Slashdot Mirror

Top Innovations of the Past Years

Actually, that's not true. They've exceeded the ever-increasing yearly quotas for years. The specific category of recruiting for the national guard has had a hard time of it lately because they can no longer say with a straight face that it'll be only one weekend a month and 2 weeks a year, and they usually recruit outgoing regular military folks looking for a reduced commitment. If you like, I can provide lots of links to boring sites with lots of numbers that lay it all out. To start with I offer this, a good synopsis of the specific trouble the ANG is having, and here are the details of FY2004's recruitment goals for the regular army and reserves.

You don't like the rules, don't play the game.

And increasingly people are not playing. The army has a huge problem recruiting, largely because people heard of conditions outlined by your parent. I thought about national guard when I was a bit younger. You know, being a hero you always see in the movie during a natural disaster without having to kill people or live in barraks for extended time. Fucking liers!

Do you really want other federal jobs to lose appeal as well because they do so many invasive background checks in return for meager pay? That said, I don't see a problem with carrying a badge of my employer's choice as long as I am not required to show it off work.

The US military (well, the Army at least, and I assume the rest of the services) does exactly this with its own sites (e.g., Army Knowledge Online and 2XCitizen). Most of the ID cards now are actually smart cards; it being the military they have a new name, too: they're now a "Common Access Card" or CAC.

The US military (well, the Army at least, and I assume the rest of the services) does exactly this with its own sites (e.g., Army Knowledge Online and 2XCitizen). Most of the ID cards now are actually smart cards; it being the military they have a new name, too: they're now a "Common Access Card" or CAC.

Actually, no. The sulfur is naturally occuring. It's just that it costs money to remove it, and as the main usage of diesel is with large vehicles that can handle the sulfur, they don't want to spend the money to remove it.

And the lowering is occuring

The lubrication myth comes because the process that removes the sulfer also removes other compounds that do act as a lubricant. You just have to add something in to replace the natural lubricants.

Actually there is a tremendous difference. When the USA is found to have employed questionable methods such as in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay there is tremendous internal outcry and the departments typically carry out laborious investigations to determine who was responsible.

China, on the other hand, relies on torture every single day, without giving it a second thought. There are no investigations carried out, except maybe into investigating which of its innocent foreign visitors to arrest next.

Anyone looking for a recent, comprehensive evaluation of wind power should look at the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Cape Wind project.

About a year ago, I was talking with a US Army recruiter about enlisting in the US Army. I got as far as MEPS. I passed the ASVAB and the physical, but they denied me enlistment after the security interview, which started out as a 10-page written questionnaire.

I answered "yes" to several questions that they wanted me to answer "no" to, but there were two that especially seemed to require a lot of "further clarification":

1. On the last page, just before a long affirmation about "this knowledge is true to the best of my knowledge and belief...", etc., etc., there was a question about like "Have you ever [...] misused [...] an information-technology resource?" I said "yes", and mentioned something that hadn't made my teachers happy during high school, about nine years before; I later found out that the high-school's disciplinary records have been destroyed from that time. However, if you think about it, downloading an illegal copy of a popular song off KaZaa is a forbidden use of an information-technology resource; I suspect the majority of the kids who did that stuff in Abu Ghraib had been regular KaZaa users...
2. The other thing was that I had visited a professional counsellor or therapist several times, all within a year or two, plus or minus, of the computer-related incident. They decided to totally misread the examining doctor's statement for something that was not in the record, and disqualify me as medically unfit by reason of depression (apparently). Of course, perhaps a college graduate who wants to join the Army is crazy. It may be that anyone who wants to join the Army has a little something wrong with them...

About a year ago, I was talking with a US Army recruiter about enlisting in the US Army. I got as far as MEPS. I passed the ASVAB and the physical, but they denied me enlistment after the security interview, which started out as a 10-page written questionnaire.

