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All agriculture is irrigated and in 1992 the water managed area was estimated at about 1.6 million ha, all equipped for full/partial control irrigation. Surface irrigation [i.e. row watering, like my dad used to do] is practiced on the old agricultural lands, cultivated since before 1975, which represent about 34% of the irrigated area (Figure 3). Sprinkler irrigation is practiced on about 64% of the irrigated areas. The central pivot sprinkler system covers practically all the lands cropped with cereals.

Oh.

According to this:

Project Phoenix, under the direction of Dr. Jill Tarter, who had worked on MOP when she was at NASA, was a continuation of the Targeted Search program, studying 710 Sunlike stars within 150 light-years of the Earth. Phoenix used the 64-meter Parkes radio telescope in Australia, the 43-meter telescope at Green Banks, and the Arecibo dish, searching 70 million channels across a bandwidth of 1,800 MHz. The search was said to be capable of picking up any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. Phoenix was completed in March 2004, with negative results.

It gets better if you assume we have a dedicated facility on both ends, two Arecibo radio telescopes (305m each) should be able to communicate halfway to the center of the galaxy. But if you're taking about a low-power radio broadcast, then that would take a huge, huge antenna. Then again, they've done some crazy things with arrays of antennas, so who knows. Certainly we're not so silent that we can't get noticed.

Yep, our TV and radio signals are practically omnidirectional since we want lots of people to receive them. Also, we haven't used more power than we strictly need so the sum of those factors is that it'd be practically undetectable outside Earth. That said, we have sent much stronger signals than that, we've run SETI experiments that was supposed to detect any transmitter about as powerful as an airport radar within 200 light-years. So a somewhat powerful, directed beam should be plenty.

The more practical issue with us accidentally intercepting any broadcast is that we've pretty quickly moved to complex compression algorithms that resemble pure noise. And while we're now using a lot more mobile equipment, for the long haul more and more goes via cable and fiber, not broadcasts. In short, neither side is likely to discover each other by accident. Most likely we will need to "ping" planets, set up some powerful array, send a simple sequence like for example the primes they can detect and some message after that. Or try finding someone that's pinged us.

We were working on these well before modern times and 1950 to 1960 sounds about right. http://www.vectorsite.net/twcruz_3.html

And none of them have ever worked well enough to produce. See http://www.vectorsite.net/avplatfm.html for the long, sad history of DARPA's drive to fly.

Footnote, as it is in the link above, about the Avro Aircar. When it wouldn't work right, some of the engineers suggested putting a skirt around the edge to catch the blow-down and make it float on an air cushion. They head engineer refused to try it. Had he tried it, Avro might have gotten rich. Instead they failed. But less than 5 years later the Army was flying equipment into ports in Viet Nam too shallow for too far out to get their ROROs (roll on, roll off) ferry ships into, using their own hovercraft, usually called "blow boats". And they're still using them. And of the head engineer? Who knows. But the Avro aircar was finally taken off display outside the Army Transportation Museum at Ft. Eustis VA because nobody had the money to scrape off the rust and repaint it. They're still using the blow boats, AFAIK at Ft. Story (Va. Beach, VA) and in Hawaii.

Churchill called it the Wizard War.

http://www.vectorsite.net/ttwiz.html

The Nazis weren't nerds but they employed some of the best nerds. Germany had a history of being very very good at chemistry and mechanical engineering at the time WWII started. So Germany had an early start and funding and developing rockets and jet engines. As the war started to go badly, Hitler had high hopes for "Wonder Weapons" that would allow Germany to reverse their losses in a flash of uber wizardry so things like the V2 rocket, the ME-262 jet fighter, and the Sturmgewehr assault rifle were designed, produced, and fielded on a forced march. On the drawing boards and prototype stages were things like the "America Bomber" and flying wing aircraft. I sometimes wonder if Germany might have held out a bit longer if they concentrated more on proven weapons systems and didn't spend so much resources on "Wonder Weapons"; an ME-262 is a heller of an aircraft but what it took to develop it probably would have put 10 ME-109s in the air.

