De Beers never destroyed diamonds to maintain scarcity - they just stockpiled them, and then worked to create new markets in emerging economies (the United States, later Japan, then Eastern Europe, now China) and eventually sold them. At one point they had a stockpile equal to several years of sales.

Yet, oddly, the market for natural pearls - by which I mean ones that aren't "cultured", but are formed naturally - collapsed when farmed cultured pearls were introduced, and has never really recovered -- even though they are easily identifiable, far rarer, and "more unique" (I am quoting the misconstruction). Natural pearl production is lower today than it was a century ago. This is a good thing, since it takes pressure off of living communities of organisms, but it is also inconsistent behavior of the market/industry compared to other gemstones.

(I have an explanation for why this occurred for pearls - that "cultured" pearls are considered "real" pearls by the market - but laboratory diamonds are not considered "real" diamonds. Pearls were really, truly rare before culturing made them something everyone could buy -- thus cultured ones were accepted because they expanded the market into a mass market. Diamonds on the other hand were really, truly rare once, but that ended with the discovery of the African diamond deposits in the mid 19th century. After that time they were something everyone could buy, and required an international cartel to manage the supply to keep the price up (in addition to restricting the supply it began an unflagging sales efforts - "diamonds are girl's best friend" - to drive up demand). Artificial diamonds did not change the supply-demand situation, there was already a surplus of natural diamond, but the cartel does not wish for there to be "real" diamonds produced outside of cartel price control. Thus no one who deals in diamonds, and is thus dependent on cartel favor for their supply, will agree that an artificial one is "real".)

Remember, Microsoft did not learn from their 1999 fiasco, they did it again 4 years later, though only in the UK.

Is your claim that the airframes are reaching their service life and need to be replaced by new builds, or are you claiming that an aircraft design undergoes some sort of senility independent of remaning service life?

Please explain why, for example, a new build F-15 or F-18, with 21st century enhancements, would be in adequate to do its job today if that is your argument.

OK - I'll bite. Why not?

Is there a major war scheduled we don't want to be late for?

Is there an enemy superpower that will outstrip us militarily in a meaningful way if we don't get this plane fielded ASAP?

It was already argued that we could buy other NATO aircraft that are in production. This option is "viable" even if the U.S. Senators prefer to keep the pork at home.

Yup. A giant PITA. Why don't they fix this?

Sure, but is the business able to utilize that team "anywhere" with the same degree of success?

Many, many businesses have learned the hard way that core software development needs to be in close (as in immediate, face-to-face) contact with the business side to translate requirements (often inchoate in the minds of the execs and product managers) into concrete requirements and actual software quickly in a very competitive market place.

It varies greatly by industry, company size, and business objective of course - but often the financial and opportunity cost of trying to get the work done with remote teams, even in the U.S., much less overseas - can be unsustainable.

I have seen many businesses/business units waste months or years trying to compete using remote teams of various compositions, before finally pulling some or all of the development back to a central location, even at higher nominal cost. Witness what Marissa Mayer (not a person I would usually use as a model) did with Yahoo. What she did, she did with some very good reasons.

Arguing that all businesses should be able to use remote teams with equal success is a silly game. Woulda, shoulda, coulda - the fact is many businesses try and fail at this, and cannot afford to keep trying to make reality match theory.

There is a lot of bickering on the this page about what Libertarianism does or does not believe, or the sins of government and/or corporations, but let's cut to the chase: Is there anybody here who thinks this scheme is a good idea?. As far as I can tell in the few hundred comments posted thus far, the answer is a resounding "No!"

Bingo!

Among the many problems with this proposal -h is notion of the wall's construction is preposterous. This is very similar to the world's highest concrete arch dams - which require solid rock foundations. A 2000 km structure 300 meters high would have to be built as an earth dam. One plus of this is that don't need billions of tons of concrete, just lots and lots of dirt and rocks, a minus is that the base is ~4 times the width of height so this structure is a kilometer plus thick. The proposal then is essentially to build a continent spanning mountain range.

Using the Tehri Dam in India as a model (260 m tall, 575 m long, cost $1 billion) the cost per kilometer would be on the order of $3 billion per kilometer, or $6 trillion dollars total. The total number of people in the tornado belt is about 70 million, so the cost is roughly $100,000 per person in round numbers. Meanwhile an F5 tornado shelter can be bought for $3000. So at a small fraction of this cost (and environmental impact) every building in the tornado belt could have a shelter able to withstand even the most intense tornados.

The original paper also asserts that this would save money over time by reducing property damage. Annual tornado damage runs $400 million, so it would take 15,000 years for this "savings" to occur, assuming the interest on the investment is zero.

Calavar crushed your case like a bug. Nice to see you are as graceless a loser as your close-minded, and logic-challenged.

Hmmm. The Director of the NSA might encounter all sorts of information about the Big Money Boys that they would rather not be known generally. Would that information necessarily be classified? But whether or not it is, being paid NOT to disclose it would surely not be a violation of security. Wall Streeters might regard a million a month mighty cheap insurance...

Viktor Belenko and it was Hakodate Airport in northern Japan. He overshot the runway, damaging the landng gear, but he was almost out of fuerl and couldn't go around (plus, he didn't want to get shot at).

The pressurized flight suit worked fine, I've never read that it didn't (athough the current F-35 program seems to be having problems). Possibly you are referring to the sophisticated environmental system for electronics that the Mig-25 did not have because its vacuum tube electronics did not need them? The vacuum tube radar was far more powerful than any on any U.S. aircraft, 600 KW continuous, with tremendous ECM burn-through power (the F-4 had a 30 kw radar).

Probably you are referring to the fact that the Soviets did not use blind rivets everywhere, as in a US aircraft, but only where they were needed? Or the fact that titanium was only used where its high temperature properties were needed?

Not when flown according to guidelines (they did have a shorter life than U.S. engines though, true).

How about extremely high operating altitude, out of the range of most other combat aircraft?

It has a very creditable (though limited) combat record. But 75% of all Mig-25s were recon versions, and there their performance and record is outstanding, remaining in service in India until recently. It remains one of the most successful combat reconnaissance planes of all time.

That is kJ, not kW.

There are three different expansive phenomenon in modern cosmology - the initial inflation of the original symmetry breaking event, the subsequent vastly longer and slower expansion (measured by the Hubble Constant) that followed where the Universe coasted under influence of gravity alone, and then the recently discovered (and cosmically more recent) cosmic acceleration.that is now offsetting gravity.

The first event lasting a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second did indeed push all the particles then existing apart very fast, while creating lots of new particles.

The second phase of coasting, and the modern phase when cosmic acceleration kicked in, is currently pushing things apart on a cosmic scale, but not gravitationally bound structures, much less the far more strongly bound electromagnetically bound ones (atoms and molecules, and molecular agglomerations) or nuclear force bound structures.

Eventually, under current models, cosmic acceleration will strengthen to the point where it will start ripping apart these galaxy clusters. then galaxies, then star systems, then stars and bulk matter, then molecules and atoms, then nuclei,and finally composite subatomic particles themselves.

The "tones" - frequencies and modulations in the cosmic medium - support the Big Bang model quite strongly.

The signal-to-noise ratio demonstrating the reality of the Big Bang in scientific data collected over decades is enormously higher than that of the posts appearing here today where numerous ACs spout contentless skepticism and derision, and to the extent they reference facts at all, they get them hilariously wrong.

Any AC who claims lots of evidence against a well-established scientific model, but it unable to cite a single scrap of same it simply polluting Slashdot and wasting everyone's time (including his/her own).