With error bars/lines on that plot, this discussion wouldn't have been needed. There are nice ways of doing error contours - showing the 1% quantile lines on top and on the bottom.
1,029 karma · joined June 29, 2010
Anyway, people don't change overnight. Once you train people they can find pirated content for free, they'll continue doing this - and it's very hard to compete with a torrent search site.
The bigger concern is 1) restaurants on the border going out of business 2) the unequal benefits derived from those using Wi-Fi more than others (ordinary eaters and email users will be subsidizing movie downloaders)
Given the number of remains, it appears to be trivial. If it wasn't they'd clean them up not just blow them up.
They'd blow it up in a hostile country such as Serbia where the remains of F-117 were transported to China afterward and the present Chinese stealth technology is a result of reverse engineering of those remains. F-117 was 20 years old in 1999 - and if this helicopter was so new and so secret that nobody has seen it before, they'd go pick it up as Pakistan is a "friendly" state.
It's just a standard transport helicopter (like MH-60 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_UH-60_Black_Hawk) modified for special forces to have less of a radar cross-section. For example, they put rotor screws under a plate.
It's not so important for a helicopter to be stealth - if the pilot has NVG, it can fly during the day right over the trees, and few radars can pick it up, unless it accidentally flies over (in the radius of about 8km) of a mobile surface-to-air missile launcher. And they know where these are: JSTARS tells them where the sources of radiation are, and they set their path around those. They also avoided all towns where someone would detect them based on noise and make a phone call, or, god forbid, tweet.