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What's the worst the Chinese military could use the DVD app for, showing training videos?

The Chinese could decode ultra-secure CSS encoded video orders to US submarines transmitted via the ELF antennas in Michigan and Wisconsin.

(Now, to see who is smart enough to figure out what is wrong with the above.)

(OT: I wish slashdot would allow the <small> tag)

There are a lot of explanations going around this thread about how core collapse supernovae occur. Some good, some terrible, none quite right. Rather than correct what's been said, I'll instead point y'all to a few of the sources of real info out there.

A good place to start is the NASA Observatorium page on Stellar Evolution and Death

A friend in the business maintains a page full of links to SN pages. Many of these are links to research groups, but there are also links to general education and image catalogs.

BTW, in case you don't believe that I know of what I speak, follow this link

Seems highly plausable when you consider the 'special modifications' that have been made to the USS Jimmy Carter - including the 'Dry Dock Shelter (DDS). Amazing.

1994. I was just out of graduate school and teaching physical science in my hometown. I had made friends with an officer from the Naval Postgraduate School who was also an Amateur Radio operator (N7HPR). It would be a year before Netcom would provide dialup for a 14.4 modem, so his ability to dial-in from home with a "secure" line to a Linux box he set up at NPS was novel. He used Trumpet WinSock and NCSA Mosaic, and we stayed up all night playing. It blew my mind, and we both knew what we wanted to do with it: Educate. I never thought anybody would pay me to play that way. The Web was going to be an avocation; they're fools to pay us to do what we do.

This was on the heals of learning about email. I had an account in grad school, but not enough peers in my field had one, so it was rarely used. It wasn't until I had to build a packet radio station while living in Hawaii for two years that I really appreciated digital communications. A letter to my Dad would take a couple of days to hop from the islands to California, no better than the pony express but saving us a great deal in phone bills. Sure helped my Dad understand the concept when I convinced him to get one of those Netcom accounts years later.

The German U-791's used Hydrogen Peroxide for fuel, and I wonder if NASA altogether dropped this idea. Would be interesting to see someone power a car on peroxide and test the environmental hazards involved.

Well hopefully Carmack can get it up and going soon, maybe he can get people like Tito to give him 20 million to send them to space.

countdown continues

If it weren't for the regulation of society through the mechanism of slavery, and hence the suppression of the free market, we could have had the industrial revolution 2000 years ago.

200 BC: Alexandria, Egypt: A cultured city with a population of 500,000, the world's first lighthouse, university, library with 500,000 manuscripts/books, multi-decked shipping, theatres, temples with automatic sliding doors, and engineers working with a simple steam engine. From: Peter James and Nick Thorpe, Ancient Inventions.

In which case we would be about where we are now in high-tech back in AD 200. By AD

230 Billus Gaticus and Laurence of Ellisonius would be multi-trillionaires, clone many offspring, build a sanctuary in space, and then des troy the planet, so they can make version 3.1 the way it was supposed to be, and then encode their plan in DNA, enslave their new creations, and create a secret society so the information isn't lost.

Who needs money when you can have a planet of slaves?

Add a couple of these. These have much better multi-spectrum detection and reaction.

Yes!

Bikini atoll was only used to test the effects of hydrogen bombs on ships, so far as I can determine (link). It was no longer being used as a test range when the above-ground test ban treaty went into effect. The development of the neutron bomb did not begin until many years later, so there could not have been a neutron-bomb test at Bikini atoll.

Bikini atoll is now one of the richest reef systems in the Pacific, because it is off-limits to fishing and over-fished species are still plentiful there.
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spam spam spam spam spam spam
No one expects the Spammish Repetition!

