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• Grace Hopper : Girl Genius of Vassar
• Lt. Hopper of the U.S. Navy
• Grace Hopper and the Mystery of the Hollerith Code
• Grace Hopper Tames the MARK I
• Grace Hopper Defeats the NAZIs
• Grace Hopper vs the Pernicious Moth
• Grace Hopper Unravells Sputnik
• Grace Hopper vs the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper Unleashes the Scourage of COBOL
• Grace Hopper Arm-Wrestles Hyman Rickover
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper : Recalled to Duty (special double issue)
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper Defeats the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper CyberGrrrrrl

• And remember, (+1, Funnay) does nothing for karma!

• Grace Hopper : Girl Genius of Vassar
• Lt. Hopper of the U.S. Navy
• Grace Hopper and the Mystery of the Hollerith Code
• Grace Hopper Tames the MARK I
• Grace Hopper Defeats the NAZIs
• Grace Hopper vs the Pernicious Moth
• Grace Hopper Unravells Sputnik
• Grace Hopper vs the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper Unleashes the Scourage of COBOL
• Grace Hopper Arm-Wrestles Hyman Rickover
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper : Recalled to Duty (special double issue)
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper Defeats the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper CyberGrrrrrl

• And remember, (+1, Funnay) does nothing for karma!

• Grace Hopper : Girl Genius of Vassar
• Lt. Hopper of the U.S. Navy
• Grace Hopper and the Mystery of the Hollerith Code
• Grace Hopper Tames the MARK I
• Grace Hopper Defeats the NAZIs
• Grace Hopper vs the Pernicious Moth
• Grace Hopper Unravells Sputnik
• Grace Hopper vs the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper Unleashes the Scourage of COBOL
• Grace Hopper Arm-Wrestles Hyman Rickover
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper : Recalled to Duty (special double issue)
• Cmdr. Grace Hopper Defeats the Commie Russians
• Grace Hopper CyberGrrrrrl

• And remember, (+1, Funnay) does nothing for karma!

Unfortunately, I can't find a bio from the offical US Navy site.

Warfare is inherently wasteful - consider the Doolittle raid on Tokyo that used B-25 bombers as expendable munitions. (Short summary - load 16 bombers on an aircraft carrier, steam across Pacific, bomb Tokyo April 18, 1942, crash bombers in China and attempt to evade/escape. Precipitate the key naval battle of Midway. Establish aircraft carriers as pre-eminent.)

Doing the job is what it's about.

I realize you probably don't actually care about the origins of the phrase, but being the wordfreak that I am, I'm going to answer anyway. *grin*
Here's one result

Here's another

And yet another

They all point to Secretary of the Navy Josephus ("Joe" - get it?) Daniels.

Except that unlike cold fusion, the US Navy doesn't have researchers who have built working 200mpg carburetors and zero-point energy devices.

Actually, there are many older Military Payloads on orbit. Here is one article.

All that ended decades ago. No manned submersible in operation today can go to the deepest part of the ocean. All the undersea habitats are defunct except for Aquarius, which the University of North Carolina now owns and struggles to fund. It's over.

Manned operations in the deep ocean never became cheaper or safer. They're possible, but not useful. Deep ocean work belongs to robots today.

Much the same thing has happened to space. All remaining manned space operations are ego trips for governments. All useful work is unmanned.

Someday this may change, but it won't be done using chemically fueled rockets.

Nice idea, but crap physics. Here's why:

From chemistry and Avogadro's Law, the weight of one mole of a substance is the same as the atomic weight of that molecule, and has a volume of 22.4 liters at standard pressure and temperature (0C and 29.92 inches). So, for 78% N2 (28), 21% O2, and 1% H2O (32), air weighs about 1.28 kg/m3, or almost exactly 1kg per cubic yard. The same yd3 of Helium (2) would weigh only 68 grams. So a cubic yard of helium displacing air provides 932 grams of lift. (The mass != weight quibble isn't really relevant here, OK?)

Allowing the airship to have the same volume of the USS Akron, 6.5 million ft3 is 224 tonnes (metric) of air displaced by 16.4 tonnes of He, so the maximum potential lift is 208 tonnes.

