'And as others have pointed out, the distinction you're making between a "fighter" and a "ground attack craft" are pretty hazy. From your description i thought you meant it was a helicopter, but after looking at a picture i would have called it a fighter myself'.

The distinction is by no means hazy. A modern fighter is optimized for aerial combat: it is designed to shoot down enemy bombers and fighters. (And ground attack aircraft). On the other hand, a ground attack aircraft is entirely optimized for that role. Compared to a fighter it is usually slow, relatively unmanoeuverable, heavily armoured, and equipped with air-to-ground weapons. True, it may have the capability to carry air-to-air missiles, but why would it do so at the expense of its proper mission payload? You can't destroy tanks if you are weighed down with air-to-air missiles.

To put it in context, the Stuka was a classic ground attack aircraft; while extremely formidable and terrifying to anyone on the ground, it was easy meat for any reasonably capable fighter. A few were even shot down by bombers. War resembles stone-scissors-paper in some ways: each weapon defeats other weapons, but every weapon has its own nemesis. The tank overruns infantry and artillery, but is defeated by the ground attack aircraft - which itself is defeated by the fighter.

I wrote nothing that suggested a helicopter. As for slang, as I said we should be aiming for accuracy. The media often refers to any warship as a "battleship" - for instance, the Argentine light cruiser "General Belgrano". But the difference between a battleship and a light cruiser is an important one, which should not be obscured either in the pursuit of sensationalism or through sheer ignorance.

My point precisely. When the government forces are fighting their own citizens, our side's terminology diverges. If we approve of the government, those they are attacking are "enemy ground forces", "rebels", or "terrorists". If we disapprove of the government, we say that it is "killing its own people". This is entirely regardless of who started the fighting, what their motives are, and how they are armed.

Since we're trying for technical accuracy here, the SU-25 is not a fighter. Even a glance at the pictures makes that transparently obvious. It's a purpose-built ground attack aircraft, much like the well-known A-10 Warthog. Its only aim in life is to kill people, and destroy equipment and installations, on the ground. And it's pretty much defenceless against fighters, unless it can keep low enough to evade them by jinking.

So why do all the media call the SU-25 a fighter? Maybe it's just standard incompetence and ignorance, but you should always ask "cui bono?" ("who stands to gain?") Perhaps the current Ukrainian "government", and those who support it - because if the SU-25 is an armoured ground attack aircraft, the question arises: whom has it been sent to kill? And the only possible answer is "Ukrainian citizens". So, just like Saddam, Assad, and Qadafi, Poroshenko is "killing his own people". Given how often the US government uses that as a pretext for a savage, unrestrained attack (and how unwilling it would be to launch such an attack against Poroshenko) it's pretty obvious that it has a powerful interest in labelling the SU-25 as a "fighter".

I don't suppose anyone will even read this reply, but surely yours is an argument of despair? Moreover, isn't it slightly circular? And it certainly doesn't speak well for the health of democracy. If no party other than the two giants has any chance of being elected, what happens to the citizens' power to elect a government that will carry out their wishes?

Speaking as an ignorant and unimportant foreigner, I wonder why - in view of the previous two posts - more of you Americans don't vote for parties other than Republican or Democrat. That way you might get a government that rules in your interest, as citizens.

Just saying.

Exactly. "No plutonium was actually lost, and the IAEA was quick to confirm that its own safeguards, which are there to ensure that no nuclear material is diverted, were applied at all times".

More worrying is the admission that "[a]s it turned out, the Genkai plant’s internal accounting system could not properly deal with such a situation, and the material ended up in the wrong column on a spreadsheet".

Spreadsheets are probably not appropriate for such critical applications. Their deceptive simplicity and ease of use makes it far too easy to enter data wrongly, or fail to understand the hidden logic behind an apparently straightforward array of numbers. See, for example, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2.... There are plenty of other detailed indictments of spreadsheet errors (and how easy it is to make them).

"Because half-a-dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring with their importunate chink, whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field; that of course they are many in number; or that, after all, they are other than the little shrivelled, meagre, hopping, though loud and troublesome insects of the hour".
- Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790))

The IRS and corporations have this in common: they want everything to be measured in terms of money, and have no interest in anything that can't be measured in money. Consequently, they mistrust and dislike anything that is exchanged freely: they see it as theft from them, as they are entitled to a cut of every transaction.

Let's barter informally as much as we can, just to spite the bastards.

"Never trust an economist, until you've checked his math".

True indeed. If you can understand his math, of course - otherwise you have to get someone else (whom you trust for good reasons) to do it for you. IMHO there ought to be a profession that entails nothing but checking the correctness of other people's math AND the correctness of their mathematical modelling.

Therein lies the even greater problem with economics. The math may even be entirely correct - but how can we tell if it corresponds 1-for-1 to any phenomena in the real world? ("Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true". - Bertrand Russell). Worse still, an economist may have modelled some aspect of reality in a reasonably accurate way, and got the math right - but the piece of the real world he modelled wasn't big enough to tell us anything meaningful, useful, or complete.

Towards the end of his long and phenomenally productive life, Sir Isaac Newton confessed that, "...to myself I seem to have been only a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me". It takes a very great man to say something so modest. Ironically, his words apply in far greater measure to modern economists - none of whom would ever dream of making such an admission.

There's theory, and there is practice. In practice everyone takes their lead from the President. After all, who's going to betray the nation by disobeying the Commander in Chief in a time of war? (And we know it's a time of war because the President tells us so).

It's convenient for the President to be able to blame things he just doesn't want to do on a recalcitrant Congress. I didn't say that Congress always agrees with the President - I said it obeys him. Even if he tells it to block measures he wants the voters to think he favours. That way he can get the PR benefit of trying to do the right thing without the inconvenience of actually doing it.

As for the Supreme Court, it has often demonstrated that law, morality, tradition, and the Constitution mean nothing to it in comparison with the President's wishes.

Yes, I do know how your precious Constitution works on paper. And that's exactly where it stays - on paper.

You just nailed one of the primary mechanisms by which the executive branch controls the judicial branch. If a prosecutor doesn't bring charges, the whole judicial system is rendered irrelevant.

"Because there are three branches".

All of which take their orders from the President. Not necessarily in a blatant, direct, overt way - usually just by doing what they know the President would like. That's how real power works and, trust me, there is only ONE branch that has any of that.

Incidentally, the same applies to the mainstream media.

"If those aren't students, then who the fuck are they?"

People who go to college for the piece of paper - as the parent said. That is hardly a description of a student, who is a person who goes to college for an education.

Yup. This guy has an auto-immune disorder. Pattern baldness is caused by premature death of hair follicles. Treating that would require a way to bring those cells back from the dead or some really nifty tricks with stem cells to replace them.

Not that that's going to stop a deluge of clickbait crap about this over the next few weeks, I'm sure.

We spent an inordinate amount of time and effort explaining (often to people with considerable software experience) why "client" and "server" were the wrong way round.