From what I've read elsewhere, Canada's current Hornets cost approximately $10K per hour to operate, while their replacement, the F-35, has been estimated to cost over $30K per hour. With the F-35 costing so much more to operate, increased simulator hours for training become the obvious move. The alternative is under trained or unqualified pilots at the controls of $100m+ aircraft.

Most organisations aren't connected to the DoD's endless money spigot.

Damn elitist squid! Hoarding all the wealth, not paying their fair share of taxes and stealing all our forklift driving jobs.

Unfortunately, yes for Australia. Not sure about New Zealand though.

Regarding episodic gaming, are there any companies apart from Telltale that have managed to acceptably use the episodic model?

They can't write decent software either.

I switched to a $35 Asus card and was pleasantly surprised. Better quality sound and no more flaky drivers.

Hmm I interpreted "wrong" in terms of China's geopolitics, not morals or ethics. You're definitely right in that respect.

China chose to side with North Korea's communist forces given a common ideology and a desire to avoid a US friendly ally on their border. I'd say that history shows they made a choice that was far from wrong, given those goals. The only downside to this choice was that North Korea's style of international politics requires the US to station more troops in the region, thereby impacting China's present and future ability to influence its neighbours.

Going the DIY route for a complete software stack isn't a magic solution to hackers. It's damn hard to write secure software and expecting any organised group to rewrite all its own software from the ground up without introducing its own set of new security holes is ridiculous. Reinventing the wheel is wasteful and likely to produce an inferior wheel. Iran deciding to roll its own software from scratch would be a massive boon for the American and Israeli hackers.

Even if Iran were to choose to go down this path, its unlikely that they have enough qualified manpower to do the job. What you're suggesting is that Iran essentially creates something similar in scope to a Linux distro and a complete network infrastructure, except building the entire thing from scratch or known good components. Now imagine trying to do this with less manpower and no help from hardware manufacturers. It would take years to produce anything that is halfway usable and they'd still be introducing the same sorts of beginner's errors that the current designers have already made and fixed in their products.

You're describing a large part of the current political landscape.

If the podcasts are licensed under a Creative Commons licensed that allows modification and sale, then Slacker's service would be legal. Given that most of the podcasts likely aren't licensed in this way, they're probably infringing. Given that most podcasters run on donations or at a loss, Slacker can keep doing what they do until they happen to rip off someone with money or stubborn enough to hire a lawyer and sue.

It's much more likely that there's no conspiracy and it's just fuck ups all the way down. The FBI doesn't regularly (compared to other crimes) investigate foreign cases of copyright infringement, hence the lack of internally well-known procedures, which leads to mistakes. When the policing of infringement cases have become routine, then there'll be a well understood protocol and these mistakes won't happen. The MPAA probably have used their influence to push the case, but given their incompetence at running legal cases in their own country, it's not surprising that they've managed to fuck this case up too.

Given the realities (ie corruption and incompetence) of the current Pentagon procurement system, if this project doesn't get killed it will be lucky to produce more than a handful of aircraft, at a cost of several billion dollars each.

It's how you sell new weapons systems. This one's all about threatening China because it's hard to talk up the usefulness of $500m+ bombers against insurgencies.

The contractors lie about capability and cost because they want to win the contract. The DoD accepts these lies because it wants shiny new toys. Congress goes along with it as long there's pork involved. No-one learns anything because there's no incentive to avoid corrupt behaviour. The MICC at its finest.

Reality intervenes and the project goes overbudget. Production gets cut, yet it doesn't really save any money. The project continues through several cycles of the death spiral until it is either cancelled or delivers a product. And we end up with the congress critters getting their pork, contractors getting their piles of money, DoD getting their shiny new toys, along with promotions for anyone who didn't end up holding the bag. The troops end up with nothing or a handful of gold-plated weapons with less capability than they were promised. Oh, and the taxpayer gets screwed, but that's the usual outcome.