Now the problems start.

Blimps use balonets to allow for helium expansion with heating and especially altitutde changes. For a maximum altitude of 10,000 feet (700mb), the blimp must allow for 30% expansion (1000mb at surface to 700mb at altitude) if it doesn't want to vent helium. Zepplins and other airships handled this through flexible bags containing the helium/hydrogen.

The movie in the article's website said their airship would rise some 10 miles before floating back down. Ten miles is 50,000 feet, or about 100mb. This requirement limits the on-ground volume of helium to only 10% of all available to allow for expansion. Thus the maximum lift would fall 208 tonnes to only 20.8 tonnes.

Okay, how about only five miles/25,000 feet? Pressure there is about 350mb, so you can only start with 35% helium volume, or 72.8 tonnes possible lift.

Now, somebody explain how to build a 6.5 million ft3 volume container for less than 20 tonnes (or 70 tonnes) that can be pressurized, as stated in the movie, to compress the Helium enough to start descent. Oh, not to mention the pressure tanks and multi-kilowatt vertical turbine to electically power the flyweight air pumps filling those tanks. The paint on the hull would weigh more than the cargo.

This might work on a planet like Jupiter, where the air pressure is around 10,000mb and more the deeper you go, but until somebody comes up with aluminum-strength aerogel, I think this plan is crap.

Yeah, shame they didn't think about doing this in December. God, that would have been great.

A couple of years ago, the Bank of Japan's Washington, DC office scheduled their annual holiday party on December 7th and sent out invitations before realizing that they had invited economists from every nation to a bash on Pearl Harbor Day.

Needless to say, Greenspan did not attend.

That was the Trieste, designed and built by the Frenchmen Auguste and Jacques Piccard. The US Navy bought it from them. To my knowledge, since that great achievement, nobody has ever gone deeper (or even as deep), so it's not exactly a good example of "not hard".

You missed my point. My point was that a radar return off the F-117 (or B-2) is more likely then not going to be bounced off the internal structure of the aircraft -- since the external structure either absorbs radar signals or reflects them back away from the intended receiver. My other point being that an RWS system could work in theory without external sensors by picking up the transmissions that weren't absorbed by the external structure -- since transmissions that were absorbed (or reflected elsewhere) are no threat. Try reading my statement before you jump all over it. Neither does ascribing fantastic capability to RWS (or is it ESM? How about BVR - Beyond Vague Ranging system?).

In that single comment you reveal your ignorance and arrogance about modern military technology. This has nothing to do with fancy Star Trek style technology. Most of this stuff has been around for decades. The concepts are nothing new -- they go all the way back to WW2.

To quote from this military site:

ESM is the area of Electronic Warfare (EW) that evaluates passive electronic devices used for signal intelligence (SIGINT) collection. These types of systems are RF based. ESM system evaluations include but are not limited to: SIGINT library validation, direction finding array calibration and validation, target fixing algorithm validation, intercept capability, and evaluation of special signals.

Here are some other interesting websites that you should consider reading. Google is your friend.

None of this is "fantastic capability" or 24th century technology. None of this implies mystical powers on the part of the F-117 (or any other modern aircraft or ship).

Now, unlike you, I don't pretend to be a know all expert on modern military technology. But I also don't pretend that just because I don't understand something or haven't heard about it that it must be magical Star Trek technology clearly beyond our current means.

I have no idea how playing Harpoon (whatever that is), Exocets and F-14's got into the mix.

Harpoon is an all encompassing sea-air battle simulation coined by Larry Bond that is played on paper rules or with PC software. If your interested (it's really quite good) I suggest you check it out. Exocets and F-14s got into the mix because you made the asinine comment about how realistic Top Gun was -- I was blowing this argument out of the water. Talk to any real Naval aviator (or Air Force for that matter) -- they think it's one of the funniest movies ever made. Though they would probably agree with you about the flight instructor sleeping with Tom Cruise part ;)

Modern weapons systems are limited by existing technology and the laws of physics, not magic not mysticism

No disagreement. You just don't seem to have an understanding of what modern technology is capable of. Read up on ESM/RWS technology sometime -- I think you'll be surprised at what it's capable of -- and it's hardly new -- it's been around (albeit in more primitive form) since WW2.

