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I first learned Pascal, Fortran, Basic, etc in the mid eighties-early nineties. But my first Software job was at Rockwell Collins programming in JOVIAL, (JOVIAL stands for "Jules Own Version of the International Algorithmic Language."), ne one else ever use that? (besides perhaps my old fellow employees at Rockwell Collins)...I'll be trying out Free Pascal tonite..been awhile...still looking for Free JOVIAL

I can see how parts of this might be interesting in a military application. Run several UAV's in formation with one person controlling them. Use the bluetooth to enable them to triangulate positions and keep from getting too close to one another.

Won't happen. They'd be bombed first. Same as if they got ahead in a space program

1. Of course, you're right, it's simply not possible to take a clear picture of a fast-moving object like, say, a race car, an airplane, or a bullet.

2. When landing, their engines will be throttled back, and therefore much quieter than usual. Also, ever heard of earplugs?

3. First you have to get the terrorists and their rocket launchers TO the beach without being noticed. Might be kind of hard considering it's a popular tourist spot on a small island in the middle of the Caribbean.

Further, NASA was a part of the United States Air Force at the time, not a separate entity with its own (very limited ) budget.

Erm, what?!?

NASA has always been a separate, civilian agency. It grew out of the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), itself a civilian organization.

The Air Force did have its own space program during the late 1950s and early 1960s (around the same time as the creation of NASA), which centered around the X-20 Dyna-Soar and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. The USAF even built an astronaut school at Edwards Air Force Base, and Chuck Yeager was the commandant. However, that whole program lost steam in the mid 1960s and was abandoned by 1969. This led the USAF to send its best remaining astronaut pilots to NASA, and convert the school into a test pilot school.

Even so, many of the most famous astronauts from the Apollo days were not USAF pilots. Neil Armstrong was a civilian (he worked for NACA in the X-15 program), and Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Alan Shepard were US Navy pilots.

The difference between then and now, in terms of budgets is this: First, the entire nation was deathly afraid of the Red Menace and national pride was on the line (nobody wanted go to sleep by the light of a Commie moon); Second, a very charismatic US President had staked his legacy on the US getting to the moon before the end of the 1960s (this at a time when the US had only put one man in space, and briefly, at that) before being assassinated and leaving the entire nation in shock.

Congress voted big dollars to the space program because it helped fight the blasted Commies, and because Lyndon Johnson, among others, helped spread the pork to important states (California, Texas, Missouri, New York, Florida, etc.). It also helped the nation pay its final respects to JFK. By the early 1970s, however, Americans began to question the investment in the space program, regularly saying things such as, "I don't think it makes sense to spend so much money to send people to the moon when we have so many problems here on Earth that we need to deal with first, such as hunger, pollution, disease, poverty, etc."

You made some valid points in the rest of your piece, but your glaring fallacy about NASA's status kind of undermines your credibility, don'tcha think?

Further, NASA was a part of the United States Air Force at the time, not a separate entity with its own (very limited ) budget.

Erm, what?!?

NASA has always been a separate, civilian agency. It grew out of the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), itself a civilian organization.

The Air Force did have its own space program during the late 1950s and early 1960s (around the same time as the creation of NASA), which centered around the X-20 Dyna-Soar and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. The USAF even built an astronaut school at Edwards Air Force Base, and Chuck Yeager was the commandant. However, that whole program lost steam in the mid 1960s and was abandoned by 1969. This led the USAF to send its best remaining astronaut pilots to NASA, and convert the school into a test pilot school.

Even so, many of the most famous astronauts from the Apollo days were not USAF pilots. Neil Armstrong was a civilian (he worked for NACA in the X-15 program), and Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Alan Shepard were US Navy pilots.

The difference between then and now, in terms of budgets is this: First, the entire nation was deathly afraid of the Red Menace and national pride was on the line (nobody wanted go to sleep by the light of a Commie moon); Second, a very charismatic US President had staked his legacy on the US getting to the moon before the end of the 1960s (this at a time when the US had only put one man in space, and briefly, at that) before being assassinated and leaving the entire nation in shock.

