Well, according to that wikipedia page, that weapons system was in service since 1980. The missiles I'm talking about are these ones and are much more modern. I have read that Russia got significantly further ahead than the US in the area of anti-ship missiles and as such, the US defences against them have never been tested for real.
My understanding was based on articles like this one. Can you point me to evidence that the Moskit's can be destroyed by this ships anti-missile defences?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that anti-ship missile technology has been ahead of defence systems now for quite some time, such that basically any ship that gets within range of them is basically always sunk. What's more, Russia, Iran and China all have such missiles. What exactly are these ships being built for, beyond the jobs they produce?
It depends what you really want when you say, "boost the economy". The reason so many EU economies are trashed right now is because they were fundamentally weak for a long time, ever since the flight of manufacturing to Asia really, and this weakness was covered up through extremely large amounts of borrowing and government deficit spending. In the UK for instance large parts of the north were almost being kept afloat by large deficits run up under Labour. In Spain a lot of employment came from an unsustainable housing bubble that triggered over-construction - construction being an industry loved by politicians because it employs lots of relatively low-skilled labourers.
So these economies were already "boosted" for a long time on what amounts to economic caffeine, and like all caffeine-fuelled energy streaks eventually it comes to an end and the drinker has to crash for a while to catch up on sleep and get things back to normal. People that were being pointlessly employed through bubbles or government jobs programs have to find something more useful to do, which is often really hard and involves complicated retraining, assuming they can even afford that, and then of course such huge amounts of resources were misallocated for so long who even says there are jobs for them to take? In fact there often aren't. This "crashing out on the sofa for 24 hours" is a recession.
Meanwhile tax takes drop, interest payments go up due to the cost of banking bailouts and thus deficit spending rises still further. But that process of adjustment is still required.
The US economy is doing marginally better than most EU economies (except maybe Germany?) because it is still jacked up on caffeine, it never had the crash, specifically, it's jacked up on massive government work programs and the resulting secondary employment, like all the towns that revolve around military contractors working on pointless boondoggle projects. Common sense tells you that the US does not need to sink so many resources into advanced weapons programs or building yet more jets or aircraft carriers. But those people and resources get directed towards such projects anyway, partly because the excuse of national security means it's easy to exclude foreign contractors and get Americans working. American can afford this much longer than most countries can because the dollar is very large, US Treasuries have a privileged place in the worlds financial system, and the Fed has basically broken the US bond markets by buying vast amounts of government debt using newly created money. Theory tells us this should cause inflation. In practice it hasn't become a huge problem yet because the dollar is such a very very deep currency, so it's possible to print more money without impacting the overall supply, and because so many prices are indirectly connected to the price of food and fuel, both of which are very cheap in America.
You do understand the reason that companies like Apple come up with such convoluted tax arrangements, right? It's because the US tax system is fundamentally broken in a very important way - it tries to tax income regardless of where it was earned or who earned it - for people this is "citizenship based taxation", for companies what it means is if they earn money overseas and spend that money overseas, not only does the overseas government take a slice but the US wants a slice too. That's not how other tax systems work. If this was actually enforced properly then every US company would get double taxed on foreign-earned income, which would make them less competitive against foreign companies that only pay tax on income where it's earned. The reason it's NOT enforced properly, is exactly because closing this "loophole" would be very harmful.
Generally the rule is that if a US company brings the income home, then it gets double taxed. So big tech companies which are very profitable end up stockpiling profits outside the USA. They don't want to bring it back to the US because then they'd lose a lot of it, after it was already taxed once. But they don't have anything to spend it on outside the US either. They instead sit it out and hope for a "tax holiday". From time to time politicians grant these because it doesn't make any sense for the money to be sitting around outside the reach of the IRS waiting for investment opportunities abroad, when it could be spent inside the US instead.
Companies that are not US based don't have this problem.
No, in fairness to Clegg, he has stated he wants to update oversight of the intelligence agencies:
British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg is to start conversations in government about how to update the legal oversight of the UK's security services in the light of disclosures by the Guardian that powerful new technologies appear to have outstripped the current system of legislative and political oversight.
The writing random bytes thing, but only on Windows, is rather puzzling. It seems like one way to build confidence that's faster than setting up a deterministic build (which at any rate, would not necessarily be accepted by the TrueCrypt authors it seems), would be to open up the binaries in IDA Pro and figure out if the bytes written there on Windows truly are random or if they are not.
