ReeferMadness

There's an understatement!!

And your butterballs are also slower, heavier and more costly! :P Which is really bad for fighter aircraft.

Good of you to acknowledge what design failures the F-35's are. :lol: Unlike your butterballs, we've found the design flaws before we started to build the product!

Harper overruled his lawyer on the definition of residency. Maybe he insisted on overruling the ship design engineers because the ships looked too "Liberal". :lol: The good news, though, is that the current government is a much bigger believe in openness and transparency than the government that rode into power on those notions!

Derek is trying to set a new record for how many times he can disparage a government before it's actually had a chance to do anything. And no, of course it has nothing to do with his stock portfolio!!

I know that the military standards are to overwrite the data 3 times but I haven't been able to locate any reasonable, credible site that says that data can reasonably be recovered after 1 pass. This site claims the whole practise of overwriting multiple times is based on an urban legend from some research that was done in the 1990s on old technology drives. Same with this site. Apparently, the science behind this is that if a bit is changed from, say a 0 to a 1, the voltage is slightly different than if it was originally a 1. However, unless you know how many times a given bit is overwritten, I'm not sure how you could apply this. Also, the method is apparently far from foolproof and any errors in data recovery would multiply. Assuming this works at all, the process of recovering data would be incredibly time consuming and tedious. And if you have, say, a 1 TB hard drive, unless you were able to correctly restore the disk directory, the process of trying to make sense of the data would be mind-numbing. Unless you are worried about a military hacker, I suggest that worrying about 3 or 7 passes is probably overkill.

There are literally dozens of free secure delete software programs out there. Most of them will let you pick a number of times you want to overwrite your data. You should distinguish between "delete" which doesn't remove any data and "overwrite" which physically overwrites the sectors on the disk with 0's and 1's. Also, some methods of securely deleting data leave your hard drive unusable (eg. degaussing). Food for thought: the problem with using a piece of software for this is you can't really be sure what it's done, if anything. For all you know, it's taken all of your data and sent it off to some hacker. The advantage of physically destroying the drive is you're not relying on some programmer somewhere to have done the job properly.

And use eye protection if you're going to try to physically destroy computer equipment.

Deleting computer files just hides them from the operating system and allows the disk space to be reused. Until it is reused, the data can be recovered. Similarly, reformatting doesn't actually go and remove all of the data. There are lots of utilities out there that will overwrite unused areas of your harddrive with meaningless 1's and 0's. I use CCleaner by Piriform. It's available for download and there is a free version. You can even set it to overwrite multiple times (up to 35). There are people who claim that computer forensics specialists are able to recover data even if it has been overwritten (now we're talking FBI) But if you just want to take a hammer to it, that works too.

The comparisons between Canada and California/France are spurious. France may have strong gun laws but not all of Europe does and borders are practically non-existent. Apparently, Belgium had very liberal gun laws not that long ago. Similarly, if you can buy weapons in, say, Arizona, nothing stops you from taking them to California. Gun laws have to be backed up by some sort of reasonable border patrols in order to be effective. Australia might be a better example.

I think improvements should be made over a period of time with the first focus being connecting up the radar stations. Satellite/high frequency radio seems pretty hokey to me. They're building an all weather road as far north as Tuktoyaktuk. I hope they are laying fibre as they do it. It will cost money but if they are smart and do it over time, it needn't be billions (or at least it will be spread over years). As you said, satellite comms are horribly expensive and the costs could be defrayed over time. Does Alert have an airfield where a Gripen could land? They could base the operator there and run patrols in the high arctic.

Hmmm... It's actually better than I thought it would be. The larger centres already have fibre connections. It seems kind of fragile to have our access to our northern defence radar dependent on satellites, which are vulnerable. I think that they should expand the fibre and microwave access both to the northern radar stations and to communities. It might cost billions to wire the whole north but not just for the radar stations. Oh... and your report mentions UAV's.

Well, it might be worth improving that. In 2015, we ought to be able to communicate with the north without having to rely on satellites.

Probably for the same reason that Harper's conservatives were all in. They valued being a junior partner with the US Military above all else. I note that a number of air forces with lower military budgets and less close ties to the US are buying the Gripen after a competition. And I never said the Gripen was all singing or all dancing. Just that it seemed to be a much less compromised design that is better suited to Canada's conditions.

We must have some way of communicating with the radar stations. Otherwise, they'd be kind of useless.

Oh, you mean like the Rand Corporation? As a defence system, it's a failure. As a mechanism for spreading money, it's a huge success. Lockmart has designed the perfect vehicle to soak up budgets. And they have US heavyweights running around twisting arms for them. The emperor has no clothes.

It's funny you say that. There is a quote from the Rand Corporation that says exactly that about the butterball: can't turn, can't climb, can't run.

Forgive my ignorance but don't we have radar stations up there already? ETA: whatever happened to the DEW line?

Come back when you have some actual evidence. The truth is out there, Mulder.

It's our territory - we can't put stations up there to communicate with our aircraft?

The problem with the whole flawed butterball concept is summed up here. The F-35 tries to be all things to all people and winds up being an enormous white elephant. Most problematic is the fact that the F-35's advantages (electronics and stealth) are likely to be short lived while its enormous disadvantages (compromised air frame and engine configuration) can't be changed. When you factor in the problem that the Chinese have stolen most (all?) of the data on the plane, it's crazy to base the defence of western nations on this already flawed concept. So much money has been sunk into it that nobody in the US in a position of authority has the guts to call it out. But it needs to be addressed. As expensive as it will be to cut everyone's losses (especially for Lockmarts shareholders), that's still the right decision.

I think that it's premature to commit to UCAV's as a sole strategy but they offer so many advantages (more tolerance to G forces, reduced weight, potentially lower cost, no risk to the pilots) that they can't be ignored. Particularly for homeland defense where lag time would be lowest and there would be least opportunity for jamming, we should be looking at them as part of the procurement. So, I think that the ability to fly unmanned missions should be a requirement of the F-18 procurement. As I mentioned before, Saab thinks they can put it in the Gripen. And there would be lots of air space patrol missions where hauling a guy around in the cockpit is really just unneeded weight and risk.

You're all over the map. The story that ISIS oil is going through Turkey (as well as Iraq and Jordan) has been reported in the Guardian (and lots of other western media) well before the Russians leaked it. The same western media that you are now accusing of lying about China. I'm not engaging in this nonsense. Find some evidence to back up your claim about Beijing's air or leave me alone.

Ummmmm.... You seem to be suggesting, without a shred of evidence, that western media are engaged in some vast conspiracy to misrepresent the air quality in China. The Guardian (hardly a right wing publication) reported that Beijing's own mayor called his own city "unlivable". I'm not going to debate unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. Let me know if you have anything substantial to add.

He'll probably have sold his shares before the service life is over, anyway. Apparently, Saab is considering an unmanned version of the Gripen.