woodman

I assume you're talking about the safety beams that prevent the door from closing on obstacles. Have you ever had the door go down on command and then halt, without any obstacle in the way? They're very noisy sensors - lots of false positives, not the sort of thing you want to wire up a massive bomb. They also actively emit light, so not very stealthy.

The first time I saw the results of an IED blast was a day after I arrived in Iraq. I had to shake a tree in order to retrieve the trousers of the guy who blew himself up planting the thing. That happened a lot. Making IEDs isn't very hard, but making a lot of them without eventually blowing yourself up is.

I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but I'd doubt anyone who said they were. The first thing that comes to mind is that the alt-right is nationalistic and has no problem with some form of collectivism. The far-right, on the other hand, is much closer to the min part of minarchism.

The alt-left, if it is presently a thing, is even less defined than the alt-right. But in the interest of maintaining symmetry, I'd say that it would have a progressive agenda by way of individualist means. Emergence?

> It's not a good way of accurately gauging the political spectrum but I'm not sure I'd say it doesn't work at all.

As it fails in such a modest charge, I'm comfortable saying that it doesn't work. The only variable that it would come close to measuring is individual freedom vs collective comfort. A multidimensional representation would do a better job, but it would quickly become so complex that it would be useless - as most people hold contradictory ideas.

That is why far-right does not accurately describe alt-right, think of it as a second dimension on the traditional spectrum.

> You wouldn't call the Republicans "right" if they started handing out generous welfare packages to the masses.

Like their pre-Obama universal healthcare proposals? The one dimensional political spectrum, with n-right vs n-left, doesn't work at all.

The role of the elected is to carry out the will of the governed except in cases where it is the will of a tyrannical majority. I think that has been demonstrated to not work, unless your measure of success is counted by generations and not years.

I don't agree with you on the media-portrayal point, because I think your premise is way off. There is no unified conservative perspective in the way that there is with progressives. This last election has made it very clear that the old conservative guard, the ones most similar to progressives, who called for universal healthcare before Obama, are in a minority position.

I'm not likely to be the one you want to discuss this with though, as I'm an anarchist.

> ... that media needs to be under strict control ...

Is that really an alt-right position? I lost interest in politics a long time ago, but the last time I heard that sentiment was from the left - calling for the Fairness Doctrine to be brought back.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairness_Doctrine

> ... in game theory when the other side always defects.

Consider the conservative position, and what strategy would work for conserving what is important to them. Any sort of compromise is a long term losing strategy, so of course they'll block progressive moves if they're capable. I'm not aware of any real trade ever being offered, something like: we want full on no joke equality of outcome for every flavor of the rainbow, and in exchange we'll give you the abolition of federal income tax.

Imagine if someone demanded you eat a sandwich made of human waste, and then they got upset when you refused to compromise and only eat half of it.

I only saw that a couple of times, in one case we caught the guy - he still had the 9v in his pocket (why he'd keep it I don't know). If you watch their videos you see that they prefer to be much further back than what is practical with a wire commanded detonation. There were rumors of laser commanded detonators, but I doubt it happened enough to warrant any sort of countermeasures.

I've never heard of a fuel-air bomb used for demining... APOBS is used a lot, and no matter how clever the mine is - it can't ignore a chain of explosives going off on top of it.

Nope, insurgents found a way around that a long time ago when convoys started including jammers. Hybrid detonation systems: radio arm the device outside of jamming range, mechanical switch detonated the IED once the vehicle triggers it.

If the cliff materialized between the time the path was plotted and uploaded to the missile prior to launch, then no. The missile has an internal map, the radar measurements are like mile markers on the highway - used to find your position on the map, not used to tell you what is ahead (that is what the map is for).

> Where were the tanks? The airplanes? The warships?

I don't know about the tanks, but the airplanes and warships were all over the place - they just weren't property of the German military. Germany was building subs in the Netherlands, and aircraft in Russia - they got around the treaty by offshoring production and selling to other nations, allowing them to refine their designs and build their industry. They did a similar thing with the officer corps - they just changed their titles, but continued perfecting and growing their training program. Conscription is pretty much the last thing to happen, if you want to watch for trouble - watch the officer training program. All that was going on in the 1920s btw.

All this might sound like Monday morning quarterbacking, but the pattern is repeated throughout history. Watch Turkey. If they rebuild their officer corps before their economy totally collapses, they'll try to annex northern Syria and northern Iraq. They've started developing domestic production of weapon systems, dropped very strong hints that they aren't interested in remaining a NATO partner, and they have a madman as chief executive - enthusiastically put their by nationalists.

> Will the barriers and walls be left in place or dismantled?

I was looking at satellite images of the area my FOB was at in Fallujah - no sign of our presence. We had double stacked hesco all over the place, as well as Texas and Jersey barriers on the road.

> Is it easier to take down or move concrete vs Hesco?

Easier to take down hesco (boltcutter and a knife), impossible to move. Concrete is easy to move with common construction equipment, I'm sure the people of Fallujah found a new use for the barriers pretty quickly.

In 1931 Germany's rearmament was public knowledge, and oddly enough the Soviets were well aware - because they were the ones training German airforce pilots. That plus the withdrawal from the League of Nations was a pretty big hint. Now I can agree with the argument that the Soviets didn't know that Germany was going to target them, but by 1933 it was clear that Germany was going to cause some major problems in Europe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_re-armament

> ... threat of being no longer the dominant power...

