At least the Manhattan Project was possible according the the laws of physics, and represented mostly an engineering problem. Modern procurement seems to be a bunch of engineering trying to do what the laws of physics disallow -- like detecting over the horizon objects with straight-line signals.
The top officials in the Pentagon have little personal incentive to discriminate between what will and what will not work, when they can arrange massive contracts for companies that will then offer them a senior position when they retire on their 100% government salaries.
It would be wrong to characterise this as entirely the fault of politicians, beach the electors also do not care if it's worthwhile or not.
It works for the politicians to do this because their local electorate recognise that the cost will fall mostly on other tax payers, and each of the tax payers is trying to screw as many as the others as possible, and they'll vote for the candidate that will be complicit in the scheme.
I very much doubt that the military is above classifying the failures and limitations of their systems, just as they classify the capabilities. They have even more reason to do so, as it protects their budgets and careers as well.
Is there not a principle that offence always beats defense?
Many of these vast military overspends appear to be based on an assumption that the potential opponents will never adapt to the new technology. I'm no expert, but is part of the analysis of a new system or strategy not, "how would we adapt to this if the enemy had this system, and does it therefore make sense to do it?"
So here we have a system designed to tackle some number of incoming missiles. Even if it's perfect, the enemy adapts by using slightly more advanced decoys, more missiles, different trajectories
You also have to question the motivation of people who will spend billions to avoid a slight chance of a large number of war deaths, but are unwilling to spend money on a continual stream of preventable medical deaths.
If you are concerned about the possible existence of beings whose genetic material is derived from more than two other beings, you should perhaps meditate on the meaning of having grandparents.
It may be an error to confuse scientific reality with newspaper headlines that are designed to stimulate sales.
The notes will be restored and then popped into a glass display case with one or two pages visible, with a sort-of description of why they are important.
Pretty much all of Bletchley is like this, unfortunately. Stuff on display that you are not going to understand, such as copies of Turing's early mathematical papers with only the first page showing.
The problem with the whole Bletchley Park experience is that it was obviously extremely important, but is practically beyond all explanation for the ordinary punter. I think I might be able to intellectually struggle through an explanation of some of it, but the displays do not explain it in enough detail to help with that. Overall, my visit felt like a patchwork of different explanations of the same few concepts using poster boards, audio devices and video and interactive displays. It's padded out with various "wartime experience" bits here and there.
It probably seems like a very negative attitude, but a technical chap in his mid-forties with a couple of bright teenagers in tow ought to be right in the target demographic for Bletchley, but I'm practically embarrassed to say that I ended up drinking weak hot chocolate in the cafe and agreeing with my boys that it was all rather dull.
Special commendation for the rack of old bicycles at the end of one of the huts, with a hidden speaker to give you the authentic experience of what squeaky bicycle wheels sounded like in the 1940's. Or something?
You're weird.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
In this case, "Yes"
probably shouldn't have surfed to that URL at work though..... but their site actually comes across as quite rational and reasonable. Not what I was expecting at all.
It really comes to something when a website for a type of church can be considered NSFW. I understand though -- in my 10 years in corporate America I sure kept my atheistic head down. Nothing would have finished a career quicker than letting my screaming, wall-thumping, secretary-humping, second-wife-divorcing bosses know that I was not also a Christian.
The idea of embedding a calculation into the system that is automatically updated by underlying data changes -- is that not just a database view?
We use this sort of technique quite widely in a Ruby on Rails app I work on -- complex calculations such as for profitability and cash flow are defined as views in Postgres, and referenced by the app as read-only models. Thus we can: Profitability.where(product_id: 27).group(:month).sum(:value)
Performs monstrously fast, as is extremely flexible. It breaks the whole "for the love of gods don't put business logic in the database" separation of concerns idea, but we have a system to ship right now and we can't wait for RoR performance and flexibility to catch-up that much.
"25 Mega Tons of fire" is an interesting way of quantifying the energy in something less than 600,000 tons of LNG. Considering your estimate of 5 or 10 million deaths, along with overuse of exclamation marks, I think that you might be a little bit unbalanced.
Because only a trivially small proportion of the population cares. Few have even heard about these services.
If you care about free TV in the UK then you could start by not watching or recording live transmissions, and you then have no obligation to pay the TV license -- they only waste it on extra redundancy payments for senior managers, and politically motivated nonsense stuff like moving programming oop north.
I get by on BBC iPlayer delayed transmissions, streaming to my TV through Chromecast. Possibly ITV and Channel 4 have compatible streaming services, but sadly their programmes are not compatible with me.
At the last company where I worked, word processors and voice mail systems allowed them to have zero secretaries and receptionists, as software developers had to answer the door phone and type their own everythings. Of course this did double the number of software developers they needed because they all got fuck all work done, so I guess the article's correct.
If you forget your Adobe password, they send it back to you in plain text.
That's quality right there.
"May your future be limited only by your dreams." -- Christa McAuliffe