Congress voted big dollars to the space program because it helped fight the blasted Commies, and because Lyndon Johnson, among others, helped spread the pork to important states (California, Texas, Missouri, New York, Florida, etc.). It also helped the nation pay its final respects to JFK. By the early 1970s, however, Americans began to question the investment in the space program, regularly saying things such as, "I don't think it makes sense to spend so much money to send people to the moon when we have so many problems here on Earth that we need to deal with first, such as hunger, pollution, disease, poverty, etc."

You made some valid points in the rest of your piece, but your glaring fallacy about NASA's status kind of undermines your credibility, don'tcha think?

Further, NASA was a part of the United States Air Force at the time, not a separate entity with its own (very limited ) budget.

Erm, what?!?

NASA has always been a separate, civilian agency. It grew out of the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), itself a civilian organization.

The Air Force did have its own space program during the late 1950s and early 1960s (around the same time as the creation of NASA), which centered around the X-20 Dyna-Soar and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory. The USAF even built an astronaut school at Edwards Air Force Base, and Chuck Yeager was the commandant. However, that whole program lost steam in the mid 1960s and was abandoned by 1969. This led the USAF to send its best remaining astronaut pilots to NASA, and convert the school into a test pilot school.

Even so, many of the most famous astronauts from the Apollo days were not USAF pilots. Neil Armstrong was a civilian (he worked for NACA in the X-15 program), and Buzz Aldrin, Jim Lovell and Alan Shepard were US Navy pilots.

The difference between then and now, in terms of budgets is this: First, the entire nation was deathly afraid of the Red Menace and national pride was on the line (nobody wanted go to sleep by the light of a Commie moon); Second, a very charismatic US President had staked his legacy on the US getting to the moon before the end of the 1960s (this at a time when the US had only put one man in space, and briefly, at that) before being assassinated and leaving the entire nation in shock.

Congress voted big dollars to the space program because it helped fight the blasted Commies, and because Lyndon Johnson, among others, helped spread the pork to important states (California, Texas, Missouri, New York, Florida, etc.). It also helped the nation pay its final respects to JFK. By the early 1970s, however, Americans began to question the investment in the space program, regularly saying things such as, "I don't think it makes sense to spend so much money to send people to the moon when we have so many problems here on Earth that we need to deal with first, such as hunger, pollution, disease, poverty, etc."

You made some valid points in the rest of your piece, but your glaring fallacy about NASA's status kind of undermines your credibility, don'tcha think?

Yes, I played Quake there once (I had a friend who was in architecture and worked on her senior project there.) It wasn't all that special. Sure it was "neat", but it wan't immersive in the way you'd want. It was tiresome having to jump and changing weapons was either impossible or very very difficult. Also, the orthogonal displays were not very immersive. Now something more like a DART-type, like this:http://www.mesa.afmc.af.mil/html/dmtvs.htm would be much more effective. But that solution relies on a fixed eyepoint, which is fine for a vehicle simulator, but not fine when you're supposed to be on your own two feet. The angled displays only work from one eyepoint. Plus the amount of data you'd need to make the 3-D images and physics-based models, etc. just doesn't make it cost effective. In fact it'd be cost-prohibitive to do any more than what they had at the CAVE for that application. And nobodoy has the sapce or the money for that size of a system in their basement.

Has 2 titans, in addition to many other US missiles.

http://www.wpafb.af.mil/museum/ac/ms.htm

On one project I worked, the AF test pilots were required to fly a certain number of hours a month to maintain proficiency. They'd check out a T-38 from Edwards AFB in California to fly to a program review in Texas - and return the same day.

The most impressive Google Maps sight I've seen so far is The Boneyard, where all the retired air force planes go. This location is at Davis Monthan Air Force Base. It is nicknamed "the boneyard" for obvious reasons and also "the world's largest airforce," as it holds more military airplanes than any nation's standing airforce. It's somewhere around Tucson, Arizona. Apparently there are also guided tours you can take.

