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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

I for one live in Connecticut, and i know that we are a target for terrorists. For we have major plants for kaman areospace http://www.kamanaero.com/ , Pratt & Whitney http://www.pratt-whitney.com/, Sikorsky http://www.sikorsky.com/, a Navel base in New London http://www.subasenlon.navy.mil/, a nuclear sub http://www.allsands.com/History/Places/grotonconne ctic_tz_gn.htm, and finally, the company that makes all your viraga http://www.pfizer.com/

You mean kerberos?

> I am part of the University of central Florida Amateur Radio Club...

Perhaps you could tell us what you know about Diego Garcia? The military have put up a BS report saying all is well due to a freak geological anomaly that protected the island and there was only a tidal surge of 6ft anyway.

But DG is on average only 4ft above sea level.....so by my calculations they were on average covered in 2ft of water (assuming the BS report bares any resemblance to the truth), which doesn't quite equate with things being "alright".

There was a bit of inconclusive chat on rec.radio.shortwave

If you can't reply to this, I'd understand :)

Me? I'll just sit and wait for the black helicopters to turn up....but somebody has to bear the bad news to the American people that their most important military asset (bar their carrier group - where was that?) in the Indian Ocean has been wiped out.

After all, they have to pay for it to be repaired (or abandoned?). Do the right thing, abandon it and give it back to the Diego Garcians rather than using it to bomb foreigners from. The story of how the Diego Garcians were treated is shameful. (Somebody else can link to that).

In Silicon Valley, thousands of geeks drive by the airship hangers at Moffett Field every day. They're so large, clouds sometimes form in them. But the beaches of Santa Cruz are a few miles away, so I guess there'll be no indoor resort in Sunnyvale.

Both, really. Some basic equations of angular momentum conservation are all you need to measure what you'd expect this effect to amount to. As for measurement, it is possible to measure both the Earth's rotation and the distance to the moon to an extremely precise degree (these measurements agree with what you'd expect from theory rather well). In the United States, the US Naval Observatory maintains a precise measurement of the Earth's rotation. This regular slow-down of the Earth's rotation is what is mostly responsible for the need for leap seconds.

We already do. The first one was in 1972.

Well lets see. We're talking about the time it takes for "the planet to spin", which we currently clock as about 1 day for the same equatorial point to make one complete rotation about the axis of the earth. Due to a change in the earth's angular velocity, it now takes 3x10e-6 seconds less time to make one rotation. The best explanation I have seen for this is that a piece of the earth's crust has broken away and slipped more towards the center of the earth; like the ice skater pulling in her arms, the rotational speed increases.

Lucky for us, the US Navy is already on the job tracking the tilt of the earth & speeds of rotation. What's also interesting is that the rotational speed is not constant, and has been slowing for almost a century...

compacted the Earth enough to speed up the planet's rotation by 3 microseconds

As someone who is forced to deal w/ the Naval Research Lab on a weekly basis, trust me: these geniuses are completely and totally incapable of anything malicious.

Some people get angry when they find out what their government is up to. If you knew what the Naval Research Lab was up to, you'd break down and cry.

This is your tax dollars at work.

http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/4637 0
http://dodpki.c3pki.chamb.disa.mil/rootca.html

There's your DOD root CA info. As some other people have already posted, the DOD runs its own PKI and it's not automatically included in any browsers. More recently they're issuing contractors certs on a Verisign-rooted CA rather than the full DOD one. If you want to automatically install all the DOD certs use this: https://infosec.navy.mil/InstallRoot2_9.zip
Unfortunately that doesn't do anything for people not using IE on windows. You can export the certs from Windows in PKCS7 format and then decode the p7 file using openssl to break it up into individual certs you can import into mozilla/firefox/etc.

Seems like a great system, but I just cant understand this statement: "Currently, Tor development is supported by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Tor was initially designed and developed as part of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory's Onion Routing program with support from ONR and DARPA."

*Puts on tinfoil-hat* isn't the guys at *.mil making their jobs harder by doing this? anonymous "terrorists" communicating freely without any traces, or do they already have this covered in the system? a honeypot?

