Update Tuesday. IRS Plot thickens slightly. Never try to rape a hornets nest.

View 774 Wednesday, May 15, 2013

This is Wednesday, and all the Windows computers here need updating. For reasons I do not understand, the Windows 8 machine wants to be told to do the updates including the resetting although it says that it does it automatically. That is, there is a screen that says updates are automatically installed, but if I manually tell it to update I am told there wre 13 critical updates do I want to do them now?, and if I do I get to download them, and after downloading install them, and then I get to tell the machine to restart or it will do it in a week or so without my having to tell it so. Now it may be that I have insufficiently pored over the Help files and other instructions for Windows 8 and my cursory look is insufficiently informed. I no longer spend about half my time mucking about with small computers, so that I do all these silly things so you don’t have to. Still, I have had some experience with these little machines over the years, and you’d think that I could get the automatic updates setting right on Windows 8 – but I don’t.

Now true, the machine is in sleep mode on Tuesday nights, and it’s not my primary machine. My primary machines are two older Windows 7 machines, and on Wednesday Morning when I sit down at my desk they will both be asking me to log in, having done their updates during the night. They’ll want me to log in. When I do that all is well and over, for them, and for me I know to go to Alien Artifact, a Windows 7 system that will have been in deep sleep for days, and get his started on his updates; and then go tend Swan, our very powerful Windows 8 system, and tenderly bring her into update condition, and that’s going to take some personal attention until it’s done. I suppose I should make an effort to find out what’s going on, and perhaps I will; but meanwhile, take this as a reminder to wake up all your sleeping machines and update them.

When Windows does an update, this is a signal to all the hackers to update their software, since there will be new fixes to older hacks, and sometimes fixes to hacks not yet loose in the wild, and that means there are millions of machines vulnerable to those hacks. Hacking is a big business now, and some of the best computer scientists in the world are employed by those interested in penetrating your computer and using it for various nefarious purposes. If you are lucky you might be taken over by a concern that merely uses your system to forward a ton of spam, and if you’re really lucky the proprietor will not only install his control software, but another virus that protects you from other hackers. There are concerns out there that do that. There are even rumored to be some who recognize that a machine has already been hacked, and stop trying to get this one – a sort of professional courtesy. And then there are those who update the scripts they sell to script kiddies who use them to try to start their own companies of zombies they can rent out.

In other words, it’s dangerous out there, and keeping your systems up to date is the first – but not the only – line of defense.

Be safe.

So having gone the rounds of the Chaos Manor computers to get them properly updated, I sat down to the mail, to find this the first mail in my inbasket.

Tried to have sex with a hornet’s nest

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=sv&ie=UTF-8&eotf=1&u=http://nyheternasverige.se/forsokte-ha-sex-med-getingbo-avled/

No matter what I’m exposed to, no matter how many times I think I’ve seen or heard it all, somebody tops it. The big, neon, flashing lighted sign in my head reads "What did you think was going to happen?"

I hope this is some sort of weird joke.

Graves

Have a nice day.

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The IRS scandal develops. The White House insists that no instructions came from there. Here is the official report of the Inspector General.

http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf

I have made only a cursory inspection, and found no surprises.

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We are awaiting the President’s speech on the IRS mess.  The official story is that two lower level IRS employees in Ohio took it upon themselves to delay the applications for tax exempt status of all groups using the word “Patriot” or the phrase “Tea Party” or other libertarian/conservative code words in their title or statement of purpose, while expediting those who claimed to be “progressive” or “responsible.” There was no knowledge of this at higher levels,k and certainly none at the political level.  It was all a matter of low level professionals.

Of course that opens the question of the civil service.  If a nation cannot control its bureaucracies, perhaps a spoils system with naked political appointments would be preferable, because that way at least you get political responsibility: everyone knows who appointed his ward leader as Commissioner of Public Roads, and if you want a road past you house you elect someone who lives near you. That way eventually you get your road, whereas with a bureaucracy you never get a road.   A politically responsible system would be able to remove the bunny inspectors after a few years of ridicule but in fact it has been several years and they are still inspecting stage magician performances to insure that if the magician uses a pet rabbit in the performance he has a Federal License to do so, and no, I am not making that up.  Indeed, if the magician geeks the rabbit – slays it with his teeth and eats it raw – he may be in violation of state or local laws, but the Federal Inspector of the Department of Agriculture has no jurisdiction, whereas if he uses the rabbit in the performance and keeps it as a pet, he must have a Federal License to do so.

