Ukraine where it's got the backing of overwhelming force and is up against old Russian kit that might be able to detect and shoot down say, a Mig 29, but not a PAK-FA.

You have to remember that Russia is great at propaganda, much of what we know about the PAK-FA is overhyped. The F-35 didn't suffer it's first engine fire until about 100+ were produced and had logged thousands of flying hours. The PAK-FA was burning after only 5 had been produced:

http://www.janes.com/article/4...

That's assuming the whole programme even remains financially viable in the first place:

http://theaviationist.com/2015...

Reduced order numbers already leaves the programme precariously close to cancellation. Another downturn in the Russian economy through sanctions or oil prices mean the programme will be dead and buried.

It's not even about being imitative, it's about interoperability. This basically would put a ban on software that can interoperate with software from companies that want to try and maintain a closed ecosystem.

I can't see European or Asian courts backing any such judgement, so this would basically hand over the reigns for leading the technology world to Europe or Asia, as America would be stuck with closed ecosystem non-interoperable software, and the rest of the world would be able to just get on with it and would have to ignore American most software.

"And Britain, which seems to prefer Ms St Louis to Professor Hunt, will get what it has chosen. Not to its advantage."

Hey, don't paint the whole country that way, a bunch of us agree with you, from the papers that are now putting forward the other side of the story through to other well known scientists putting their own reputations on the line to defend him (Brian Cox, Richard Dawkins). It's only the UCL that's going to lose out at this rate, not the country as a whole. Do you think if people like Cox, Dawkins and so forth are annoyed about this and putting their name publicly on the line to defend it that there wont similarly be many other scientists privately agreeing with them but not willing to put their name on the line?

How do you think the UCL will do for high quality guest lecturers in future if said lecturers know it's a university with an anti-science mindset that supports lynch mobs?

St. Louis is under investigation for her fraudulent CV now, hopefully it's only a matter of time until this is sorted out, and UCL is the only one left with it's reputation taking a massive blow.

Yeah, and he's married to an award winning female scientist in the same field as him. When he "doubled down" as you called it, he couldn't possibly have been merely referring to the fact he was reflecting on his own mistakes as a scientist in allow his personal relationship that developed in a lab to interfere with the science he was supposed to be doing could he?

I don't see how him admitting his own personal shortcomings is in any way a suggestion that it's a general and widespread problem unless you're on a witch hunt and have already decided you hate this guy because the Twitter hate mob has told you to.

It's sad watching someone who has done far more good in the world that any of his accusers including encouraging women into science and pioneering research that has and will continue to save the lives of men and women equally have his life destroyed by a hate mob of nobodies who have achieved nothing other than dragging the human race backwards to an era of lynchmobs and witch drownings based on a combination of gross out of context quoting, and outright lies.

What nonsense, so historical news might as well have not existed before the internet?

How do you think journalists used to dig up past stories and such? Requiring someone to get off their fat ass to find something does not mean it does not exist. It just means you have to put some effort in, and if the digging is worth the effort? well that's your call.

"Would you want the government to hide that record so they have a second chance? No."

You realise that's exactly what happens right? You know that in the UK such convictions only have to be disclosed for a certain amount of time afterwards yes?

"But simply hiding someone's history won't make me change what I would think about their history if I were to know it - it won't address the true problem, at best it might relieve the symptoms a bit."

Right, but that's a big if. If you weren't to know it then you're admitting that you will view them differently, which is kind of the point.

If we insist on condemning people indefinitely, making it impossible for rehabilitated offenders to get a job then what choice do you leave them but to go back to offending? If they can't earn money legitimately, then their only option for survival remains returning to crime.

Not going forward, but a lot of our existing contracts, for example for some of the large banks mandate that we continue to build with what we've always worked with, and the official Java packages weren't always that obnoxious.

The fact they've now reached a point where trying to force Ask on you without even offering an obvious opt-out is really the straw that broke the camels back.

As I say, it's not that I absolutely wont use Java any more, I suspect I will, and certain then I'd always tend towards OpenJDK going forward. But the very existence of such fragmentation coupled with this sort of obnoxiousness really hurts it as an option.

Technologies have to be easy to adopt to grow market share, and once they get lazy, and stop doing that, and start doing the opposite, decline is inevitable. Oracle needs a wake up call, because the very fact that you have to choose between different flavours in the first place is problematic enough.

We always joke here on Slashdot about "Oh no, not another language" but the fact we do is symptomatic of the fact that the world of technology is insanely competitive, and then why continue to use Java if something better comes along that doesn't require that you make choices between flavours, and have to go out your way to warn clients not to use _that_ version because it contains malware and to use this version that says to use that version but ignore that it says to use that version and use this version which you can download from this third party? It's all rather unnecessary.

We're seeing both Apple and Microsoft tred into what was classically Java's territory now, and these are both big names, so it's not like we're even talking about simply having to make a choice between a tried and tested technology supported by a big company and some fly by night pet language project run by a 13 year old kid in his bedroom. Java has real competition now.

Of course I do, but I don't have any control over client deployments, and I never really saw any point going out of my way to explicitly install it on my home computer when it's already long had the consumer auto-updating version of the JRE on it.

Just because it's there, hidden out the way, doesn't mean it's guaranteed to be the one everyone will use.