Is this an implementation of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (manet)? An IETF working group has been around for a while. If I remember correctly, original motivation of the group was to create dynamic routing technology for the battle field communication.

And that's why although this may make a good press release, any professional astronomer (or even amateur) knows why we have the calendar we do

..you want to reorganise the entire western hemispheres calendering system because the new one is easier to code?

I'm not pointing at this new idea in particular, but I would certainly like an easier calendar to understand. Or are you telling me that you understand all the rules regarding leap years and even leap seconds?

What I would like to see, though, is the 28 hour day. It splits weeks into six days, with a full third devoted to the weekend. You still work the same amount, because going into work for four longer days instead of five shorter ones means that there's less travelling time.

I think this idea is even less likely to get off the ground than the new calendar though :(.

optical system can take over, similar to what the U.S. Tomahawks do

And a tomahawk costs over half a mil

I bet that a good way to get the attention of the secret service would be to shine a laser on the whitehouse.

As far as the optical system goes, one could probably get away with a webcam in conjunction with a Mini-ITX motherboard and some really sophisticated pattern-matching software, along with a decent amount of flash RAM

Would those components be able to take the stress of a missile? If it's based on UAV/model airplane technology, maybe, but it'd be iffy for rocket or jet propulsion. Also, even those components would be tough to fit on something small enough to bypass the radar.

I'd see a mortar attack sooner.

I can understand shutting it down or turning back on the "built in inaccuracy" or whatever if they SUSPECT a terrorist attack is about to happen and they know they are using GPS. But the way this is worded, that in the event OF a terrorist attack GPS would be shut down, seems to me that we would be WITHOUT GPS in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack!

This is incredibly shortsighted, let me give you a good example: In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Charley, cellphones, telephones and existing radio systems were down in the areas hardest hit, but amateur radio operators swarmed the area and deployed new antennas and crank up towers and tons of radios for the first responders. In addition to that they deployed this amazing technology called APRS for the salvation army and others that allowed the participating groups to track in realtime the location of all of their vehicles.

Now, if your not familiar with APRS, it starts with a low powered radio, a GPS unit, and a device that hooks up to the GPS and the radio that transmits the GPS coordinates in digital format on the radio. Then, ideally, a central radio tower can hear these signals and develop a picture of where all the signals are based off of their GPS coordinates. Whats even more insane is that APRS has grown so much that satellites and even the international space station repeat and broadcast APRS signals!

So if GPS were shut down first responders would lose a valuable emergency coordination resource. Not to mention the fact that some police/fire already have similar systems in place, though generally such systems are wiped out in disasters, hence the amateur radio operators who are at the ready to redeploy communications gear.

Read more:
More on APRS
APRS on the ISS
Amateur Radio Emergency Communication

I can understand shutting it down or turning back on the "built in inaccuracy" or whatever if they SUSPECT a terrorist attack is about to happen and they know they are using GPS. But the way this is worded, that in the event OF a terrorist attack GPS would be shut down, seems to me that we would be WITHOUT GPS in the immediate aftermath of a terrorist attack!

This is incredibly shortsighted, let me give you a good example: In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Charley, cellphones, telephones and existing radio systems were down in the areas hardest hit, but amateur radio operators swarmed the area and deployed new antennas and crank up towers and tons of radios for the first responders. In addition to that they deployed this amazing technology called APRS for the salvation army and others that allowed the participating groups to track in realtime the location of all of their vehicles.

Now, if your not familiar with APRS, it starts with a low powered radio, a GPS unit, and a device that hooks up to the GPS and the radio that transmits the GPS coordinates in digital format on the radio. Then, ideally, a central radio tower can hear these signals and develop a picture of where all the signals are based off of their GPS coordinates. Whats even more insane is that APRS has grown so much that satellites and even the international space station repeat and broadcast APRS signals!

So if GPS were shut down first responders would lose a valuable emergency coordination resource. Not to mention the fact that some police/fire already have similar systems in place, though generally such systems are wiped out in disasters, hence the amateur radio operators who are at the ready to redeploy communications gear.

