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Actually, THE US MILITARY is working to determine the alignment of the Earth's terrestrial reference frame.

It is just a matter of time before the Dr. Strangeloves at the Pentagon start realigning the Earth to suit their purposes!!!

After Castro assumed power he refused to recognize the treaty that established the base. Castro had not cashed any of the $4,000 checks since the Bay of Pigs Incident in 1961. The Castro government takes every opportunity to declare that the perpetual lease provision of the treaty of 1934 for the base are illegal.
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USAF C-23 Sherpa
USCG HH-65A Dolphin (Dauphin)
Sony
Panasonic Toughbook
Software for the F-35 Strike Fighter (p.17)
Fox NBC Rec Vehicle

Not huge projects, but not inconsequential, either.

https://www.infosec.navy.mil/

I can accept the fact that there is a framework to grant wiggle-room for "unique" situations, however after personally witnessing spills due to proprietary office documents coupled with stupid users I would be hard pressed to ever accept a process that allowed downgrading MS Office documents.

This has been done for years via APRS. http://www.aprs.net/ http://web.usna.navy.mil/~bruninga/aprs.html It would be much nicer if there was a Google Maps interface for this.

After hitching a ride to the pier, I walked up behind friends and family waiting for me while the ship was still tieing up.

My ship, USS America, was towed out to sea last week and will be sunk this week.

The military wont be without Weather data. Indeed they have some very interesting reaserch projects going on.

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/researchproj.htm

I get what i need from here...

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat-bin/display10?SIZE= full&PHOT=yes&AREA=pacific/eastern/pacus&PROD=vapo r&TYPE=sat&NAV=epac_westcoast&ARCHIVE=Latest&CGI=e pac_westcoast.cgi&CURRENT=20020829.2030.goes-10.wv .x.pacus.x.jpg&MOSAIC_SCALE=15

And here...

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat-bin/display10.cgi?S IZE=full&PHOT=yes&AREA=pacific/eastern/monterey_ba y&PROD=vis&TYPE=ssmi&NAV=epac_westcoast&DISPLAY=La test&ARCHIVE=Latest&CGI=epac_westcoast.cgi&MOSAIC_ SCALE=15

The military wont be without Weather data. Indeed they have some very interesting reaserch projects going on.

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/researchproj.htm

I get what i need from here...

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat-bin/display10?SIZE= full&PHOT=yes&AREA=pacific/eastern/pacus&PROD=vapo r&TYPE=sat&NAV=epac_westcoast&ARCHIVE=Latest&CGI=e pac_westcoast.cgi&CURRENT=20020829.2030.goes-10.wv .x.pacus.x.jpg&MOSAIC_SCALE=15

And here...

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat-bin/display10.cgi?S IZE=full&PHOT=yes&AREA=pacific/eastern/monterey_ba y&PROD=vis&TYPE=ssmi&NAV=epac_westcoast&DISPLAY=La test&ARCHIVE=Latest&CGI=epac_westcoast.cgi&MOSAIC_ SCALE=15

The military wont be without Weather data. Indeed they have some very interesting reaserch projects going on.

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/researchproj.htm

I get what i need from here...

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat-bin/display10?SIZE= full&PHOT=yes&AREA=pacific/eastern/pacus&PROD=vapo r&TYPE=sat&NAV=epac_westcoast&ARCHIVE=Latest&CGI=e pac_westcoast.cgi&CURRENT=20020829.2030.goes-10.wv .x.pacus.x.jpg&MOSAIC_SCALE=15

And here...