Well, maybe in another 15 years you can understand what, "able to return to combat duty aboard an aircraft carrier within 72 hours" means.

Link.

We understand they don't necessarily go up with cannons mounted for your average airshow, but that doesn't mean they're stripped down that far either. I can't imagine that they're building a whole new plane in three days.

Really? Some one should probably inform the Blue Angels then. They seem to be confused on their own planes.

I was going to call bullshit, because it was always my understanding that a knot == 1.15mph (something to do with the distance of a nautical mile at the equator as I recalled), but it turns out that you are correct. According to this website:

The term knot or nautical mile, is used world-wide to denote one's speed through the water. Today, we measure knots with electronic devices, but 200 years ago, such devices were unknown. Ingenious mariners devised a speed-measuring device both easy to use and reliable, the "log line."

From this method, we get the term "knot." The log line was a length of twine marked at 47.33 foot intervals by colored knots. At one end a log chip was fastened; it was shaped like the sector of a circle and weighted at the rounded end with lead. When thrown over the stern, it would float pointing upward and would remain relatively stationary. The log line was allowed to run free over the side for 28 seconds and then hauled on board.

Knots which had passed over the side were counted. In this way, the ship's speed was measured.

Google also says that a knot = 1.15077945 mph or 1.85200 kph.

So I stand corrected :) Glad I researched that before opening my big mouth. Learn something new every day...

Earth is closest to the sun (perihelion) when the northern hemisphere is experiencing winter, and furthest (aphelion) when the northern hemisphere is experiencing summer. (In 2004, perihelion was on Jan 4, and aphelion will be July 5. [source])

Earth's perihelion: 147,000,000 km = 8.17 light-minutes
Earth's aphelion: 152,000,000 km = 8.44 light-minutes [source]

But on the other hand, it would become somewhat easier to defend since the target would be that much smaller.

Built an ancology and bristle the outside with Phalanx batteries. No missile or unauthorized plane would get within a mile of the place! (literally)
=Smidge=

Gotta think it would be cheaper and safer to sink *several* retired vessels, instead. The Navy is just days from designating a site for the decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Oriskany to be sunk as a reef, and there are a couple more old flattops in the pipeline. Those will be more interesting dives, i think: less environmentally risky, and not as likely to claim the lives of unwary divers.

With their radar emissions I'll finally be able to take out obnoxious drivers using my handy-dandy roof rack mounted HARM missiles.

Nice try: Real IRA (RIRA); a.k.a. True IRA

In the US, however, doesn't this make them terrorists and entitled to a free, one way, all expenses paid trip to Cuba?

Right now the US Navy has only two type of ships that are nuclear powered. Submarines and Aircraft carriers, and not all of the current 12 active carriers are nuclear powered. The non-nuclear carriers are the USS Shitty Kitty (former crew member) USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63) and the USS John F. Kennedy CV-67. USS John F. Kennedy (CV 67) See "Navy Fact File: Airecraft Carriers" for more info.

Right now the US Navy has only two type of ships that are nuclear powered. Submarines and Aircraft carriers, and not all of the current 12 active carriers are nuclear powered. The non-nuclear carriers are the USS Shitty Kitty (former crew member) USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63) and the USS John F. Kennedy CV-67. USS John F. Kennedy (CV 67) See "Navy Fact File: Airecraft Carriers" for more info.

Right now the US Navy has only two type of ships that are nuclear powered. Submarines and Aircraft carriers, and not all of the current 12 active carriers are nuclear powered. The non-nuclear carriers are the USS Shitty Kitty (former crew member) USS Kitty Hawk (CV 63) and the USS John F. Kennedy CV-67. USS John F. Kennedy (CV 67) See "Navy Fact File: Airecraft Carriers" for more info.

The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about the student and users rights.

The big thing here is, you have to stop worrying about users' rights. Some users are terrorists, some are Communists, some are dissidents, some are Revanchists, some are Homosexuals, some are Jews.