Read more:
More on APRS
APRS on the ISS
Amateur Radio Emergency Communication

One thing a lot of people seem to have missed (it helps to RTFA) is that the Naval Undersea Warfare Center is kicking in dollars for this project. What do you suppose they're monitoring down there?

I have been 'keeping up' on Virtual Reality, and I see it as a very close thing... Especially after reading the Tom Clancy: Net Force books (great books BTW).

What really gets me, is that a google for virtual reality turns up this as the first result. (it's neat, but seems kinda unrelated)

The problem with putting a telescope (or any other facility, for that matter) at L2, or any of the other Lagrange points, is that their location puts them out of the orbits reachable by the Shuttle for repair purposes. All maintenance would have to be done robotically, and considering the delta-V to return any robotic craft to LEO, it's likely that the service robots would be single-use only.

For those not space-science oriented, the Lagrange points (L1 through L5) are points in space around any two orbiting bodies where their gravity exactly (or nearly so) cancels out; as a result, other objects can be left in stable position at those points. It's even possible to put an object in orbit around a Lagrange point, even though there be no mass there. These are referred to halo orbits. SOHO, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory is in such an orbit around L1, the postion directly between the Earth and Moon. More information is available online (the last link is a PDF, sorry).

The Yorktown is the fifth vessel to bear the name and has been in service for twenty years. She has had a lively career and an excellent reputation, in which a testbed Smart Ship failure in 1997 would rank as a demerit only on Slashdot. CG 48 Yorktown

It would seem that success in a combat environment is not beyond Windows.

One of the deployment pages has the usual clarity of high level Navy Programs, which is just below the clarity of a 10 foot wall of lead. Someone must really need some bullets for their FITREP and/or fruit salad (ribbons/awards) for their chest.

On a serious note, the fact that it is the recycling stream in the first place is an indication that the initial use was wasteful. My complaint would be more against any process that is adding more arsenic and cesium to the waste stream. Three cheers for the people that are doing the hard work trying to clean it up after them.

We can read :
"since the first leap second in 1972, all leap seconds have been positive and there were 22 leap seconds in the 27 years to January, 1999."

Which means after running a clock, according to _our_ standards, for 365 days, we need to manually adjust it and add 1 second. This then looks like _our_ own time standard and its clocks are ticking on a too slow rate. From which i conclude that, compared to Paris time standards, our world and planet earth is "gearing" up in speed. Indeed, i feel as if i'm loosing time every day :)

The conclusion i get from this, is that our natural surroundings are ticking faster, compared to our own standards of time.

Now there's two solutions to this problem :

1. fix our own standards of time, i.e. nature must be correct.

2. our standard of time is correct, we only need to force nature to be on time. This would be absurd however.

Now as to the leap seconds. I run several computers here, and one of them is running as my local ntpd server, which is synced to a GPS time system :

[hubble:stock]:(~)$ /usr/sbin/ntpq
ntpq> pe
remote refid st t when poll reach delay offset jitter
*ntp1.NL.net .GPS. 1 u 378 1024 277 25.086 0.125 1.103
ntpq> q
[hubble:stock]:(~)$

What i make of this , is that either someone has been fiddling with our .GPS. clocks, or our Paris time standards are a total joke. I tend to believe the first. What does this mean? That instead of loosing 5.9 hours in a galaxy cycle of 26000 years, we actually lost 3.1 years during this galaxy cycle of 26000 years. "Loosing" here means, positive time manually added to our own Paris clock standard.

Galaxy Cycle :
"The Moon has a cycle around the Earth, the Earth has a cycle around the Sun, the Solar System has a cycle in the Milky Way," Ms Blake says. "That [the galaxy cycle] takes 26,000 years, and this particular calendar is coming to the end of that cycle. "That long cycle ends in 2012 - it's the end of a cycle, the end of a time. A new era is starting for the solar system."

news.bbc.co.uk

Robert

Unfortunately the world has not completely standardized on when and how these leaps seconds are to be inserted

Rubbish. This has been standardised for many years.

