Do you believe Iran is attempting to develop nuclear weapons?

[Chunk Yogurt for President!]

No, but they are a convenient scapegoat.

[dead0man]

dead0man should watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y1ya-yF35g

omg i had no idea!


Which part did you want me to pay attention to?  The stupid things various AF people have done related to nukes in the last couple of years? I knew about them long before you did and you'll note they have been punished.  Or the conclusion that we should have fewer nukes?  that I already agreed to in the thread.

There certainly are issues within the system, nobody that knows anything is going to argue against that....but it doesn't follow that we should just dump our arsenal.  We should work on fixing the system, not throwing it in the trash.

(the equipment is old for a couple of reasons, the most important being you can't use modern, off the shelf computer hardware because it's not EMP protected.....like 15% of my job is making sure HEMP/EMP protections are in place and functional.  It would be nice to get everything modernized, but it would cost buckets of money.  And they are only going to show you the most ancient, funny looking stuff.  The modern looking stuff wouldn't make for as good of a "gotchya".)

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Yeah, Oliver is being slightly disingenuous with the clips of floppy discs and old hardware. These sort of old manual clunkers are funny to laugh at, but good in the sense they are less vulnerable to cyberwarfare etc. as dead mentioned above.

@ dead0man

Sorry, I didn't mean to sound like a douche in my response. I still disagree that nukes are particularly useful - beyond the obvious muscular bragging rights - and prefer to maintain contemporary, more flexible military forces. Because of the optics syrrounding nuclear bombs, any usage of them by any power would invite immediate censure by the international community, and the inevitable sh**storm would be highly counterproductive.

Removing nuclear bombs is an ideal that all countries can work towards. Perhaps it is an impossible ideal, but all politics (for me) is essentially working towards an impossible dream by whatever means. At the very least, I see little remaining point in ditching the remaining Minuteman fleet - IMO a particularly pointless relic.

[dead0man]

Aye, we're mostly on the same page.

For fun, I was thinking what is the oldest looking equipment I work on.  We had these until just a couple of years ago

mostly been replaced by

and this

The main switching was done by a DEC Vax until just about a year ago.  70s and 80s tech.  We've recently upgraded to some proprietary Raytheon tech that's still slower than my cell phone, but it gets the job done.  Much MUCH smaller footprint (like 15% of the old one), and running a secure version of Red Hat instead of VMS.  They keep talking about going to VOIP, but the road blocks for that are large.  Security wise, not tech wise.  The tech is there.

Some of our phones (for important people) are more or less state of the art though.

That's a touch screen....for the line buttons, which with expansion units can hold up to 200 line buttons.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Probably, because why the hell wouldn't they?

[Person Man]

Probably, because why the hell wouldn't they?

Because its hard? Seriously. Why do only 10 countries have them?

[dead0man]

Probably, because why the hell wouldn't they?

Because its hard? Seriously. Why do only 10 countries have them?

A lot of countries don't have them because they have good friends that do.