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat-bin/display10.cgi?S IZE=full&PHOT=yes&AREA=pacific/eastern/monterey_ba y&PROD=vis&TYPE=ssmi&NAV=epac_westcoast&DISPLAY=La test&ARCHIVE=Latest&CGI=epac_westcoast.cgi&MOSAIC_ SCALE=15

I'm not too sure about the "Nuclear Engineer" thing. Most of his career had nothing to do whatsoever with anything nuclear. His background was more mathematics. And his military experience was varied (from here):

1 yr - radar officer and CIC officer
2 yrs - Training and Education Officer
6 months - Communications Officer, Sonar Officer, Electronics Officer, Gunnery Officer and Supply Officer, Approach Officer
10 Months - Engineering Officer for the precommissioning detail for USS K-1 (SSK 1)
11 Months - Executive Officer, Engineering Officer, and Electronics Repair Officer
4 months - Detatched to Atomic Energy Commission to assist "in the design and development of nuclear propulsion plants for naval vessels."
7 months - preparing to become the engineering officer for the nuclear power plant to be placed in USS Seawolf (SSN 575). After his fathers death, he was honorably discharged so that he could take care of the family interests. I'm guessing that means the peanut farm.

The guy was no slouch. And he may be the most honest president we have ever had, but he just really sucked as a president. People made fun of his brother Billy. They criticized his indecision with Iran. They panicked at his handling of inflation. And they laughed at his running from a frigin Rabbit.

People may have disliked him because of his bad luck , bad decisions, and bad timing. But be real, nobody disliked him because he was a "Nuclear Engineer". There is plenty enough wrong with America for you to hate without having to make stuff up.

Some don't, except by the most tenuous "Kevin Bacon" routes. This one didn't, at least not intentionally, when I worked there. The military pioneered a lot of modern medicine, from plastic surgery (to fix disfigured casualties) to pretty much anything related to trauma.

Right now the gain is in the summer where there are more hours of light in the evening. In June, with DST, twighlight is ~9 PM.. so people spend more time outside or with natural light indoors (theoretically at least).

If they extend daylight savings time, it will get dark in March at around 7 instead of 6, and in November at 6 instead of 5. Again, the theory is that people will use less electricity during those times.. I tend to think the gain isn't so great those times, since people don't spend as much time outdoors due to the temperature.. although I guess that's not so much of a factor in the warmer climates.

Although people do seem to spend far less time outdoors now then during the 40s and 50s.. so perhaps daylight savings gains are much less now than in those days.

For reference, I'm using this calculator.

Universal Time. It's been tried before, and tried again, and then even tried more recently in a different fashion from UTC and bizarre marketing fashion: Internet Time from Swatch.

Personally it would make the most sense to use the International date line as the time meridian no matter the "unit" of time you choose, but hey, apparently I'm a raving lunatic. I also don't care if "time X" means anything definite with regards to the position of the sun or whether I'm at work or whether the kids are in school. The sun would likely rise somewhere between "X" and "Y" time and go back and forth depending on season, and schools and businesses could either have set or moving times going with the seasons instead of "following the clock".

I bet a phalanx could target one of these MAVs. They specialize on targeting small, relatively close in stuff like this.

Here is a hi-res map of the eclipse path: http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/eclipse/map105.p df

If fans of Enterprise can scrape up money to try and save a show, surely there is no problem getting a few thousand geeks to "buy" Voyager from NASA.

You may be interested in this then. It's about how the country's youth saved the USS Constitution. Sounds like you're proposing the same thing. Here's a quick summary:

School-aged children from all 50 states contributed their pennies to buy the sails that will be used during the July sail. The "Old Ironsides Pennies Campaign" led the nationwide effort that was coordinated by the USS Constitution Museum, a private, non-profit educational institution dedicated to preserving the heritage of the historic frigate.

Yes, secret trials make me very nervous...

But at least temporarily secret court proceedings are better than no proceedings at all, or
those which are farcical at best, and now (thankfully) ruled illegal.

America creates anti-Americanism by being so un-American.

IF the pilot is stillin control, then he doesn't need to go to Cuba.

Except that if he doesn't, he gets whereever he's going with a bunch of dead people in the passenger compartment. At the very least, dead customers are bad for the airline's business, thus providing a strong incentive for the pilot to comply.

It's a question of control of the situaton versus control of the aircraft. Success of the hijacking attempt is defined by whether they can get the pilot to comply with their demands, not whether they end up at the controls of the plane.

