But who would kill all the Martian spiders for these women? Hook up their TV and stereo? Change the oil in their Martian sand buggy?

That's not entirely true, and I say that as fan of the YF-23. The F-22 was less stealthy but more maneuverable. The Air Force valued the latter somewhat more than the former at the time, and here we are today.

That said, the real farce was that Lockheed was allowed to submit *two* proposals. The first one clearly would have lost to the YF-23, so Lockheed was allowed to go back to the drawing board and submit a second...*after* the USAF told them what they needed to change in order to win over their hearts and minds. Northrop was given no such second chance.

First, if all they needed was a strike aircraft with overwhelming air-to-ground capability, they already had it with the A-10 Warthog (or Thunderbolt II for you purists). It can carry a cubic assload of bombs, has extended loiter capability, can take off and land on short, unimproved runways, is perhaps the best aerial gun platform in the history of aviation, and can take an immense amount of punishment, make it back to base, and be repaired for another strike before the pilot has time to grab a sandwich. Alas, it's not "sexy" enough so nobody wants to fly it. Fighter jocks look down on the "air-to-mud" boys, you know. But us grunts -- I'm a former Marine -- absolutely love knowing your call for CAS is being answered by a 'hog.

Second, the F-35 is not just being pitched as an "attack fighter" as you claim. It's being positioned as the Swiss Army Knife of airframes, the complete multi-role, multi-service, multi-theater, all-season do-it-all flying wonder plane. It's stealthy...but not terribly stealthy compared to other airborne threats. It's fast...but not very fast compared to fighters it's likely to face. It can flow slowly for accurate bombing...but not as slowly or as accurately as what we already have. It has endurance...well, not so much. And it costs less than what it's replacing...except it doesn't. McNamara tried this same crap back in the 60's and we ended up with the F-111, a "fighter" that couldn't fight. It was too big, too heavy, too complex, too expensive to make, too expensive to maintain, too hard to fly...and *nobody* wanted it. Today the F-111's are largely rusting away somewhere while B-52's are still flying, delivering bombloads much more effectively, reliably, and cheaply.

Honestly, what the US needs in the way of air power is this:

- A small but elite force of the stealthiest, fastest, most-maneuverable, most survivable, most advanced aircraft this country can possibly produce (i.e. F-22, B-2). These are our "alpha strike" planes. They go in on the first day of a conflict and kick the shit out of SAM sites, ground- and air-based RADAR, Command and Control facilities, fuel and ammo dumps, runways, and staging areas. After a brief but furiously intense campaign, the enemy is left without any effective way to defend against even basic air strikes. Then the war is turned over to...

- A medium-sized force of semi-stealthy and non-stealthy attack aircraft (fixed- and rotary-winged) which can now operate with near impunity due to degraded enemy defenses. A-10's, B-52's, F/A-18's, AH-64's...you get the idea. These are much more affordable than the "alpha strike" package to keep operational. They're also already bought and paid for, have large cadres of trained pilots, and can deliver much bigger attack loads than their stealthier brethren. This phase keeps up until the enemy is more or less fully subdued and organized resistance has almost been wiped out. Then things are turned over to...

- A very large force of unmanned and/or autonomous drones equipped for air-to-air and air-to-ground operations. These can be cheaply maintained for an indefinite period with absolutely zero political cost should one get lost to enemy action. Further, they act like omnipresent snipers, orbiting beyond normal aural and visual range but ready to deliver a laser-guided Hellfire "bolt from the blue" in an instant. The effects of such constant threats on enemy morale cannot be understated. Meanwhile, our "boots on the ground" are largely back home or operating in secure areas, reducing the chance of domestic upheaval by an unhappy populace over some "neverending war."

The biggest mistake this country is currently making is assuming we need just one type of aircraft for just one type of conflict. Modern wars have many different phases, most of which will involve a "low intensity conflict" in an area where large, high-value targets are not present. Having a fleet of super-advanced weapons which costs too much to make and too much to maintain is just stupid when there are better options on the table.

Yes.

"Whenever anything went wrong it became usual to attribute it to Snowball. If a window was broken or a drain was blocked up, someone was certain to say that Snowball had come in the night and done it, and when the key of the store-shed was lost, the whole farm was convinced that Snowball had thrown it down the well. Curiously enough, they went on believing this even after the mislaid key was found under a sack of meal." -- Animal Farm, by George Orwell

“This is the most transparent administration in history,” -- Barack Obama, February 2013

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." -- Napoleon, Animal Farm, by George Orwell

https://itunes.apple.com/us/ap...

There is an x server for the ipad...

It's not laziness. It's to fit each line of code in an 80 column display.

It's not about helping valve out, it's about the market forcing prices to be low. it's capitalism working. The games will cost what they have to, and not more (this is the idea anyway)

The fear is that the presence of free games will cause an overall drop in quality; mobile gaming is used as evidence of this.

I know...

Everything is coming up Millhouse!

Maybe they would be better at their jobs if they knew a little more about software, and that it is not black magic, but an art that takes time and care to get good results.

Yea, but the problems are the following:
1) except for engineering and math students, very few students will *take* higher math classes in college
2) the first two weeks of college calculus covered more then the entire year of high-school calculus. It's slowed down so people who want to go to college, but don't want to take math, can keep up.
3) learning abstract logic through programming in an expressive language like python or ruby (or perhaps some domain-specific language) is much more applicable to day-to-day life then calculus, which is only really used by engineers and scientists. Even math-heavy jobs like those in the accounting and finance fields don't use much calculus, do they?

I'm sure someone will stand up shortly and complain that this is somehow racist, sexist, or otherwise deleterious to the well-being of the pupils being schooled. Can't have kids learning about how money is made, handled, taxed, and invested. That would interfere with them being good little minions who simply do what they're told by their betters...i.e. those in government power.

See, it's this kind of "we've got to do *something* now!" thinking that's so destructive to rational thought. If the proposed "fixes" for climate change were minor and otherwise insignificant then nobody would mind. But they are not. The proposed changes will be costly, both in terms of real money and in terms of people's quality of lives. If you want someone to make a drastic change in their lives, you need drastically good evidence. Thus far, you have *some* evidence, but that does not equate to proof.

First, is the planet getting warmer? On that I'd say there's general agreement, although it is not a 100% consensus.

Second, if it is getting warmer, is it caused in large part by human activity or is it part of some natural variation? This is the sticking point. If it's part of a natural variation in temperature -- and I will point out many such variations have happened in the past few million years, all without any input from humans -- then there is no need for us to radically alter our life to stop it because such actions will have no positive climatic effect while having a signficant negative effect on quality of life.

Third, if it is anthropogenic, what should we do about it? Curtainling greenhouse emissions is an obvious choice, but is it the best one? How severe are the predicted warming effects? The economic and socio-political upheavals from drastic policy changes might be worse than adapting to a changing climate. And how much confidence can we have in the predictions regardless of how severe (or not) they may be?

These are not minor issues. They deserve to be studied and debated *in depth* before drastic action is take, if for no other reason than to determine that we're taking the *most effective* action possible. This whole "the debate is settle and if you don't agree with us you're a denier" smacks of the same kind of thinking that gave us an Earth-centric cosmic model and burned "deniers" as heretics.