I answered "yes" to several questions that they wanted me to answer "no" to, but there were two that especially seemed to require a lot of "further clarification":

1. On the last page, just before a long affirmation about "this knowledge is true to the best of my knowledge and belief...", etc., etc., there was a question about like "Have you ever [...] misused [...] an information-technology resource?" I said "yes", and mentioned something that hadn't made my teachers happy during high school, about nine years before; I later found out that the high-school's disciplinary records have been destroyed from that time. However, if you think about it, downloading an illegal copy of a popular song off KaZaa is a forbidden use of an information-technology resource; I suspect the majority of the kids who did that stuff in Abu Ghraib had been regular KaZaa users...
2. The other thing was that I had visited a professional counsellor or therapist several times, all within a year or two, plus or minus, of the computer-related incident. They decided to totally misread the examining doctor's statement for something that was not in the record, and disqualify me as medically unfit by reason of depression (apparently). Of course, perhaps a college graduate who wants to join the Army is crazy. It may be that anyone who wants to join the Army has a little something wrong with them...

OK, it's pretty damn short article to begin with, but I betcha what's driving these comments from someone like Tenet is the fact that more and more of the government's information, records, processes, yadda yadda yadda is online. It may be "secure" (in a manner of speaking) but it's online. The military (DoD) has been mandated to have everything networked - communications is a good example (look at JTRS to see what I mean). Interoperability and accessibility are the words of the day (well, decade) at DoD. So if all that info, if all those processes, if all that is plopped ontop of a networked infrastructure, where the security of the system relies on the security of 3rd party products (i.e.: OSes, app software, web servers, even hardware, etc.), then those 3rd party vendors better be providing an incredibly secure and robust product. If the DoD builds a big honkin wall between its network and the rest of the world's network, you only need one point of compromise to take down that internal network. A chain's only as strong as it's weakest link, right?

I have to agree. I'm an EMT and member of my county's Search and Rescue team. We go out all the time looking for folks that are either already dead, or who may not be lost at all. Once in awhile we'll rescue someone who's actually lost, needs help, and WANTS to be found. We use the same skills, follow the same procedures, and expose ourselves to the same level of risks on all of those calls. Guess which ones the media slaps the 'heroic' label on?

The bottom line is that heroes make good press. No one wants to hear that everyone participating in a rescue was simply doing their job, following their traning, and not taking unnecessary risks.

Want some REAL heroes? Look here for a few examples.

What do you call this?

Or this?

Or this?

Beyond that, the point is that a president does *have the power* to instate a draft, and it seems worth having a president who understands the full implications of that power.

In any case, I find it strange that you call Bush and Kerry children during Vietnam, but yet our all-volunteer military is mostly composed of persons the same age. If today's 18 year-olds are adult enough to make such a binding decision, wasn't Bush old enough not to make a "childish" decision during Vietnam?

I got another one for you... not everyone who hunts is as economically endowed as the average computer geek. Most of the guys I know who hunt, save massive amounts on their grocery bills. You say "buy it at the store!"... you know what venison (or any other meat) goes for by the pound? You know how many pounds of meat can be had for the price of a bullet and a hunting tag?

Repeat after me: In many (but not all) cases, hunting is an economic affair.

(the bold was mine)

You'd said you had a hard time believing the "many" part, based upon your "on the road" observations, so I just thought I might be able to offer an explanation of why the two might not match.

I guess the sticking point would be what the original poster meant by "many". I'm not sure it implies a majority, but I'd guess it means at least it's not the least likely reason that people hunt.

It's funny, apparently neither the original poster, you, nor I actually hunt and none of us bothered to go and try to find some hunting demographics studies! Gotta love /.

Here's a survey (granted, at the grounds of a US military base, so possibly biased) that would suggest "meat" hunting is behind recreational, but sizable.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service (you think they might know something about this!) does lots of hunting and fishing surveys, there's an index here. There are some interesting things in there, but after plowing through some of it, I doubt it comes out and give any clear answers on this. We can tell that "avid hunters" are most likely rural, and most likely "below median" income, but it'd be a stretch to draw "they hunt for economic reasons" from that. I'd wager that the "casual hunter" category that is split between urban and rural and is more frequently "above median" income is where you see your mega-SUV drivers. Maybe you can wade through the study if you're curious.

Working at the RS/GIS Center at CRREL (a US army engineer research and development lab), I was asked to make a brand new website for the building, since the current one stinks. My boss was set on me using Plone/Zope, which I had mixed feelings about.

Plone is a very nice CMS. It has a special wysywig editor for Internet Explorer and is very user friendly. The default skin (and this, I guess, was the reason for choosing it) looks pretty nice and is pretty elegantly coded. The template system that it uses is really cool and XML-based. It can run on any major OS, but there are some issues in moving a site across systems/OSes.