Germany was also good but not the best at electronic warfare and codebreaking. But the British put considerable effort into those areas. Everyone here knows about Alan Turing and his team of codebreakers. The British also had an anti-submarine radar that operated at a wavelength the Germans considered impractical to achieve. The Germans thought the British were detecting U-boats by excessive EM emissions and put a lot of useless countermeasures into place for that. Late in the war, they shot down an antisub bomber and were shocked when they got into the radar. There was much much more of this sort of thing.

Other than the bomb, the US did some of this too. We figured out how to build miniaturized tube electronics that could survive being fired out of a gun a high percentage of a time. Late in the war, we had radio proximity fused anti-aircraft shells and field artillery shells. The AA shells were deadly and were estimated by Vannevar Bush to be 7 times more effective than the old 5-inch AA shells.. The electronics only survived and operated correctly a relatively low percentage of the time but even so were vastly superior to shells that detonated on contact or at specific altitudes. The field artillery version was equally deadly as they exploded at pre-set heights; Patton loved "those funny shells" by all accounts.

That's a quote from and the theme of "Flying Platforms and Jeeps" http://www.vectorsite.net/avplatfm.html all PD and referenced material on VTOL air/ground craft from 1950s to present. No, these weren't just a 50s and 60s fad. The last military oriented program was running in 2002. There have been greater and lesser successes within the class, but none have been successful compared to other vehicle types. When they compete with say, helos or hovercraft, they're just too inefficient. The amount of power it takes compared to their mass makes them notoriously hard to control.

Included in the web site referenced is the Avrocar, the 'flying saucer' built by AVRO for the US Army. When it wouldn't hover stable, the engineering team told the chief engineer that a flexible skirt would make it more efficient as well as stable. The chief engineer refused (likely was instructed to by management) and so missed out on developing the GEV (ground effect vehicle). ie. hovercraft.

One of the two Avrocars is on display in a military museum in Canada. The other suffered a great deal of rust damage on display outside the US Army Transportation Museum at Ft. Eustis, Virginia. It is now inside, waiting on a funding source that so far has not materialized that will pay for its refurbishment. Another attempt to salvage it, based on having it taken home to Canada, has progressed further in the talking phase thanks to many fans of AVRO and its products as well as authors of books on them, but has made no other progress. Full disclosure: I'm one of those fans, have been in talks with the authors, Canadian military and AVRO fans, and the Ft. Eustis museum. This is in large part to having been to the museum and seen the Avrocar many times (as well as being an AVRO Arrow fan), and having been stationed at Ft. Story, a satellite facility of Ft. Eustis, where we had a whole fleet of operational hovercraft. I'm not soliciting for it now, but hopefully someday soon.

Truly, the idea dies hard, with regards to both the future and the past efforts. Despite their problems, likely unsolvable, they'll keep building them. And we'll keep nostalgizing them.

The space program, for example, has resulted in lots of useful product spin-offs, but almost nothing that could not have been discovered independently without spending billions on a manned space program

If this site: http://www.vectorsite.net/tamrc_24.html is worth anything, it didn't do even that:

"In contemporary dollars, Apollo cost $25 billion USD, and at its peak it accounted for almost one cent on every dollar of US economic output. Apollo funds similarly totaled about 20% of all US public and private research money at that time. In 1971, NASA commissioned a study that claimed the Apollo program generated a $7 USD return for every dollar spent. The impartiality of such a study was suspect, since NASA used it to justify their funding requests, and the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), never much of a friend to the agency, was highly critical.

There was also the question of how relevant such a statistic was even if it was true. A critic could easily observe that to justify the Apollo program only in terms of its incidental benefits and not on its own merit was to imply that it had no merit in itself. States with industries and centers that were the beneficiaries of Apollo funding, such as Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and California, of course obtained an economic benefit from the work, but could the money have been better spent?