The more creative solution would be large number of mass produced, inexpensive, lightly armed robots. Either autonomous or remote-controlled, you'd put so many of them out there that the loss of one or two wouldn't be significant.
I imagine something the size of one of those Roomba automatic vacuum cleaners, armed with one small rocket or missile and a hefty self-destruct charge.

I assume they're there mainly for spare parts?

Yeah and storage.

The official name is the AMARC.

Here's another great Aerial photo

If you're ever in Tucson, the Pima Air and Space museum gives tours of the boneyard.

I assume they're there mainly for spare parts?

Yeah and storage.

The official name is the AMARC.

Here's another great Aerial photo

If you're ever in Tucson, the Pima Air and Space museum gives tours of the boneyard.

For Contract Work: The US Government's policy is horribly broken. "Cost Plus" contracts may have been great in the 50's for jets and stuff, but we're reaching the point with computer systems and software where we're proving that Design Up Front does not work for large projects.

I don't think that the type of contracts the US Government issues is the problem with IT projects. Really, from a contracting standpoint how is developing a brand new, never tested weapon system different than developing a brand new, never tested IT system?

IANACO (I am not a contracting officer) but from what I have learned:
Cost Plus type contracts (of which there are 3 types) are used where Firm Fixed Price contracts would not be applicable.

FAR 16.301-2 Application (of Cost-Reimbursement Contracts) Cost-reimbursement contracts are suitable for use only when uncertainties involved in contract performance do not permit costs to be estimated with sufficient accuracy to use any type of fixed-price contract.

For those of us unfamiliar with the contracting terms, fixed-price contracts say I will pay you X dollars for X goods/services. These types of contracts essentially say I will pay you an amount determined by a formula based which can be based on the cost you incur, the performance of your company and the system, whether you deliver on schedule, etc. Now here are the 3 types:

FAR 16.304 Cost-Plus-Incentive-Fee Contracts
(I'm paraphrasing)
These give the contractor an initially negotiated fee to be adjusted later by a formula based on total allowable costs to total target costs.

FAR 16.305 Cost-Plus-Award-Fee Contracts
(Paraphrasing)
These give the contractor a fee consisting of a base amount fixed at the start and an award amount determined by the Government sufficient to "provide motivation for excellence in contract performance."

FAR 16.306 Cost-Plus-Fixed-Fee Contracts
(Direct Quote)
A cost-plus-fixed-fee contract is a cost-reimbursement contract that provides for payment to the contractor of a negotiated fee that is fixed at the inception of the contract. The fixed fee does not vary with actual cost, but may be adjusted as a result of changes in the work to be performed under the contract. This contract type permits contracting for efforts that might otherwise present too great a risk to contractors, but it provides the contractor only a minimum incentive to control costs.
(Emphasis mine)

These types contracts are actually more beneficial for the contractor than Firm Fixed Price type because they allow for the amount paid to be increased or decreased based on the contractor's performance. There are also incentive contracts, but I leave those as an exercise to the reader.

Couple this with FAR 39.103 Modular Contracting (which was specifically created for IT projects and is required by the Clinger-Cohen Act) which allows each piece of a large IT project to be broken down into a separate module and then contracted for individually, I don't think contracting is the problem here.

I think the problem is the same problem that other large organizations have with IT projects which is that IT projects are just difficult to design, manage, and implement. But if you don't like the contracting types you can always have your company lobby for a better type. It isn't like Congress can't change the playing field.

For Contract Work: The US Government's policy is horribly broken. "Cost Plus" contracts may have been great in the 50's for jets and stuff, but we're reaching the point with computer systems and software where we're proving that Design Up Front does not work for large projects.

I don't think that the type of contracts the US Government issues is the problem with IT projects. Really, from a contracting standpoint how is developing a brand new, never tested weapon system different than developing a brand new, never tested IT system?

IANACO (I am not a contracting officer) but from what I have learned:
Cost Plus type contracts (of which there are 3 types) are used where Firm Fixed Price contracts would not be applicable.

