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The BLU-82 Commando Vault (also known as the Daisy Cutter) is a 15,000 lb. thermobaric bomb, not "hyperbaric" as he calls it (although I suppose it makes sense in the way he uses it). And they certainly aren't dropped from unmanned planes. They are pushed out on skids from the back of Special Operations C-130s (or perhaps AC-130s).

For more on the Daisy Cutter and other thermobaric weapons, check the following links:

• Fuel air explosives
• In Afghanistan
• Psychological effect
• FAE animation
• Gulf War usage

Also notable: The bomb used in the beginning of Outbreak (1995) was a fuel air explosive similar to the Daisy Cutter.

OK, I'm no engineer, and I never really looked at this idea before I read your jibe. But if I understand this explanation of laser propulsion, there's no reason the thrust has to be strictly vertical. The thrust comes out of a nozzle, just as with a chemical rocket.

The CDC reports taht the vaccine is 93% effective. Which is much better than the 5% who survive without it, but it still sounds like even with a vaccinated US the terrorists could kill a fair number of people. Even according to the military the vaccine has some side effects that sound pretty nasty, but then I have no medical training so I have no idea how it compares to other vaccines. The military also reports that antibiotics can be effective if administered before symptoms appear. I have no idea how often or if it's true. I must admit I'm puzzled why there's so much trouble producing the vaccine. Louis Pasteur made an anthrax vaccine for animals in the 19C and the current human vaccine isn't looking to be a spring chicken either so it seems like pretty established tech. Seems more like the blocks are more incomptenance and buracracy.

In many ways I find smallpox scarier than anthrax, because it can be person to person transmitted. On this one, however, the US government does not appear to be completely asleep at the switch. It has ordered up 40 million doses of vaccine, but they won't be ready till 04. Oh well, hope the terrorists wait three years and I'm one of the lucky ones.

The CDC reports taht the vaccine is 93% effective. Which is much better than the 5% who survive without it, but it still sounds like even with a vaccinated US the terrorists could kill a fair number of people. Even according to the military the vaccine has some side effects that sound pretty nasty, but then I have no medical training so I have no idea how it compares to other vaccines. The military also reports that antibiotics can be effective if administered before symptoms appear. I have no idea how often or if it's true. I must admit I'm puzzled why there's so much trouble producing the vaccine. Louis Pasteur made an anthrax vaccine for animals in the 19C and the current human vaccine isn't looking to be a spring chicken either so it seems like pretty established tech. Seems more like the blocks are more incomptenance and buracracy.

In many ways I find smallpox scarier than anthrax, because it can be person to person transmitted. On this one, however, the US government does not appear to be completely asleep at the switch. It has ordered up 40 million doses of vaccine, but they won't be ready till 04. Oh well, hope the terrorists wait three years and I'm one of the lucky ones.

I've contacted several FBI employment offices via phone as well as the FBI employment websites, even checked the C3I and the DSS and the NSA websites.

There are no listings of a "Computer Hacker Extraordinaire" position.

Perhaps, the Cult of the Dead Cows are hiring...

We have met the enemy and he is us

Better endurance figures are contained in the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation Annual Report to Congress. The numbers quoted will also likely be reduced significantly because of the additional drag of the missile and associated wing modifications.

You do that, and they'll come back with something even more terrifying. Ebola, anthrax, take your pick.

Hehe once again idiocy rears it's ugly head. Anthrax isn't nearly the threat that idiots on Slashdot seem to think it is. Certainly nothing compared to leveling a country.

That's easy, here's a few examples:

Gore initiated the National Performance Review. The 1993 report from his office asserts, "The answer for every problem cannot always be another program or more money. It is time to radically change the way the government operates--to shift from top-down bureaucracy to entrepreneurial government that empowers citizens and communities to change our country from the bottom up." I'm sure you'll dispute the $108 billion that its analysis shows to have been saved by the federal government. The report.

The Committee on Governmental Affairs of the US Senate filed a report in 2000 analyzing the Clinton administration's "Reinventing Government Initiative". Among its findings: "Substantial downsizing of the federal workforce has in fact occurred--but substantial issues remain. Federal civilian employment is now at 1.8 million, its lowest level since 1960. During the Clinton administration, it has dropped 19 percent. The reductions are unquestionably real." The report.

Did you sleep through the entire campaign? The only reason Gore even came close was by blatantly lying about Bush's tax cuts (the "over half the benefit goes to the richest 1%" bull***t) and Social Security reforms (it's a "risky scheme" to invest in money market funds, far safer to hand it over to the government and hope that when you retire they'll give you some of it back by taxing the hell out of your grandchildren.)