The US interstate highway program, another huge Federal project, also boosted the economy through government contracts, but the end result of the interstate highway system was an "infrastructure" that was directly useful to the vast majority of American citizens, and by even conservative accounting exercises paid back its investment many times over. It is difficult to identify similar long-term benefits from Apollo. The specific technologies developed for the program, such as the Saturn V booster, were more or less abandoned later. While manufacturers used the publicity hype associated with Apollo to promote "space age" products such as Velcro and Teflon, these products had been developed long before. Teflon was actually discovered, more or less by accident, in 1938, and had been used in chemical processing for the US atomic bomb project in World War II.

The only major consumer products to obviously owe their origins to the Apollo program are cordless tools. The Black & Decker company had won a contract to develop a lightweight portable drill for the Apollo program, and promptly developed and delivered it. The company thought they could leverage this effort into a commercial product, and in 1974, Black & Decker introduced a multifunction portable tool that could be configured as a drill, portable vacuum cleaner, and a hedge trimmer. The product died in the marketplace, since nobody had developed low-cost rechargeable batteries that had acceptable lifetimes. The Moon drill itself had used high-grade silver-zinc batteries that were too expensive for a consumer product. It wasn't until 1978 that General Electric was able to provide Black & Decker with rechargeable batteries that could last from five to six years, and in 1979 Black & Decker introduced the popular "Dustbuster" cordless vacuum cleaner. "

I would defend Moon program on the argument that it *made entire humanity more ambitious and feeling less constrained on this planet*, but not even on basis on producing usable technologies as side effects.

now, don't get me wrong. this is a cool bird. but I wouldn't say it was cooler than the SR-71.

I've found a few better articles and videos, here, here , here & here.

It's probably designed to be the replacement for the "blackstar" program, which doesn't exist, but is hands-down the very coolest thing out there, the only thing cooler would be a functioning Orion spacecraft.

But this looks like it might have the capability of taking the place of the blackstar "mothership", although I bet with less performance & payload; as this isn't designed to be a Mach 3+ cruise nuclear bomber, that's understandable. but those cold-war birds have got to be tired by now, and looking forward to retirement. i think one would look great in my driveway as a static display.

I do wonder what they are going to use to replace the orbital component, which was probably based on the X-20. Maybe a NASP? The X-43?

The Japanese experimented with incendiary devices that used the jet stream to travel across the USA. To maintain the correct altitude, the balloon would either dump ballast or vent hydrogen. It might even be possible to make of the fact that wind direction and speed can be completely different depending upon altitude.

* Building a balloon that could survive a three-day trip across the Pacific and then automatically drop its warload was technically challenging. Since a hydrogen balloon expands in the sunlight and rises, then contracts at night and falls, the Japanese engineers had to develop a battery-operated automatic control system to maintain altitude. When the balloon descended below 9 kilometers (29,500 feet), it electrically fired charges to cut loose sandbags. The sandbags were carried on a cast-aluminum four-spoked wheel, and discarded two at a time to keep the wheel balanced. Similarly, when the balloon rose above about 11.6 kilometers (38,000 feet), the altimeter activated a valve to vent hydrogen; the hydrogen was also vented if the balloon's pressure reached a critical level.

The balloon had to carry about 900 kilograms (1,000 pounds) of gear, which meant a hydrogen balloon with a diameter of about 10 meters (33 feet). At first, the balloons were made of conventional rubberized silk, but there was a cheaper way to make an envelope that leaked even less. An order went out for ten thousand balloons made of "washi", a paper derived from mulberry bushes that was impermeable and very tough. It was only available in squares about the size of a road map, so it was glued together in three or four laminations using paste derived from a tuber with the Japanese name of "devil's-tongue".

