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Apparently, EM pulses have also been studied by the Pentagon for fighting fires http://www.stormingmedia.us/97/9736/A973683.html

Perk? Maybe not, but caffeine improves focus, cognition, and memory recall. At least that is what these studies show, and most of them account for withdraw.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=21812869
http://www.springerlink.com/content/y414x83288221635/
http://www.stormingmedia.us/28/2891/A289133.html
http://www.springerlink.com/content/yj8v0h54w05x222q/
http://arno.unimaas.nl/show.cgi?fid=7943
http://heldref.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,6,9;journal,31,55;linkingpublicationresults,1:119922,1
http://www.springerlink.com/content/a7k04226627g6326/

You've been watching too much CSI. I believe what they mean is that they can see if a large heat source exists behind a cement wall. Walls are very good insulators and *stop* heat. With an infrared camera, you can barely even see through a sheet of glass! It's a passive sensor, detecting the heat that the object gives off, and giving that temperature a color in the image. To get an idea of heat blocking capabilities, turn on your reflector space heater, which is a incredibly powerful IR source, shine it at a window, and go outside. Chances are, you wont be able to feel *anything*.

Currently, the only way to see through walls, which *is* possible, is to use THz (link 1, 2), Xray, and UWB. These are active devices that transmit and receive reflected signals, then construct and image.

And, before someone brings up that infrared is in the THz band, "Low frequency versions of terahertz waves are known as millimeter waves, and they behave much like radio waves. At higher frequencies, the terahertz waves straddle the border between radio and optical emissions." from space.com. From the IEEE paper, "(0.6 to 3 THz) offer a greater degree of penetration through architectural and textile materials", so they're using the looow range.

If you're worried about people seeing through your walls, maybe you should turn off your wifi! :-o

There's any number of technologies which would be convenient here. Micro-missiles, for example. Or rail guns. (They didn't specify gauss gun, rail gun, etc. No idea which they meant here.) Homing bullets are actually in development - they don't exactly turn corners or anything, but make corrections. You also don't need a homing projectile at all; all you really need is a scout vehicle with passive detection and sighting, and a mortar at another location.

One'd think that the cognizant city, state, county, and federal agencies would have building plans prior to issuing permits, and emergency plans for emergency response.

i would think there'd have been a requirement to install Halon 1301 or its successor/s (but not PKP, due to nasty corrosion effects...) to trip after evacuation of personnel. With all those magnets around, a magnetic trip mechanism could work if mechanical linkages fail or are burned out, releasing the agent.

(Assumption here) For a fire department to arrive without KNOWING the particulars of the site, and not using time en route to ascertain the particulars is not very effective -- IF that is the case here. Still, employees of such facilities need to be REQUIRED to be first responders.

http://www.periphman.com/fire/fire-suppression-systems.shtml

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&hs=5vd&q=halon+fire+suppression+system+corrosion&btnG=Search

But, i know when aboard ship, we were trained that if the helo crashed on our flight deck, and the fuel tanks ruptured and ignited due to friction or electrical ignition, the landing gear (made of alloys... magnesium and or titanium, IIRC) WOULD burn like hell and there was no point in trying to salvage the helo NOR in trying to suppress the fire. The main recourse would be to use a forklift or brute manpower to jettison it. Failing that, the ship would have to make hard rolls at speed (assuming we were underway AT a decent clip) and toss it off that way. Otherwise, the bird would burn down into the hull very quickly and then there'd be NO removal and it would continue to burn down into the hull.

For INSIDE fires involving exotics, sand and constant water deluge could COOL, but not necessarily extinguish the burning. The danger there is that aboard ship (particularly one not underway (not moving; AT SEA doesn't mean "underway", a ship not making headway (forward movement) is either anchored, station-keeping, or if stopped, "underway with no way on"...), shipping (taking on) huge amounts of shifting ballast (fire-fighting water) could lead to stability issues or restricted maneuvering to keep it inside flooding boundaries or to manage drainage.

http://www.chaoticsynapticactivity.com/2006/05/17/the-morning-of-the-attack-on-the-uss-stark-ffg-31/

Fire Fighting Appliances
http://www.mcaorals.co.uk/Firefighting%20Appliances.htm

Stability

At Shipboard Fires
http://www.marinefirefighting.com/Pages/Newsletters/Newsletter6.htm

THE IMPACT OF THE USS FORRESTAL'S 1967 FIRE ON UNITED STATES NAVY ...
http://www.stormingmedia.us/30/3019/A301924.pdf

Physical memory analysis is an up and coming challenge for many law enforcement agencies. How can you guarantee that a suspect's computer was not infected by some bad memory-only malware? Current tools only address the hard drive and what it contains. There has been a lot of research into physical memory analysis over the past few years:

Rootkit.com: has been researching physical memory for years http://www.rootkit.com/newsread.php?newsid=130, but in a slightly different context (hiding vs finding).