I wish I had slept through it! Come on, be serious with this stuff. Bush wants to cut taxes big time for the richest people, he's explicitly admitted that. And I can't believe anyone seriously would be willing to try the Social-Security-in-the-stock-market scheme. The whole point to Social Security is that it guarantees a certain payment, not some unknown speculative value! I suppose you need support for that as well... here's Al Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, on the subject:

Asked about the President's plan to put approximately one-quarter of Social Security funds into the stock market, Greenspan said, "Let me just say it's not so much a trade-off of benefits versus costs. I'm frankly just hard-pressed to find any benefits there are in doing it." -- WH Bulletin, 1/20/99

"There is really no strong evidence to suggest any positive aspects of moving Social Security funds into equities," Greenspan, the chief architect of the government's last major revisions to Social Security 16 years ago, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee. From the Washington Post.

First off, the C-5 has been out of production for some time, and half of the fleet is essentially being parted out to support the other half. Cost: $184 million per unit, plus additional cost for reopening the production lines.

Secondly, the C-141 is too small for the job. The 747 freighter can carry about 2.5 times what the StarLifter can carry- it just can't carry the laser and all the equipment needed to aim it. In addition, the fleet is aging rapidly.

Just for kicks, I'll throw in the C-17, too. The C-17 is is twice as expensive, can travel half as far, and carries half the payload of a 747. Cost: $348 million per unit, average.

Plus, all of these are designed for cargo operations with easy unloading capabilities (like the ramp in the back). You don't really need that type of capability for this job. And, the list price on the 747-400F is $145 million per plane. That's a new aircraft, ready to be modified.

As for the danger in putting a 'civilian' aircraft to use, we already employ DC-10s as tankers, 767s as AWACS units, 707s for all types of things, and the occasional 737 for airlift. It's nothing new- it's simply another airframe. And if they do in fact shoot down a civilian aircraft, whoever the agressor is has just lost the propaganda war- a really really really bad move (think:pearl harbor style, you're shooting our civilians down, the enemy is pure evil backlash across the world). They'll be careful not to pull something like that.

P.S. I am not a troll, and did not post the first reply. Have a nice day.

What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?

Here's a report from 1999 on the status of the project.

Depleted uranium isn't killing anybody. You get more exposure from a week in the Alps than you get from depleted uranium. Take a look at some facts.

"That fat, dumb, and bald guy sure plays a mean hardball."

Indeed you are very correct,and if we look at this website.. we see that it is infact done in HTML as well! http://www.anthrax.osd.mil/HTML_interface/default. html and looks just as good =) granted they don't know what they are doing with graphics.. since I"m running here at 800x600 and the right frame is in scroll bars... but...

http://www.anthrax.osd.mil/Flash_interface/intro.h tml

Basically, all the real security in this system was controlling physical access to the terminals (the terminal room was guarded by a door with an electronic or mechanical push button lock and you had to know the access code to get in), and controlling access to the removable media (it had to be locked in a safe when not being used).

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Anybody who wanted to could pack up as much classified information as they wanted into their briefcase, and walk out the front door with it. The security guards were there to prevent people without badges from getting in without being on the regular hourly tour, and without having their bags (purses, backpacks, etc...) pass through the scanner. There wasn't anybody there to help ensure that you didn't take classified stuff out of the building -- you were on the honor system.

In addition, if you had a badge, you just sailed right through the security checkpoints, without ever passing through the scanner or having your bags scanned. You could be bringing in C4 plastique by the briefcase full, and they'd never know -- Well, at least not until a quarter of the building was blown up. ;-)

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When I left, the only reason that my badges got turned back in was because I didn't want the damn things, and I hand-carried them and all the paperwork around to make sure that I got rid of anything that could potentially allow me to get back into the building as if I were an employee.

Speaking of which, the badges were a joke. I could have printed up better-looking ones off my ink-jet printer and laminated them myself. It sure would have been trivially easy to make some fake ones this way. Jeez, Louise....

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Later, when they started work on replacing the WWMCCS systems, they named the new project GCCS -- Global Command and Control System, and called it "geeks". Originally, they were going to use /etc/hosts files to control name to IP address translation, but as the Domain Technical Point of Contact for DISA.MIL, I managed to convince them that they should use the DNS instead. Sigh...

Oh, and it was all built on top of Solaris 2.2 (wanna make me puke?) running on original Sun SPARC 10 and SPARC 20 computers.

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Granted, with WWMCCS, these guys had what amounted to newsgroups and mailing lists years and decades before anyone else, and with the new GCCS systems each desktop machine was far more powerful than the old Honeywell mainframes they were replacing, but their mindsets never changed -- all real security comes from controlling physical access to the machines and the computers that can access them.

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Wanna hear something funny? When I went to Assistant Security Monitor training, they told me that Top Secret stuff had to be assumed to be in the hands of the enemy within six months of it being generated. Stuff classified Secret took only one to two months, and stuff classified Confidential had to be assumed to be in their hands as soon as it was produced.
--
Brad Knowles

Upfront disclaimer: I work for Apple iServices, and was only peripherally involved with this project which was shifted to a different contractor shortly after I joined. Nevertheless, there was a wealth of information that was floating around the office at that time in terms of lessons learned, architectural discussions, etc.

