You know whats worse than todays pilots flying ancient airplanes, a brand new extravegantly expensive F-35 that cant match an F-16 or F-15E built in the 80s, planes built for a fraction of the price.

The F-35 might be an OK successor to the F-117 as a mostly stealth small bomber, but all indications are its completely worthless in a close in dogfight, you just have to read the leaked report from a recent test against an ancient F-16.

The F-35 simply doesnt have enough power, cant turn fast enough and bleeds off to much energy. The pilot found one manuever he could use to shake the F-16 but it consumed so much energy he had to run away and try to get the energy back.

The F-35 will also be horrible in the close air support role at which the A-10 excels, again at an even smaller fraction of the price tag.

F-35 is a classic jack of all trades and master of none.

There might have been a place for a few hundred of them but for the U.S. and every allied air force to think they are going to use one horrible design to replace every fighter they have is complete insanity. If it ever reaches full deployment, one accident or problem and the entire western world will have no air force. At least the Navy has the sense to keep the F-18 alive.

The F-35 is a tribute to the extent Lockheed has seized total control of Congress and the Pentagon, they could literally sell the Air Force actual turkeys for a hundred million a pop and get away with it.

Those B-52â(TM)s still flying today is because Northrop, has also seized control of the Air Forces generals made the B-2 so expensive and so few in number the Air Force canâ(TM)t afford to risk it in combat.

Besides the U.S. has been fighting people living in mud huts who have no air force and air defenses for over a decade, B-52â(TM)s and A-10â(TM)s work incredibly well in that role.

If you want to run applications completely controlled and filtered by Apple, yea go with that. Apple doesnâ(TM)t like something about some app you want to run then you do without that functionality. Apple wants you to use their crappy version of some app so they kill the competing apps, which one are you gonna be using?

I am fine with the prospect of using mobile devices to do everything assuming they have peripherals and expansion, but the prospect of Apple and Google controlling all software, not so much.

Hacker News has a fairly good track record causing something resembling the Slashdot effect at least on lower capacity servers. Its pretty rare you hear anyone comment that they got a traffic surge when their blog appeared on the front page of Slashdot any more, though it is quite common to hear comments about traffic surges from Hacker News.

Iraq used chemical weapons to pretty good effect to stave off Iranian human wave attacks during the Iran Iraq war. If they hadnâ(TM)t it would have somewhat increased the likelihood that Iran would have won the war. With the help of chemical weapons Iraq fought a much larger country to a stalemate.

The Reagan administration and numerous western companies were fine with Iraq using chemical weapons against Iran during that era. They didnt want Iran to win that war.

Deep Neural Nets will use it, at least the very big, wide, deep ones will.

Iâ(TM)d still play BF2 if there were any servers left for Karkand Infantry that didnâ(TM)t suck. For pure fun to play 64 man infantry only Kirkland was about the pinnacle of PvP, way better than any newer COD or BFn.

Game companies are spending way too much money on graphics and gimmicks and nothing at all on good PvP.

Good PvP requires evenly matched teams and gear in a space big enough for variety and small enough so the teams are compelled to be in contact.

You wanna see an example of a horrible PvP game, try PlanetSide 3. The teams were/are never even, you spend most of your time running around trying to find the other team, when you find them either they are massively outnumbered or you are outnumbered.

Then there are the microtransactions so someone foolish enough to blow the money can advance with no skill whatsoever.

Most COD Iâ(TM)ve played you circle endlessly in a fur ball killing and being killed, there is never any discernible point or strategy.

Seriously if you want a great game that people will want to play forever look at CS and BF2. The graphics kinda suck, BF2 is certainly buggy, but they are still pure fun to play.

Paypal is a scam company now. It wasnâ(TM)t really a scam company when it was originally founded. It broke new ground in paying for stuff on the web when the web was in its infancy. It was also had to deal with massive scams coming from the other direction, faux customers.

Bitcoin companies seem to be having a much worse problem with being scams than Paypal did, at least until it was sold off by the founders to EBay at which point, yes it turned in to an obnoxious, kind of a scam company.

It should also be noted 9/11, the Patriot act and the 2008 crash all happened in there which made Paypal increasingly obnoxious in reaction to crushing Federal scrutiny of and intrusion in to financial transactions.

Point her to the Elon Musk TED talk. When asked how he did so many amazing things, one of his more insightful comments was he learned physics, and he learned how to approach things from the bottom up the way a physicist would. If you learn something at a fundamental level you can do amazing and new things. If you learn stuff, shallowly, from the top down, you often end up copying others which is both less amazing and less valuable.