However, the problem is that you can't just run it straight on Apache, like you could with a PHP/MySQL application. It runs its very own web server. So you have to make an entry in your httpd.conf to make a virtual host that goes to the port that the Zope server is running on (which the system admin doesn't want to do). It's actually gonna be hosted on its own server, just to make sure it doesn't upset any of the dependencies that their mission-critical stuff has. So if I wanted to use it for my own purposes on a shared server, I can't.

One problem for me was that making custom content types required knowledge of Python, which I was able to fake my way through somewhat. This is made much easier with something called Archetypes, a bunch of classes and functions that does stuff for you.

I guess the biggest thing that made me uncomfortable with it was that it uses a custom database format and a custom format for storing all the site's files inside of one actual file. And you can't just move that one file, there's other dependency issues and problems with paths if you move it to a different location or OS.

I was, however, to develop the site much quicker with Plone/Zope than I would with developing my own CMS for that purpose or using an existing PHP one. And the end result is pretty nice. It's going to be very impressive. Once a co-worker finishes adding all the content to it, the new site will be up and tunneled from the location I linked to in this article.

Not only are their legal precedents shaky (to say the least), they didn't even bother to check their facts very well. For one thing, they refer to the "ping" program as "Packet Internet Groper (ping)". This meaning of the program's name is a well-known backronym of the original meaning which the author of ping stated had to do with the similarity to submarines.

Maybe this is a hint as to how much actual investigative work they have put into this spectacle.

That said, some actual information about the Packbot is available. First, from the company website. Near the end of the page, we learn that it runs .

Here is info on the Pacbot EOD, which sounds like the most likely model to carry a shotgun, although no mention is made of that anywhere on the packbot site.

Here is an army.mil article that mentions in passing that " In combat, the PackBot would be equipped with a pump-action shotgun system able to recycle itself and fire remotely," however, it does not state that such a system is currently available on the Packbot. So far, I have been able to neither confirm nor disprove that a shotgun is available now.

I can, however, confirm that the smear piece at newstarget.com contains no substance whatsover, it's just an anti-American rant. If you want information about Packbots you'll have to google it; you'll find none at newstarget.com.

Now for my own opinion piece.

As others have noted before me, there is no difference between a Packbot with a shotgun and a Predator with a Hellfire missile on board. Neither are robots; both are remotely operated vehicles. One operates in the air, the other on the ground.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

Haven't we already covered the packbots and their shotgun plug-ins enough? This is pretty old news.

The Bay Model is still in existance, and still used, if you ever get the chance, go see it!

Here's a summary, and here's the Wikipedia link (grep 'Morocco'). This is much more authoritative though, but longer.

we rely on Pakistan's army

Your leader is such a pathetic, drunk-driving, anti-diplomatic weakling that you have to rely on an army that obviously cares more about sheltering bin Laden than bringing him to justice. You got what you deserved when you voted four years ago.

Look back in January, the Army War College said, "The war against Iraq was not integral to the war on terror, but rather a detour from it." The same is true today.

your link mentions nothing about predator drones

The fact that the Pentagon pulled the fighting force most equipped for hunting down Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan in March 2002 in order to pre-position it for Iraq cannot be denied.

Fifth Group Special Forces were a rare breed in the US military: they spoke Arabic, Pastun and Dari. They had been in Afghanistan for half a year, had developed a network of local sources and alliances, and believed that they were closing in on bin Laden.

Without warning, they were then given the task of tracking down Saddam. "We were going nuts on the ground about that decision," one of them recalls.

"In spite of the fact that it had taken five months to establish trust, suddenly there were two days to hand over to people who spoke no Dari, Pastun or Arabic, and had no rapport."

Along with the redeployment of human assets came a reallocation of sophisticated hardware. The US air force has only two specially-equipped RC135 U spy planes. They had successfully vectored in on al-Qaida leadership radio transmissions and cellphone calls, but they would no longer circle over the mountains of the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

1a
2

I also see they have the college payment cap up to $70K, a $7K bonus for bilingual ("translator aides"), and have the other elistment bonuses up to $8K from $2K back in 2000. My daughter will be paying that off.

You sound just like the Iraqi information minister!