The President is speaking now, and he will fix it, and see to is that nothing like this will ever happen again, and it was never anyone in his staff who ordered it, and it’s all going to be all right, and trust him. It was outrageous and inexcusable and it will never happen again, and the acting head of the IRS has resigned, and it is all going to be all right. The perpetrators have been “disciplined” but so far have not been identified nor discipline defined.

So it goes. More breaking news. There is a link between the two people in Cincinnati and the acting director of the IRS (who has resigned). Too much for me to follow.  The President took no questions and left after promising to make everything all better.  And of course he may well be completely sincere. But someone in his campaign staff knew exactly what was going on.  The story is not yet over.

The Tea Party frightened the campaign to reelect the president, and someone took steps to place a primary hamper on the Tea Party after 2010. Who knew what, and when did they know it?  Those who lived through the Watergate investigations will remember all this…

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IRS Scandal expands to EPA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI53kkF-WGM&feature=youtu.be

John David Galt

And now there are stories of leaks from tax returns to political groups.  The old Nixon Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP) never went this far. One wonders what the media will make of all this. The last time, a President resigned.  That isn’t likely here.

And I don’t know about any of this:

[Link formerly here deleted as it does not lead where I thought it did.]

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We have a case in Los Angeles of a guy who was curious about bombs so he built some. He never exploded one, nor threatened to.  He just wanted to see if he could do it.

Having done something of that sort at age 14 – I am sure there is a statute of limitations at work here – I suppose I have a bit of sympathy. Of course I made mine down by the hog pond having turned the hogs out into a previously harvested cornfield, and he was working in a city apartment, so I suppose it’s right that he be charged with endangerment – but if he wants to volunteer for the Army bomb squad I’d let him go do it. Rather see him there than in jail…

 

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I see on tonight‘s news that sexual harassment in the military is now one of the gravest of problems.  It must be “solved.”

Of course a long time ago this was predicted as an inevitable consequence of making military service a “right” and sexually integrating the services.  It was unfair to women to exclude them from any part of the military, and any attempt to segregate the sexes was just wrong.

Of course the purpose of a military is to break things and kill people; to win battles; and the kind of people who do that are not always those we want as our neighbors.  The French long ago created the Foreign Legion for that purpose. They never though of making membership a right, and ringing women into the Legion barracks.

It is certainly the case that women can do many of the functions of military forces.  It is also true that one has to have career paths for the troops at the sharp end.  When the fighting me begin to think it unfair that women are promoted over them through a quota system, that has an effect.  If your goal is to have a sexually integrated service with no segregation of the sexes while also having no sexual harassment you may have set yourself a more difficult task than you think.

It may be easier to win battles than to integrate your armed forces without sexual harassment. History doesn’t show many successful military forces with sexual integration – except of course the present one. Which, we are now told, suffers from an intolerable problem of sexual harassment that must be rooted out of the system.  And of course full sexual integration of the forces requires that mothers be sent overseas at the need of the unit, not making much allowance for the needs f the children – who are future citizens and future warriors.

I know that women can perform many of the military functions, and probably do some of them better than men can. But to try to erase sexual differences while building an invincible military has yet to be done; and the flurry of complaints about sexual harassment suggest that it’s not going as well as we would like it to.  Yes, certainly, it’s a lovely ideal and we have had some movies based on the notion of absolute equality of the sexes in military forces.  We have rather fewer examples of battles and wars won by forces that enforce absolute egalitarianism.

It will be interesting to see what comes next. The Navy has a long experience of men at sea; rather less than men and women at sea; if it’s going to work anywhere it should be in the Navy and perhaps the Air Force.  We’ll see,  But is the goal to win battles or to demonstrate sexual integration?

Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation for the West as it commits suicide.  James Burnham made that observation log ago, and as the Soviet Union collapsed we all forgot it.  Let’s hope that we know how to bring this off and build a thoroughly integrated force that wins battles and can be deployed when and where it is needed.

 

 

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Education conflicts

View 775 Monday, Thursday, May 09, 2013

Today’s LA Times has two education essays. One is “Closing the Education Gap” by Michele Siqeiros. It’s on the editorial page, and it’s a pretty standard exhortation . “The state must develop a comprehensive strategy for public K-12 education, adult education and higher education systems for addressing remedial education.” We have to spend more money, and we have to pick up where the schools have left off or are leaving off, etc. etc.

Apparently they admit that the schools are awful and probably unfixable so we need to set up a second education system for remedial education. That will certainly hire a lot of teachers.  It beats the Mexico system where a bunch of education students in one of the colonies are holding 8 state policemen hostage demanding that they all be employed on graduation.  I hope I am imagining having read that is happening, and even more I hope it was in Mexico and not somewhere in the US. So we need to fix the system with remedial education at all levels.  Apparently we just write off the enormous sums being spent on the present failing system,.

The second essay isn’t supposed to be an essay but a front page story. My edition of the paper has it as “A Milder Way to Fight Defiance” by Teresa Watenade http://articles.latimes.com/2013/may/12/local/la-me-adv-lausd-discipline-20130513 and it appears above the fold on page one.

“Damien Valentine knows painfully well about a national phenomenon that is imperiling the academic achievement of minority students, particularly African Americans like himself: the pervasive and disproportionate use of suspensions from school for mouthing off and other acts of defiance.

The Manual Arts Senior High School sophomore has been suspended several times beginning in seventh grade, when he was sent home for a day and a half for refusing to change his seat because he was talking. He said the suspensions never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind.

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"Getting suspended doesn’t solve anything," Valentine said. "It just ruins the rest of the day and keeps you behind."

But Valentine, who likes chemistry and wants to be a doctor, is determined to change school discipline practices. He has joined a Los Angeles County-wide effort to push a landmark proposal by school board President Monica Garcia that would make L.A. Unified the first school district in California to ban suspensions for willful defiance.”

The rest is about the same. And of course it’s another attack on the notion of schools as places of opportunity to get an education. They’re not that: a school is a place you are entitled to be at, whether you belong there or not, whether you behave yourself or not, whether you are capable of learning or not; and Damien Valentine has as much right to be there, and to talk in class, and defy the teachers, and make it impossible for those around him actually learn something, as anyone else. The fact that Damien’s presence is one reason for the failure of the schools doesn’t seem to impress anyone.

The answer it seems is “restorative justice” in which the teacher spends a lot of time “working with” Damien and those like him. Teachers “exchange letters” with disruptive students, “each taking some blame and pledging to better cooperate.” Of course time spent with Damien and his ilk is taken from the students who just want to learn and who don’t insist on their right to be disruptive, and don’t insist on “restorative justice” if they are disciplined.

So long as the voodoo “education science” insists on transferring educational resources from those who can and want to learn, to Damien and others who are more concerned with their rights than their education, and who render themselves pretty well impervious to actual education, we are never going to have schools in which all but a very few learn to read, write, cipher, learn some civics, and generally have an educational foundation that helps them go out and find jobs or go to college. We need remedial education, not for Damien, but for those that Damien robbed of the chance to get an education in the regular system. 

We must pour more money into the schools so that there can be restorative justice for Damien and others like him; we must no have enforcement of discipline and teacher control of the classroom; and of course it is senseless to question what the results of all this will be. We don’t need to. We can see what the results are.

One result is increased class rigidity. There are those who go to good schools with hard discipline – they are the children of the rich, and a favored few who manage on some sort of charity or scholarship. There are those who live in the parts of town where the students tend not to talk in class and tell the teacher to shut up when they are disciplined, and who manage to get through a public school, so that they can now go to a college where they acquire a lifetime debt. And those whose parents can pay or work the system so that the kids can graduate without those crushing debts.

