kosmic_k

The reason why it was negotiated in secret is because there never would have been a consensus. It's literally a learned best practice of trade diplomacy.

The performance of diesel car's in recent years has been quite literally miraculous. If you knew a little bit about engines you would know that something was a off for there to have been such a dramatic improvement in power, efficiency, and emissions at no apparent cost. Diesel has traditionally not been the most powerful choice so for the power to be comparable was very fishy. Now just about every single diesel manufacture is being investigate from Europe to Japan for cheating. Initial reports are already showing that Mercedes, Toyota, and plenty of other players all have significantly worse emissions and efficiency.

Europe is cracking down on diesel, and they're going to remove tax breaks that cheating manufactures enjoyed. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is talking about ban these vehicles from the city by 2020. This is the end of european diesel cars.

Power, Efficiency, or Emissions. Choose two for diesel. We now know exactly what we got: exhaust spewing out deadly particulates and NO2.

Diesel can run clean, it's just they'll be far more expensive and produce far less power than their gasoline alternatives. The entire european diesel wonder was that engines of similar power were able to offer better milage than those of gasoline. However this has been all due to substantially worse emissions. For VW to bring emissions down to regulation the engines will produce significantly less power and customers will no longer want to use them.

Simply put, this is the death of diesel for automobiles. It's just a dead end technology that has thrived by cheating. Europe was dead wrong in their automotive efficiency priorities and public health has suffered as a result.

No. The air quality of paris for example is notoriously terrible, with many instances of worse air quality than Beijing. For a environmentally conscious and highly regulated nation that is an absolute disaster.

Diesel has been linked to producing more byproducts that are responsible for smog than gasoline. If anything this has all been a long well funded war by european car manufactures to push locally produced diesel vehicles which appear to have better efficiency than gasoline. France was swept by the trend and now is regretting the fact that >60% of their cars are diesel powered.

Simply put this was all a tragedy of choosing wrong metrics. Europe chose CO2 levels as the important metric to try to reduce. By optimizing for CO2 they allowed vehicles that produced 4 times more NO2 and up to 22 times more other fine particulates which are significantly worse for human health. Gasoline or Diesel, we still are damaging our environment. It's just with Diesel we see more of that damage done on ourselves.

Edit:

And just as a final point, the US alone has spent $51 million for "green diesel" VW cars. Now we know.

Ultimately neither are ideal for the environment, it's just diesel by products are worse for humans than gasoline and contribute more to smog.

A-10 cannot penetrate modern armor with it's gun. It had difficulty with T-72 when it was designed and could only kill them from the rear.

The A-10 is an obsolete concept. Weapons are so much more advanced than armor that the best defense is to not get hit. If you want cannon fire supporting you from above then you want an Apache.

War is boring's reporting on the F-35 has biased and is considered among defense reporting to be very un-reputable. "Jack of all trades master of none" is followed by "is better than master of one". It's replacing the F-16 which also was a multirole and did it damn well. The A-10 is just no longer an effective weapon. A turbo propt is better when you're fighting while having complete control of airspace and a F-35 is better when you're fighting in the presence of very advanced air defense systems. The A-10 is old and doesn't fit into modern warfare.

Using capacitive touch sensors the iPhone6s measures the tiny flexing of the front screen as you touch it. Pretty clever actually.

Am I going to be the only one who is going to question the source here? The author has a clear opinion on the F-35 that he interjects inbetween the comments and War is Boring's previous reporting on the F-35 have been mostly trying to take it down a couple of notches. Everything here is based on an unnamed source and a document which may or maynot even exist.

According to Aviation Week, a reputable defense and aviation source, the F-35 has been doing loading tests. Meaning that if this report and dogfight happened then it was against a electronically limited F-35 against a platform that is very mature and limits understood. Here's a link to the story in question: http://m.aviationweek.com/defense/f-35-flies-against-f-16-ba...

So what is someone working with embedded devices for IoT supposed to do? Much of that work is based on ARM C/C++ Compilers.

There's something about these that just feels incredibly human.

Thank you, I knew I had to have overlooked some aspect.

Goodness me, I feel like I let myself down now by not releasing a flash game I made a while back.

I could see an indie game using this to great effect.

We've gotten above 40% before... http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/PVeff%28r...

I'm not sure if its fair to blame contractors completely in this case. The government, their customer, defined requirements for a project. Halfway through the project with ~80% of funds committed they decided that they don't need it anymore.

The US does this all the time.

For example, the Navy LCS program called for a fast ship that could patrol the coastline while traveling as quickly as a speed boat. Lockheed Martin designed the Freedom Class. They made a 378ft, 3,000 ton boat that can travel at speeds of 47 knots, or about 54 MPH. However the Navy was not very happy because they concluded that it wasn't survivable enough and that its armament was lacking. These are all things that should have been well defined at the start of the project. Especially considering that the speed requirement practically begged designers to make certain compromises in order to limit weight.

By the time that original program that justified the need of the facility was canceled NASA had already made a substantial investment of time and money building it. Only time can tell if this facility will help with future engine development or not.

I don't have any expertise in Space & Aeronautics, but I'd love to hear from anyone in the industry what they think about the completion of this facility.

Just an fyi, Pierre Sprey is a bit of a controversial figure. He has argued that the army should abandon the M1 Abrams and go with M48's. Both war's in Iraq should have unequivocally shown that numeric superiority can be defeated by a more technologically advanced foe.

http://pogoarchives.org/labyrinth/09/07.pdf

China has since dramatically intensified their efforts in modernization learning from Iraqi mistakes from Dessert Storm.

What do you think of the F-16?

It's a relic of the cold war that everyone seems to have a completely unrealistic and romanticized view of. Yes it's a heavy slow plane that was designed around a massive gun. But that gun actually isn't very effective against modern armor.

The A-10 could not penetrate the T-62 from the front, let alone the better armored T-72. For a gun kill, it would need to attack from the rear, but that would put it at significant risk to soviet anti air. The solution was to use a Maverick missile against armor.

There are now far more effective planes to lob missiles at armor. All while staying high and away from danger. The A-10 also was not designed with MANPAD's in mind, because they didn't exist then. Even if they do survive, there is down time in having to repair the platform.

In a cold war gone hot scenario, the airforce estimated that they would have lost all of their A-10's within 2 weeks of conflict.

For the CAS mission an Apache would be just as good. 16 Hellfire missiles along with strafing with a 30mm chain gun throws a hell of a punch, all while being slow enough to accompany ground troops.