These people are Enemies of State, and their activities must be tracked -- minutely tracked -- so that we can learn what other Anti-Social Counter-Revolutionaries these traitors to the Motherland are collaborating with.

Then we can remove all these Dissident Intellectual Cosmopolitan Terrorists to the Gulag, or KZ Dachau, or to Guantanamo -- or Manzanar -- because it has happened here.

I'm sure there were some honorable men working at I.G. Farben who never dreamed that Zyklon-B would be used as anything other than an insecticide.

And the grandparent poster I'm sure never built his network tools to suppress political dissent or to accumulate evidence of users' sexual proclivities. Bit I'll bet these uses have occurred to Admiral Poindexter.

(Clumsy Soviet-era insults taken from here.)

No, people die. In the military more so than in the general population at a young age. Even when not in combat the military is not a good place to be if you want a long life. A soldiers life expectancy is significantly lower than the general population even in peacetime. Moreover training accidents occour at a fairly high rate. For instance accidents including vehicles in the army motor vehicle pool resulted in 225 fatalities in the years 1987-1998 Source, and the marines had 193 non-combat related fatalities from 1999-2003 Source. So yes more people are dying in Iraq but at only a couple times the rate of death that occours in the military even in peacetime.

The US Navy actually does similar G force training in Lemoore California on their C-FET device. The pictures on the web site do not do the device justice. It's simply an amazing device and I've had the unique opportunity to write the software that controls the device. The Boeing Company recently updated the software and hardware that controls the centrifuge, and I was on the 1 man team to redesign the software. The Air Force has a similar centrifuge for their pilot training too.

In the NADC centrifuge, as in the Swedish model, the pilot controls the g-forces by maneuvering the "airplane" with a typical set of fighter jet controls, and watches the various instruments in front of him respond appropriately. I don't know whether there are currently graphics capabilities, but as an aircraft simulator test engineer, I can tell you with authority that visuals are NOT required for a good simulation, depending on the goal of the simulator.

So, this has basically been done for at LEAST 13 years if not quite a bit longer (the NADC centrifuge first opened in 1952). And oh, by the way, this centrifuge also does at least 9g. So unless someone else has some explanation of what's different about this new Swedish device, the only difference I can see is that it's been built by a commercial entity, instead of the US Government.

Here are a couple links, in case you'd like to read about this specific simulator/centrifuge (the first link is an excellent discussion of G-LOC effects in general; the second shows no less than four sites where such training is conducted for the US Government):

http://www.codeonemagazine.com/archives/1990/artic les/april_90/apra_90.html
http://www.nomi.med.navy.mil/STD/ASTCPax/initial.h tm

There was an interesting story on cryptome a few days ago about putting a Phalanx anti-aircraft missle & 20mm machine gun defense system on top of the proposed Freedom Towers. Well, I don't know if a setup like that could effectively disable or destroy a target before it reaches its mark but I have to admit it sounds more viable than the solution describe in the article...

No, they don't add (or subtract) a leap second every year; they do it whenever it's needed. And up until 1999, it had been needed every year or two, which is why it's a bit unusual that we haven't needed one in 5 years. See the complete list of leap seconds.

As someone pointed out earlier, the article is incorrect, and a leap second is based on the slowing of earth's rotation.

The dominant force behind the slowing is "tidal braking" from the moon. Basically, just as the moon exerts forces on the ocean, the ocean exerts forces on the moon. As a result, the moon is getting thrown gradually into higher and higher orbits because of force from the earth. The energy has to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is earth's rotational inertia.

Leap seconds were implemented as a result of branch of astronomy known as earth orientation. Basically, Earth Orientation is astronomy backwards. By looking at distant quasars constantly and monitoring atomic clocks, astronomers can see minute changes in earth's rotation. Quasars are observed because they are bright (in the radio part of the spectrum) and are far enough away that any physical motion over time would be negligible in the night sky. Correcting for leap seconds and other rotational issues like precession and nutation allows for the accurate functioning of GPS.

For more information, check out USNO's Earth orientation web site

According to http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/leapsec.html leap seconds compensate for changes in the earths rotational speed not the earths orbital speed.