For a while it looked as if we were working on a system that paid attention to The Bell Curve and did trend toward a meritocracy; but now apparently we are to dismantle all that. The way to be sure that no child is left behind is to make sure that only the rich kids get ahead. The rest are to be subjected to Damien Valentine, who was wronged by the system and must be rendered restorative justice; and the teacher needs to spend time exchanging letters with those who won’t accept classroom discipline, or else must support the union which protects her from that stuff, and whatever the union’s faults it at least doesn’t make her spend her scarce free time in T-groups and sensitivity training, but can just get on with teaching those who want to learn. Given those choices I’d support the union. I don’t want to exchange letters with Damien. But Damien wants to be a doctor, and all those suspensions “never helped him learn to control his behavior but only made him fall further behind”, and he wants to be a doctor, and surely there are patients who deserve him?  So it is time for retributive justice.

The well disciplined kids who want to learn might actually learn something: but they better want it pretty badly, because the teacher is busy apologizing for disciplining the defiant.

Apologies for the rant. I presume that those who are in this crazy movement really believe the voodoo social science garbage they have been fed. Alas, I suspect that some know perfectly well what they are doing. If teachers are evaluated on actual results – how many students can actually do calculus when they graduate high school – then a lot of teachers aren’t going to be given the bright students to work with. But that’s another story for another time. Apologies for the rant. But not many.

If you want your kids to get ahead, learn about the Kahn Academy lectures, and learn more about Art Robinson’s education programs. Make sure they can all read, and by read I mean read anything including nonsense words like montheoretics and polydodmanite by the time they are in second grade. If they can’t read those words they can’t read. And note that they won’t know the meaning. Learning the meanings of words is important, but first you need to be able to READ words you have never seen before. If you want to be sure of it all, start them at age five on Mrs. Pournelle’s Reading Program http://www.readingtlc.com/. But it’s your job: don’t rely on the school system, because the goal of the schools is retributive justice, whatever that is, not teaching the kids anything at all.

I’ll have the California Sixth Grade Reader ready as an eBook shortly. It will help; the notion is to show what all California sixth graders were expected to read in 1914 – and with luck get out 10th graders up to that level. But for your kids, you’d best be able to get them up to that level in 5th grade. Which you can do, you know. Our modern protoplasm isn’t inferior to that of rural Florida or California back in the days of World War One…

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The pledge drive ended reasonably well. For those who don’t know what that is, this place operates on the Public Radio model. It’s free but it needs to be supported if it’s going to stay in business. I run my pledge drives when KUSC the LA Classical Music station runs theirs. I don’t bug you about money much except at those times. The drive is ending, and thanks to those who subscribed or renewed. If you haven’t subscribed yet, this would be a great time to do it; and if you haven’t renewed in a while, it is never too late. And that’s enough about money for a while.

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Mostly notes. Pledge drive continues

View 773 Friday, May 10, 2013

The pledge drive continues, and thanks to all those who have opened new subscriptions or renewed their old ones. This site operates on the Public Radio plan, meaning that it is free to all, but it remains open only as long as it gets enough subscribers to keep it open. If you have not subscribed this would be a good time to do it. And if you haven’t renewed in a while, this would be a great time…

The good news is that I pretty well confine my appeals to pledge week, and I don’t do pledge weeks until KUSC, the LA classical music station, does theirs. And I don’t do advertisements. As I said, the Public Radio model…

There is a bit of a lull in news about the Benghazi affair. It is the duty of the Congress to act as the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and we have the death of our ambassador to explain and policies to prevent this sort of thing to develop.

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Subject: The Benghazi Incident

Jerry, as you can probably guess, I’m not exactly a fan of our current president. However, in this case, I can only find one fault with what he did: in my opinion, at least, he turned the job over to the wrong person. This isn’t a matter of 20/20 hindsight; if I’d been asked at the time who should be in charge, I’d have said the same thing: he should have given the job to the Secretary of the Navy.

I say this for two reasons. First, the Navy was almost certainly going to be doing the job, so you might as well give them control. Second, it’s a long-standing tradition that the President can commit the Navy (and, of course, the Marines) on his own authority, but using the Army requires Congressional approval. In this case, of course, I can’t know how effective any intervention would have been, but I’m sure that something would have been done, and the Marines would have been as eager to land at Benghazi as they were on the shores of Tripoli.