From the DoD's Antiterrorism Personal Protection Guide:

Determining the best response in a hostage situation is a critical judgment call. Passengers need to remain extremely alert and rational to try to understand the intentions of the hijackers. Sitting quietly may be prudent in most circumstances, but it is conceivable the situation may require actions to not allow hijackers to take control of the aircraft. In all situations, it is important for individuals to remain alert to unexpected events, think clearly and act responsibly.

If the system is so broken that I can be tortured to reveal the password, then it stands to reason that it is so broken that they can inflict "something bad" on me without trial, confession, evidence, or not.

A Bug.

The Navy uses alot of open source, check out Protean Forge, the Naval Research Lab's sourceforge server...

Since then, I've discovered that they've been involved in multicasting, network testing suites and a whole bunch of other stuff. They've a site based on the Sourceforge software for developing such projects, called ProteanForge.

So far, so good. They're obviously into Open Source in a big way. Despite the fears of some posters, this has not caused the end of the world. Yet, anyway.

Two drawbacks, though. They may be good coders - and they are! - but they are LOUSY at keeping projects going and even worse at posting news items. The last news posting is dated November 14, 2003. Ok, sure, they might have decided to put their efforts elsewhere. That happens. So why not hand the code over to someone else? The stuff isn't classified, it's Open Source, why not keep the good stuff alive?

Make that three things. They're lousy at letting anyone know they ARE doing Open Source work. I happen to keep a close eye on groups I know are involved in Open Source, but I only found out about the newer projects relatively recently and I'm damn sure that most people don't know about them at all.

(Well, up until this post on Slashdot, anyway.)

True, nothing is "owed", but this isn't about owing. This is about establishing yourself as a credible source, thereby not only increasing the interest of coders who might be of value, but also enhancing the testing of these products, and finally establishing a rapport with a sector of the IT industry that has become wary of Government involvement.

It wasn't so long ago that IBM was the "Evil IT Baron". These days, their relationship has mellowed, their older product lines have a new lease of life, their reputation has recovered and they've even made some impressive strides into the extreme high-performance computing world.

This is where the US Navy could have been, seven or eight years ago. They were already releasing Open Source products then, and may well have been years earlier. Instead, their Open Source products are shrouded in secrecy, even though they're plastered over the Internet and GPLed/BSDed to boot! Instead of learning from their own experiences, they are pulling away.

Yes, I find that annoying. There are some damn good projects out there, that they're letting rot for no reason at all. (Like I said, even if they didn't want to maintain them, they could always hand them to someone else. As IBM did recently, for example.)

It's good that the Navy is now starting to back Open Source R&D, but I will only believe that they understand what that means when I see some real understanding from them over what they already have.

More of the same, not that I've got any problem with that!

For instance, the Navy's Proteanforge is fantastic on so many levels it's not even funny. Besides being one of the few public Sourceforge deployements outside of sf.net, the code there is just wildly interesting, and has been for several years now.

Not to mention the funding the Navy put into Onion Routing Research and it's very popular implementation.

Guantanamo does not fall under US jurisdiction.

You, my friend, have been utterly lied to if you believe that. I don't blame you: there's a lot of people out there who would want you to believe that, but it's just not the truth. Allow me to provide you with some information about the terms of our lease of Guantanamo Bay (from the U.S. Navy's own website: http://www.nsgtmo.navy.mil/gazette/History_98-64/h ischp3.htm)

Over the leased areas of land and water, comprising the Naval reservation, Cuba consented that during the period of occupation, the United States would exercise "complete jurisdiction and control over and within said areas", including the right to acquire for the public purposes of the United States any land or property therein by purchase or by right of eminent domain with full compensation to the owners thereof. On the other hand, the United States recognized "the continuance of the ultimate sovereignty of Cuba over and above the leased areas". "Ultimate", meaning final or eventual, is a key word here. It is interpreted that Cuban sovereignty is interrupted during the period of our occupancy, since we exercise complete jurisdiction and control, but in case occupation were terminated, the area would revert to the ultimate sovereignty of Cuba.