"A second highly-monochromatic red laser (674 nm) is then aimed at the cold ion, and tuned to two very precisely defined energy states in the cold ion. Once the laser is locked on to this precise energy or frequency interval it becomes very stable."

ASIDE: Strontium give the nice red you see in fireworks.

Physical constants are defined in terms of time. We only know that they are constants so far as we can measure the passage of time. Our model of the universe is based on constancy. With a better clock we can refine or if necessary change the model.

If you care to learn about time, take a tour of the Navel Observatory's Time Service Department.

Many plastics that are visible light opaque serve happily as crystal-clear infrared lenses.

Sort of a poor man's version of this?: http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/factfile/weapo ns/wep-phal.html

Worked out real great for them last time. Why bother?

Bone conduction is actually a pretty good idea: the ear drum is too close to the density of the water to stop any sound wave when in immersion. The bones are hard enough to stop the fast sound waves though. Basically the bones from the neck and skull resonate and carry the vibrations.

So others can have fun slashdotting other technologies, here are some websites. There are probably others, but this should keep those who do really want to move away from TCP happy.

• Actual sourcecode to transmit binaries by multicast
  
• IETF Reliable Multicast Transport - Charter + RFCs
  
• Introduction to Multicasting (a little old, doesn't cover things like IGMPv3)
  
• Lightweight Reliable Multicast Protocol
  
• Microsoft's Reliable Multicast
  
• SUN's Reliable Multicast system
  
• Navy Research Laboratory implementation
  
• Scalable Reliable Multicast
  
• Cooperative Reliable Multicast
  
• Reliable Multicast for Wireless environments
  
• Selectively Reliable Multicast
  

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

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

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

Thanks for the links. In looking around the site, they showed the U.S.S. Akron in use as an aircraft carrier. I can't even imagine what kind of guts it takes to launch from an airship at 6,000 feet and then attempt a recapture mid-air. These are truly some very brave individuals that put even normal floating carrier aviators to shame. Some interesting pictures of a head and a messon board as well. Cool.

It looks like they were for the most part even more cramped than a submarine, but that would have been a neat ship to serve on.

Thanks for the links. In looking around the site, they showed the U.S.S. Akron in use as an aircraft carrier. I can't even imagine what kind of guts it takes to launch from an airship at 6,000 feet and then attempt a recapture mid-air. These are truly some very brave individuals that put even normal floating carrier aviators to shame. Some interesting pictures of a head and a messon board as well. Cool.

It looks like they were for the most part even more cramped than a submarine, but that would have been a neat ship to serve on.

Thanks for the links. In looking around the site, they showed the U.S.S. Akron in use as an aircraft carrier. I can't even imagine what kind of guts it takes to launch from an airship at 6,000 feet and then attempt a recapture mid-air. These are truly some very brave individuals that put even normal floating carrier aviators to shame. Some interesting pictures of a head and a messon board as well. Cool.

It looks like they were for the most part even more cramped than a submarine, but that would have been a neat ship to serve on.

The crash of the Hindenburg was the straw that broke the camel's back. There were many, many airship disasters previously - in studying airship history, one is struck by just how few of the great airships had a peaceful end. By 1937, virtually everyone had lost interest in the airship anyway.

Definitely you'd want to steer clear of a hurricane! Or any kind of storm (eg the USS Shenandoah, which was destroyed in a storm in 1925). And as you say, mooring those things in a high wind could be hell - you may have seen these photographs of the USS Los Angeles basically being blown up until it's standing on vertically on it's nose! Lightning is not great, but it doesn't have to be fatal if the structure is well designed (it has been implicated in the Hindenburg's fate). Of course, a modern airship would use helium, not hydrogen. I think pressurized cabins came in just as airships went out of fashion; although the German height climbers in WWI used to operate at 20,000 ft unpressurized, at about the limits of human endurance.

They were beautiful things, but sadly just too impractical to be of much use.

There is a nomograph on that page that allows one with a straightedge to quickly explore the relationships between elevation and line of sight distance. Unfortunately, it is not very clear in html, so the pdf version is also provided, here.

