F-22 production termination is premature

[MirariNefas]

AKVs won't be practical until either (a) the onboard computing power edges much closer to that of a human brain, something the AI community has said is "just around the corner" for the last 60 years

They've been saying that? Moore's Law says it's still decades away.

A high-G AKV that's not all that smart, but is carrying a DEW, which keeps on coming until it succeeds, is scarier to me than a "genius" AKV that's trying to outfly me and shoot me down with missiles.

Such a beast would lose versus an armored ground station, every time.

Unless the AKV is stealthed and high altitude. What would the ground station be able to do?

I suppose you could build a tracking system that follows the ion trail from DEW blooming to find and attack the source, but how quickly? Would it have moved before you can respond?

[TallDave]

AKVs won't be practical until either (a) the onboard computing power edges much closer to that of a human brain, something the AI community has said is "just around the corner" for the last 60 years

Heh. In science fiction, maybe. I think Kurzweil estimated about 20 - 30 years before they have our raw computing power, and that was ~5 yrs ago iirc.

Anyways, AKVs can probably outperform humans well before that. They already beat us at chess. What they lack in power they can make up in specialization.

The last AI domino to fall will be Turing. The most complicated interactions are social; they involve a lot of very complex modelling of reality in our mirror neurons.

[TallDave]

"But I believe that God created us and also that He can create an evolutionary process that allows species to change and adapt."
...
I suppose that this was meant to be a quote by Sarah Palin.

Her exact words.

This is not what I remember. I remember more something along the "young earth creationism" opinions

Like I said, people want to believe she's dumb. It's easy to do that with anyone. I could pull up various quotes that make Obama sound like a moron, but it's a stupid game.

Because Bush rubbed Old Europe's faces in their own feckless irrelevance.
...
No, he pissed people off, by starting a war, ignoring the will of the UN.

Heh. You just said the same thing I did, in different words.

We ignored the UN in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Panama, Grenada... they only complained about Iraq because Saddam was massively bribing them. Remember Oil-For-Food?

Feckless, corrupt, impotent, irrelevant.

That war only benefited two countries so far.

By far the Iraqis are the biggest beneficiaries -- GDP has tripled, they have elections, free press, freedom to protest, freedom of speech... they are the closest thing Arabs have to a liberal democracy outside of Israel and Lebanon. And it's created a nightmare for Iran. Already their people are asking why Iraq has cleaner elections and doesn't murder people in the street for questioning the government.

The big threat to the Iranian regime is the Shia quietist movement headquartered in Iraq. The Iranian people are starting to question the legitimacy of the mullahs' rule, asking whether perhaps the clergy should be concerned with only spiritual matters. The Iranians are turning away from Qom and toward Najaf, and that constitutes an existential threat to a regime built on faith.

[djolds1]

A high-G AKV that's not all that smart, but is carrying a DEW, which keeps on coming until it succeeds, is scarier to me than a "genius" AKV that's trying to outfly me and shoot me down with missiles.

Such a beast would lose versus an armored ground station, every time.

Unless the AKV is stealthed and high altitude. What would the ground station be able to do?

An armored DEW equipped ground station with beaucoup power versus a small aircraft with an onboard DEW powered by the propulsion turbines?? The ground station wins versus the aircraft in any line of sight engagement, which DEWs require.

I suppose you could build a tracking system that follows the ion trail from DEW blooming to find and attack the source, but how quickly? Would it have moved before you can respond?

Doesn't matter. You can stack tonnes of earth or refined armor on top of the ground station. The ground station can absorb hits while it seeks the aircraft. Munitions can be rapidly detected and destroyed before impact - already demonstrated with lasers. Meanwhile, rapidly expanding computing capacity is making things like passive radar more and more doable. With that the short era of stealth passes into the mists. A DEW heavy environment is the end of military "airpower" as we know it. For fen who get the reference, it is the Slammerverse, absent FTL.

[kunkmiester]

One way to make a UAV work is to turn it into a missile boat. A larger UAV sits orbiting a waypoint out over the ocean or boonies. It carries a large number of high-speed, long-range missiles. When the air defense net detects a potential threat, and decides to engage, the UAV launches a missile. Due to altitude among other things, the missile has a much longer range than a land based missile, and due to the number carried, can overwhelm a target. The missiles become the actual attack vehicle, you just use a UAV to carry them because you don't have to worry about pilots or anything.

[DeltaV]

Such a beast would lose versus an armored ground station, every time.

Unless the AKV is stealthed and high altitude. What would the ground station be able to do?