FAR 16.301-2 Application (of Cost-Reimbursement Contracts) Cost-reimbursement contracts are suitable for use only when uncertainties involved in contract performance do not permit costs to be estimated with sufficient accuracy to use any type of fixed-price contract.

For those of us unfamiliar with the contracting terms, fixed-price contracts say I will pay you X dollars for X goods/services. These types of contracts essentially say I will pay you an amount determined by a formula based which can be based on the cost you incur, the performance of your company and the system, whether you deliver on schedule, etc. Now here are the 3 types:

FAR 16.304 Cost-Plus-Incentive-Fee Contracts
(I'm paraphrasing)
These give the contractor an initially negotiated fee to be adjusted later by a formula based on total allowable costs to total target costs.

FAR 16.305 Cost-Plus-Award-Fee Contracts
(Paraphrasing)
These give the contractor a fee consisting of a base amount fixed at the start and an award amount determined by the Government sufficient to "provide motivation for excellence in contract performance."

FAR 16.306 Cost-Plus-Fixed-Fee Contracts
(Direct Quote)
A cost-plus-fixed-fee contract is a cost-reimbursement contract that provides for payment to the contractor of a negotiated fee that is fixed at the inception of the contract. The fixed fee does not vary with actual cost, but may be adjusted as a result of changes in the work to be performed under the contract. This contract type permits contracting for efforts that might otherwise present too great a risk to contractors, but it provides the contractor only a minimum incentive to control costs.
(Emphasis mine)

These types contracts are actually more beneficial for the contractor than Firm Fixed Price type because they allow for the amount paid to be increased or decreased based on the contractor's performance. There are also incentive contracts, but I leave those as an exercise to the reader.

Couple this with FAR 39.103 Modular Contracting (which was specifically created for IT projects and is required by the Clinger-Cohen Act) which allows each piece of a large IT project to be broken down into a separate module and then contracted for individually, I don't think contracting is the problem here.

I think the problem is the same problem that other large organizations have with IT projects which is that IT projects are just difficult to design, manage, and implement. But if you don't like the contracting types you can always have your company lobby for a better type. It isn't like Congress can't change the playing field.

Could it be that this is actually a toy for star wars - or whatever they call the US military's ambition to "strike any target on the planet" - you can read more about this BS (plutonium driven lasers, total US dominance of space, upsetting everyone else - China, Russia, N-Korea..., more junk in space) in the US Air Force Transformation Flight Plan, the document is there . Analysis of the text is at: <http://www.space4peace.org> <http://www.nuclearpolicy.org> < http://www.cdi.org>.

There was a show recently on TUC Radio , the first part of the show can be heard on that page , further down, at: MOST RECENT PROGRAMS: Arming the Heavens.

I think it's safe to say, though, there's probably as much manufactured "science" as there is manufactured "news".

Besides which, once the flight control system version x.y is finished, the development tea doesn't then immediately start working on flight control system version x.y+1 (or worse, versionn x+1.0). It isn't as if NASA finishes a shutttle, and then immediately starts building a new, improved shuttle.

Every flight requires a new version of the primary flight control software and, because of the long lead time to prepare a version, they often have 2 or more in the works at the same time. At one time in 1983 there were 5 versions being worked on simultaniously.

Reliability in the flight control software for the space shuttle comes at a price. Their cost per line of code is $350*. That buys more quality than most commercial vendors can afford.

Eddie Burris

*http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/1998/11/k rasner.asp/

Already been done. Although, they used a light gas gun, not a catapult, and like all such concepts, if you want the G forces to be bearable by a human you need an incredibly long "catapult". Good idea for cargos, bad idea for people.

Take a look at the pictures, BTW - it's pretty sleek looking.

Already been done. Although, they used a light gas gun, not a catapult, and like all such concepts, if you want the G forces to be bearable by a human you need an incredibly long "catapult". Good idea for cargos, bad idea for people.

Take a look at the pictures, BTW - it's pretty sleek looking.

