Posts by JLV

Re: Such is life. Have a look around - it's a constant race of arms.

So whats to keep you from using an old version of FF? Or a fork? How is that different?

I get the frustration here, but, on balance, I find it better that FF de-crufts itself. If it was not such a front-facing program when it comes to security, I'd probably be less tolerant of breaking changes.

Not everything they do suits me - still peeved at cookie-management changes from a while back. But overall they're not MS or Google or Safari so I cut them a bit of slack.

p.s. I wasn't thinking of generally paying but NoScript's guy almost got some of my cash just now, except he's PayPal only.

Re: Such is life. Have a look around - it's a constant race of arms.

Oh, come on. While I am just as annoyed as anyone else at losing my personal faves - NoScript in my case - at least temporarily, this analogy is pretty darn leaky.

If you had a leaded gasoline car, you'd be out of luck, unless you did whatever you need to do to keep them running on modern gas.

If you had bought lots of cassette tapes, you'd not have them working on any recent equipment.

If your light fixtures for some reason insists on incandescents...

And, how many times have we seen people complaining that Windows is a mess due to its support for outdated technologies? How many people have - justifiably - skewered IE for leaving all sorts of crud enabled?

FF has put in a lot of effort rewriting their core, it's time that we get some payoff.

There's always a fine point between gratuitous changes and ones that make sense going forward. Python 2 vs 3 is a case in point - the changes to 3 were important clean ups in a language that takes clarity and consistency very seriously. To the best of their ability portability was facilitated and stuff back-ported to 2.7. It's not super difficult to write code that runs on 2 and 3*. But, yeah, it broke code. I'm still on 2.7 myself, but I disagree that the whole idea was an unplanned clusterf**** and will eventually move to 3.

Uncomfortable and inconvenient? Yes. Unjustified? No. Sometimes you need to change things and I respect that, as long as you aware of the costs to your users.

Browsers are too central to current computer security to take risks from keeping huge chunks of legacy code, including extensions that may essentially be un-maintained.

I'll give the benefit of the doubt to Mozilla, one of the better software projects around IMHO, that they've done a good job, weighed the alternatives and had reasons for doing this. Then I'll wait for NoScript before upgrading. If they've really screwed the pooch I'll switch to Vivaldi.

What I won't do is compare my ($$$) car to my (free) browser ;-)

* which is not to say that what makes sense in a development framework - where the complexity of compatibility is the developer's choice and is limited to their app - is the right thing to do on a browser.

Re: Intel - the hardware retail arm of the NSA

what's a good consumer-grade router than comes, or can take, the better open source router OSs?*

* skipping on DD-WRT - DD-WRT itself is really nice, but their website is utterly confusing as to what build might be expected not to be brick your particular router. I'll confess a lack of comfort at playing around blindly with something that controls your internet access - even if it's not permanently damaged, googling how to fix your corrupted router can be problematic.

wait... wait... I am confused.

is that the same activist Bono who frequently complains that industrialized countries don't do enough 3rd world aid? (which presumably requires more taxation)

and whose band is tax-registered in the Netherlands, because less taxes than Ireland?

Re: Musk, the new Jobs?

ah, how far the mighty have fallen. critics (AC) are popping out if the woodwork.

I'm a moderate fan of Tesla, the car, a doubter of Tesla's, the company, financials and an opponent of excessive electric car fiscal carrots.

But Musk's endeavors, which you so breezingly dismiss, are pretty impressive and pushing lots of engineering boundaries. In hindsight, moving electric cars from stodgy green perceptions to objects of (unwarranted?) desire was a marketing/engineering coup.

Not many "captains of industry" have shaken things up quite so much, even if I am sure Musk also relies on reality distortion fields a bit.

i.e. no problem with the article, but I sense a little tiny bit of unjustified peevishness on your end, dear.

Re: Fake news

Yup, another missed Schicklgruber*

moment.

* Nope, not calling Blowhard a N*** here, which is just as overblown an exageration as his ego, just appreciative of the power of names.

>Actually Windows these days is extremely modular. Far more so than say Linux!

Cool. Can you tell us how to unload the telemetry and ribbon modules?

>This argument that the technology will soon be supplanted

You're not wrong in criticizing new-flavor thinking. The USAF for example was way too quick to switch to no-guns/all-missiles in the runup to the Vietnam war.

Yet...

Whether missile-to-missile or dogfighting, there has been little real top-tier peers air-to-air combat, so even wrt guns vs missiles the tea leaves don't tell us that much. And missiles in the 70s vs missiles in the 2010s are not the same thing at all. Having Wild Weasels walk all over Iraqi and Lybian air defenses is not guarantee that they would do the same against an enemy fielding top-end SAMs with well-trained and motivated troops.

You could also make the case that we are currently investing heavily in, very costly, last-war technology. Bit like producing a massive fleet of pre-Dreadnought cruisers in 1890s. Or mass-procuring battleships in the years running up to WW2.

To me, it's a toss up whether gen 5 fighters are going to be useful in a hypothetical top-tier peer war (West vs China, not West vs Russia, btw). They may be . They may end up being totally besides the point however. Not least because China is so far away from Western power centers that jet fighters won't be too involved in non-peripheral combat zones unless they're carrier-based (with the F35 not being known for having a particularly long range).

What's certain is that right now, the F35 is in the unpleasant position of being costly, unfit for purpose and presented as the only game in town.

For now, we are only dealing with 3rd rate opponents who don't have credible air superiority/defense components. China is not in a position to challenge the West, yet. And Russia won't have the industrial capacity to do much in a serious conventional war.

We have time, for now.

