I miss how massive IRC used to be. I've been on the same network since 1996. We're now at around 350 users down from the 6-8k we used to have back then. I've tried other networks and they all seem dead all the time.
A lot of the decline was due to people being driven away, directly or indirectly, by tyrannical ops.
A given channel, or even entire networks, would often start out pretty free. Dissenting discussion and arguments were allowed, if not encouraged. Users could hold and share their own beliefs without fear of repercussion. It was generally a fun experience. The channel or network would see growth.
But as the community became larger and more established, certain users would often end up becoming ops, and they'd start to enforce their own beliefs upon the entire community. People would start getting kicked or banned unnecessarily for very minor "violations", which most often involved just holding a different opinion than an op.
These kicked or banned users wouldn't come back, those users who liked them would have less incentive to return, and eventually there'd be more people getting booted or leaving than there would be new people coming and returning. The channel withers. If this happens with enough channels, the network withers. As networks wither, IRC itself withers.
I always thought major reason for the decline was all the other alternatives coming up back then (msn messenger and the likes) and more recently things that aren't really an alternative but steal time anyway (facebook and the likes) ?
I agree here, my friends weren't affected by ops (we were all ops in our own channels) - they moved to MSN and gave up on IRC. Then MSN was dropped and they moved to facebook/google chat, and now it's almost like IRC was by using group chats in whatsapp, but without meeting any new people.
I've been on Freenode for almost 10 years now (9 years, 48 weeks, 4 days, 18:19:12 ago), it's the only network which doesn't seem to be shrinking, though most of my old friends are gone now.
Ironically much of the damage to Tel Aviv and Haifa was not the direct result of Scud impacts but debris and explosives from Patriot SAMs launched against them.
39 Scuds were fired, 17 were engaged by Patriots and three were confirmed intercepted. I can't find the figure of how many Patriots were actually launched.
The number of Patriots that struck the ground intact after failed launches / failed interceptions remains classified but is greater than four. Most of the rest self-destructed in flight.
The Patriot was so overhyped and yet so bad in practice that Israel went and developed its own missile interceptor system (Iron Dome), because they realized that from the claimed 80+ % success rate, Patriots really intercepted less than 10%.
And yet they still successfully sell this system to many countries.
The Patriot system used in 1991 was an anti-aircraft system that was hacked up to work against missiles. The Patriot system being fielded today is considerably different and much improved.
Iron Dome isn't comparable. Iron Dome is made to shoot down short-range rockets and shells. It makes intercepts against slow moving targets at low altitudes. It would not likely have much success against a mach 5 Scud that would spend only a few seconds within Iron Dome's engagement range before impact.
Iron Dome is vastly superior to Patriot in one key area, namely cost. Shooting down cheap Palestinian rockets and mortars at $2 million/missile for Patriot would not be feasible, but at $30-50,000/missile for Iron Dome is completely doable. I don't know what Patriot's success rate would be against these targets, but given its cost, it doesn't matter if it was 100%, it still wouldn't be workable.
I'm sure you realize that the Patriot system has been upgraded some in the last 24 years.
However, I think one of the brilliant things about Iron Dome is the fact that it doesn't try to shoot everything down. If a missile is determined to not threaten anything, it is allowed to crash on its own.
That may not be as big an optimization against opponents with good aim, but the people who fire rockets at Israel are often using old equipment that they can't aim well.
War has always been a game of each side adapting their offensive/defensive weapons to their opponents' defensive/offensive improvements. I expect that to continue. But that doesn't prevent me from admiring clever optimizations along the way.
IRC, beating the TV networks since at least 1991...