The future of the Internet is in what I call "rational programming" derived from a revival of Bertrand Russell's Relation Arithmetic. Rational programming is a classically applicable branch of relation arithmetic's sub theory of quantum software (as opposed to the hardware-oriented technology of quantum computing). By classically applicable I mean it is applies to conventional computing systems -- not just quantum information systems. Rational programming will subsume what Tim Berners Lee calls the semantic web. The basic problem Tim (and just about everyone back through Bertrand Russell) fails to perceive is that logic is irrational. John McCarthy's signature line says it all about this kind of approach: "He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense." More on this a bit later, but first some history, because he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat its nonsense:

When I invented the precursor to Postscript (an audacious claim that I can back up -- it started as a replacement for NAPLPS which I proposed while Manager of Interactive Architectures for Viewdata Corp of America back in November of 1981 -- the Xerox PARC guys found my approach of what they called a "tokenized Forth" communication protocol to be an intriguing way to encode text and graphics), I was interested in having a Forth virtual machine migrate into silicon (ala Novix) so it could evolve from mere graphics rendering into a distributed Smalltalk VM environment (ala Squeak) as videotex terminal/personal computer capacities increased. But I was _not_ interested in object-oriented programming as the long-term semantics of distributed programming environments. (I still have some of the hardcopy of the communiques with Xerox PARC and others from this period.)

Rather, relational semantics were what I saw as the ultimate direction for distributed programming. I had a bit of a go at Tony Hoare's "communicating sequential processes" paradigm and its Transputer realization because he was, at least, starting with the hard problem of parallelism rather than making like the drunk looking for his keys under the light post the way everyone else seemed to be doing (and still are, save for Mozart, since threads, etc. are always an afterthought). But, because there were other hard problems like abstraction, transactions and persistence that he ignored, I christened his approach "Occam's Chainsaw Massacre" in my communiques (in honor of his distributed programming language "Occam") and dropped it in favor of relational programming, which has inherent parallelism resulting from both dependency and indeterminacy. (BTW: Dr. Hoare seems to have finally come to his senses about this issue.)

Unfortunately, the only researcher doing hardcore work on relational programming (meaning, getting to the root of relational semantics in a way that Codd had failed to do) at the time was Bruce MacLennan, then, of The Naval Postgraduate School, and he just didn't have the glamour of Alan Kay at places like Xerox PARC to attract the attention of guys like Steve Jobs. Bruce had a bit of a blind-spot, too, when it came to transactions and persistence, which I attempted to remedy by bringing David P. Reed's work on distributed transactions for the ARPAnet to him, but although he wrote a white paper on a predicate calculus (close to a relational) implementation of Reed's thesis (MIT/LCS/TR-205), he didn't really "get it", IMHO. Reed and MacLennan abandoned their work for other pursuits (ironically, Reed was chief scientist at Lotus while Notes was being developed but did not contribute his ideas on distributed synchronization to that development despite the fact that we had a mutual acquaintance from my Plato days by the name of Ray Ozzie -- so, I share some of the blame for this failure) even as Steve Jobs botched the embryonic object oriented world by abandoning Smalltalk and giving us, instead, a lineage consisting of Object Pascal on the Lisa/Mac which begat Objective C on Jobs's NeXT which begat Java at Sun via Naughton and Gosling's experience with NeXT.

This brings us to the present -- a world in which Javascript-based technologies like Tibet promise to not only salvage the object oriented aspect of the Internet from the birth defects of Jobs's spawn, but actually provide an advance over Smalltalk in the same lineage as CLOS and Self. But it is also a world in which there is growing confusion over the proper role of "metadata" in the form of XML -- particularly when it comes to speech acts and distributed inference. I would call Tibet "the next major Internet advance" except for the fact that the basic idea for a Tibet-like system has been around and well understood since the early 1980's. When it is finally released, Tibet (or a system like it) will put the Internet back on track. I call that a "recovery", not an "advance".

We are now poised to move forward with type inference based on full blown inference engines, thereby dispensing with the nonterminating arguments over statically vs dynamically typed languages that allowed Steve Jobs's spawn to get its nose in the tent. If you want to declare a "type" in a declarative language, just make another declaration and let the inference engine figure out what it can do with that information prior to run time. See how easy that was? Well, there is more to it than that, but not that much: Assertions have implications and assertions made prior to run time have implications prior to run time. Live with it and don't repeat the mistakes of the past.

The confusion over semantic webs, and the reason Berners Lee et al will fail, is essentially the same as the confusion that has beleaguered all inferential systems such as logic programming and "artificial intelligence" over the years: logic is irrational and the real world demands rationality -- otherwise nothing makes sense. By "rationality" I mean that reasoning must literally incorporate "ratios" -- or, as John McCarthy would put it, doing arithmetic so things make sense. By making sense, I mean there is a sense in which one interprets the sea of assertions that clearly dominates for a particular purpose. With logic not only are you limited to 0 and 1 as effective quantities; you have no adequate theoretic basis from which to derive more accurate quantities with which to make sense by taking ratios and determining which inferences are dominant.