That is pretty obvious, with the silly resumption of strategically useless bomber flights nearly 10 years ago.

> Germany went from "no threat" to ...

You might have a better grasp of the history than me, but it was my impression that by 1933 everybody was keenly aware of how dangerous Germany was getting - with the book burning and Nazi parading. Hopefully Russia has learned not to trust treaty partners that behave so. That is a pretty long lead time, and the only country that I can think of right now that exhibits similar behavior is Turkey. So unless Russia is concerned about a Neo-Ottoman empire invasion, they really don't have an excuse.

> Active radar increases your detectability.

An active radar pointed at the ground, so you'd need a pretty extensive detection network. Also, I don't think stealth is much of a concern once the cruise missiles are over the target's territory. BTW, TERCOM doesn't need to be continuously radiating when in use, it only needs to get a fix frequently enough to keep INS within acceptable accuracy bounds.

> That isn't how radio signals work.

It is when you're talking about trying to interfere with a weapons grade radio, by transmitting to the sidelobe instead of mainlobe.

> ... go back to MAD with a credible deterrent and credible defence. Whether it is technically feasible or not is one thing...

It isn't credible if it isn't technically feasible, it is just a waste of money and it looks foolish. While I can understand how Russia would be upset about NATO neutering its nuclear arsenal with anti ballistic missile systems, I have a hard time believing that intelligent people actually think NATO wants to invade Russia. It is just frustration over a censor bar being placed over the dick waving.

> A system like this ... could theoretically work.

Sorry, but no. You know how modern ones skim along terrain? Terrain maps. If you are using terrain maps to navigate, then you don't need GPS - so this system has no hopes of working against low altitude cruise missiles. Also, the cruise missiles would need to be flying lower than the cell towers - which would only be a problem if the directional antenna was sensitive to 180 degrees. Beamforming tech is so common now that it has found its way into wifi routers.

The terrain following guidance in cruise missiles had an accuracy of a few meters in the early 80s. The only place that tech doesn't work is over the ocean... where there aren't any Russian cell towers.

http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a110286.pdf

This has to be propaganda designed for domestic consumption, because there is no way this would be effective. You know how cell towers are on the ground, and missiles are in the air? Yeah, sky facing directional antennas in the hundreds of cruise missiles would defeat a 250,000 tower project. I'd be surprised if the functionality wasn't already built into the weapon systems - the handheld GPS unit I was issued in 2006 had the ability to detect jamming and selectively ignore the direction of the source.

Good to know. Although it does raise the question of how a line is drawn. I'm imagining a "I smoked pot when I was your age but..." sort of conversation - just infinitely more uncomfortable for everyone involved.

All those animals were domesticated for very different reasons. I've spent a lot of time with horses, my family had three, and they're great animals - but they don't come anywhere close to dogs when it comes to trust and the ability to read people. I've seen dogs trained with nothing more than praise - the desire to please is that strong for them. That doesn't work for horses.

> There's no rational reason not to use dogs for meat...

Yes there is, unless you would make the same argument for having sex with relatives - which philosophers have rationalized against for thousands of years (way before the genetic consequences were understood). Morality is a rationalization. Dogs are genetically predisposed to be man's best friend - friends don't get eaten.

Diamonds don't even come close, there is no positive moral argument - just a fairly recent PR campaign.

> So, kind of like Ayn Rand, which had a known history of blind following entourage?

Without any sort of quantification, that is a very hollow argument. All systems of ideas, and originators of such systems, have a history of "blind following".

Saying that Objectivists are less critical of their own and competing ideas strikes me as pretty laughable, especially when compared to the more popular ideas - like Marxism. Maybe Ayn just doesn't look as good on a T-shirt as Che...

Pretty sure Schrodinger's cat dies regardless of what I think or perceive...

No, it isn't - it is basic network administration, and it does nothing to advance the state of the art. That is a bad faith interpretation, especially when considered in the context of offensive development. You're putting license maintenance in the same category as TCSEC, which broadens "hardening" to the point of losing all meaning - hell, throw in the cost of electricity to power the firewalls.

Nothing would make me happier than to be able to take your word for it, but I think your definition of "hardening" might be incredibly broad. DoD funding Ada development, SELinux, rainbow series, cyber grand challenge - hardening. DoD buying firewalls and maintaining Oracle licenses isn't hardening.

Satellites and undersea cable taps fall to the NRO and the USN, though I'm sure the NSA pays for some of it. That is beside the point though, the issue is exploit to hardening ratio - not exploit to everything-else ratio.

I'd really love to know how you know this. I can think of a handful of very public DARPA, NIST, USN and NSA programs that are dedicated to hardening (most are little more than academic curiosities, measured in millions) - whereas the NSA's black budget (measured in billions) easily dwarfs those. Are you saying that the NSA is secretly spending large sums of money on hardening software outside of their black cube?

I don't disagree on the lack of private hardening spending, which is really beside the point, because obviously there is very little incentive for a company when all they have to do is budget for useless CYA lifelock service.

Thankfully those who shutdown biological weapons development in the DoD didn't follow the same logic. Purely from a strategic perspective: defense costs much more than offense, it doesn't make sense for a superpower to spend more on offense than defense when their potential adversaries can't afford to defend themselves against low cost attacks.