CHCS and its follow-on, CHCS II, are electronic medical records systems for the U.S. Department of Defense that are supposed to do basically what your organization wants. It's a monstrously complex endeavour, spanning all of the major arms of service, so that records can follow an injured serviceman as he is moved to different locations -- e.g. a Marine is injured in an exercise in Norway, evacuated to the Air Force base hospital in Ramstein, Germany, eventually sent home to Bethesda Naval Medical Hospital, then sent for follow-up physical therapy at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. While this is more dispersed geographically than most situations, it is more a matter of scale than anything else. A medical records system will encounter similar issues and challenges as a patient moves from an emergency hostpital close to the scene of an accident to a hospital close to home for recuperation to their doctor's office to a physical therapy out-patient clinic.

Four things that you will need to consider as you look into systems are:

1) Patient confidentiality - Who has ownership of the records? Who should be allowed to see them? Who should be allowed to see them for a short time, and then cut off?

2) Ease of use - We got bit on the ass big-time by this one. Many physicians see their time as extremely valuable, and hate anything that takes more time than the current system for them. (I get the feeling that this is one reason why their handwriting is so bad on average -- they're rushing through the writeup.) Most of them are slow typists, so entering data into a screen, especially free-form notes, is a slow process for them. There was a lot of resistance to using the system as a result of this.

3) Scalability - To be blunt, this is an enterprise-scale task at the high end of things, and Linux and the *BSD's have not yet proven themselves to be players at this level. The requirements for availability, uptime, backup, etc. are such that you really ought to be looking at high-end Sun, IBM, HP, or similar sorts of systems. Forget about using mySQL -- it doesn't do ACID; any system needs to be based on something like Postgres, or a high-end commercial database like Oracle or Informix or Sybase.

4) Integration with legacy systems - This is a major task, as I am willing to be serious money that there are existing systems that have records for different departments in your hospital system. Some of them will be on relational DB's, but some will be on other sorts of systems based on M/MUMPS.

In summary, this is a major undertaking at an enterprise scale. The direct cost of the OS and other software will be a relatively small fraction of the cost. The lion's share of the cost will be from the necessary customization and systems integration that needs to happen, followed by the cost of the necessary systems administration and aftercare. Although open source software may give you peace of mind and low upfront acquisition costs, the fact of the matter is that you get what you pay for in this arena.

There are darn few organizations that have the money to burn like the Department of Defense, to do an entirely new project. There are existing medical records packages that operate at this scale designed to run on mainframes and the like. Even a high-end multi-processor Intel-based systems is no match for the truly enterprise scale systems that were designed that way from the ground up.


--Paul

If I remember correctly, the military is working with a technology known as Active Caomouflage. This system would allow a soldier's uniform or a tactical vehicle's camouflage netting to analyze the light signatures of the surrounding terrain and mimic these signatures thus integrating the soldier or vehicle into the surrounding area. There is an army Submission of Proposal for this technology. Read about it here. From what I understand, the candidate would wear a special suit lined with fiber optic cabling which would dynamically integrage the wearer into his surroundings. There was also a special on the Discovery Channel last year about this technology but I can find no reference to the programme on their website.

I did some work with Integrated Magnetoelectronics (IME), a small company that's developing a nonvolatile *solid-state* memory--solid state meaning it has no moving parts that would slow retrieval times *AND* is random access, unlike flash, which is also solid-state. Also based on GMR, it's called PRAMM (permanent random access memory). It basically works exactly the same as the old addressable nonvolatile core memories from the 60s and 70s, but only much smaller--the GMR effect allows the size of the charges to be reduced so that a few hundred megabytes don't take up an entire basement ;-).

I cowrote an article about it: Magnetic Field of Dreams--if I could plug my own stuff so crassly.

Like every other nonvolatile RAM maker, IME are still in the kilobyte-stage of prototyping and who knows if it'll scale. It would be great if it would though--if so, imagine accessing your entire hard drive as quickly as you would RAM and having your screen return to where it was when the cat tripped over and pulled out the plug . . .

Joab

http://www.cdi.org/Issues/Nuk eAccidents/accidents.htm

Q: Why didn't you tell us about these problems last fall after the first test? I mean, why are we hearing about this now?

SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Honestly?

Q: Sure.

SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Didn't see then as problems.

Q: What? SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Didn't see them as a problem. I mean, and maybe it's because we're lowly material developers -- you know, all we do is test. But, yeah, there's anomalies that happen on every test. And in fact, I would be concerned when we start doing tests if we don't have anomalies.

Q: The question is why you didn't tell us about the anomaly?

SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: My answer? Didn't think it was that important, to be honest with you.

Q: We were told last fall it was a successful test, things went well.

SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Yes. Yes. And it did. And I will say the same thing. It was a successful test; went well. Were there anomalies? Sure.

Q: Well why weren't we told about them?

SR. DEFENSE OFFICIAL: Didn't think it was that big of a deal. To be honest, I --