Fuzzy logic and expert systems incorporating probabilities have typically failed because they are not based in the first principles of probability and statistics. As Gauss, the premiere probability theorist put it, "Mathematics is the study of relations." He didn't say, "Mathematics is the study of multisets." There are good reasons that relational databases, and not set manipulation languages, have come to dominate business applications -- and Gauss was aware of these differences when he began to derive his laws of probability. Subsequent axiomatizations of mathematics based on set theory were similarly misguided and have led to the idea that "fuzzy sets" are the way to introduce rationality into programming. Rather than sets, relations are the foundation, not just of mathematics but of rationality in the same sense that Gauss realized when he derived his theory of probability from the study of relations.

Rationality allows for judgment which is recognized as inherently fallible -- but which allows one to procede without exponentiating all possible paths of inference. Judgment also allows various identities to limit sharing of information to that needed -- thereby creating speech acts and a basis for rational measures of credibility associated with those identities. Since credit-rating is a degeneration of credibility, it should come as no shock that the invention of negative numbers, originating as they did with the Arabic invention of double entry account keeping, has its analog in something that might be called "logical debt" with which negative probabilities are associated.

And now we have come to the "quantum" aspect of rational programming. It is precisely the "credibility debt" aspect of rational programming that corresponds, in mathematical detail, to the various equations of quantum mechanics and their negative probability amplitudes. (Von Neumann's quantum logic failed to properly incorporate logical debt which has led to much confusion.) Logical debt is important to distributed programming for the same reason debt is important to financial networks. Logical debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of information flow in the same way that financial debt is a way of handling poor synchronization of cash flow. As in any rational system, there are both limits to credit and limits to credibilty that influence one's judgments and actions, including speech acts.

The object oriented folks may, in a sense, have the last laugh here because when we divide up inference into identities that engage in speech acts, we are reintroducing the notion of objects that hide information via exchange of speech act messages that can be thought of as "setters" (assertions) and "getters" (queries). However, I believe it is only fair to recognize that the excellent intuitions of Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard did need the added insights and rigor of philosophers like J. L. Austin and T. Etter.

An incident like this has just been waiting to happen, take a look at this link below The Inevitable Strategic Collision between the United States and China Keep in mind this was written in 1996

Automatic Position Reporting Systems are easily available. just check out
Aprs.Org

Now, one of those should really never be fired at a Blackbird, but I imagine the Bad Guys have something similar.

Also the fact that we add leap seconds does not mean that the earth's rotation is slowing, it means that it is slower than the definition of one second according to atomic clocks. The existance of leap seconds does not mean the earth is still decelerating; a change in the frequency of leap second insertion would indicate the earth was slowing down.

Now, it so happens that, yes, the earth's rotation does appear to be decelerating by 1.79 milliseconds per day per century, i.e., 100 years from now a day will be 1.79ms longer than today is. Earth rotation time and the SI second matched up around 1820, which means that in another 180 years leap seconds will be twice as frequent as they are today.

i always thought sending data through water was a cool idea

with all the solids showing up in our tap water maybe this is the future of home networking

I've been considering a similar attempt this summer during the Courage Classic ride in Colorado. The combination of a Kenwood TH-DA7G transciever and VC-H1 camera are hard for a gadget-hound-radio-amateur-cyclist to pass up. Paul, KB0LUR

Actually, you are talking about two different things. Selective Availability, the degredation of the general-use signal, was turned off last January. However, you seem to have confused SA with the different codes available.

There are two (three, actually) codes transmitted by the GPS satellites. The C/A-code (coarse/acquisition) is the "general use" code, available to all, and (formerly) subject to SA. The P-code (precision code) is the "military" code; it requires special receivers, and you have to have a DoD license to get said receivers. The third code is the Y-code, and is used in conjunction with the P-code, and is not relevant for this discussion.

There is no way to get to the P-code from the C/A-code; the P-code is approximately 1 millisecond in length (1,024 bits, transmitted at 1.023 MHz); the P-code is a week long, even transmitted at ten times the rate (10.23 MHz).

