Hi all In reply to a.ashfield's point on Drones being used as weapons. Russia has been using PKT armed (Medium machine gun about the same as an M240) Kamov KA 137 drones since the 1990s.
The US analysts were shocked at the advanced capabilities Russia showed, eg not their best stuff, in the Ukraine. http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2016/09/us-army-racing-catch-russia-battle-drones/131936/ Iran is a prolific user of drones and if you remember captured the USA's most advanced stealth drone several years ago. Hezbolah is known to be field testing drones for Iran in Syria. As to ISIS they already used an explosive armed Mini Drone based on an off the shelf product in Iraq to kill two Kurdish Peshmurga and wound french soldiers. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/10/11/isis-used-an-armed-drone-to-kill-two-kurdish-fighters-and-wound-french-troops-report-says/ NATO special forces in Iraq and Syria now carry an anti drone jammer gun as standard issue. Problem is such devices are easily defeated, by the simple expedient of locking on to the jammer signal and riding it to the source. The US HARM Missile used to take out radar defences is an example. Net guns don't have the range which limits their abilities. Static Nets make you static so you loose mobility. You are then looking at point defence systems like phalanx which can only really work on ships. Or directed energy weapons again without LENR capabilities you are looking at ships to carry the required power system Here is a list publicly known Drone capabilities it doubles every year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unmanned_aerial_vehicles And it is dwarfed by the real ones you will not hear of. I worked on advanced military simulations of drone capabilities a decade back and wrote a report warning then that advanced capabilities in drones would make all current assets from tanks and aircraft to the soldier in field to the General and the Executive branch that control them obsolete. The AI capable drones are the real killer app of drone warfare. The White House report is just preparing the way for the end of the military as it currently exists. Kind Regards walker On 22 October 2016 at 21:02, Jed Rothwell <[email protected]> wrote: > a.ashfield <[email protected]> wrote: > > It could have been written more clearly with half the number of words. >> They seem to think that displaced workers can be retrained for better >> jobs, something that seems increasingly unlikely with current graduates >> dead last in the world in math and science. >> > > U.S. college grads are first in math and science. Perhaps you mean high > school graduates. That statistic is somewhat suspect because a higher > fraction of the population graduates from highschool in the U.S. than from > some other countries. > > The same problem confuses a discussion on the effects of funding on > education. People have noted that New York and Massachusetts spend far more > per capita on primary education than, say, Alabama or North Dakota even > taking into account regional consumer cost differences. New York is the > highest in the world, I think, at $19,818 per child. Yet SAT scores in > North Dakota are higher than New York, 1799 versus 1463. This is taken as > proof that spending money on education does not work. > > That argument falls apart when you look at the fraction of students taking > the SAT test. 76% of kids in New York take the test, lowering the average > score. Only 7% of the kids in Alabama take the SAT, and 2% in North Dakota. > The top 2% of New York kids are far ahead of the 2% of kids in North Dakota > who take the SAT. I believe the top 2% of kids from New York probably have > the highest academic scores in the world. They are ahead of the average > kids in Japan, and equal to the elite in Japan, in my opinion. I base that > on my somewhat subjective experience in elite schools and universities in > New York state and in Japan. > > See: > > https://ballotpedia.org/Public_education_in_New_York > > https://ballotpedia.org/Public_education_in_Alabama > > https://ballotpedia.org/Public_education_in_North_Dakota >