The article explicitly says this does not appear to be based on the co-operation of US providers but rather international fibre taps - presumably placed or operated by compliant intelligence agencies that are merely extensions of the NSA. The US might be a ringleader in this activity, but other countries have out of control security services as well. After a long period of political silence in the UK we finally got some discussion this week, after senior cabinet members who served on the national security committees admitted they had no clue anything like that was happening. Cameron's response was priceless, he said the agencies would have told them about it if they'd asked!
I searched that, clicked the first link, clicked download, and on the right hand side is "Community edition: FREE". I'm not sure how much clearer they could make it
Android does do sandboxing and the "nuisanceware" the OP talks about could just be uninstalled.
There have been one or two exploits in the past that allowed apps to make themselves difficult to uninstall. They were bugs that got fixed. Android doesn't have anywhere near the same level of risk as Windows does when it comes to malware.
Yes, I have too - IntelliJ itself is written using Swing and it's quite appealing on all the platforms I've used it on. But I guess that they had to develop custom themes for it and be very careful to achieve that.
JFX8 looks great out of the box. It supports hi-dpi/retina displays and has a generic cross-platform theme called Modena which is a lot more tasteful than previous Java desktop themes. It doesn't match any particular platform, but I've been writing an app with it on the Mac and it can actually look better than Aqua sometimes. Still, the theming system is powerful enough that you can also get AquaFX which matches the theme in MacOSX Mountain Lion (it's done by a third party).
Just to ram home the point about Maven+IntelliJ, enabling AquaFX in my project involved typing in the following code:
if (System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase().contains("mac")) {
AquaFx.style();
}
(you're only allowed to use AquaFX on a Mac because of the art being copyrighted by Apple, etc).
Of course AquaFx is an unknown class, so I just asked for an auto correct there, told it to find the class in Maven, then did an interactive search for AquaFX in the resulting dialog. Press enter, and it was downloaded+installed in the background. Also the build system definition (an XML file) was updated so people building from the command line or using other IDEs would also see the dependency. A few seconds later the code is no longer red and the app runs.
It may well be that
The Windows JRE installer is an obnoxious piece of crap. Fortunately modern JDKs ship with something called the JavaFX Bundler, which makes native installers (exe, msi, dmg, rpm, deb) for each platform that bundles a stripped down JRE with the app, so there is no need to install the JRE or keep it up to date. If you are distributing consumer software or don't want to handle the problem of keeping JREs up to date, it's useful.
There are also tools that can eliminate the need for the JVM entirely, for instance by ahead of time compiling entirely to native (Excelsior JET is one such program), or alternative JVMs that sacrifice some performance for code size, like Avian.
No, I've seen pretty much that dynamic happen at Google where we use a lot of C++ and Java.
There are some places Java just can't follow C++
Despite that, lots more code is written in Java, because the cost of using C++ is so high. Sure, when the sailing is smooth there isn't a huge difference between them as long as your libraries and support infrastructure are good, but the moment someone slips up and accidentally double frees memory on an error path you've got a problem that can take an entire team a week or more to track down. I've seen it and partaken in such bug hunts. There's nothing quite like trying to find memory corruptions that only show up in the production environment once a day, when you have thousands of servers.
Basically any programmer can screw up that way. Java strikes a reasonable balance between safety and performance, which makes sense even when you are a company like Twitter or Google.
IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition is both open source and free, so your comment is a pretty epic failure. As it happens I bought the Ultimate edition during their end-of-the-world sale that was in the hours before the Mayan calendar predicted armageddon, so I got it cheap. Best doomsday scenario ever!
You know, it's not like Java lacks unsigned types because they simply forgot about them. It lacks them because experience with C and C++ indicated that mixing of signed and unsigned types can lead to lot of weird bugs. It's one of the reasons those languages have a reputation for being giant cannons pointed at the developers feet.
On the flip side, although lack of unsigned types probably makes pure Java code more robust, the moment you have to do any kind of parsing of file or wire formats it immediately becomes a sharp edge with which to cut yourself (that and the decision to make the JVM big endian - doh!).
Ultimately I'd rather Java had unsigned types, if only to make interop eaiser, but the line between safety and features is always a finely balanced judgement call.
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