The C/A- and P-codes are not "encrypted" in the classical sense of the word, they are just signal formats. (The P-code is encrypted to form the Y-code, but that's another matter.) SA does not perform any "encryption" on the C/A-code, it blurs the timing slightly between satellites, so your receiver doesn't know the precise length of time the signal took to arrive from the satellite. This causes the receiver to have a certain amount of ambiguity, and degrades the accuracy of the signal.

For more information on the system, check out the Naval Observatory's site on GPS.

"Emergent properties of the combination of genes" have been known for decades to be the dominant factor in genotype-to-phenotype translation. AI computer scientists working on genetic algorithms have called this epistasis, borrowing the word from biology (see here), and giving it a slightly broader meaning:

"You have epistasis when the expression of a given gene has a significant effect on the expression of other genes, thereby inducing the fact that a genotype of N genes cannot be analyzed by observing the effect of each gene separately". The unwritten corollary being: "which is quite a pain in the ass".

Genetic algorithms work best (in comparison to other methods) when the problem space is highly-yet-not-too-highly epistatic. See this page for extensive information, or just try a Google search.

Come on people! Do your homework before you start whining!

I'd stay out of the Navy were I you... their latest ships are operated by M$ -- poorly. (look for `Navy'...)

Secondly, such a system would have to be accurate to at least 1/2 a lane width (to accurately differentiate acceleration/deceleration lanes from normal traffic lanes). A lane is about 3-5 meters wide. Thus the accuracy of such a system would have to be about 2 meters. If we look at the accurace of gps, stand alone systems are accurate to about 10 meters (thanks to W.J.C's executive order).

What this means is that inorder to effectively and safely implement such a system either military grade GPS receivers would have to be installed in all vehicles (woohoo, I'll take 2 thank you) or we will have to move to a differential GPS system which means that D-GPS transmitters will have to setup all across the country ($$$$ major bucks). Either way, what this effectively means is that with the purchase of any vehicle you will receive a box that can pinpoint your exact location to about 2 meters. This sounds really great on the surface, but now imagine a rogue nation with a slight beef against the US (or any other country for that matter).

Though there may be laws against tampering with the device (there are also laws against setting off explosives that seem to be routinely ignored) all that, say Iraq, would have to do is send a couple of operatives to the US, purchase a couple of cheap cars, extract the GPS receivers and implant them into a missle. Launch the missle from just about anywhere and you can be reasonably assured that the missle will be within 2 meters of its target.

As much as law enforcement agencies may love this idea, I am reasonably sure that the even more draconian military will promptly pimp-slap such a plan based on national security.

Here is a link for you: Navajo Code Talkers in World War II

If you do a little searching with Google and friends, you'll see that US fighter aircraft (and their components) are designed -- and tested -- to withstand significant amounts of EMP radiation. EMP is a well-known problem, and the engineers have been designing-in solutions for it for decades. Over a decade ago, in fact, I worked for a defense contractor on fighter aircraft, and EMP was one of the standard things upon which the aircraft were tested.

Basically, an aircraft near an EMP acts like an antenna, building up a voltage of about 8V/ft of aircraft size. There are fairly standard ways to design around this kind of build up. It might seem like a nasty problem after the fact, but if you know about it when engineering aircraft (and other military hardware), it's not the uncrackable nut it's made out to be.

See, for example, this reference that Google turned up. This is textbook stuff now.

I interview with the Navy a few months back as a coop for their Naval Sea Systems Command.

The job was developing applications for Windows CE-based PDAs which the maintance crews would take onboard ships to log data on the ship's functions. The data is then entered into an Oracle database and served up using ColdFusion extensions on IIS.

In short, it was a lot of extremely (notoriously?) non-free (neither speech nor beer) software. (And the pay was shitty.)

Needless to say, it would be really cool if other branches of the armed forces followed the Army's lead here. If the above scenario was linux running on the handhelds, and linux, apache, perl, mysql running on the servers, the job would have been much more attractive. And plus, everyone would think the Navy was cool ;-)

Question:
There was a /. story awhile back about how the US Armed Forces were having trouble getting new IT workers. Would *you* work for the Army if you knew you could get your hands on these embedded linux devices, and promote OSS at the same time?