BlackHat Talks:
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-federal-06/BH-Fed-06-Burdach/bh-fed-06-burdach-up.pdf
http://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-usa-07/Butler_and_Kendall/Presentation/bh-usa-07-butler_and_kendall.pdf

Papers: http://www.stormingmedia.us/50/5037/A503754.html
FatKit: http://www.4tphi.net/fatkit/
Contests: The Digital Forensics Research Workshop is running a Challenge to see who can create the best linux physical memory analysis tool: http://dfrws.org/2008/challenge/index.shtml

Now the commercial world is entering the fray: http://www.hbgary.com/hbgary_responder_datasheet.pdf

I'm looking forward to using some tools that don't require me to keep a notebook of esoteric command lines and a usb key full of dependencies. Not to mention some report friendly output. Should be a good year!

http://www.stormingmedia.us/40/4026/A402640.html

I wonder if they have a collection or recycling mechanism for the dead/mulfunctioning/washed-up ones, otherwise I can't help point out the irony that in the process of studying the environment (in order to be friendlier to it) you pollute the hell out of it.

While in principal, I'd agree that research devices shouldn't pollute, your phrasing is a bit hyperbolic. Do you realize the magnitude of the junk we toss into ocean? The Argo bots are insignificant. Don't get your knickers all in a twist about little crap like that. Worry about the big stuff. That said, I'd sure like to find one tossed up on the shore. Much more useful than the usual stuff we find.

Shouldn't / Doesn't the definition of an airplane include the vehicle achieving flight primarily through the exploitation of aerodynamic forces, instead of primarily through the expulsion of reaction mass? The Blue Origin vehicle (if the picture on the cover of the FAA Draft is any guide) has no wings, it looks like the DC-X.

If a vehicle has wings or a lifting body, and flies by using the lift generated by those wings or the lifting body, then it is an plane. If the vehicle travels exclusively through the atmosphere using aerodynamic lift, then I'd say it is an airplane (driven by gravity, propellers, jets, or rockets). If part of the operational envelope includes operation beyond the 62 mile (100km) altitude normally defined as the limit of space but it still has aerodynamic lift generating elements used for takeoff, cruise (think of the "skipping" designs), or landing, then it is a spaceplane. The shuttle is a spaceplane. Spaceship1 is a spaceplane.

What then is the Blue Origin vehicle? It doesn't have any (as far as I can tell) any lift generating surfaces, so it cannot be a plane of any sort. Is it a manned rocket? According to pedants in the thread, rocket applies only to the means of propulsion, so I'll play along and say no. Is it a missile? How about a manned (what it carries), sub-orbital (altitude envelope), ballistic (flight profile), missile (type of vehicle)?

According to a quick Google, ALONtm or Aluminum Oxynitride (which is obviously NOT Aluminum Oxide) was first developed by Raytheon pre 1987 Ref. Army Material Tech Lab . That was when the report was made public. Since Star Trek IV was filmed in 1985 and released in 1986 it is reasonable to presume that one of the marvellous Trek writers or Tech consultants was actually aware of the existence of this material and wrote it in expecting it to become a popular material in the future. What has happened here is that Surmet Corp in conjunction with Raytheon has developed a superior method of manufacturing the material which finally seems to make it a viable material for mass production. Since this material is technically a ceramic it's not hard to understand why its so much stronger and harder than glass, which at the molecular level is a liquid. It would also have vastly superior heat resistance which will be a good thing for it's applications in the aerospace industry.

Here is a 1987 report on this material. Man, this is news?

Transparent Aluminum has been around for quite some time now. The public knew about it even before the military published a report about it.

You cannot be serious. The flood control down there has been inadequate for at least half a century. Some of the pumping stations that are still in use were built a hundred years ago. They have screw pumps made of wood which are now national historic landmarks. Very advanced for the time but hopelessly antiquated now.

Bill Clinton had a chance to fix this, as did every Republican and Democratic president of modern times. It's ludicrous to hang it all on Bush.

