Have they been upgraded? Yes. Have they replaced those 1970s era engines with subs that have quieter electric drives as planned? Nope.
From the open letter (linked above) by the experts: "The last concentrated investment to modernize the triad came during the Reagan administration."
Even if you believe the subs are in great condition, that doesn't fix the other two fundamentally broken legs of the triad. The B-52 fleet would likely get shot down because they're very slow and non-stealthy. The ICBMs probably don't even work (no public evidence they do), they're in well known static silos, and have just a few minutes of "use or lose" time.
you do realize the ohio replacement class is literally in development right now.
> The ICBMs probably don't even work (no public evidence they do), they're in well known static silos, and have just a few minutes of "use or lose" time.
They fire off a few randomly selected minuteman IIIs every so often and the footage is typically public. maybe not perfect evidence but it is some evidence.
Why don't we have bunk style bed racks for international flights? I'd gladly take a sedative, crawl into my cubby hole and wake up at my destination 6-12 hours later with no recollection of time loss. Of course, some sort of health screening would be necessary to ride Anesthesiologist Airlines.
Safety first might not be a good rule to guide civilization by. It basically means doing nothing is the best path. Maybe safety third would work better?
Releasing a chip like that would be close to useless without also developing a user-friendly hobbyist API like the Raspberry PI and Arduino's already have.
Releasing the chip plus a nice users manual of all of its registers and assembly instructions might pose a security threat for device jail-breaks that they probably aren't interested in either.
Microsemi primarily deals with the aerospace industry and manufactures radiation-tolerant FPGAs; Their latest product line is a series of Flash-based reprogrammable devices (RTG4). Perhaps these alternative memory technologies lend to better data integrity.
I'd rather be exposed to generic advertising in the form of billboards, banners, and commercials, than head towards the dystopian future of The Minority Report in which you're constantly tracked, biometrics measured, and eyeballs scanned in order for advertisers to bombard you with personalized greetings and targeted ads that follow you relentlessly.
It's already too creepy that my smartphone has trained its autocorrect with words I've never texted before but can extrapolate from my digital footprint.
My question: could programmable waveguides be done with MEMS technology? (mechanical features etched in silicon)