Actually, the key thing for them is "cheap". They need to keep costing sub-$1k missiles in the ballpark of these Iron dome systems - the more, the better. They might as well just omit the warheads to save money and increase range. Every $50k shot Israel fires with those systems costs 25 Israelis' annual tax contribution to the IDF. Every $55m system they deploy costs 27.500 Israelis' IDF tax contributions.

Palestinians are poor, but they're not *that* poor that they can't leverage those kind of lopsided financial ratios.

Thank you for that!

I can't help but picture a sign on the door at the exit of an airport in Israel. It reads "Thank-you for not stirring up ancient inter-tribal conflict".

Now I can't help but think of this excellent video :)

Using a nuclear device at high altitude? You do know what happens if you do that, right? That one test bomb knocked out street lights and long distance phone service nearly 1000 miles away and took out a third of all satellites in orbit around Earth at that point in time.

No, in the case of Iron Dome, that's only PR too. They're shooting $50k+ missiles at $800 rockets. Even after factoring in that Israel's per-capita GDP is 20 times that of Palestine's, that's still a losing proposition, even *if* they had a 100% hit rate (which this article is suggesting it's anything-but) and assuming that you get the launcher, radar, etc for free instead of the actual $55 million per unit. It's in Palestine's best interests that Israel deploy as many of them as possible and try to shoot down every last rocket, because every shekel they spend on Iron Domes and missiles is a shekel they don't spend on jets, tanks, and bombs.

As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls

Sigh.

For about the sixth time, in only about two weeks, I am prompted to remind people of this:

Just recently -- only a couple of months ago -- a Federal judge ruled that the FAA has no authority over small low-altitude drones or models, regardless of whether they are being used commercially.

The ruling has been stayed pending appeal, but the judge ruled on the basis that it was never Congress' intent to give FAA authority to do this, and his argument was very strong.

In the meantime, the FAA has seemed to be intent on regulating everything in sight, before the appeals court slaps them down... which it is extremely likely that it will do, since it is pretty clear that it wasn't, in fact, Congress' intent to give the FAA such authority.

In that way, they have been acting just like the EPA, apparently trying to usurp every possible authority they can before the 2014 elections. I have no other explanation for their sudden, intense attempts to pass further regulations.

So NOW, after weeks of insults, ad-hominem and attempted character assassination, you want to try to present an actual scientific argument? Under a heading like that?

What the hell is wrong with you?

It seems pretty clear that something is.

As you well know, I have many times denied both of those.

And I have no reason to continue denying them on demand. Shove it up your ass.

I did not use the words efficiency or efficiency. You might want to work on your reading ability. It's not able, and you're not reading.

What the hell is a "threat actor"?

Why use jargon when "criminal" is a perfectly good word? And if this is a specific type of criminal, say a terrorist or a thief or the intelligence apparatus of a foreign country, then there are very descriptive and precise words for those as well. If it's corporate espionage, then "crook" works well, too.

Why do people who use technology feel the need to create neologisms for the most mundane things? Just the other day, I saw someone from a news web site refer to an "article" as an "explainer cardstack". I'm not shitting you. I immediately took that news source out of my RSS feed because if they're that dedicated to lexical obfuscation, I don't trust anything they write.

English motherfucker. Do you speak it?

Evolution doesn't deal with life or death

You lack a realistic understanding of evolution, I'm afraid. Time for some remedial study.

Have I read every paper associated with the Assessment Report? No. But then neither have you.

Have I read the summaries? Yes.

What, you think the summaries are dishonest? Yes or no?

I fully understand how an MCU saves time over using discrete logic. That is a trivial issue. But I sort of fail to see how dealing with complex software on top of complex hardware beats using simple (not trivial!) software on top of simple hardware, perhaps with the exception of this being The Only Way for a lot of solution vendors ("What, you don't want to program in C++ with our 3GB environment? But that's how we do things!").

FedEx used to do these things in Forth. Given how featureful Forth software can be even in tiny amounts, I just still don't see a reason for embedded XP. But then again, what do I know, I'm a brain-damaged Wirthian/Mooreian.