Except that he's telling the truth

Link, please?

http://www.usarec.army.mil/hq/apa/goals.htm

What? You mean everyone doesn't get hits from ARPA?

http://www.dragva.com/awstats/awstats.pl?output=al ldomains

I'd think everyone would have a few hits from them, maybe not? Then again a decent chunk of the traffic is from the local miltary bases, mainly Langley Air Force Base. Go tax dollars!

Some other notables:
* http://www.nao.usace.army.mil/
* http://www.nmci.navy.mil/
* http://www.uar.navy.mil/
* http://enterprise.spawar.navy.mil/
* http://www.uscg.mil/

Hope /. doesn't have Eschelon connected o_O

" Even though they are expensive, in the end they are probably more reliable anyway in the kinds of situations where radio communication is essential."

I disagree. Ham radio operators (myself included) pride themselves in being competent masters of radio technology. We might be called amateurs but you do need to hold a license in order to participate. Amateur radio operators have a network of likeminded individuals who ensure that we are there in the case of emergencies. Preparation is important to us as well as the ability to talk to anyone, anywhere, from anywhere. We need no electricity (generators, solar power, etc) and we need little time to organize.

Ham radio operators assist the red cross and the military with communication. For more information you might want to see:

this as well as this and this.

We are the ones there, first, when shit hits the fan and communications need to be set up.

I contract for a branch of the military and they have a policy NOT to keep emails after a certain period of time.

Why? The Freedom of Information Act. People are always filing them (damn you! Damn your FOIA rights!) and they use that time limit as more of a defense for themselves because in the words of legal, sometimes you don't want this stuff coming up.

Given who they are, you'll understand.

WASHINGTON (Army News Service, Oct. 1, 2004) -- For the fifth year in a row, the U.S. Army Recruiting Command hit its fiscal year active-duty and Reserve recruiting goals.

As of Sept. 27, the command brought in 77,587 active Army recruits against a Department of the Army mission of 77,000, and 21,278 Reserve recruits against a 21,000 requirement.

Yes, the Red Army is certainly composed of some tough hombres but at that point in time the Russians had just fought hard action against the Nazis and were only a shadow of what they became.

Pressure for faster demobilization from an articulate public, the Congress, and the troops themselves upset the plans for an orderly demobilization. The Army, which felt the greatest pressure, responded by easing the eligibility requirement and releasing half its eight million troops by the end of 1945. Early in 1946, when the Army cut down the return of troops from abroad in order to meet its overseas responsibilities, a crescendo of protest greeted the move, including troop demonstrations in the Philippines, China, England, France, Germany, Hawaii, and even California. The public cry diminished only after the Army more than halved its remaining strength during the first six months of 1946.

I did some adminwork when I was in the USMC and there are very strict quality control on all official documentation I am not sure when this quality control was implimented but this memo does not meven come close to meeting that requirement.
look here for what the actual procedures are.

I don't think you'll probably want to go geocaching there. It's in the Dugway Proving Grounds.

Sure. Here is a CNN article on the shortfalls in the 1990s. Here are some articles on recruiting for 2002, 2003 and 2004.

The concerns about recruiting and reenlistment have all been based on opinion polls that predicted that shortfalls would arise. So far there is no sign of those shortfalls actually arising. I guess the polls are not reliable predictors of what people will actually do.

As for the stop-loss orders, this is reasonably informative. The orders only apply to units that are deployed, so they make no difference to the task of meeting yearly recruitment and reenlistment goals.

NG/ANG

Ahead of schedule

CNN agrees

It's in obscure trade journals

Straight from the horse's mouth

The stop-loss orders do not imply a lack of recruitment. Rather, it's a way to retain forces-in-being and their experience, and a way to increase numbers without increasing recruitment. Plugging the drain in the bathtub doesn't mean that the faucet has turned off.

If the military can commit people to things like the Air Force Band, sending people to the olympics, and things like the Golden Knights, then they can commit a crew or two to this project. If one or two helecopter crews are going to make the difference in winning a war then we have an even bigger problem.

Would it be so hard to get one more helecopter and train one more crew over what we already have?

Not all of them. Vandenberg is the launch site for the targets used in testing EKV (uhm, mid-Phase Intercept or whatever they're calling it now). Targets out of Vandenberg, interceptors out of Kwaj.

The Army was planning on developing portable reactors in the 50's. I believed the idea "lost steam" when the had a few incedents. Not quite portable but mobile, the Army had three small test reactors in the 60's. The air force used smaller reactors to power remote radar stations during the early cold war also.

