Really? 10 to 1 is a midrange? Indiscriminant? If you have a good information source, please share. I feel we both want the same thing - fewer dead civilians, but I suspect you are using very bad assumptions.

In the Human Rights Watch report "Troops in Contact" they go out of their way to say that planned strikes result in few civilian deaths, and that the bulk of civilian casualties come from coalition land forces coming under fire and calling in air strikes to take out insurgents who are using civilians as human shields. Unmanned drones, by their very nature, are slow and are not used for close air support of ground troops. A-10s, helicopters, fighters, and even B-2 and B-52 bombers have been used for close air support, some carrying heavy weapons.

Using your reasoning, there would be fewer precision strikes by unmanned drones (carrying missiles with 20 pound warheads) against evaluated targets, and more ground troops under fire screaming into their radios for close air support by aircraft carrying large bombs, resulting in more dead civilians. The whole reason for using precision laser guided missiles such as Hellfire II (used by Predator and other UAVs), is to limit civilian casualties.

I second the opinion that the $1.4B is for proof-of-concept. Reuters reported that the contract was for the System Design and Demonstration phase of the contract, with which the Army buys two orbits of two aerostats (likely engineering design models) for testing and evaluation.

Regarding the aerostats floating over Iraq and Afghanistan now, these are likely the Persistent Threat Detection System.

Ditto on the summary. Looking at the bigger picture, it's a good thing that foreign students attend U.S. universities. They pay more for their education, they frequently get better educations than what they get in their home countries, and after a few years they go home with a decent understanding of the U.S. Making it attractive for them to get hired for a short period while on their student visa is not a bad thing either. Angry mobs screaming "the ferriners are taking our jobs!" is usually a very bad thing for all involved.

It's been a while since I've taken a CS class, but doesn't COBOL compile to a binary? For what the USPS needs, it was probably more economical to port their old COBOL code over to Linux, instead of rewriting ungodly numbers of processes in a snazzy new language that 1) they may not know as well 2) wouldn't necessarily run faster than the stuff written originally in COBOL.

Kind of a nasty spin you put on this story. The British don't deny Polish involvement, and TFA didn't mention the Polish because that's exactly not what this story is about. Also, using a little logic, if the British don't honor their own over concerns over secrecy, they sure won't honor Poles for similar effort. In any case, I'd leave it to the Polish government to honor their cryptologists, if they haven't done so already.

There are two large PDFs with qualitative and quantitative system requirements here. This system goes beyond "modified ham radio gear", and few ham operators carry their equipment into burning buildings, etc.

The U.S. government pays dearly for disposal, it's just that reefing old ships after many millions of dollars in preparation is more cost effective than scrapping under the current U.S. government environmental rules. Read this if you want to know more: http://www.rand.org/pubs/documented_briefings/DB391/

One flaw in your logic - the rich can afford prophylactic anti-malarial medications and do not get infected if they are taking them. The poor generally do not have access to the same, and that's the point of Mr. Gates' presentation.

Also, the only Dengue Fever anyone will catch in Long Beach is the band. The type of mosquitoes that carry dengue don't live there.

You said it! They stink on ice!