Note that this information is from a US Navy web site, and as such, the distances are listed in nautical miles.

There is a nomograph on that page that allows one with a straightedge to quickly explore the relationships between elevation and line of sight distance. Unfortunately, it is not very clear in html, so the pdf version is also provided, here.

Note that this information is from a US Navy web site, and as such, the distances are listed in nautical miles.

US Electricity production in 2003 was 3800 Billion KWh (=3.8 PWh =13 Quad); 21% nuclear (.76 PWh=2.6). For comparison, hydro was 7%; solar, geothermal, and other alternative sources about 1%.

Total energy consumption, however, is about 100 Quad, once you include all energy use ("petroleum, dry natural gas, coal, net hydro, nuclear, geothermal, solar, wind, wood and waste electric power").

Since nuclear energy is used exclusively for electricity generation (neglecting the effect of a few floating cities), it would not be impossible to replace nuclear power with an expanded coal program, especially given the vast proven US coal reserves. However, coal-fired plants have arguably greater drawbacks-- coal ash is radioactive, and burning more coal would release more CO2.

Replacing nuclear power with an expanded alternatives program (wind or solar) would require an order of magnitude increase in generation capacity. It would also result in a cost increase; wind energy costs around .

Subs aren't only for battle (or even primarily, these days.) They're for spying.

Use a satellite, and they can see you coming. Use a plane, and they know you did it, which is useful info. A guy on the ground, James Bond style can't really carry around a sophisticated radio room full of eavesdropping crap.

Subs these days are being heavily modified to carry all kinds of spy gear, and even other subs to get even closer to the action. photo.

Of course, the thing to be spied on should be close to the coast or out at sea, for best results with this method.

Also, the informative US Navy Fact File on the Clam Lake, WI ELF site, as well as the station's actual home page.

Also, the informative US Navy Fact File on the Clam Lake, WI ELF site, as well as the station's actual home page.

AC was trying to post this, I think.

cute.

While I'm sure if Paramount could if it were possible to formally trademark the phrase "U.S.S. Enterprise", since it is the name of an actual ship not owned by Paramount I think it would be more problematic for Paramount Pictures to be able to enforce that trademark.

The name "USS Enterprise" has a long and distinguished history going all the way back to the administration of George Washington. There isn't going to be judge in the USA that will seriously recognise trademark usage except by the U.S. Navy for that term. I think Richard Branson is very safe by using that name.

Being piloted by a Capt. James T. Kirk (or even Capt. Sulu) on the other hand....

These people are the guys that made latest russian fighters possible.
Mind you, by the time the russians had made up the performance gap in the flight performance, the name of the game had become Electronics .

Here's an idea for head position tracking hardware: put a bunch of bright balls around the outside of a helmet, and have the person surrounded by a handful of cameras.

Better yet would be the use of tiny gyroscopes like this that provide 6DOF, although this one doesn't. No need for worn optical cues and cameras. There is also this product that has 3DOF, which claims to "have metallic interference virtually eliminated". I presume it is some kind of magnetic tracker that isn't as vulnerable to the weaknesses of normal magnetic motion tracking methods, which I think the grandparent poster is referring to.

The method you are mentioning using bright balls and cameras are optical motion trackers. Magnetic ones have advantages over optical ones. Optical ones have other disadvantages, and don't normally work in real-time, so they wouldn't be viable for head position tracking for virtual reality.

Here's an idea for head position tracking hardware: put a bunch of bright balls around the outside of a helmet, and have the person surrounded by a handful of cameras.

Better yet would be the use of tiny gyroscopes like this that provide 6DOF, although this one doesn't. No need for worn optical cues and cameras. There is also this product that has 3DOF, which claims to "have metallic interference virtually eliminated". I presume it is some kind of magnetic tracker that isn't as vulnerable to the weaknesses of normal magnetic motion tracking methods, which I think the grandparent poster is referring to.

The method you are mentioning using bright balls and cameras are optical motion trackers. Magnetic ones have advantages over optical ones. Optical ones have other disadvantages, and don't normally work in real-time, so they wouldn't be viable for head position tracking for virtual reality.