Balloons in warfare

The second successful american helicopter company had similar roots, Frank Piasecki built his prototype from reclaimed auto parts; the comapny he built from this was eventually sold to Beoing. He also built several "Flying Jeeps"; search the web some and you can see them flying 60ft high around teh Philadelphia Naval Yard.

Tranformable airplanes have been made before as well. Nothing new here...

There are companies that sell random number generation hardware. Are you saying they're flawed or something?

Short answer - yes.

There are things called laws against such conduct with very severe penalties. I'd have to be a total idiot to do such a thing.

There is a reference out there that talks about OTP and gets very close to what I would like to tell you towards the bottom here - http://www.vectorsite.net/ttcode_04.html where he talks about OTP.

The name of the game is to crack it by any means available.

GP and GGP are both wrong and you're probably right about a triple system. Triplex is what JAS39 Gripen uses (the third being analogue instead of digital fly-by-wire.)

They don't use "crays" the heart of the F22 is two COTS processors.

And it wouldn't fly without avionics and flight control systems. It's an aerodynamically unstable design meaning it wouldn't even be flyable even if hydraulics was a backup option because humans aren't fast enough to keep it stable.

(source: http://www.vectorsite.net/indexav.html and click on the planes. He gives sources for his claims at the bottom of each article. The articles seem to be mainly written in 2002 so they may be a tad dated though.)

Short answer - yes. However it is more than adequate for most applications. Even commercial/business/banking encryption. The biggest threat there isn't the encryption being cracked, it is the guy taking your credit card to ring you up or the card reader for example. There are far cheaper ways of getting secret information than to try to attack the encryption. Besides, the random number generator isn't as important there. I'm talking about people that need to keep stuff secure even if the enemy has an unlimited budget and they haven't been able to get someone on the inside or someplace else that is much easier to crack. OTP would work for business too, however like I said before it isn't practical.

You'd have to kill me if you told me. Feel free to trot that out, but I hope you don't expect me to take your word for it.

Maybe you didn't read all of what I wrote to you? Maybe you have cryptographers confused with some other organization? There are things called laws against such conduct with very severe penalties. I'd have to be a total idiot to do such a thing. Once again you don't have to take my word for it. Go to the National Cryptographic Museum. There is a reference out there that talks about OTP and gets very close to what I would like to tell you towards the bottom here - http://www.vectorsite.net/ttcode_04.html where he talks about OTP. Essentially the intro course I didn't want to reiterate here though it seems that I have and you still don't get it. If you are smart you can figure it out from there. If not, feel free to continue to believe OTP can never be cracked. Feel free to believe in the tooth fairy as well.

Sure. If you redefine "decrypt" or "break" as "guess about" then it becomes really easy.

The name of the game is to crack it by any means available. There are very strict rules on how this can be done in the case of an educated guess. Often it is the case they use encryption that you don't know the length, you have to do it the hard way. Sometimes that means brute force. Sometimes that means something else. Anyhow, have a nice day.

Ah, but Mars does have an atmosphere, although thin.

Few years ago they were going to take a balloon to Mars. It would've had a snake-like tether, engineered in a way so that it would not get stuck anywhere on the surface. Unfortunately, the probe was lost (somehow unsurprising). The Planetary Society was doing good publicity for the Mars balloon project. I found one introductory site at: http://www.vectorsite.net/avabot.html

>at once point (probably a while ago) we did "capture" a MiG or whatever

Yes, there was a Russian pilot who defected by flying his jet to Japan.

