Philips and Bell had executives who had come up through the ranks, knew their industry, and intended to stay with the company long term. Today's executives are uniformly MBAs and lawyers who have spent their entire careers hopping from one job to another in a game of 'Executive Musical Chairs', bumping up quarterly profits with short term fixes to ensure their bonuses, hoping to not be in the corner office when the music stops and the results of their bad decisions tanks the company. What interest do they have in long term investment when by the time it bears fruit someone else will be reaping the benefits?

When my wife started working at Target the CEO had started on the sales floor three decades earlier, by 2010 there wasn't a single person in the executive offices who had ever worked at a low level retail job. The entire company was being run by people who had no idea what the employees who kept it functioning day to day actually did, and the decisions coming from Minneapolis showed it.

I put an awful lot of the blame on the introduction of the 'Business Ethics' courses in the '70s, and the flood of MBAs with no real-world employment experience in the '80s. When you have guys that have never worked a day in their lives (and six figures of debt) coming in to manage businesses about which they know little to nothing, having been erroneously taught that their one and only duty is to enrich shareholders, it's a recipe for disaster. Then combine that with executive pay plans hyper-focused on quarterly returns, and the resulting meltdown was utterly predictable and unfortunately unavoidable.

Doesn't work that way at AWS. All anyone in the company sees is a blob of encrypted bits to which they have no access unless the customer shares the key with them for some reason. If they have to move the data from one location to another or back it up they have to do the entire blob (that's what the data techs refer to it as, a "blob"), they have no ability to see what's in it. It's not like your local drive where the administrator can take ownership and view whatever they want. Go to AWS with a court order and they'll have to hand over the entire encrypted blob.

That's my stalker troll, I think most of its posts are done by a (fairly poorly programmed) bot. I've seen over a dozen before after a single post that I've made, it's quite pitiful. I suspect it's the same troll that has been stalking rsilvergun for the last several years, and creimer before him.

So, "whenever we wanna".

Iran has never been involved in any terror operations to the scale of the US. Just the Contra terrorists, directly funded, trained, armed, and directed by the US, killed a minimum of 30,000 people. The Hmongs in Southeast Asia may have approached or even exceeded that number. The Afghan mujahideen's death toll of civilians was thousands even before they became al Qaeda. The various US-funded right-wing groups in Colombia terrorized the countryside worse than the FARC. To this day the US continues to fund at least a dozen terrorist groups across Africa. All Shi'ia terrorism, whether associated with Iran or not, combined might have a death toll of a couple hundred, tops.

TFA doesn't mention a court order, so apparently they didn't even require one. They've done that repeatedly with people's iCloud data and their location data, so I'm not surprised. No idea why the fanbois seem to think that Apple gives a shit about their privacy, I've never seen any indication of it.

Russia only attacked civilian infrastructure after Ukraine spent 8 years doing it.

I'm sorry, but WTactualF? Are you unaware of the last 80 years of US military history? Damn.

For that matter, which I didn't think of until later, Kazakhstan has a border with China and ports on the Caspian Sea. I like your idea better, though.

Of course not, and the F-150 isn't the same truck as when it was introduced in 1975. It's still the same basic vehicle except now it's got power steering, you can't get it with a manual transmission, and it has air conditioning. Sure, the Patriot has had some improvements, especially a better radar system (which now needs gallium that China won't sell us), but it's still the same basic vehicle.

This wouldn't be allowed if the Chinese government didn't approve to a certain extent. I'm wondering if this is their way of allowing the BRICS countries to arm themselves with a weapon the Empire has no defense against.

Interesting claim. Why is it then that Patriot batteries in Ukraine keep getting destroyed? It couldn't possibly be that a weapon developed in the 1980s is inadequate for usage four decades later, could it? Nah, that's just crazy talk...

Easy to shoot down, until you run out of interceptors and have to spend half an hour or more to reload while the next wave is incoming. Then there is the simple fact that if you're spending $8,000,000 (two THAAD missiles, which are fired in pairs) to shoot down a $100,000 missile that's a serious self-own. (Of course if you don't shoot it down you may lose your $500,000,000 radar set.)

Heat dissipation is a major issue with those systems. Throw a dozen drones at it and it might be able to handle it, throw three dozen in its direction and it will overheat and be the biggest infrared target in the region and impossible to miss.

Between the Ukraine and Iran conflicts Western militaries should be panicking, but all they seem to be doing is asking for more money to continue with business as usual and preparing to re-fight the Iraq clusterfuck.