I know when I was in the Marines all I wanted to do was kill innocent civilians. And as I carried my full alice pack on 15+ mile humps I couldn't help but think how much like a video game protecting the freedom for people to be total a$$holes really was. Maybe you can meet some of our servicemen and women at the airport as they come home so you can spit on them and call them babykillers. I've got an even better idea... just go here.

Not only that, but there are a few other details that make this a little different.

First, all of the email will be coming from .mil domains. The military owns the entire domain. Implement a verification procedure, such as a reply-to-sender that "I received your vote. Please reply to this email to let me know that you actually sent it."

Second, the military ID card (the CAC, or Common Access Card) is a Smartcard. (Hopefully, the link works. I'm not positive that it's accesible from a machine outside the .mil enclave, but I'm on base right now and can't check.) Every member of the military should have three certificates that are issued by one of the military's private PKI servers. The three certs are intended for identification (such as logging into computers and web sites), email signing and email encryption.

This doesn't make the scheme foolproof or provide airtight security. But an email that is verfied as coming from a .mil domain, and that is signed and encrypted by two different PKI certs issued by private and extremely well protected PKI servers isn't the gaping security hole that "Just send your vote by email" makes it sound like.

It's like the soldier who's ordered to commit war crimes. What do you do? It's in no way you're (sic.) fault

LTG Peter Cuviello (Army G-6/CIO 2000-2003)

LTG Stephen Boutelle (Army G-6/CIO 2003-present)

These are a new generation of Army commander who have much more in common with today's geek than you would expect. Both are technology-centric men who are interested in the network and the applications we run on it, including games. I've had the opportunity to meet both men and I have to say that the generational issues regarding technology have been overcome with the arrival of men like this in command. Before them, perhaps the Army's senior leadership was brought up in an era before personal computing. That is no longer the case.

FAQ is at http://public.afca.af.mil/LIBRARY/MARS1.HTM . Another article explaining the Air Force MARS is http://www.asc.army.mil/mars/history.htm

If you want winter experience, learn from Finnish, Norwegian or Swedish soldiers.

Ahh, you have never heard of Fort Drum, New York Don't let the average weather chart fool you. The average low temperature in January is -10 C (I was kind enough to do the conversion for you)... but it wasn't uncommon to get several days to several weeks of weather far colder than that. city-data.com pins it at -13 C.

The average snowfall in December is listed as below a meter... but I don't think that's accurate at all. We got several 2-meter snowfalls, and it simply snowed a lot.

We called it the "Land of the Frozen Chosen."

Advantages: You learn to handle extreme cold. It's easy to dig trenches and to camouflage the tent.

"Ground's frozen, Sergeant." "Good. I'll ask for heavy equipment to dig us in."

We had white camo netting for the tents. It was just as annoying to put up as the green/brown stuff we used during summer.

*cough*Marine Doom*cough* ;-)

The trend today is for the DoD not to excercise total control over system development and give the contractor more leeway. See Performance Based Service Acquisition.

http://www.hood-meddac.army.mil/default.asp?page=l asik&vi=n&mnu=0 Military personnel perform their duties in a variety of operational environments that may not be the ideal situations for the wear of eyeglasses or contact lens. For example, head gear, NBC gear, high altitude "G" forces, salt spray, night vision goggles, and sand affect the visual performance of soldiers who wear eyeglasses and contact lenses. This is a readiness issue. For this reason, the Department of Defense has approved the Warfighter Refractive Eye Surgery Program.

Actually, Eisenhower wanted the first US satellite to be the result of a Civilian Space Program, NASA, and not a military program. He ordered the engineers at Redstone not to "accidentally" put anything in orbit during their test flights, which was exactly what they were planning to do when they saw how close the Russians were. While it is true that the Viking platform for Vanguard was a Navy design, it was the "civilian" aspect that the president through the Secretary of Defense, wanted played up. Hense the order from the SecDef in November 1958 ordering the Army to transfer Redstone technology in order to hasten our own space efforts once the Russian had beaten us. On their own, the Redstone scientists could have put the first "American" satellite in space over a year before the Russians. They just were not allowed to do so. You can see some of this chronology here .

I thought we were supposed to invade normandy? http://www.army.mil/cmh-pg/reference/normandy/norm andy.htm