* On 6 September 1976, a Soviet pilot, Lieutenant Viktor Belenko, decided to defect to the West. He flew his aircraft, a Mikoyan "MiG-25" interceptor, from Siberia to Japan. The "Foxbat", as it was known in the West, was one of the most advanced aircraft fielded by the USSR to that time, and it had figured prominently in the nightmares of Western military officials.

http://www.vectorsite.net/avmig25.html

There was also this program that attempt to steal a combat-ready Russian MiG-15 Fighter for one hundred thousand dollars

http://www.psywarrior.com/Moolah.html

The canopy opened, and from the plane stepped a cocky young lieutenant in a blue flying suit. While the American pilots watched in open-mouthed wonder, the Red pilot tore up a photograph of North Korean dictator Kim il-Sung, and handed his pistol to a nearby F-86 pilot in a jeep on the way to the 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing Headquarters. Early reports were that he had torn up a picture of his girlfriend, but North Korean pilots were not allowed to have girlfriends during the war. They were warned that many girls were South Korean spies.

After a few moments of shock, the defector was rushed to intelligence while his MiG Fighter was placed in a well-guarded hangar. The North Korean Lieutenant, No Kum-Sok, explained his motives to the officers assigned to interrogate him.

not really... http://www.vectorsite.net/ttcode8.html

The Wasp and lots of other really neat, really funky stuff along the same lines can be found at this page.

As for links, there are a few million on the Bios of Alan Turing and Bletchley Park (though both have home pages and I suggest starting there). There is some information on Sir Winston Churchill's homepage on the matter, too.

The NSA and CIA are rather less forthcoming on their strategies for hiring.

Wartime cryptography is slightly better-known, and there's some good information out there.

Compound that with reports of cannabalism and the irrationality surrounding the cult of Juche, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung and you wonder what the heck kind of nation state it is.

It's a nation-state worried about it's own survival. Do you really think they are going to pick a nuclear war with the United States of America? A country that has hundreds of warheads that can be falling on North Korea less then 30 minutes from the time that Bush gives the order?

Yes it's a fscking evil place. Yes Kim Jong il is one sick bastard. But even Adolf Hitler himself refused to use WMD (chemical weapons) against the Allies because he understood the concept of overwhelming retaliation and deterrence. If Hitler couldn't be convinced to use WMD even as Germany was being defeated from both sides then what the hell makes you think that Kim Jong Il will?

Not exactly. The HARP project did fire test probes out of a massive gun, with subsystems intact. Checkout this site

Perhaps the parent is referring to the Focke-Wulf 190. Although the spelling is still different.

What was interesting is that it was the British, not the Germans, who were closer to using chemical weapons during the second world war, which would have been a tremendous mistake as at the time British chemical weaponry relied primarily on WW1 vintage mustard gas, whereas the germans had perfected and produced stocks of nerve gas agents.

Churchill wanted to drop chemical weapons on German cities in retaliation for the V1/V2 raids, but fortunately was persuaded against it. If the Germans had used chemical munitions against the Normandy landings, it is highly likely they would have failed.

Ref: History of Chemical Warfare(2)

• Access to all the commericial and public algorithms in use today and many others
  
• The ability to directly influence cryptologists
  
• The power to weaken algorithms before they are commericially implemented
  
• Access to the money and expertise to build specialist custom decryption hardware which can continue to out perform COTS hardware for many years e.g. colossus!
  
• The ability to delay ideas often for many years
  

The B-52 undercarriage was quite an innovation at the time, and was kept a secret for a while. It allowed the plane to land in pretty strong crosswinds.

An interesting page on the development of the B-52:

http://www.vectorsite.net/avb52_1.html

Actually this is the final product of the same research that was the backdrop of that movie.

• Balistic Missile Defense: (Second link - look above in section 2.6 as well)
• And mount it in one of these

Re #1: My first though also was that there was a lot of spin on this story, and it was getting a bit out there. As long as the possibility does exist though that it can still be salvaged, perhaps it is just well placed optimism.

Re #2: Someone being able to make do with what they have and still build what they need would be a sign of good engineering, in my mind. The British Hawker Huricane I believe was made out of wood, probably a more important (numerically at least) fighter than the spitfire. Considering the comment was on wood, how about this German creation, arguably better than anything the allies had - and constructed out of wood.