My take: a) punish - hard - Lockeed by dumping its contract b) fire the military procurement folk that promoted taking so many development risks on a jack-of-all-trades airframe c) maintain R&D and training and keep the budgetary oomph to contain China, should the need arise d) engage with China to ease it into its role as future superpower while constraining its behavior to acceptable (ex: Spratley's) e) shift to designing gen 6 fighters and autonomous AA drones and design and field limited but varied 5.5 fighter designs, specialized to their roles and users.

In the 2030-2040s we may or may not have to actively counteract China to contain it. Hopefully not. But investing massively in a plane that will be 30-40 years old at that point - even it that plane worked - is the opposite of hedging our bets and being able to flexibly respond to Chinese challenges. All the while signalling to China that we are willing to bleed our budgets to develop a system that only has one credible opponent justifying it - them - thus fueling any paranoia they may have.

Re: Let's make planes that can't fly......

I am really really puzzled that you don't grasp the complexity difference between a modern fighter and say a Spitfire and can't figure out how incredibly simplistic your statement is.

Lead times _are_ going to be inherently longer now. Every single country is hitting that wall, but not many would not have yanked Lockeed from the public teat by now.

The incredibly stupid wastefulness of the F35 program does not change your bit of punditry from being laughably ill-informed and specious.

BTW, the US pretty much never did field a tank that could beat the Germans ones. They fielded incredibly brave men who swamped the Nazis by numbers w inadequate Shermans and suffered grievous losses doing so.

Re: However, they do appear to want to dominate those countries that they are close to....

>They set up a situation similar to what used to be in Canada with the French language in Quebec.

You so don't know what the f*** you are talking about. Quebec has been, like it or not, in Canada for 250 years. That brings expectations, good and bad, on both sides of the equation.

The USSR exported many ethnic Russians throughout its protectorate states, but these people were injected forcibly into their host countries from the 30s on and the USSR broke up 25 years ago. Treating them fairly is one thing, expecting them to benefit from special privileges granted to longtime resident ethnic groups within a country, like for example Quebecers or Catalans wanting to speak Catalan officially, is quite another.

The "our unhappy ethnic group in country X" card has been done before. You might have heard of it. 1938 or was that 1939?

If, and that's NOT the case now, Russia was behaving in good faith, I'd say give them recognition over Crimea, since that's the reverse problem - Stalin should have never gifted it to Ukraine. Make sure the Tatars get treated fairly in that deal, reach agreements re Russian minorities in other Euro countries - use NATO and EU treaties to bind the countries to these agreements and let each go their way. Have NATO stop well short of expanding into new Russia-adjacent countries too.

But Putin isn't so much into finding reasonable solutions as trying to make himself look good to the people he and his buddies are ripping off.

Re: Any war with Russia probably will be a Nuclear War

>stop missiles with a failure rate of 0.01%. The technology is there, it just needs perfecting.

Hey, I got this bridge for sale. Brilliant business opportunity!

@ MrXavia Re: ah the costs of buying abroad

>building in your own country vs importing.

a.k.a autarky, which has a brilliant track record.

I hate to break it to you, but military hardware is too expensive to develop all in-house these days. We're not just manufacturing ships, rifles, howitzers with 50 year obsolescence cycles. If you add up attack choppers, transport choppers, transport aircrafs, SAMs, AAMs, fighters, tanks, IFVs, you probably end up with about 2 dozen types of weapon systems that each costs a huge amount to develop, require specialized engineering expertise and can easily go irremediably wrong on any given design. That all to produce relatively small unit volumes for each country, thus driving up R&D costs per unit.

Building it all in-country is a daft undertaking, much as your resident military industrial complex would have you believe otherwise. And in the long term, you are not even doing the workers much of a favor, since the plug will be pulled sooner or later.

If you lump in the friendly Western countries, like France, UK, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Itally, etc... you could probably have each specialize in 3-4 weapon systems and cross-buy the others. Develop centers of excellence for certain types of systems. Buy from the US as well, when it makes sense.

Another benefit from not buying all locally is that when your local dudes build a dud, you shop elsewhere. That happens fairly often - it's not uncommon for a weapon system to be unsuitable, so it is important to preserve competition and alternative suppliers, again not something easy to do when you can barely give enough work to your local industry to build one weapon system of each type.

In the case of the F35, no, it doesn't make sense to buy it, at all. For Apaches, yes, it probably does.

Simplistic thinking looks good for jobs for the boys, but it doesn't balance a budget or keep soldiers alive during wars. i.e. you need to export your weapon systems to keep their manufacturing viable and not every country can export all its stuff without importing anything (the USA tries). It's gotta be give and take.

Case in point: Canada's enduring love affair with the Arrow, a plane whose interceptor design was obsoleted about 5-6 years after it would have gone live. Remember the, similar, F106 and F104? no? That's because their mission - intercepting nuke bombers - was superseded by ICBMs. We all love to cry about losing the Arrow, but reality was it wasn't viable.

Re: But...

not to mention that the islands were invaded by the then miltary Junta, whose performance was probably a big factor in them losing power a few years later.

Not a cuddly lot, those.

In fact, I really struggle to see what claim Argentina has, given that the only time their ancestors had anything to do with the islands, it was pre-Bolivar, ie it was Spain doing it.

But when you have a tinpot govt, looking at you, oh Kirchners, what fun external issues are.

p.s. this whole QE + F35 thingy is really starting to look like a Chinese military planner's wet dream, innit? Given thats the only adversary remotely justifying that white elephant. shoehorn your opponents spending in unproductive directions, straight outta Sun Tzu.