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Sun Tzu's Art of War talks about spies and double spies. This is all older than dirt.

Awesome! That looks like a fairly weighty translation; thanks for the link. I always like to add perspective to my understanding. You may also enjoy this site: Sonshi.com .

They have a slightly more 'translated' translation, and they've removed most of the references to specific weapons/figures/people, to get to the core of the understanding. Their forums are set up to promote discussion of the individual sentences, which is rather cool. And their library is filled with other great works on Strategy & Leadership: The Prince, The Art of War (Machiavelli), On War (Von Clausewitz), Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), and many others.

- DaftShadow

Sonshi.com has one of the best translations of Sun Tzu's The Art of War available anywhere. I've read multiple translations and this one is my personal favorite. Not only can you read the text, but each line of the book has its own thread on their forums, where people gather to discuss each line. To top it all off, access is completely free!

Print out the html pages, drop it into a report-cover, and you have an instant classic.

- DaftShadow

from: http://www.sonshi.com/

Therefore, to gain a hundred victories in a hundred battles is not the highest excellence;

to subjugate the enemy's army without doing battle is the highest of excellence

Therefore, the best warfare strategy is to attack the enemy's plans, next is to attack alliances, next is to attack the army, and the worst is to attack a walled city.

What we just saw was a failed attack on the walled city. Comeon people, this spam stuff is easy. We should be more passive, evasive, quiet, never raising our voices to spammers, never confronting them, yet battling them by proxy, and avoiding them. Use spamassassin to quietly drop email's that are flagged as spam. Use various rules, checks, and metrics to assign probable spam flags to messages, keep your rules up to date, monitor trends, evade and obfuscate.

If the general cannot control his temper and sends troops to swarm the walls, one third of them will be killed, and the city will still not be taken.

This is the kind of calamity when laying siege to a walled city.

Generally in warfare:

* If ten times the enemy's strength, surround them;
* if five times, attack them;
* if double, divide them;
* if equal, be able to fight them;
* if fewer, be able to evade them;
* if weaker, be able to avoid them.

Evade, evade, evade. Avoid, avoid, avoid.

Awww...come on. You just weren't looking looking hard enough.

BTW, Rice is a great place for nanotech (I know, master of the obvious). They're even getting a medical nanotech conference together here accross the street (Texas medical center) on 5/14. It's billed as "bridging the wet and dry divide". Smalley & Hirsch are going to be speaking, along with a bunch of others. I'm going to try to go, if I can get away from the lab for a while.

Why does not firebird thru slashdot not allow me to see a preview? Did slashdot do another upgrade?

MS and The Art Of War on competition

Some grip on reality is needed here. Especially for any article with a quote like, "It dawned on me that the key to survival and victory in today's battlefield is information," said Garcia That pearl of wisdom has been around in written form since Sun Tzu so what vaccuum has this person been working in? That aside look at the various conceptual flaws in the article.

"nature can provide ready-made solutions." is a comment made in many fields including computer science. The problem is that nature developed solutions for a carbon based lifeform. Imitations in silicon, steel, polymers cannot hope to achieve the same results. Flocks of birds do fly but they also eat and their cells reproduce and die. Steel and silicon simply dissipate energy (with nothing close to a Krebs cycle for renewal) and wear out (since repair or replacement of steel or silicon is hideously demanding of energy). So on a very fundamental level, solutions found in nature do not completely translate to the current materials of technology. You can get aspects of them, like the imitation of flapping flight, but not the whole package.

But lest you think, "Fine. We'll go with _some_ of the benefits." Think: what are they? The article says Flapping wings allow insects and birds to fly at low speeds, hover, make sharp turns and even fly backward. The latter cite trying to imitate a hummingbird's flight. A hummingbird's flight can already be imitated by helicopters and even the V-22 Osprey. But both the helicopter and the Osprey achieve the desired result (within bounds dictated by inertia and thrust-to-weight ratios) with a structure evolved for maximum efficiency given the materials i.e. the propeller. Even if you are utterly fanatic and feel that flapping is the way to go, consider further the imitation of a hummingbird. The birds virtually eat constantly. In fact, you could argue that the researchers haven't looked to nature very closely for their solutions. Even if you could translate the physical properties of a hummingbird to a machine, nature itself demonstrates that the energy requirements are huge for that type of flight. At least the researchers acknowledge this at the end of the article but the impression is more that it is an afterthought rather than an evident truth even before the research had started.

And is the flapping flight really the goal of ornithopters in this article? In this article it's a flock of small, lightweight robots hovering over Martian land rovers and guiding them to places of interest that seems to be the pitch. So what advantage do ornithopters have over other "eye in the sky" objects like helicopters, blimps, gliders, or high power satellite cameras? There don't seem to be any.

At this point one might even ask, how appropriate is a solution inspired by nature (on Earth) to the environment on Mars? Environments on Earth that are similar to Mars don't have an abundance of life because there isn't much to support the energy requirements of life. Therefore a solution based on "nature" is arguably inappropriate.

And finally, Mars exploration has top priority at the CSA. Sorry but Canada officially bowed out of its option to participate in the Mars exploration program via lack of federal funding. Maybe some Canadian companies will keep their hand in without the CSA but odds are NASA will buy American, and why not?

(As for the submitter's comments, let's put on our thinking caps people. What kind of ride would people in the hull of a flapping aircraft get? Replacement for the Osprey indeed!)

"You should only bother reading The Art of Deception if you know next to nothing about the human aspect of security and then only if you really think you are safe."

The only book on "The Art of Deception" one should read is this one.