Also has pretty good lessons for all the wanna be startup founders in Silicon Vally who are doing Uber of . . . or AirBNB of . . ., me too companies.

He also covers doing big, hard things for the benefit of humanity part pretty well.

Like send the Colorado congressional delegation to attack SpaceX for no particularly good reason. ULA has a large operation in Denver and they pay Colorado Republicans handsomely.

Iâ(TM)m not exactly sure why Saudi Arabia would want to harm Islamic State. ISIS is Sunni, fundamentalist and they are tearing apart the Alawite and Shia pro Iranian states in Syria and Iraq. You would almost figure some Saudiâ(TM)s are funding ISIS under the table.

ISIS is undoing some of the damage George W. did to Sunni interests by toppling Saddam and unleashing a wave of Shia ascendence in Iraq.

More probably plunging oil prices have wiped out the Iranian governments revenue stream. There is speculation that one of the reasons Saudi Arabia is continuing to pump oil and crater oil prices is to cripple Iran, a bitter Shia enemy, and defund programs like uranium enrichment, missile development, their miliary in general and their support for other anti Sunni groups in the Middle East.

The other speculations for continued Saudi efforts to crash oil prices are to wipe out frackers in the U.S. so they can regain more political control over the U.S., to wipe out expensive offshore and artic oil exploration, to punish Russia at the behest of the U.S. or because Russia is a key benefactor of Iran.

Much of that inflation dates back to massive spending and debt from the Vietnam War and the creation of OPEC spiking oil prices, neither of which Jimmy Carter have much to do with. LBJ and Nixon are the ones to blame, if you were alive then you would remember the failed attemps at wage and price controls under a Republican administration, Nixon. Carterâ(TM)s presidency was doomed before it started because of the mess he inherited, and there was very little he could do about it.

Interest rates were 20% because Paul Volcker and the Fed set them to 20% in 1979 to break the back of an inflationary spiral, which he did, and that is not something Reagan can take any credit for. Carter can only take credit for having appointed Volcker to the Fed. Volcker was one of the very few great Fed Chairmen.

The legacy most working people can thank Reagan for is jacking payroll taxes up to to an inescapable 12.5% on all working people, while he was cutting taxes on the rich.

A key reason we have income inequality today is working people pay an inescapable 12.5% in taxes on their wages not counting sales, propery, state and federal income taxes. Rich people pay 15% on capital gains, and those taxes are incredibly easy to dodge.

If they dont have evidence they dont know they are criminals.

I donâ(TM)t blame /. Its hard to have insightful commentary on our society any more.

Who would have figured Wall Street and the The City would rape the global economy in 2008, and instead of going to jail the central banks rewarded them with free money for six years and theyâ(TM)ve tripled their money as their punishment.

There was a brief glimmer of protest in the Occupy movement and it was crushed like a bug. The Department of Homeland security has turned most small town police force in to something resembling an occupying army you would see in Iraq, and they seem to be spending much of their time arbitrarily confiscating cash and cars for profit, no judge, no jury, no trial.

The Five Eyes are not just spying on some stuff, they are spying on EVERYTHING and we all know it and there isnâ(TM)t really anything anyone is gonna do about it. To stay on topic, 60 minutes had a shill do a great peice on the nice kids that work at the NSA.

We figured the Republican brand was destroyed as of 2008 and we elected this hopie changie President. It turns out heâ(TM)s pretty much as bad or worse than the previous clown and nothing changed. There is a high probability the next one is gonna be worse than the last two. In six years the Democrats have laid such waste we are welcoming the Republicans back. We donâ(TM)t really want either of our parties any more but they arenâ(TM)t going to allow us an Option C.

Its hard to find biting satire or piercing commentary that does it justice and you know it isnâ(TM)t gonna change a God damn thing. After everyting thatâ(TM)s happened over the last ten years, there should have been change, our civilization was ripe for it. There just wasnâ(TM)t any. The man seems to have his jack boot on our necks and heâ(TM)s got us down.

Pretty sure NASA has blown more on Constellation, Orion and SLS, launchers to no where that never launch, than SpaceX has spent on successful development of 2 new rockets and Dragon1, and will probably spend on Falcon Heavy, Dragon 2 and their reusable program.

NASA's problem is not insufficient funding. Its inefficiency, bureaucratic bloat, corrupt contractors, and the inability to build or do much of anything in the vacinity of its manned space program. JPL and a few others places are doing fine but they are an exception to the rule.

Some people at Orbital probably do need to be sacked for trying to use 40+ year old Russian engines, the engines are actually that old not just the design. Some people at NASA probably should be sacked for buying in to a contractor proposing such a flawed concept.