Joe

That’s pretty close to my view. Of course what came after that, with the cover-ups and the talking points, and the rest is a bunch of political nonsense designed to obscure facts, but the simple truth seems to be that the President was in over his head, understood that, and turned it over to people who had convinced him they were smart enough to handle their jobs. I am disappointed in Panetta: he had the authority. Why didn’t he use it? As to handing it to the Navy, we are very much in agreement.

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Bring back the Iwo Jima

Jerry,

LHD 7 is still out there.

http://www.iwo-jima.navy.mil/

She has the 26th MEU embarked now http://www.navy.mil/local/lhd7/

Dan Greif

Actually the present Iwo Jima is a new ship built to replace the old LPH Iwo Jima, which it did well. It is supposed to be in the Mediterranean and had it been anywhere near Syrtis Major could have easily handled the Benghazi situation. It is a great puzzlement that given unrest in the area and the deployment of the US Ambassador from Tripoli over to Benghazi there were no support assets over there. The USS Tripoli, an Iwo Jima class LPH, was my son’s first sea deployment ship back during the Somalia incidents. She and the Iwo Jima have been scrapped.

The new Iwo Jima is Wasp class, and a bit fancier than the LPH Iwo Jima. It is more capable but also more expensive.

My point mostly was that if we are going to act as if we are the great superpower of the world, the original analysis of Cold War days leasing to the assessment of a requirement for a rapid response force that could inject a battalion of Marines anywhere along the shorelines seems relevant, although certainly needs revision from the time I worked on that problem in the 1950’s. If we are going to meddle in Arab affairs we need a force majeure that can react swiftly to get our agents out fast: few terrorist groups or even local militias care to face a full battalion of helicopter-supported Marines, and sending enough force is usually the best way to avoid actual combat.

Think of this as a ramble. I haven’t thought in detail about these matters for a while because I do not have access to operational details, and it’s details that dictate the actual force requirements. On a strategic level, it’s clear that if we are going in meddle in Arab affairs we need a way to get the meddlers out of there at need.

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Changing earth

http://news.yahoo.com/stunning-30-year-timelapse-shows-earth-s-changing-surface-161911528.html

My first thought was, what was the position of the moon each day these were taken.

Was the tide in or out?

A daily overlay might be a better example.

B

Glacial advances and retreats are more a function of rainfall than temperature, and that tends to change in cyclical ways. The rain/drought cycles change across the world. But those are striking pictures, and there’s a good bit to think about.

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Regarding your recent columns, there is a successor planned for Hipparchos, Gaia, scheduled to be launched this October by the ESA. It should be capable of doing parallax measurements to some tens of thousands of light years, and easily refine/confirm/refute current "standard candle" definitions.

-Ed

I wonder about the accuracies at that distance, but it should get astronomy back to observations and data, not theoretical  calculations. In particular we can verify the size of the Andromeda Nebula, and thus its absolute brightness, which will help a lot with detgermining distance to far distant nebulae.

 

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Yesterday was spent with Niven, mostly working. And now I have to pay the bills.

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Bring back the Iwo Jima?

View 773 Thursday, May 09, 2013

Pledge week continues. This journal operates on the Public Radio model – it is free to all, but it will continue only so long as enough people subscribe. If you have not subscribed, this would be a great time to do it. We encourage you to become a patron of this place of rational discussion. It is also a daybook. If you have subscribed but have not renewed in a while, this would be a good time to do that. Since this is a Public Radio model site, I hold periodic pledge drives. I time them according to the pledge drives of KUSC, the Los Angeles good music station. They’re having their Spring drive now which is why you are seeing this. Normally I don’t pound on you with exhortations.

And thanks to all those who have already responded to this Spring pledge drive, both with new subscriptions and renewal of older ones.