I think I would. For one thing, the job security would sure beat working for a dotcom...

-the wunderhorn

Greets --

The Royal Greenwich Observatory is now a muesum, but the United States Naval Observatory at http://www.usno.navy.mil/ is a good resource for this kind of (modern) information...

Grins --
Carl

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I work as a Web developer and designer at navy base outside of washington. i believe our best stuff never makes it out of the internal DoD servers. There are some very talented people working here, with some amazing ideas. It's a shame no one ever gets to see our work. I've been working here 18 months, and my parents, girlfriend, or friends have only been able to see 1 of the approximately 10 sites i've worked on. The one site i've worked on that is open to the public is this recruiting site

It's embarassing, because the AvroCar in the 1950s used the same idea and actually flew. But it wasn't stable. The AvroCar guys knew they needed automatic stability augmentation, but early 1950s control technology wasn't up to doing that. The stability problem should be solveable today, but the fundamental inefficiency problem of pure-thrust VTOL craft remains.

There was lots of enthusiasm for vertical takeoff craft in the 1950s, and quite a few flyable prototypes, some very wierd, were built. Many of them ended up in the Hiller Aviation Museum.

Other than helicopters, the only VTOLs made in any quantity were the Harrier and the Osprey, both of which are used by the USMC. Both operate as pure-thrust aircraft only for takeoff and landing; they're ordinary winged aircraft in cruise.

Kinda reminds me of my first astronomy class. I hadn't even made it to my freshman year of high school and I had 4 credits of Astronomy from the local community college.

Many people have given good advice above. I'll mainly just second their comments. The order I'd proceed in is.

First item, a good beginners star atlas.

Second item, warm clothing.

Third item, many nights in the country just learning the stars and constelations.

After that go and get a good pair of binoculars or a good telescope.

Last, but not least. As your doughter is so young, you will need to be there as a source of infromation. You'll need to learn alot to help guide her in the early years.

Now for some Links. The first two have good beginners information. Some of the links below may be dead. I just quick cut and pasted them from the astronomy section of my Interesting Places page.

• Astronomy Mag. (www.astronomy.com/home.asp).
• Sky & Telescope Mag. (www.skypub.com).
• Minnesota Astronomical Society (MAS) (www.mnastro.org).
• The Telescope Shoppe (www.telescopeshop.com), 3402 Federal Dr., Eagan, MN, 651-688-7335. Yes this is a local Twin Cities telescope shop. They have a map on their site showing where they are. They are tucked in the lower level along the side of the strip mall they are in. The store is small and easy to miss. If your at the corner of Yankee Doodle RD and Federal Dr., park in the lot to the south east. They are a short stones throw from the intersection.
• Telescope making links
• • Many good links on making AltAz mounts (zebu.uoregon.edu/~mbartels/altaz/altaz.html).
  • ATM's resource List (www.freenet.tlh.fl.us/~blombard).
• Astronomy-Mall.com (www.astronomy-mall.com/Astronomy-Mall).
• Stellafane (www.stellafane.com).
• Terrestrial Planet Finder (tpf.jpl.nasa.gov).
• Many Images of the moon (www.seds.org/nineplanets/nineplanets/pxmoon.html) .
• Solar Views (www.solarviews.com).
• Planetary Image Atlas (www-pdsimage.JPL.NASA.GOV/PDS/public/Atlas).
• Hubble Space Telescope Archive (oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pictures.html).
• Hummble Site (hubble.stsci.edu).
• StarStuff (www.starstuff.org).
• SpaceRef (www.spaceref.com), Your space refference.
• Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive (antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html).
• SkyView (skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov) virtual observatory.
• 2MASS (www.ipac.caltech.edu/2mass/) and (pegasus.astro.umass.edu/GradProg/2mass.html) Two Micron All Sky Survey.
• Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) (http://lasco-www.nrl.navy.mil/lasco.html).
• AAVSO Network to Search for Optical Counterparts of Gamma-Ray Bursts (www.aavso.org/grb.stm).
• High Altitude Observatory (www.hao.ucar.edu).
• Asteroid Comet Impact Hazards (impact.arc.nasa.gov).
• • Unusual Minor Planets (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/Unusual.html).
  • Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/PHACloseApp.html).& nbsp; Of particular interest to me are LB16 and AN10 which will pass at a distance closer than the moon's orbit. LB16 currently only has one opposition charted so it's predicted orbit will likely change as new data comes in. It's expected to swing by in 2004. In 2027 AN10 will visit earth. It's orbit is calculated with three oppositions meaning it't much more likely to really showup ontime and in place. With further data LB16 could either get closer or farther away. When AN10's orbit was first predicted (only one opposition at the time) it's error envelope included earth. With further data it was found to just pass within the moon's orbit and miss the earth.
  • Forthcoming Close Approaches To The Earth (cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/lists/CloseApp.html).&nbs p; This is the document to look at when you want to know who will visit next and how far away. It has all close approaches to 0.2 AU away from earth or within 20% of the distance of between the sun and earth. On Sep 19th, 2000 we will have a visiter at 0.0477 AU and on Oct 31st anotehr one will pass at 0.07386 AU. LB16 and AN10 are expected to pass at around 0.25% of the distance between the sun and earth.
• Mars Global Surveyor (mars.jpl.nasa.gov/mgs/index.html).
• Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter (MOLA) (ltpwww.gsfc.nasa.gov/tharsis/mola.html). There are full data on the shape of Mars including 1 degree and .5 degree elevation data sets.
• Planetary photojournal by JPL (photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov).
• NASA's Origins Program (origins.jpl.nasa.gov).