As a professional developer who has led a number of fairly large scale Java projects I've always just accepted the existence of Java on my computer, it's a thing I've worked with so it's a thing I need. Or so my default thinking always went.

But the last time Java asked for permission to update on my computer at home there appeared to no longer be an obvious way of avoiding the Ask toolbar install. I had a choice of next, or cancel which cancelled the whole installation. I was getting fed up of it anyway, given that it seemed to be persistently asking to update every time I went to my computer anyway.

Java, therefore is gone from my home computer and I will no longer consider it for any spare time projects. This has the knock on effect that it's reduced in desirability for me as an option when determining what technology to use for new commercial projects at work too. If I have a choice between Java + Ask, or no Java, it's not really a difficult choice for me.

So for me, Yahoo can stick whatever they want on it, but under Oracle's stewardship it's going to end up a dying product. For some reason, Yahoo seems incredibly intent on consistently tying itself up with losers. Instead of continuously wasting money backing losers, they should probably just spend what needs to be spent on backing a winner for once.

I like Java as a technology, and a language - hell, I've posted enough times here defending it, but when the client distribution forces the installation of malware like Ask, it's pretty much a dead end for anything desktop based. You can't as a professional insist your clients install something that tries to bundle malware to use your product with a serious face, it's just not tenable. It'd be one thing if it was just a one off question you could say no to on initial installation, but the frequent updates often mean it can be an attempt to force it on you multiple times a week in some cases. It hopes that in just one of those cases, you'll forget to untick the checkbox and accidentally install, well, obviously that hoping was fruitless, because now there just is no checkbox to untick.

I understand that with command line switches you can tell Java to skip that crap, and that there are options to automate installation without it in corporate environments but frankly in the end it's just easier to not install Java in the first place unless you simply have no choice.

I can't say I've missed it one bit, I can't remember the last time I needed it for anything at home. So my "I need that because I work with it" attitude has changed to "Why did I ever put up with all those incessant update nag screens for years". I've got better things to do than play the "try and remember to avoid installing malware because Java wants to update" game every time I sit down at my computer.

There's not much they can do to specifically enforce it, but it probably opens the door for citizens whose property is damaged because of climate related issues to be able to claim compensation from the government I imagine.

If the government hasn't done what it both said and was legally obliged to do, and someone suffers loss as a result then it would seem to be a fairly clear cut case for compensation.

No, we grew past this idea in Europe after World War II after we found out the hard way that elected governments can do bad things.

The government of the day builds on law created by previous governments, the government is bound by the law as much as anyone, they don't get special status. As such you need someone to hold the government to those laws, and that's what the judiciary is for.

Though it's not really even remotely just a European thing. One might equally ask Americans why a few hundred year old piece of paper written by some dead guys gets to overrule the elected government of the day too following your logic.

The underlying problem is that governments are elected for an extended period (typically 4 - 5 years at a time) and their democratic mandate only exists at a snapshot in time when the elections are held. It could well be that the next day the new government announces everyone must die, at which point the democratic mandate is lost because basically no one will support that.

Having a national and even supranational judiciary strong enough to hold governments to laws past and present, as well as external conventions and treaties that countries have signed up to and ratified, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and it's respective treaties is a good thing. It limits the potential for governments to go off the rails.

Democracy is imperfect, it has it's limits, strong judicial systems exist to try and make sure those limits don't lead to bad things.

In this case the Dutch government is merely being held by the judiciary to the promises it made previously. If it doesn't want that it shouldn't have made those promises, or it should revoke those promises. Even better If the government was elected in part on those promises - people always whine about lying politicians, what's so bad about them being held to account for their lying?

Do not view a democratic government as an overriding power, it should not be. It should merely exists to run the country in the way it said and nothing more. What you talk about is merely elected dictatorship - where a guy and his friends get elected and then does whatever he wants regardless of the changing will of the people post-election. Government is just one of a number of entities that a healthy state requires, a strong, honest, and independent judiciary is another.

Whether it's irrelevant or not depends on the discussion at hand, given that I'm making the point about not turning her into an idol over a purely selfish, rather than selfless act, then it's wholly relevant.

I've already made the point that I agree it's good for other artists, but that doesn't mean I have to ignore the fact that there's a danger she's being idolised for something she really doesn't deserve respect for. She should only be given respect if she was acting wholly in the interests of smaller acts, but she's not doing that, because some of her other actions are harmful to smaller acts (i.e. propping up big music).

Yes this is as an aside helpful to smaller acts, but that doesn't make criticism as to why she is doing it irrelevant.

Yeah, the problem is the cost of game development has escalated drastically.

So instead of reducing prices they just opted to give us bigger and better games.

It's easy to make a promise about reducing prices if piracy reduces when all games can be made with a team of 3 in 6 months, but without the foresight that people demand bigger and better games that promise rings a bit naive.

I found my old Hero Quest video game the other day, price tag on it was £24.99. That would be £50 now and I typically only pay £40 for games, I think a 20% reduction in price coupled with a massive amount more effort put into art work and storyline nowadays is not a terrible deal. The headline price isn't an issue for me, I think it's fair.

What I do detest is this DLC crap and the fact that Season Passes are now standard from companies like Ubisoft - you're only buying half a game now and the other half is ready at or near release, you just have to pay more for it. That's what's really unfair and unacceptable.