There you have it, from the Horse's mouth: We have complete and total Jurisdiction and Soverignty over Guantanamo Bay until the expiration of our lease.

Perhaps you want to re-phrase or retract your previous statement.

And I call shenanigans on you.

No one recognizes it as US territory. It's a US base on Cuban soil. The land is owned by Cuba, but the treaties established between the US and Cuba early in the 20th century require both the US and Cuba to agree to turning the land back over to Cuba for its use, and until that time, the US pays Cuba $2000 a year for its use. The US isn't about to give up its foothold in the area. Citizenship for births at Gitmo are handled exactly the same way as on any US base located on foreign soil.

Just out of interest, I wonder what would happen if, say, Japan had imprisoned a bunch of innocent US citizens at an offshore location, held them there for several years, and tortured them, without even charging them, let alone any other due process?

Similar to Vietnam?
I don't know why this reminds me of what you said but it seems to fit. No due process, torture, years at time of imprisonment. I guess the only charges that they could be held on were war charges. Or terrorist charges...I guess it all depends on who you ask.
As for Guantanamo, I agree that it's barbaric.

> Everyone knows security through obscurity doesn't
> work.

Tell that to the CodeTalkers.

You want LUNAR. It's especially cool because it uses an underlay network called selnet (ARP forwarding instead of straight-up IP routing). Also, there are a bunch of normal layer 3 ad-hoc multihop protocols designed especially for highly dynamic/mobile nets that you can install for free (I can verify that they work on 2.4 kernels, anyway):

NIST AODV
unik OLSR
US NAVY labs OLSR
CLICK modular router (contains a DSDV and DSR implementation, provides a framwork for rapid prototyping of stack behaviors)

These all might be nice for a smallish office as a way to extend and enhance the probable coverage area of the network without getting more APs.

Now, Bruninga gets a little overboard at times talking about how bad the current APRS system is, but he does live in one of the high use areas. The interesting thing about his proposal outlined in the link is that he recomends setting up a high speed backbone system to relieve the stress on the current mesh network. I think it could be a very useful thing for routine traffic, but in an emergency it could be a little less effective, since the mesh network may not be able to pass traffic without the backbone links in place. He is also recomending a hard limit, enforced by the digipeaters, on how many hops are permitted by a packet. Again, while this is fine for routine traffic that is likely to hit a gateway (internet or HF) in a few hops, under less than ideal conditions it may severely limit the usefulness of the network. And remember that APRS packets can potentially travel over several miles. The few hundred feet an 802.11x signal can travel will require many, many hops and lots of aloha circles. Bring on the QRM!

Also, like an abandoned sailing ship, the Hubble would be claimed as government property.

You forgot another unique thing about the U.S. government: They will bomb any country you want. Just send a request to U.S. Army. They've been looking for some serious action. They would prefer to bomb a developed country, the food is better. It's really a drag going to places like Afghanistan and Iraq and Vietnam and Cambodia and Somalia. Also, requests to bomb a country with deep water ports are especially respected, because the U.S. Navy wants action, too.

I'd have to say that this is correct. You would simply create a wobble in the skew pattern, but the skew pattern could still be detectable over time (say 10 hours) and even adjust for time of day, etc.

I suppose, as someone said, that since heat level in the mobo will affect the skew, that having a programmable fan for the crystal(s) would allow for geek-control of the skew itself. This might even lead to mightily accurate clocks, since the skew itself could then be adjusted, and clocks synchronized with the US Navy (official timekeeper in the US -- See http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/).

A quick google showed a bit about the occupation of Germany here

Note on point 5 it talks about the allies setting up the German 'Basic Law', and German federalism. Because the Allies were worried at that time that Germany might become nazi again, they introduced these free-speech inhibiting laws.

microsoft exploited Kerberos as well, and it's my understanding that if Ted T'so and the other developers had it to do over again, they would have licensed it under the GPL rather than trusting microsoft to play nice (which they still have not.)