An armored DEW equipped ground station with beaucoup power versus a small aircraft with an onboard DEW powered by the propulsion turbines?? The ground station wins versus the aircraft in any line of sight engagement, which DEWs require.

I think the issue MirariNefas raised is detection, not emitted power. Beam power would be far greater for a fixed ground-based weapon and somewhat greater for a mobile ground-based weapon, granted.

I suppose you could build a tracking system that follows the ion trail from DEW blooming to find and attack the source, but how quickly? Would it have moved before you can respond?

Doesn't matter. You can stack tonnes of earth or refined armor on top of the ground station. The ground station can absorb hits while it seeks the aircraft. Munitions can be rapidly detected and destroyed before impact - already demonstrated with lasers. Meanwhile, rapidly expanding computing capacity is making things like passive radar more and more doable. With that the short era of stealth passes into the mists. A DEW heavy environment is the end of military "airpower" as we know it. For fen who get the reference, it is the Slammerverse, absent FTL.

Ground weapon armor does not affect detection of air threats, generally. Bistatic/wideband radar and smart EO/IR can reduce current stealth advantages, but I think there are still opportunities for improving airborne stealth and protection via metamaterials, active plasma sheaths, skin-integrated RF/IR/optical arrays, etc. The trend towards hypersonic attack, currently being researched, would also reduce air vehicle vulnerability and reduce ground target response time. I'm not so sure a ground based DEW would have the advantage.

[DeltaV]

AKVs won't be practical until either (a) the onboard computing power edges much closer to that of a human brain, something the AI community has said is "just around the corner" for the last 60 years

Heh. In science fiction, maybe. I think Kurzweil estimated about 20 - 30 years before they have our raw computing power, and that was ~5 yrs ago iirc.

Anyways, AKVs can probably outperform humans well before that. They already beat us at chess. What they lack in power they can make up in specialization.

The last AI domino to fall will be Turing. The most complicated interactions are social; they involve a lot of very complex modelling of reality in our mirror neurons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... irth_of_AI

"The first generation of AI researchers made these predictions about their work:

1958, H. A. Simon and Allen Newell: "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" and "within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem."[59]
1965, H. A. Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."[60]
1967, Marvin Minsky: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."[61]
1970, Marvin Minsky (in Life Magazine): "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."[62]"

[alexjrgreen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of ... irth_of_AI

"The first generation of AI researchers made these predictions about their work:

1958, H. A. Simon and Allen Newell: "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" and "within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem."[59]
1965, H. A. Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."[60]
1967, Marvin Minsky: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."[61]
1970, Marvin Minsky (in Life Magazine): "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."[62]"

We don't have artificial intelligence yet. If we did, Jaguar at ORNL (the first computer to approach the scale of the human brain) would be taking part in this conversation. Instead we have lots of party tricks - clever programming, but not intelligent.

Real intelligence is already present in a single cell and scales up in larger clusters.

[Skipjack]

By far the Iraqis are the biggest beneficiaries -- GDP has tripled, they have elections, free press, freedom to protest, freedom of speech...

And death arround the corner everywhere. Living under Saddam Hussein was comparably save. Back then you were arrested and maybe put into prison for a while if you said something against Saddam in public. In extreme cases you were maybe killed. Today you just have to go out into public in order to risk being killed.
Not sure whether they think that this is such a big improvement over what they had:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_casualties

they are the closest thing Arabs have to a liberal democracy outside of Israel and Lebanon.

LOL, well I have my own opinion about the so called democracy in these two countries, particularily the Lebanon (look up Brigitte Gabriel).
Lebanon is a terrible place now. It used to be great a long time ago, yeah.

[TallDave]

And death arround the corner everywhere. Living under Saddam Hussein was comparably save.

No it wasn't. The average death rate under Saddam was 7,000 a month. There were 3 major wars, 2 civil wars, several ongoing genocides, and crippling sanctions.

The average casualties now are a couple hundred a month. That's better than a lot of countries that aren't considered especially violent.

http://www.icasualties.org/Iraq/index.aspx

Back then you were arrested and maybe put into prison for a while if you said something against Saddam in public.

And maimed, and tortured, and raped, and maybe forced to watch while your children were raped. There are videos of life under Saddam (because the regime liked to send them to family); one favorite punishment was throwing people off a roof repeatedly until they died. And this was all official policy.

Nothing resembling free elections, free speech, free press, you couldn't buy a car or a cell phone or a computer without gov't permission... it was a Stalinist police state, with no hope for a better, freer future. Maybe it wasn't too bad if you were a Sunni Baathist or one of Saddam's professional rapists, but everyone else was pretty happy to see American tanks rolling into Baghdad. Even at the neight of the post-invasion violence, large majorities of Shia said the invasion was worth it to be rid of Saddam.