Forget hunters; they're too slow. What about using the same systems for defense as found on Navy destroyers such as the Arleigh Burke class, the Phalanx Close In Weapons System?. This point defense system is good enough to annihilate incoming missiles and stuff, incoming birds are equivalent to missiles in the windmill's case.

Forget hunters; they're too slow. What about using the same systems for defense as found on Navy destroyers such as the Arleigh Burke class, the Phalanx Close In Weapons System?. This point defense system is good enough to annihilate incoming missiles and stuff, incoming birds are equivalent to missiles in the windmill's case.

As the article says, the treebot is part of a "Networked Infomechanical System", a type of wireless sensor network, developed by the UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. The forest network is used to develop practical wireless sensing technology while simultaneously providing an example of its utility. The use of a mobile network node in a wireless sensor network requires some engineering of the multihop message routing protocol, since such networks are usually assumed to have stationary nodes. I don't know what they've done to address this; it could be anything from MANET-style routing (e.g., AODV, in which they accept the resulting increase in route establishment overhead), to a quasi-static approach in which the treebot reassociates to the network every time it stops.

Actually, there are approximately 86,400.002 seconds in a day (see here). In addition, you neglected to add the leap seconds that may or may not be required.

I'm just sayin', if you're going to try and be ultra accurate, then don't half-ass it.

There's also the interesting fact that Japan is the only country in the world to have a foreign military base in its capital

Your military tourism handbook is defective.

For starters, there's Yongsan Army Garrison in Seoul.

How about Navy? There's NAVEUR headquarters in London, with several more scattered around, some suburban.

Kuwait and Riyadh also come to mind, although that second is declining...

I'm bored with chasing down links, so I'll just add that there are plenty of foreign military bases in Baghdad.

But if you do not secure a boat

Which can be hacked and run remote

Make sure you only fit a cam

Or the Spartan Scout

Could make us JAM!!!

news.navy.mil

according to netcraft www.news.navy.mil runs Microsoft-IIS/5.0 under FreeBSD.

Well, defense is their business, isn't it?

...you might want to think twice before you try to hack this to "help" them.

Specially if you live near a coast.

Yep.. http://www.news.navy.mil looks pretty hosed to me.

Help /. the US Navy http://www.news.navy.mil

BTW, two more comments:

1. Why did you link to the Lexington? The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) would have been a better choice. She's the largest ship on the waters, bar none. The Lexington was about 800 and some change feet. The Enterprise is 1,100+ feet! That's quite a difference!

2. The original show suggested that the Galactica was hundreds of years old. I kind of like that idea myself. She's not a simple carrier, but an entire colony in space devoted to the defense of human kind. That also makes her self-sustaining, something that a simple carrier is not.

Ok, so you could argue that #2 doesn't work with the new series. After all, how would you decommission something that big? Of course, they could have simply had her in retirement, with nothing but old Vipers for show. That would have given her a chance to actually join the battle and kick some Shiny Cylon ass!!! Instead, they mope around looking for bullets while their modern vipers get shutdown and blown up.

BTW, two more comments:

1. Why did you link to the Lexington? The USS Enterprise (CVN-65) would have been a better choice. She's the largest ship on the waters, bar none. The Lexington was about 800 and some change feet. The Enterprise is 1,100+ feet! That's quite a difference!

2. The original show suggested that the Galactica was hundreds of years old. I kind of like that idea myself. She's not a simple carrier, but an entire colony in space devoted to the defense of human kind. That also makes her self-sustaining, something that a simple carrier is not.

Ok, so you could argue that #2 doesn't work with the new series. After all, how would you decommission something that big? Of course, they could have simply had her in retirement, with nothing but old Vipers for show. That would have given her a chance to actually join the battle and kick some Shiny Cylon ass!!! Instead, they mope around looking for bullets while their modern vipers get shutdown and blown up.

Yeah, somehow, I don't think that thing will stand up against my radiation-seeking-missile.... Move away from the jammer now...

US, UK, France, Russia, and China have security veto power. China! HAve you considered their opinion of free speech rights?

Yeah, they lock people up without trial and deny access to a lawyer while their investigators 'interrogate' them.

This really reminds me of something... oh yes, here it is.