I wonder how big his piss can was?

IIRC, the USAF's U-2S high altitude reconnaissance aircraft piss can held about a quart.

Sometimes, if we were turning a jet for a second sortie the same day, the crew chief would forget to empty the can (thank God I was an avionics specialist!) after the first pilot had made his contribution. The second pilot would discover this oversight when his urine would fill the can and then back up the tube to overflow in his pressure suit, where it sloshed around for the remainder of the flight. . .

There is no facility for disposing of solid waste though. Every now and then a mission would abort because the pilot was suffering from "gastrointestinal distress." In the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron's (IYAABYAS!) ops shack, there is plaque high up on the wall, with a roll of toilet paper attached, commerating all those brave U-2 pilots who joined the exclusive "Stratoshitters Club." One guy's name was on there twice. . .

Yeah, out here in California, it's all skyscrapers. We certainly don't have anywhere he could have landed safely.

The first remotely-controlled non-stop circumnavigation. And the first autonomous non-stop 'round the world trip. Both will happen in my lifetime. I actually think the former is harder than the latter, unless one has Milstar at their disposal.

Another closely related methodology is "Visible Ops" from the Technology Process Institute. Also have a look at their TWiki site which is quite valulable: ITPI TWiki. Tripwire has also been supporting this methodology and has some good information about it on their "IT Best Practices" web site.

One real problem with ITIL is that it primarily focuses on what how to structure organizations and procedures but not on the nuts and bolts on how to actually implement the methodology in a particular situation. The "Visible Ops" methodology listed above tries to address some of these shortcomings with ITIL.

Ultimately, it is not the strict application of a particular methodology itself that is going to solve any such problems. That is really only going to happen when experienced management working with competent staff appropriately apply these techniques to their own organization. Certainly watch out for any pronouncements of a single "Silver Bullet" methodology!

This is probably a better paper on the subject, titled "Offensive Counterspace: Achieving Space Supremacy"; but is even harder to get than a NYTimes article and probably isn't in google's cache.

It's even outlived its successor, the MX "Peacekeeper" from the Reagan era. MX has been retired, but the Minuteman III lives on. They're "remanufactured" every few decades, on a slow upgrade cycle. The basic vehicle lives on.

So the "cheap booster" is quite feasible, if you order a thousand at a time.

You can manage things, but you need to lead people. Any knucklehead can count beans and make sure there are enough desks and computers in the shop. But to get people to work together toward a common goal -- that takes a talent called leadership. Contrary to popular belief, it is most often a learned skill. I spent some time as a leadership instructor in the Marine Corps, and in over a decade of active duty, I met many good and a few great leaders. But I only met one person who was a natural leader. The rest learned the skill.

That said, here are the basics:

1. Always treat your people with honesty and respect. Let them know they don't work *for* you, they work *with* you -- BIG difference.
2. Yes, they're *your* people. Treat them like what they are -- precious assets entrusted to your care. The best thing you can do for them is to keep the day-to-day annoyances off their backs so they can get the job done. When your boss is trying to push something that's going to cause needless trouble for your people, fight tooth and nail for them. If you work hard for them, they'll work hard for you.
3. Don't just be in charge, take charge. If something calls for a decision, go ahead and make it. If it was the wrong decision, you'll figure that out in short order, and you can make adjustments from there. One of the worst people to work for is the one that won't make a decision. Any company that kills a career over one bad decision is a company you don't want to work for anyway.
4. Praise in public, reprimand in private -- ALWAYS.
5. MBWA -- Management By Walking Around. You don't really know what's going on if you spend all your time at your desk. Make the rounds and talk to people -- if they think someone's willing to listen and do something about it, they'll tell you where the problems are.

I would also recommend checking out the Marines' 11 principles and 14 traits of leadership here -- they apply to the office just as much as the battlefield.

Best of luck to you.

At least part of FOIA request costs must be paid for by the requester. It really doesn't cost the agency much.