Diskless nodes are much better from the point of view of maintenance and upgrading software on the system. Do it once, on one node (the "master" node with the disk), and all nodes are updated.

Caveat: Using the network for temporary storage hurts performance and doesn't scale if you have a lot of temporary data.

High Performance Computing Hardware

If your parallel process has a lot of communication, you would be using Myrinet, and/or getting a CSPI cluster running Linux, because ethernet is too slow. (You would avoid Mercury and RACEway because they are avoiding Linux.)

Appropriate Parallel Applications:

In short, this system would be good for embarassingly parallel tasks like a brute force search through key space for breaking encryption, or encoding mp3s. In such tasks, each processor only has to communicate at the beginning and ending of the task, and no processor has to communicate with any other processor during the task.

Inappropriate Parallel Applications

This system would not be so good for STAP in RADAR or SONAR.

Kenneth J. Hendrickson

All these archives are searchable from the web site, and (if you've registered with them) available for download. Images from HST and CADC are restricted to only the primary researcher(s) for a period of time (I think it's a year).

You mean Identification, Friend or Foe?
Here is a link that explains the whole thing.

wow.. can we say robocop.. just found this over at navy.mil.

"OTOH there is one huge disadvantage to a UCAV: in a dog-fight, or whenever human perception is needed to reduce the decision tree to something manageable, they will always (well, for the next few decades anyway) be outmanned"

Fighter pilots may be chomping at the bit to get in on this one but the fact does remain...

If one can pull 10G+, use it to get on the tail of a bogey, and while still pulling 10G+, stay there and deliver a knockout blow then you have ALL the advantages. A human cannot maneuver beyond that, or out of the robot range, as they will blackout.

That is all the "decision tree" these things need in close combat (guns or heatseeking missiles).

In the BVR (Beyond Visual Range) shot using the AMRAAM or Sparrow (whatever they may be armed with) they are going to be a bigger handful for any anti-US force than the current primary manned US air-to-air vehicle (F-15) is... why?

The reason is they can shoot and select a new target and then maneuver beyond any threat response (piling on those G's while deploying chaff and flares (if they are onboard) to evade a return missile) better than any human can.

cheers

front

The HARM can be used in different ways. You can fire it off a platform such as the F-4G Wild Weasel. In this case, the EWO (Electronics Warfare Officer) selects a threat, hands that threat to the HARM, and sends the HARM on its way.

But the HARM also carries its own threat table and can be sent after a target with little direction. In this case, a threat is identified in a general area and the HARM is fired. The HARM then looks for threats, identifies the highest priority threat according to its internal table, and then goes after that threat.

