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.

Someone needed to talk to Boeing's crew that handles the designs of the AH-1 and UH-1. Lots of parts commonality, increasing as time goes on, and good at their roles, but different shapes for different missions.

The Harrier can't meaningfully hover with a full weapons load, either, and it really only takes off vertically at air shows. STOVL is short for "short takeoff, vertical landing". They've been planning ramped takeoffs and vertical landings at sea from the beginning, just like the Harrier uses.

I'm not fond of the F-35, but don't ascribe features to its (at least as problematic) predecessor that aren't there.

No, because the F-16 was designed as a multi-role fighter and it did extremely well. When it was announced that both the Air Force and Navy would use it, there was concern because of memories of the F-4 (a good plane for its time, but certainly not without its problems) and the compromises it had. When it was announced that it would also replace the Harrier and was planned to become the most common plane in the military, that's when people started fearing the worst.

The main problem is the Marines wanting a replacement for the Harrier, something that can do STOL/STOVL operations, and that is completely under their control. The JSF was already under development, and the contractors said they could figure out how to make it fit the Marine requirements. What we got was a fighter that can't dogfight, a strike aircraft with a pitifully small payload, and the political impossibility of starting over from scratch.

One of the lessons that came out of this and the Zumwalt-class destroyer programs is that the military should stop trying to cram every feature into a program. While the proliferation of designs led to unwieldy logistics in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, the attempts to simplify everything have resulted in a reduced overall capability and the need to extend the lifetimes of planes the new projects were meant to replace. The F-15 and F-16 will still be around for decades, and may form a larger part of the tactical strike platforms than the USAF would like to admit. The same will probably be the case with the F/A-18E against the Navy's F-35C.

Dedicated designs are the most efficient. Some of them turn out to be spectacular at other jobs. The F-15 was designed with the adage "not a pound for air-to-ground" and yet from it was developed the F-15E Strike Eagle, an extremely effective air-to-ground platform. Hopefully the military is listening when it goes trying to build its next platform, a replacement for the B-1, B-2, and B-52 expected to come online between 2035 and 2045.

Weddings are social occasions that may demand that even the most wanted people come out of hiding to participate. That doesn't excuse them being used as targets. It's just the reason they're chosen.

I'm neither a kid nor have I forgotten the space race and the political squabbling that accompanied it. I want SpaceX to succeed, but I also want Orbital Sciences and Blue Origin to succeed, and anyone else that can reshape the space launch industry.

But there are people who desperately want to see Elon Musk fail. For that to happen, Tesla and/or SpaceX must fail. These people will hunt for any little indicator that Musk has bitten off more than he could chew and gleefully let everyone know about it.

I'm well aware that there are those who wanted (and still want) NASA to fail. They see NASA as the embodiment of government bureaucracy, slow and inefficient especially when compared to companies like SpaceX, and so they want to get rid of it. NASA is that, but mostly because the missions that they work on tend to be those difficult to replace: some extremely expensive satellites, interplanetary probes, and manned missions. A telecomm satellite lost on launch will be replaced by insurance and the contracted company will build another one. A failed satellite or probe may never be rebuilt (had New Horizons been lost, the atmosphere would have frozen and precipitated out before another probe could reach it). A failed manned mission may result in loss of life. Mission success therefore has higher priority than are the case with most commercial missions.

Or we build storage.

You don't HAVE to generate it within a fraction of a second of when it's used - that's just been convenient so far. So it's not with renewables? Fine! Store that juice!

When Bill Gates says:

"There's no battery technology that's even close to allowing us to take all of our energy from renewables and be able to use battery storage in order to deal not only with the 24-hour cycle but also with long periods of time where it's cloudy and you don't have sun or you don't have wind."

he's totally wrong.

For starters, there's Vanadium Redox. A flow battery (pumped electrolyte): Power limited by the size of the reaction device's electrode and membrane assembly. Energy storage limited by the size of the tanks. It's mainly used for utility-level energy storage down under (Oz or Nz, I think), because the patents are still fresh and the little startup doesn't want to license it to others. Vanadium is some substantial percentage of the Earth's crust so there's no shortage. Using the same element (in different sets of oxidation states - vanadium has (at least) 6 of 'em) for BOTH electrodes means leakage of small amounts of the element through the dilectric membrane doesn't poison the battery.

Lithum cells are already good enough to run laptops, cars, and houses, and are improving at a Moore's Law like rate. The elements are also not rare and the use of several nanotech techniques on the electrodes have drastically increased the lifetime and other useful properties. (We just had reports of yet another breakthrough within the last day or so, doubling the capacity and extending the life.) The fast-charge/discharge cells are also extremely efficient. (They have to be, because every horsepower is 3/4 kW, so even a few percent of loss would translate to enormous heat in an automotive application.) The main problem is to get companies to "pull the trigger" on deploying them - and risk their new production line being rendered obsolete before the product hits the market by NEXT month's breakthroughs.

Lead-acids need to be replaced once or twice per decade. But they have been the workhorses for off-grid since Edison's and Nikola Tesla's days, and still are today (though not for long, if Elon Musk and the five billion dollars of investments in his lithium battery plant have anything to say about it).

Nickel-Iron wet cells are a technology developed by Edison. They have more loss than lead-acids. But they literally last for centuries. If you have a moderately steady renewable source (like some combination of enough wind and a big enough windmill, enough sun and a big enough solar array, or a stream and a big enough hydro system) you'll have enough more power than you need to keep them topped off. They're just fine for covering days, or even a couple weeks, of bad generation weather, or down-for-maintenance situations. That IS what they were in at least one hydro plant I know of. (The problem is finding them: They last so long you only need to buy them ONCE, so there aren't many plants.)

That's just four FAMILIES of entirely adequate solutions. There ARE more.

So Bill is either uninformed, talking through his hat, or starting on the "embrace" stage of yet another:
  - Embrace
  - Extend
  - Extinguish
  - PROFIT!

What he's talking about is tabletop gaming design. He just uses FreeMind and MySQL to track what he's doing with it. It's no different than building out skill sets in a spreadsheet and writing up the actual books in a word processor.

When I was young, I played games from SJG, TSR, Palladium, R. Talsorian, ICE, FASA, and a bunch of one-off studios I can't remember now. Some of the systems worked really well, some required some tweaking, and others were essentially unplayable. But it was easy to see links between systems. Despite the occasional legal threats, there seemed to be a lot of borrowing each other's ideas. Palladium clearly was influenced by TSR (and I think they've admitted that the first version of their rules was essentially heavily modified D&D rules), and R. Talsorian's old D10/D6-based system seemed to have some influences from FASA.

When you're designing a game, what external influences help shape the game? How far can you adopt someone else's ideas before you have to start worrying about lawyers getting involved, and has that changed as the pen & paper RPG has waned in popularity?

It wasn't that long ago that celebrities were blamed for making the sex tapes in the first place. That seems to be changing now, and for the better.

This will expand as people look around and see that we have foibles. Some people are still going to be jerks about it by not hiring someone because there's a picture of them from 20 years ago holding a joint or by hiring someone because they found the nudies posted a couple of years back and want the chance at seeing it for themselves. But past drug use isn't going to be nearly as much of a deal-killer as it is now, and even current drug use (at least for marijuana) is probably going to subside as a major concern as long as someone isn't high while on the job.

There will still be reasons people don't get hired for things that end up online. Posing while hanging out with the local Klansmen, for example, is going to make someone wary about hiring them for fear of having to deal with racism in the workplace. But being caught toking, flashing a nipple, or even engaging in sexual activities isn't going to be as important.