Too true. And what really accelerated the USSRs Nuclear arms program was the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. America not only showed that they had the bomb but also demonstated their willingness to use it.(Race For The Super-Bomb)

Yep. IIRC water injection was used on certain models of B-52s (B-52G ?) to provide additional thrust. The general effect was F = ma. Here's a link that explains it quite well.

Yes, stealth tech came from Skunkworks.
Yes, Skunkworks and Skunkworks derived programs did lots of testing at "Area 51".
No it's not all fiction.
But it's not like aliens came down to Area 51 and gave us stealth. The truth is much more mundane. (But still an excelent read.) Basicly it came down to a little computer program called ECHO I (ECHO 1?).

The gyro story is interesting though. I do vaugley recall something along those lines. But I don't have enough info, to know what happened. Maybe something *is* up there.

As for the consparacy theorist site you linked to, so far all the claims I've seen for extrordinary aircraft later proove to be nothing more than new tech in prooving grounds. How many F-117 prototype flights do you think were mistaken for spaceships by nut-job conspiracy theorists in the 1980s?

"As for the "no fighter plane that *I* know if in the world could possibly turn like THAT!" people, I give you the Russian MiG 35. It doesn't look too radical, but the way it maneauvers is unreal. It uses vectored thrust like the U.S. F-22, but the russian designers have taken the vectored thrust a couple steps further than the F-22's. The diffrence is one of design theory. Western design emphesises standoff weponry and stealth. BVR kills (beyond visual range), where you shoot and kill the other guy before he even knows you're there. Russian designers are still designing for the dogfight. Close in furballs where speed is life. The guy with the most power and the tightest turning radius will usualy win (and in many cases, the guy with the most altitude has a tremendous advantage. Remember: You can always trade altitude for airspeed and vice versa). This kind of combat hasn't evolved a hell of a lot since the days of Baron von Richthofen. Anyway, I saw a demo of the MiG 35 on Discovery Wings. Amazing. The pilot was quite skilled, and a master of his aircraft. He could coax it to do things, that I would have told you were impossible to consistantly do on purpose and in control ina modern fighter aircraft. The man actually put the plane into reverse controled flight. He flew backwards for a short distance in controled flight. The Russian SU-37 also has thrust vectoring, but it's unclear to me which of the two represents a more advanced form of this tech. At any rate, an aircraft like these (or a more advanced generation of the same idea) could have moved like these "impossible patterns".

Resurecting the NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Applications) might lead to reviewing its unsightly bastard brother Pluto (bottom of page), one of the most horrible weapons ever devised.

Pluto is a low altitude Mach 3 nuclear cruise missile. It's designed to hurt the enemy threefold

• By the shear force of its Mach 3 sonic boom.
• By the highly radioactive exhaust.
• By the (many) fusion warheads it can launch.

Not the kind of weapon you would like to see in, well, any hands.

There's far more than Nyquist to digital sampling.

For fun, look up quantization and sigma delta filters on google.

Most digital audio products use one at a bare minumum.

Here's a link or two.

Basically, an A/D convertor records all harmonics within it's pickup range. All sounds can be represented as a set of harmonics. A square wave, for example, is a mix of all harmonics possible. So, when it is sampled, all harmonics relating to that square wave below 22.5 kHz are recorded. Since humans can only hear harmonics in that range, it sounds just like a square wave would. As the square wave reaches a higher pitch, it is likely to be recorded closer and closer to a sine wave, since most of the audible harmonics are below the threshold of hearing, and the threshold of detection by the DAC. One would say it is deformed, but guess what! Our ears hear a 20 kHz square wave as a sine wave due to the same "problems" inherent in the DAC, so everything is A-OK!

Or so I was told by the telecomm students...

This might explain it in more detail...

• Dan Goldin, NASA Admin, mentions this as a future goal for NASA
• Use of this tech for SETI
• Use of Light-sails to put a telescope at this distance