These kinds of abilities allow a HARM to be used with platforms not otherwise especially equiped for Wild Weasel missions. It also allows for more creative functions. A pilot can "pickle over the horizon" and send a HARM after a known target without coming in range themselves. And by extending a HARM's fuel capacity, it can "hunt" for an extended period of time awaiting threat radars to power up after hiding from the Wild Weasel aircraft.

Vicous stuff.

The sobering part comes from a few rare reports during the Gulf War. There were reports of "near misses" with HARM missles by friendly surface forces. The theory is that the HARMs mis-identified friendly radar or communications systems as a threat in its internal threat table.

Identify Friend or Foe (IFF) has been around for a long time, but friendly fire casualties still occur. Why? War isn't a perfectly planned effort -- there are million things that can go wrong with an operation. If I was in a deployed military unit, I wouldn't want machines to automatically hunt me down and open fire on me just because my batteries crapped out.

They have begun. For reference, check out the Navy Marine Corps Intranet contract . As a IS worker who has recently left his government contracting job, largely due to this coming, I can say that the government is at least TRYING to do this. The contract basically gives all handling of computer and related tech to contractors. From providing the systems/hardware, to desktop support, to cell phones and PDAs. It has slowly begun to take effect. I jumped ship from my contractor company before it directly affected my job (which would be gone soon, due to this). I wasn't a captain .. no reason to stay aboard as the ship sank. :)

You are right about the gov. computer admins not coming in after hours and such. The one admin who was in charge of our department would regularly leave after his nice little 8 hour day (well... if 7 AM to 2 PM counts as 8 hours). Often we would be explaining to him the big problem we were in the middle of, and he would simply say somehting like "Wow, what a mess. Oh well, I will see you tomorrow."

Shortly before I left, we were in a mad rush to have a major project done, and one user needed a new machine which had been purchased and configured for him, to be set up on his desk and prepared for his use (NT Domain system.. users couldn't log in local, so we had to join the thing to the domain for him, etc.). Anyway, in the middle of this rush, our gov. admin tells the user "Nope, can't do it .. we are too busy." .. then our admin promptly returns to his game of solitaire.

This is not isolated, I am sure. The biggest problem with US gov jobs is that the employees are not fired. Once the initial 90-day evaluation period is passed, it pretty much takes commission of a felony crime to be dismissed. And even that isn't a sure thing. Employees who are not performing their job are not incompetant or failing to perform their duties. It is the job. The job is "not defined properly for the employee". In other words, the gov. needs to give them something more suited to their abilities. Like play-testing solitaire (from my own experience, this was a popular job task).

Now don't get me wrong, there are many government employees who do their job (and the jobs of their co-workers). However, it is the large amount of non-productive workers who are the problem. This is why the government has contractors. If the contractor does not perform, they can be replaced. Quickly (relatively).

Wow, I didn't mean for this to turn into a rant... guess I have more pent-up hostility about my former job than I thought. Time for some therapy... where is my baseball bat?

Zzyzzx

that was the USS Yorktown in the Smart Ship' program that was merely TESTING Windows integrated with all major shipboard systems. Not all of the ships in the navy have this, previous poster is correct that only basic front end stuff runs Windows NT. In fairness to NT they tried to integrate almost all major shipboard services, and did'nt have enough time to really QA their stuff. What happened on the Yorktown could have happened regardless of the OS since it was the software they were using that goofed.

As noted before, this is an old idea - but one that is interesting, and of course, still in development.

Another individual noted that the military was developing an omnidirectional treadmill - this is true. It is part of the dismounted soldier project. Here is a link. Look around his site, under research and publications - you'll find it as a PDF file.

Basically, the treadmill can be thought of as two perpendicularly overlapping treadmills, the belts of which are composed of longitudinal "rows" of rollers along the length of each belt. Thus, when the user is walking in the center of the overlap, the motion vector is translated into X and Y motion, one axis for each belt (it is tough to explain, but once you see the thing, you will smack your head). It works real similarly to a holonomic drive robot, except in reverse. Also, various "terrain" can be simulated by tilting the platform, as well as controlling the belts with active braking/acceleration.

There is also a Japanese "toroidal" omni treadmill, but it is VERY hard to understand (I may have a link to it on my site).

Personally, I don't think any of these devices will see much entertainment or personal use in the future, just because of the scale of the devices, the complexity, and the cost of materials that go into them.