He was a programmer. But really it doesn't matter. Everybody who works at MS in any capacity shares in the responsibility for their corporation does. Not 100%, not mostly but some. Even if it's a tiny little bit they have to share some of the blame.

Does everyone who lives in the United States share responsibility for what their nation does?

WIth a name like that, I expect to see pictures of him eating those Cell processors, and describing how they taste.

So Clarice... should I tell you what I do with that nice cell processor server? Hmm?

I calculate their atomic quiver... with java beans, and a nice chianti DB.

You know what the "*" behind the USS CORAL SEA means?

*Note: USS Coral Sea (CV 43) was decommissioned and scrapped 2 July 1993. Other ships' names appearing have been USS Missouri (BB 63) which was decommissioned on 31 March 1992 and USS Nimitz (CVN 68) which is an active ship.

According to the US Navy the USS Coral was scrapped in July 2nd 1993 - and according to this web page you're the victim of a urban legend.

Was that using Standard Positioning Service (SPS) or Precise Positioning Service (PPS)? The SPS is used by both military and civilian. Anyone who can purchase a $100 receiver can use it to detect their location within an accuracy of 100 meters (95 percent) horizontally and 156 meters (95 percent) vertically.

The PPS is used by the military and users authorized by the U.S. P(Y) code. Not anyone can use this one. It provides provides a predictable positioning accuracy of at least 22 meters (95 percent) horizontally and 27.7 meters vertically. Not to mention that most PPS GPS devices are hard to come by. PPS is typically used in military, aviation, and marine usage.
The only way I can figure you got ~1mm accuracy is if you used a ground station as a known point of reference to correct the skew. Either that or your triangulation is wrong ;)
GPS also uses, I believe, up to twelve satellites at a time to improve accuracy. Very rarely do they only use three satellites to obtain its coordinates.

Link

[There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent who thought to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating this in late 1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it -- and that the present curator of their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints was not actually exhibited for years afterwards. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! --ESR]

I,_________,do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

You haven't done squat to protect the rights of US citizens.

I don't see it that way. When I was a Navy corpsman off the coast of Mogadishu, Somalia in 1994 (and participating in civilian medical programs in Kenya), we were protecting hundreds of thousands of people. You've heard the saying that none of us are free until all of us are free? I believe that.

Steinway succeeded in getting one of it's pianos installed aboard an early "boomer," the SSS Thomas A. Edison, in 1961, perhaps the ultimate in product placement. Cold War Sub Piano Part of New Museum Exhibit

Clark Gable was frequently photographed in a Dusenberg he probably never owned.

Try this link instead. It is a javascript+JPEGs in high-res movie, works better than the link submitted in the story.

The US Naval Observatory http://www.usno.navy.mil/pao/QuickCamAstro.shtml/ has information on how to connect inexpensive digital cameras to amateur telescopes and perform some very impressive astrophotography. But the cameras need mods to extend the exposure time beyond their normal range. Being able to control this without a soldering gun would be very handy for amateur astronomers.

...

Oh shit.

We're fucked, right?

No, no, no, a Day is defined outside the International system of units, but is accepted within it as the defined quantity - 86,400 s.

Outside of scientific usage a day may have any number of definitions - rotational period of the earth, sunrise to sunset, etc.

However within scientific usage SI units (or a system compatible with SI) are generally used and a Day will mean exactly 86,400 s unless that definition is modified by the standards committee (which might be done if it gets sufficently different from an astronomical day).

Otherwise you would get annoying things when one person is refering to one measure of a day and someone else is refering to another and neither knows they are using different quantities.

Note a year is not an accepted outside unit to the SI system so feel free to define it however you wish, but please notate what definition or time system you are using in accepted SI units (although defined time systems will generally have these definitions available).

If you want to use UTC year the leap second is added to the year under UTC, or Coordinated Universal Time to make it agree with astronomical time. Other systems of time.

Is it just me, or has GTA clouded the minds of others as well?

It isn't just you...

Don't do it!

While the day may have gotten shorter, the orbital period of the Earth didn't change, so you get the time back over the entire millennium as an extra leap-second.