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Discussion of the Benghazi Incident in which the American Consulate in Benghazi was left hung out to dry in the face of a major terrorist attack over a period of some ten hours resulted in the deaths of four Americans including the US Ambassador to the newly “liberated” Libya continues without much result. For reasons not yet revealed, the US Ambassador to the United Nations went on national television five times with the story that the Benghazi Incident was a general uprising in reaction to an obscure anti-Prophet video posted on You tube. This supposedly erupted into a spontaneous demonstration which grew into an actual attack by mortars and other heavy weapons. Various US responses including sending in a military reaction team to secure the Benghazi airport and conduct an evacuation of US personnel were contemplated, and at one point a team was ready to depart from Tripoli when it was told to stand down. We do not know who gave the order to stand down – either who was directly responsible for conveying the order, or who originated it. Normally the US military is more clear in defining its chain of command.

The US State Department second in command in Libya (a career Foreign Service Officer who was in Tripoli) was told by the Ambassador on the telephone that the Consulate in Benghazi (and the Ambassador personally) was under armed attack. There was no mention of a video or of any spontaneous demonstration. He has since been demoted from second in command to a desk officer. No explanation of this has been published.

The Congress is the Grand Inquest of the Nation, and it is supposed to determine why extraordinary events happen. Such inquiries can be used as political weapons, but that is not their purpose. One would think that both political parties would be interested in knowing how such a thing could happen and what the US, with the world’s most powerful military establishment, might do for the future. Perhaps a company of airborne troops on ready alert in each major theater? That might be overly expensive. Still we have this greatly powerful military – surely that confers some capabilities? We have carrier groups. We have various air weapons. Has no one given any thought to such matters?

And for the record, the President left the scene at 5 PM with the instruction to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State to “do what you have to do”, which I would have read as a blank check to include anything up to a nuclear weapons response. One can understand that a President with no military experience might turn the matter over to the Department of War (well, we call it defense now). It may be that he simply went back to the domestic quarters of the White House having left the matter in what he thought was good hands with full power to deal with it.

What happened was that nothing happened. No rescue units were sent, no airplanes were sent to buzz the area, no tankers were sent to stand by to refuel any fighters that might be sent; there not only was no single integrated operational plan (although one might think that on the anniversary of 9/11 there might be some reason to have some active forces on ready alert), there don’t seem to have been any plans at all for dealing with major incidents in Northern Africa – an area that is still volatile.

Is that worth discussion? Are operational plans being formed now? Have any units been designated as standby for alert in case of a repeat incident? If so I don’t know of any. It all seems very odd.

In past times here wasn’t a lot of choice. Technology dictated that we would do nothing but react to incidents of this sort although I seem to recall that we had contingency plans on how we could react swiftly – it was the lack of any real operational plan that led to the developments in the early days of the Korean War with the defeat of Task Force Smith and the near disaster when the Pusan Perimeter was threatened. MacArthur and the Marines saved us at Inchon, but with that came a determination that we would be more ready in future. Of course that is a long time ago and few will remember those times.

The Iwo Jima class helicopter carriers with a battalion of Marines aboard were designed to be the ready force available for brush fire wars and general world peace keeping. They came about due to a number of strategic theory papers published in the 1950’s: a way to project a fair amount of force in a reasonable time. They were built and in use in the last part of the 20th Century, and were quite effective. Over time they were sold off and scrapped, supposedly replaced with more effective systems. Perhaps so but has a couple of Iwo Jima class ships been cruising the Mediterranean the Benghazi incident would not have happened. Of course those ships were not cheap and keeping operational level of troops on alert is expensive, but if we have goals requiring the projection of force we need to have forces to project.

Perhaps we need to rethink the need for swift reaction forces for the future with the technologies available to us now. They would be useful for either a Republic or a Competent Empire.

It has been a while since I gave serious thought to these matters; but it is time someone did.

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Subject: space shuttle main computers

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_AP-101

They required a cold plate to keep from burning up. Brute force, the flower of 1970’s tech. 24 layer printed circuit boards etc.

Phil

Even more primitive than I remembered.

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IBM_AP-101

You missed this ( or at least didn’t point it out ) in the link about the space shuttle’s computer.

"The shuttle software was written in HAL/S, a special-purpose high-level language."

Arthur C. Clarke, where are you?

"Open the pod bay doors, HAL."

Pete

Peter Wityk

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