I remember something called the "M&M" principle from a book i read as a kid. I don't remember the book, though, so any reply as to the source would be appreciated.
The basic principle is this: if you take a jar of red, green and blue indestructible M&M's and shake it for a million years, at any point in those million years there will be huge clumps of red, green and blue M&M's, interspersed with regions of near perfect dispersion. Never (or at least extremely rarely) will the entire jar be entirely evenly dispersed, or as evenly grouped as it was when you started. The explanation for this was that, of all possible arrangements that those M&M's can be in, almost all will show clumps and evenly mixed regions, only a few will be nearly all evenly dispersed or all grouped.
I tend to stick to Cowboy Neal.
This encourages a mental image that i would rather not have.
Funny you should quote John Wayne, since he normally portrays values of fairness. It's not about dying for your country, it's about fighting fairly while still doing everything to win.
All I'm saying is those who don't fight fair should not also expect to be *respected* for their efforts.
Is this a boxing match or a war?
In WWII the US did intentionally slaughter a couple hundred thousand civilians in Dresden and Japan
And Berlin, Monte Cassino, Okinawa, Tokyo, etc...
I'm not going to justify these actions, they were horrendous. Nonetheless, they were all done for the purpose of ending the war.
Not the intended goal of the insurgents whom we are fighting, who are actively seeking out such conflict.
They might own the ground in the war zone, but we own the air.
The problem with this philosophy is, simply put, we own the ground also. Decisively. Yet they are still there.
Their goal is not traditional military superiority, their goal is to win the political game. As proof of how effective their campaign may eventually be, consider this. The U.S. won every battle in Vietnam. Every single one. Most by an embarrassingly huge margin. But, who has control of the Vietnam peninsula today? How did they achieve this?
nothing better than 90 days
I forget the actual details, as i've been out of the medical equipment repair business for years, but depending on the class of equipment, med. equipment manufacturers are required to support equipment for a decent amount of time. Defibrillators and phys. monitors, for example, both require ten years of support from the manufacturer. This is due to F.D.A. regulation.
UAV's also have weight issues. The shadow, the one mentioned in the article, doesn't have any kind of radar, heck it doesn't even have brakes. This is due to the very reliable but fairly weak engine it uses. It's internal computer basically only handles the inertial nav system, the communications, and maintains straight and level flight. The ground control station makes all the actual decisions. If the AV loses contact with the GCS, it's preprogrammed either to return to a predesignated coordinate and fly a loiter pattern (hopefully getting signal back again on the way), or to deploy it's parachute.
In other words, nevermind avoiding another aircraft, this thing will fly into a mountain if allowed to fly itself. I believe that the reason that this aircraft is the one being selected for FAA approval is because of it's reliability at doing it's job even with it's limitations, not because of it's feature set. My unit, and many others, have never crashed one of these UAV's. Other UAV's, even more sophisticated ones, fall out of the sky all the time. While the shadow is not perfect, it is definately going to be the benchmark in the future for how rugged and simple versus how feature rich a UAV needs to be.
Numeric stability is probably not all that important when you're guessing.