-ccm

The proton-boron method using a laser reminds me of colliding beam fusion, which I first heard about in 1997. Interesting thing here is that energy capture occurs electromagnetically using a "decelerator." Read about it at:

http://fusion.ps.uci.edu/beam/introb.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/278/534 2/1419?ijkey=A.zNwOzIwyrKA
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/281/537 5/307a
http://www.stormingmedia.us/01/0116/A011653.html

Clinically dead just means their heart and brain activity have stopped as far as I can see.

They can reverse it after the surgery.

I found this link,
http://www.stormingmedia.us/30/3027/A302724.html

Not the most readable thing but you can see what they do.

You are completely ignorant of the basics of English, so your comment has been ignored.

I bothered to read up a little more and came across this abstract discussing the waste output from such reactors, and it seems that they actually produce more waste than the current type of reactor in use.

Still, you have much the same problem as with any booby-trap, which is why civilized people tend to frown on it...

Uhh... yeah.

The guy who's listed in the document as the project lead (Frank B. Mead, Jr.) has done some other work with frickin' lasers.

comes from building hardware for a specific task. Unfortunately most of you can't access this little bit of nerd heaven but some incredibly cool hardware architectures are being described at the High Performance Embedded Computing conference. Sky and Mercury have some of their hottest new designs here. How about a machine that can do a 256 mega-sample FFT in real time?, or a self configuring supercomputer on a chip? Of course most of these tricks will never escape the lab except for the speed-ups for rendering engines...one place where gamers and the DOD are driving technology in a dead heat race with lots of winners. Besides, in a few months, something will come along that will go even faster than blue gene.

"But even with these enhancements, it's been conclusively shown that some problems are intractable for neural networks. In any case, neural networks are no new thing."

Not so. Maybe you're still thinking about extremely simple neural nets, because no such proof of intractability exists for larger more complex networks.

Here's proof: Neural Networks can emulate a Universal Turing Machine. Since they can also be emulated by a UTM their limitations are no greater or less than those of any UTM. One citation if this isn't obviously true.

This is exactly why Marvin Minsky has been accused of slandering neural nets unfairly, and hindering AI research. In his book _Perceptrons_ he demonstrated a simple problem that a trivial (one or two layers with no feedback) NN can't solve. A lot of scientists wrote off Neural Nets just as you have, because a toy was the only tool used. Never mind the fact that an only slightly more complex NN can solve such a problem easily. I find it telling that for a human to solve the same problem, one has to construct a strategy to do it. Not the sort of thing I'd assume any extremely simple machine could do. These days Minsky complains that AI isn't trying to build human brains. He's a brilliant man, but in some cases (as with many famous people) his chutzpah occasionally outstrips his judgement. I only wish that great scientists were immune to this.

Lots of less qualified people complain that neural nets aren't useful because they have some unpleasant experience with them. They have no idea of the variety of neural nets. It's like using a Playstation and complaining that computers are not useful.

As for spam filtering with AI, unless you have the narrow definition of AI, the Bayesian techniques of SpamAssassin are AI, as is the Latent Semantic Analysis done by OSX mail.app for spam filtering. LSA, while computationally expensive on a PC, is regarded as equivalent to a particular type of 3 layer neural net, (see Kohonen self-organizing maps.)

One thing you have right. Neural nets are "no new thing." They're as old as biological brains. Novelty is not a criterion for usefulness.

I'm honestly a bit concerned as to how they plan to apply this to human subjects. Prohibitin isn't restricted to human white fat. It has other applications in the human body; it's a potential tumor suppressor protein, for one. If they cut this thing out, I'd bet my left arm that we'd see instances of breast cancer shoot up.

The concept behind stealth is simply to build aircraft with geometry that minimizes reflections directly back towards the source. It's the inverse of a corner reflector, which sends most of the energy back in the direction it came. The geometry to do this is complicated, but the concept is simple.

But the stealth approach fails if the radar transmitter and receiver are at different locations. Such "bistatic radar" systems can overcome stealth. See "Bistatic Radar Cross Section (RCS) Characterization of Complex Objects".

Multiple emitters and receivers are even better. See "A Dispersed Radar Concept for Air Defense". This 1981 paper from the US Army Missile Command outlines the basic concepts of a distributed radar system. 1981 was too early to build such a system, but it's worth looking at the technology again today.

With the basics covered, we can now architect a system, designed, say, to cover a nation's capital and outlying areas. A basic system might use medium-sized phased-array antennas perhaps a meter or two across, placed flat on rooftops. Stations would be placed about one kilometer apart. Each station needs a radar transmitter of modest power (comparable to a microwave oven), a good receiver, some DSP and SAW processing power, a GPS receiver, a good clock, a general-purpose CPU running Linux, an RF data link to its neighbors, and a broadband connection to an air defense center.

