So, more crew than a cruise missile? Multiple targets like a MIRV, ability to recall, and no (pilot/crew) lives at risk... what's not to like?

to deal with a PRC attack on Taiwan you will wake up in the morning and find a hammer and sickle hanging over taipei, and have to decide if you want to launch an invasion to liberate them from the phillipines or Japan, and if so how in the hell you're going to pull that off with china in control of the whole area at sea.

Unmaned drones are all well and good against enemies who's greatest weapon is a 20 year old shoulder mounted anti aircraft missile you sold them, or a state that has no real interest in putting up a fight, with soldiers who don't want to die for the dipshit in charge. China is none of those things. You will run out of missiles long before china runs out of things worth bombing, and they aren't going to fuck around without electronic warfare capabilities. If they decide to take taiwan by force you're going to be scrambling to source electronic components, because they will control the sea around taiwan, shipping around korea will be treacherous at best, and the same could be said of most of japan and thailand, and it suddenly looks much harder to run a high tech war without reliable access to most of those goods. Possible, but difficult.

not that rail guns are all that much more use. On a good day they're about 100Km range, and you can't get much more than that without assistance (rocket powered) simply because the air has too much of an impact beyond that point (friction, drag, random wind orientation in the intervening space etc.). I suppose if you had a ring around taiwan of rail guns it would give coverage over half the straights with china, but still, going in the other way a good missile will knock a ship out of commission for months at much longer range. Rail guns might be cost effective, but it remains to be seen if the cost savings is worth the tradeoff. It's basically like a new version of a battleship with triple the range, but still against missiles and aircraft carriers with ranges 5x the base, so I'm not sure it gets enough to be a deciding factor.

It's a little less laughable when you consider that the Cylons owned most of the electronics manufacturing business on the twelve colonies.

That's a nice thought, but it doesn't help when your firewall switches to "allow all" once it sees the right magic packet. Which is exactly what happened in the pilot episode.

There sure is. But all it takes is one little "mistake" to turn it from unbreakable into child's play [debian.org].

Imagine a world where one company in, say, China makes more than half of the world's consumer electronics, including parts used for high security applications. In such a world it would be easy to see why people lie awake at night dreaming of Ken Thompson style hacks [bell-labs.com].

A nifty graphic on the federal budget [nytimes.com] While defense is high, healthcare and social security both outstrip it and interest on the national debt is gaining ground rapidly. Not to say we can't reduce defense as well, but it's not the only bogeyman in the budget, and it's not the one with a rapidly increasing share of the budget either.

As for the grandparent's assertion about Iraq, total spending in the total war on terror is estimated (on the high side) at about $4T. The deficit has increased by the same amount since Obama was elected. So is it the sense of /. that Obama is as big a disaster as the Iraq war? If you want to blame Bush, just remember the Democratic majority in congress for two years prior to Obama's election that passed those spending authorizations up to and including all Obama spending. Many of those same people voted to go to war in Iraq.

Now go worship your Obama god having completely ignored any of the accepted facts above.

You need to be careful when using a term with such diverse meanings as "hack." The "hacking" of the PS3 you refer to is some people gaining control over their own machines in their possession. Normally, we refer to this as "using" the machine. The fact that the gaining full control over one's own property is now a challenge and considered remarkable is a sad thing indeed.

Gaining control over a remote machine flying through the air at hundreds of miles an hour thousands of feet in the air is a totally different prospect. The USAF has the ability to employ multiple hardware as well as software security measures. They can communicate with their machines via narrow beams transmitted from satellites. On the software side, cryptographic security can actually work when the secret keys remain secret, something which is impossible to guarantee when the attacker has access to the hardware.

The "optionally manned" bomber sounds like one of those transition craft that appears as a new technology is replacing an old one. A classic example were steamships of the 19th century. Various combinations of paddle wheels, screws, and sails were tried. None of the hybrids were very successful.

In bombers, the classic example is the B-36, with four jet engines and six propeller engines. The B-36 was a stopgap measure until the all-jet bombers were ready, and was quickly replaced by the B-47 and B-52.

Wasn't a lot of war time spending actually kept off the books? Wouldn't it make sense that you'd collect less taxes during a recession?

If you want to blame Obama, remember that Bush had 4 years with a Republican Majority in both houses with which to balance the budget.

Eliminating chinese control and knowledge that close to its own coast isn't feasible. This isn't libya, which is a very sparse country of only about 6 million people, or Iraq, which was softened up for 12 years.