I personally advocate HMD's with tracking devices, because it allows for the most interaction with the virtual environment (ie, you can explore and look around the world easily, and manipulate and examine objects as well).

With that said, though, I think that this guy is onto something, and may make inbounds to the commercial and personal arenas before anyone...

I support the EFF - do you?

By steering laser beams at a rapidly rotating helical surface, you can build a 3D display that doesn't require special glasses and can be viewed simultaneously from all angles. Only slightly off-topic. Here's a descri pti on of a fancy color version, and the photo at the bottom of this page shows one in operation.

As I recall, Digital Convergence did not hestitate to fire off bogus legal threats. This is no "good will" to abuse.

They have a busines plan with a hole large enough to float the USS Truman through. Namely, they hope to profit from a service that can easily be obtained elsewhere for free. They're trying to cover this gaping hole with legal intimidation.

An altruistic outfit might reasonably expect a somewhat altruistic public response. But once the lawyer threats start, forget it.

Bruce Schneier made a pretty good argument argument against cracking contests, in general, in one of his Cryto-Grams. In particular, he notes that "Contest prizes are rarely good incentives.... Taken at a conservative $125 an hour for a competent cryptanalyst, a $10K prize pays for two weeks of work." The contest runs three weeks, and you only get paid if you win. Of course, the contest isn't targeted at "competent cryptanalysts," but isn't that a point worth making?

If you're looking for more ammo for a Slashdot post ridiculing a cracking contest (did I say that out loud?), Bruce links to commentary by Gene Spafford in Electronic CIPHER.

These are the guys who, aside from inexplicable decisions like considering the F-16 a suitable replacement for an A-10, put Windows NT in charge of a cruiser.

The ones in charge clearly don't have any clue whatsoever.

Besides, do you want free software considered to be vital military equipment? That's kind of a scary thought. A little close to the "munitions" argument over encryption software.

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Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.

A lot of these research projects are funded by the millitary, because ad-hoc networks are an obvious solution for situations where you don't have or cannot trust the infrastructured networks (be they wireless or wired).

Both wireless LAN and Bluetooth are capable of ad-hoc networks, but higher layers (the IP layer) must have some form of configuration to talk to each other. This is being developed in the IETF in the MANET and ZeroConf working groups.

Speed of these networks will improve over time, the other developments are at least as important and they will take some more years to mature I believe, so when it all comes together, heaven is upon us ;-)

Another interesting subject is ubiquitos or pervasive Internet. Meaning the accessibility of Internet in all (reasonably capable) devices and in all physical locations.
One complication is that Internet should not just be accessible to the rich, but also the poor and the people in the developing countries (this is important for a lot of reasons, but I digress...)

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It got out of control and they had to wait for it to run out of ammo to manually disable it. But that's just off the top of my head, no sources to quote

Sounds a bit too anecdotal. The Navy does have Phalanx anti-aircraft systems that are for close range defense. The Phalanx is radar guided and tracks its own bullet stream to correct its aim. It shoots something like 4,500 20mm rounds per minute. Even if it went nuts, you wouldn't have to wait long for it to run out of ammo, it only carries 1,500 rounds. here's a link to the site I got my info from.

This voxel acceleration isn't even being pushed for gaming. It's being pushed for Augmented/Virtual Reality surgery and oil drilling types of applications. Sure it'd be nice to have a voxel accelerator so when you blow some guys arm off in a game you can see chuncks fly correctly, but it's more important for other applications. I do research in AR and the fast the accelerator the better. We've already hit walls with $1400 OpenGL accelerators. Sure gaming is nice, but put on a head mounted display and try to make CG things look like they're in the real world and you'll see that acceleration has PLENTY of room to grow.

Links for those interested in AR:
rit.edu
Media Lab
The Navy

There are plenty more out there also. VR stuff looks fine for now, but when you're trying to make CG stuff look like real world stuff and have it line up with real world objects you can use all the acceleration you can get. Untill CG looks real we're not there yet.

And, to join the system (become a junior Time Lord), read up on NTP!!

Don't settle for anything less than UTC for your timekeeping needs.

WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?

And, to join the system (become a junior Time Lord), read up on NTP!!

Don't settle for anything less than UTC for your timekeeping needs.

WWJD -- What Would Jimi Do?