When they say 160 seconds I wonder if they are talking about Specific Impulse? The definition of specific impulse has never been clear to me, but it has something to do with the amount of thrust you get per amount of fuel burned, and is expressed in seconds. For example, the space shuttle main engines have a specific impulse of about 450 seconds.

"Warfighter" is a term USAF has been using for several years. Since the majority of USAF personnel serve in roles that will likely never be involved in direct combat, the term is used to describe people who do actively fight and kill the enemy. It's meant to remind the support personnel that the USAF's primary job is fighting wars (and if you've ever worked with the Air Force you'll know why they need reminding).

USAF is fond of euphemisms, catchphrases, and slogans, the most infamous of course being the now-defunct Strategic Air Command's "Peace Is Our Profession" motto.

I spent twenty-three years on active duty with USAF. While we often laughed at the sometimes ridiculous language the PHBs and Public Affairs types dreamed up (my favorite - the Air Force Flight Test Center's "Warriors Supporting Warriors" motto, as if the civilian electrical/aerospace/computer engineers working on the F/A-22 Raptor or OV-22 Osprey projects were commuting to work every morning with knives in their teeth), we were never enraged and I don't know why we should have been. The Air Force is as prone (sometimes more so) to management buffoonery as any large corporation. Thinking up new words instead of using perfectly good ones like warrior is a symptom of this buffoonery.

Don't get mad. Rent a copy of Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove and laugh, because laughter is the best weapon of them all.

I seem to remember that Hydrazine or at least one of its relatives, UDMH is really nasty. Contact with the vapour kills you. OTOH, it has a good specific impulse and is hypergolic with certain oxidizers. This means that it has a good bang per kilo and will self ignite on contact with the oxidizer so making it quite popular for use in an RCS (Reaction Control System) for manouvering in space.

High Flight
by John Gillespie Magee, Jr.

N.B. I have it framed and hanging in my bedroom. It seems quite the apt description of what they are attempting.

P.S. John Magee was a pilot in the RCAF, No. 412 squadron, during WWII. He wrote the poem when he was only 19. He died a few months later.

Agreed the Saturn V would be most impressive as an outdoor exhibit.

However, Florida is not an ideal location, especially not the Florida coast. The salt air, combined with high tempatures and humidity, make for a very corrosive environment. The time and effort required to properly maintain a metal structure as large as the Saturn V would quickly exceed the investment KSC made enclosing the rocket in a building where humidity and temperature can be controlled.

You must mean this:
National Museum of the United States Air Force

And this:
The National Museum of the United States Army

And this:
Welcome to the Naval Historical Center

To me a better solution than all this jail time for "criminals" would be to at least try rehabilitation programs first.

That brings up a whole other debate, though. What would these programs be? A friend of mine once suggested to me that we replace prisons with schools so we can educate criminals and turn them into productive members of society. The appeal of simply killing my high school guidance counselor instead of taking out $25,000 in loans was immediate.

Honestly, the best "rehabilitation" program I've ever heard of was forced military service. If a convict's sentence is, say, 10 years... well, that's more than the average contract length for enlisting in the Army. We have a draft (though we don't really need it anymore), why not use its powers to rehabilitate criminals? As an added bonus, any further criminal activity they engage in would then be punishable under the UCMJ, which is MUCH more of a deterrent. Honestly, being a prior-service myself (medical discharge, unfortunately), I can tell you that the military is a hell of a career. The pay isn't as good as the private jobs of course, but the benefits are unmatched. Instead of just being removed from society, they'd be serving it. And when their "sentence" is up, they'd have the option of staying in or taking their new valuable skills elsewhere.

Ah. Linkage is nice. According to this site, What was done in 1919 was the invention of the non-ripcord or freefall personal parachute. Not a plane level chute. Before that, skeptics thought that freefall would render a man unconcious.

Too stupid to deal with? More like a different world view. Sure, I search google, it's my homepage. But just screaming "USE GOOGLE" doesn't help. Remember, my worldview is different, the keywords I select will be different. The sites I pull up will be too.