LOL, well I have my own opinion about the so called democracy in these two countries, particularily the Lebanon (look up Brigitte Gabriel

Parts of Lebanon are fairly liberal by Arab standards. The Shia portion is an Iranian satellite run by Hizbollah. Their election laws are byzantine but they're freer than Egypt, Syria, SA, Yemen, etc.

Israel's Arab citizens are some of the richest, freest Arabs in the world. Ironic, when you think about it.

[TallDave]

"The first generation of AI researchers made these predictions about their work:

Every field has a few wild optimists. Most people did not think it was right around the corner. The wiki notes that in the 1960s, even people in sc-fi like Clarke didn't think it was going to happen before 2000.

We know a lot more about neurology and chipmaking now. AI comes in pieces: voice recognition here, facial recognition there, speech recognition here, chess-playing there, etc.

If we did, Jaguar at ORNL (the first computer to approach the scale of the human brain) would be taking part in this conversation. Instead we have lots of party tricks - clever programming, but not intelligent.

Even after achieving the raw power and developing the inputs, social intelligence is also a huge programming/data problem (keep in mind, it takes 18 years to produce a reasonably intelligent human). Before we get past Turing, we'll have a generation of extremely autistic AI. But idiot savants can be very useful...

[alexjrgreen]

If we did, Jaguar at ORNL (the first computer to approach the scale of the human brain) would be taking part in this conversation. Instead we have lots of party tricks - clever programming, but not intelligent.

Even after achieving the raw power and developing the inputs, intelligence is also a huge programming problem. Before we get past Turing, we'll have a generation of extremely autistic AI. But idiot savants can be very useful...

You've missed the point. Nothing about Jaguar is intelligent.

It doesn't take size to demonstrate intelligence. Single-celled organisms that respond appropriately to their environment and reproduce are already intelligent.

[Skipjack]

The average death rate under Saddam was 7,000 a month.

Citation please.

That would seem a lot more than their birth rate can support.
Also what I named are just the casualties of the war. The total amount of deaths would be higher otherwise too.
Anyway, I cant quite believe that there were more people killed than during the war, unless you count the Iraq- Iran war and his genocide on the kurds. These were separate events though.
Generally Saddam was better for Iraq than a muslim regime would have been (that would have been there without him).
The US knew this too and this is why he had been tollerated for as long as he was.

Look, the only people that benefit from the Iraq war were:
1. The muslim extremists. They can now get footholds in Iraq and Iran has lost its main opponent giving it all the money and time to do whatever they want.
2. Israel. One of the two nations in the region that could become a military threat is gone. That is also why the Mossad never cared to inform the US about the lack of WMD in Iraq. I am sure the best secret service in the world and also local to this area, knew this very, very well.
To bad for them, that the side effect was a strengthened Iran. But I am sure they will get the US into yet another war to take care of that little problem for them as well.

Parts of Lebanon are fairly liberal by Arab standards.

Yeah, if you are a muslim man you can do whatever you want, very liberal! If you are anything else, you will most likely get killed, or "mamed, tortured or forced to watch your children get raped".
The only thing that Lebanon is a good example of, is what happens if a country does not have a government run military on its own.
Relying on others to defend you is always a bad idea. Again look up Brigitte Gabriel on youtube. Her story is a real eye opener, even if only half of it is true. It is what I see coming for Europe, particularily Austria and Germany too.

[MSimon]

Violence in Islam is not a new thing:

http://powerandcontrol.blogspot.com/200 ... m-inc.html

Wm. Burroughs from 1950. It is short and amusing. If you are amused by that sort of thing.

[MSimon]

Skipjack,

Them durned Israelis benefited in another way. Saddam was no longer subsidizing the suicide bombing of Jews.

Even if you think 7,000 a month is way high. My more likely estimate is 1,000 a month for housekeeping. Let us cut that in 1/2 again. The death rate now is 1/2 that. What do we loose in Chicago? 16 per 100,000 per year.

Equivalent for Iraq would be 4,600 per year. About the going rate. So currently Iraq is probably as violent as Chicago.

Not nice. But no threat to the government.

Here is a report on Iraq 2005 when things were bad:

http://machiasprivateer.blogspot.com/20 ... rates.html

Iraq safer than New Orleans. From the peak of the violence in 2007:

http://www.topix.com/forum/topstories/T9S7J50S1VJ0G2V6F