With that hardware, all of which is available off the shelf, it becomes a software problem.

First, we need a network. All the nodes need to link up, preferably using encrypted IPv6. Linkup should occur both over the broadband connection and the RF data links, so that if the broadband connection goes out, the radars can use their own RF net to intercommunicate. As long as the air defense centers can contact a few nodes of the net, they can still get a radar picture.

The nodes need to know their own location, hence the GPS receiver. But once installed, they save that data in non-volatile memory, so that they can survive GPS outages caused by hostile action. GPS can also be used to get the time. But, again, it can't be relied on. Using NNTP over the RF network will allow nodes to synch up with a precision of tens of nanoseconds, which is needed for the radar signal processing. Provided, of course, the RF links have low latency and jitter.

In operation, only some nodes emit radar pulses, and emitting nodes take turns. The other nodes listen for echoes. Off-axis echoes from stealth aircraft will show up somewhere in the net. Ordinary aircraft will show up as well.

Some of the emitters may be taken out by HARM missiles. That's why all nodes are potential emitters, but most don't normally transmit. Damage to the net is routed around by telling passive stations to go active. Gaps in the net are thus filled in automatically.

Some fraction of antenna time is used to detect and locate jammers. Most of the illusions created by jammers fail when multiple, synchronized stations are listening. Receivers must have delay lines that can record what was received in a chosen time slot, then play that back more slowly into the local computer. Nodes share these timestamped samples with their neighbors over a peer to peer network. Each node then correlates its samples with ones from its neighbors, looking for time-shifted matches. Four or more matching samples, received at different locations, will yield the coordinates of a target.

So that's a basic design for an open-source air defense system.

The concept behind stealth is simply to build aircraft with geometry that minimizes reflections directly back towards the source. It's the inverse of a corner reflector, which sends most of the energy back in the direction it came. The geometry to do this is complicated, but the concept is simple.

But the stealth approach fails if the radar transmitter and receiver are at different locations. Such "bistatic radar" systems can overcome stealth. See "Bistatic Radar Cross Section (RCS) Characterization of Complex Objects".

Multiple emitters and receivers are even better. See "A Dispersed Radar Concept for Air Defense". This 1981 paper from the US Army Missile Command outlines the basic concepts of a distributed radar system. 1981 was too early to build such a system, but it's worth looking at the technology again today.

With the basics covered, we can now architect a system, designed, say, to cover a nation's capital and outlying areas. A basic system might use medium-sized phased-array antennas perhaps a meter or two across, placed flat on rooftops. Stations would be placed about one kilometer apart. Each station needs a radar transmitter of modest power (comparable to a microwave oven), a good receiver, some DSP and SAW processing power, a GPS receiver, a good clock, a general-purpose CPU running Linux, an RF data link to its neighbors, and a broadband connection to an air defense center.

With that hardware, all of which is available off the shelf, it becomes a software problem.

First, we need a network. All the nodes need to link up, preferably using encrypted IPv6. Linkup should occur both over the broadband connection and the RF data links, so that if the broadband connection goes out, the radars can use their own RF net to intercommunicate. As long as the air defense centers can contact a few nodes of the net, they can still get a radar picture.

The nodes need to know their own location, hence the GPS receiver. But once installed, they save that data in non-volatile memory, so that they can survive GPS outages caused by hostile action. GPS can also be used to get the time. But, again, it can't be relied on. Using NNTP over the RF network will allow nodes to synch up with a precision of tens of nanoseconds, which is needed for the radar signal processing. Provided, of course, the RF links have low latency and jitter.

In operation, only some nodes emit radar pulses, and emitting nodes take turns. The other nodes listen for echoes. Off-axis echoes from stealth aircraft will show up somewhere in the net. Ordinary aircraft will show up as well.

Some of the emitters may be taken out by HARM missiles. That's why all nodes are potential emitters, but most don't normally transmit. Damage to the net is routed around by telling passive stations to go active. Gaps in the net are thus filled in automatically.

Some fraction of antenna time is used to detect and locate jammers. Most of the illusions created by jammers fail when multiple, synchronized stations are listening. Receivers must have delay lines that can record what was received in a chosen time slot, then play that back more slowly into the local computer. Nodes share these timestamped samples with their neighbors over a peer to peer network. Each node then correlates its samples with ones from its neighbors, looking for time-shifted matches. Four or more matching samples, received at different locations, will yield the coordinates of a target.

So that's a basic design for an open-source air defense system.