Next time you say something factually incorrect, I'm going to demonstrate.
I'll hold you to the same standard.

nuclear bombs dropped on ICANN headquarters always work too!

I'd say the conversation went like this:
Europe: Why should we let you turn off our system?
USA: Because otherwise we'll use one of these if we have to.
Europe: Okay, we'll turn it off if you say so.
USA:Thanks.

Here's more information if you're interested: http://www.jovial.hill.af.mil/

I ended up spending some time reviewing it and figuring out how the functions worked, but it was frustrating.

The amazing thing is how well Moore's law has stood up against repeated Malthusian forecasts of its demise. One still presumes that the fences of quantum uncertainty, relativistic delay, and heat production will prevent Moore's law from continuing number of device doubling indefinitely, without major paradigm shift (async to beat the clock?reversible to beat heat & entropy? optical? quantum?), but mere technological advances may continue far beyond my Malthusian imagination.

================
Cole's Law -- Finely Sliced Cabbage with dressing.

Tomorrow's Promise. The aerospace force, with the right organization, training, and equipment, could deliver precisely calibrated effects, from taking a picture to dropping a precision munition, anywhere on earth, in less than an hour from the "go" order, with surprise and immunity to most defenses. Larger-scale deployments would be lighter, faster, and more effective, and the need to station forces in foreign theaters would be greatly reduced.

You're kidding, right?

The DoD has been having many cutbacks

Since the Cold War's end, DoD has borne about 80 percent of all government cutbacks, which, after four rounds of base closures, have resulted in the loss of approximately 355,000 civilian and 743,000 military jobs since the early 1990s.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find an area with bigger cuts.

Also, with these cuts, it's essential that if they want to stay competitive globally, they need to spend their remainingn dollar efficiently - and today, that means outsourcing overseas. Various Indian consulting companies are indeed getting the security certifications to do much of this work.

Well if you capitalize it ADA instead of Ada, then yes, they might get the wrong idea. But ... the programmers I feel for are jovial programmers.

I'm a USAF active-duty programmer as well.

The Global Hawk has the ability to fly nearly half way around the world WITHOUT a pilot. So this guy's claim to fame will be that he did it solo? It seems to me that with the right equipment, he could spend to whole flight taking pictures out the window or sleeping. Won't this claim will be rather pointless given the current state of technology?

I have had the opportunity to work on some of the AF's critical applications. They all run on Sunfires running Solaris. Windows is for the desktop, unix is for the servers. The only exceptions I've seen are the Exchange servers and the domain controllers. The whole reason for going with MS for the desktops, as explained to me, is that the cost of supporting and training the unwashed masses how to use *nix shifts the TCO so far that windows turns out cheeper. Also, the AF can bulk buy PCs at rock bottom prices with windows preloaded, which turns out to be cheeper than getting custom machines with linux. Here is a link to where the AF is going on the server end: http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/crosstalk/2003/08/0308 acton.html

USAF Version

As a smartcar owner, I am interested in how safe my car really is (I read that it was safer than many small cars before I bought it). According to my calculations, if the safety cell remains more or less intact during impact a person should be able to survive a head-on crash for speeds up to 70 mph. The human body has been tested up to 48G on a living subject. The formula for calculating G force in a crash is G's=.0333X(M.P.H. X M.P.H.) / Distance in feet.
So if the speed was 70 mph and stopping distance 3 feet we get 54G which is survivable, hopefully.

A way to stop drug users, supply deals with Coke and Speed mixed with Anthrax http://www.usafe.af.mil/direct/sg/anthrax/Pictures /anthrx22.jpg/.... And watch to see who develops sours and boils. ----- "Clutch my testes, bloody squirrel humpers!!" -Happy Noodle Boy

You're right. But. If you have low-res video, which gradually and slowly moves around (as in, say, a handheld shot of almost any sort), you should be able to retrieve more information than any one frame has by combining many images which overlap and are offset from one another by sub-pixel amounts. A bit of Googling reveals that substantial work [PDF] has already been done in this area.