You know whats worse than todays pilots flying ancient airplanes, a brand new extravegantly expensive F-35 that cant match an F-16 or F-15E built in the 80s, planes built for a fraction of the price.

The F-35 might be an OK successor to the F-117 as a mostly stealth small bomber, but all indications are its completely worthless in a close in dogfight, you just have to read the leaked report from a recent test against an ancient F-16.

The F-35 simply doesnt have enough power, cant turn fast enough and bleeds off to much energy. The pilot found one manuever he could use to shake the F-16 but it consumed so much energy he had to run away and try to get the energy back.

The F-35 will also be horrible in the close air support role at which the A-10 excels, again at an even smaller fraction of the price tag.

F-35 is a classic jack of all trades and master of none.

There might have been a place for a few hundred of them but for the U.S. and every allied air force to think they are going to use one horrible design to replace every fighter they have is complete insanity. If it ever reaches full deployment, one accident or problem and the entire western world will have no air force. At least the Navy has the sense to keep the F-18 alive.

The F-35 is a tribute to the extent Lockheed has seized total control of Congress and the Pentagon, they could literally sell the Air Force actual turkeys for a hundred million a pop and get away with it.

Those B-52â(TM)s still flying today is because Northrop, has also seized control of the Air Forces generals made the B-2 so expensive and so few in number the Air Force canâ(TM)t afford to risk it in combat.

Besides the U.S. has been fighting people living in mud huts who have no air force and air defenses for over a decade, B-52â(TM)s and A-10â(TM)s work incredibly well in that role.

"Oh and I can see the fanbois are out modding again and taking everything personally."

Been here long?

Well, you have to factor in the Iranian cultural mania for disagreeing with each other. The Shah couldn't keep them under his thumb, neither can the mullahs, who have their hands full disagreeing with each other.

From a tyrant's perspective Iran is ungovernable, which doesn't mean elements in the government don't give tyranny a go on a regular basis. It's an ideal setup for producing martyrs. The futility of cracking down means you have a little space to rake some muck before official anger overcomes reason.

Unfortunately, I'm in the UK, where the selection is much more limited.

For example, Dell UK's web site lists exactly one laptop with a 17+" screen and SSD, and it is also a touchscreen and comes with Windows 8.1.

HP do at least promote the Windows 7 option (via Win8 downgrade rights) for the high-end ZBook laptops on their site. However, the pricing on those tends to make the closest equivalent Retina MBPs in specification look cheap.

Also, Microsoft UK don't seem to have any high-end devices at all within their Signature Edition range, so it's invasive crapware city all the way with a lot of the big name brands, even on their expensive, high-end models.

Airliners carry transponders that squawk. Same diff.

But the screenshots I've seen of Windows 10 still mostly look flat and/or garish, and it seems to be more a case of trying not to make the visuals too much worse than what is already available via Windows 7 than actually trying to be better. Another example is the icons, which have gone from being widely ridiculed to being... well, slightly less widely ridiculed... in all of the reviews I've come across, and with considerable justification if the examples I've seen myself were representative.

It's not just the visuals that put me off, though. It's also the fact that I use a traditional desktop PC with multiple large monitors, and I want an OS and software that work well in that kind of environment. I saw a review the other day of the new preview release where literally every screenshot that had substantial content in it also included the word "tap" somewhere, with obvious concessions to touchscreens that just don't make sense for a desktop workstation. This was one of the big problems with Windows 8, and it seems like with the Surface tablet hardware and Windows 10, Microsoft are doubling down on touchscreens. #donotwant #haverealworktodo

I'll wait to see what people say when Windows 10 actually ships and we're not just talking about preview releases and educated guesswork, but so far the signs don't seem promising. Windows 7, on the other hand, is tried and tested and works just fine on the numerous computers I use it with today, so as I said, if I could buy an approximate equivalent with newer and more powerful hardware right now, I'd be right in there. Sadly, I'm in the UK, and what you can pick up over here is quite limited compared to what you can get in say the US.

I presume the "for-profit" is actually related to their IRS status and not their overall financial goals. Most colleges are (IRS recognized) non-profits, though they pay high-6 and 7 figure salaries to top officers and have endowments in the billions.

If I could find a good high-end laptop that came with vanilla Windows 7 instead of 8 and all the pre-installed extra junk, I would be throwing money at the supplier and begging them to sell me one. That has far more to do with avoiding more recent versions of Windows and their kindergarten, touch-obsessed UIs than it does with wanting a cheap upgrade when 10 ships.

IIRC, ambiguous language in a contract, or that which is not defined or poorly defined, should generally be found to be in favor of the person receiving the contract. In other words, if Verizon wrote the contract and implied that "pass" meant to bring fiber to all residents, or the city believed in good faith that "pass" meant to provide a fiber outlet / headend / demarc readily accessible to every resident, then the courts should find in the favor of the city. The reverse is also true, though. If the city wrote the contract and didn't specify what they meant by pass, then Verizon gets to define what they meant (within reason, of course).

Are you aware that there are hundreds of legitimate fission power reactors operating around the world that are indistinguishable from plutonium production reactors using your "$10 billion" network of neutrino detectors? I'm also wondering if you realize that building primitive `atom' bombs (such as the one that destroyed Hiroshima) won't emit neutrinos because it doesn't involve nuclear fission.

It's not funded because — despite what the group-think malcontents around here have been trained to believe — the world isn't actually run by drooling idiots.

Weird analogy to choose for this summary. Weirder that the next 5 days the top barbershop quartets in the world will be vying to be awarded
"International Champion". (http://www.barbershop.org/pittsburgh/)

Well, alright, lets take close air support in Afghanistan. What would have been the cheaper, easier-to-maintain solution with better time on station?

I distinctly remember it being promised that the F-35 would beat anything but an F-22 in air-to-air combat, at a fraction of the price. It was not part of the original concept for the system but it was definitely sold politically as being capable of acting as a poor man's F22.

I wonder about the helmet mounted display, whether that's something you'd consider absolutely necessary in an aircraft whose job is to hit surface targets in contested airspace.

To be fair, that was not the original justification for the thing. That was mission creep.

I think the original impetus was to have something stealthy that could do ground strikes in enemy territory. And it makes sense to do a naval version of the same thing. If they'd just focused on that they'd have been done a long time ago with a solid design, which of course in engineering nearly always turns out to be more versatile than you planned for. Adding STOVL and the whizbang helmet (cool as that may be) as necessary elements of the system turned this into an "everything for everyone" project, which almost always turns out less versatile than you hoped.

Sure you can identify scenarios where the A-10 is useless. But in the last twenty years it's been extremely useful in a number scenarios we've actually faced.

The idea that a system ought to play every role in every conceivable situation is why the F35 performs none of them very well. In hindsight the idea of accommodating the Marines' need for a STOVL aircraft in the same basic design probably dictated too many compromises in the plane's other roles.