Quantum3D/NVIDIA technology: Military Applications
Posted by
Hemos
on from the battle-of-the-video dept.
rask22 writes "FiringSquad has a interesting new article up discussing the changes at Quantum3D since the demise of 3dfx along with the current military applications of NVidia chipsets. Interesting to see how the US Gov is using all this technology coming out of the gaming sector."
Not terribly surprising...
by
neksys
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The military, even the US military, has a limited R&D budget. Why go to the trouble of developing a chipset from scratch, when you can just use one that's already been developed? I can guarantee that the amount of money spent on commercial research and development in the area of graphics far exceeds that of any military research into the same area.
Really, this is no different than the US military using Intel or AMD CPUs in their computer systems - there's no doubt that these consumer-driven products give them more than enough bang for their buck. Why spend $100 million on a new CPU when you can buy one for $99 at CompuSmart? It's not "surprising". Its good business.
Re:Not terribly surprising...
by
dbretton
·
· Score: 2
Why go to the trouble of developing a chipset from scratch, when you can just use one that's already been developed?
Because....many of those (not all) commercial off-the shelf (COTS) items don't live up to MIL-spec. While you might not run Quake3 in:
sub-zero temperatures (-50F)
desert temperatures (130F)
low/no/exo atmospheric conditions
a Nuclear Environment (OPINE)
chemical/biological agent environment
the middle of an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP)
Chances are, the military equipment will.
And don't forget the fact that such equipment is typically designed to go into some kind of vessel, so you need to take into account:
energy consumption
thermal dissapation
physical area
When designing electronics for planes, ships, vehicles, etc. the ultimate goal is to provide a maximum GFLOP per watt per square inch
That's why the DoD spends so much money on some of these things...
Does it mean I will finally get my "emotion engine" PS2 guided atomic bomb I ordered on Ebay last year?
Military stuff gets back to the consumer
by
xee
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sometime soon this military stuff will be availible for consumers wishing to build heavily ruggidized systems for their cars and ATVs. This is a very Good Thing, especially because it takes technology beyond what the main 90% need.
-- Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
I trust you read this today
by
Rareul
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nvidia up after restatement, CFO splits
By Chris Kraeuter, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 4:15 PM ET April 29, 2002
SANTA CLARA, Calif. (CBS.MW) - Shares of Nvidia jumped 17 percent Monday after announcing an upward revision of earnings for the last three years and better than expected targets for the current quarter.
Also, the graphics chipmaker named Corporate Controller Mary Dotz as interim CFO as Christine Hoberg takes a "leave of absence." Nvidia said it will conduct a search for a permanent CFO.
Shares (NVDA: news, chart, profile) rose $5.06 to $35.43 on Monday.
For the quarter ended in April, Nvidia said it expects earnings of $79 million to $84 million, or 45 to 48 cents a share, on revenue of $570 million to $580 million. This outlook is ahead of Wall Street's consensus projections for a profit of 42 cents a share and revenue of $533.7 million.
As for the restatement, Nvidia will adjust results for the first three quarters of 2002 and fiscal 2001 and 2000 upward by a total of $1.3 million.
The restatement follows a review by the company's independent audit committee. The SEC had asked Nvidia to conduct a review.
So does this mean that the new Dell laptops woth the Quadro4 Go chips in them could be called weapons?
Actually, probably. These laptops aren't exactly lightweight. 80GB HDD, 512MB DDR RAM, 15" UXGA+ Monitor, etc do add up.
oh sorry if this is offtopic...
-- I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
I see it now...
by
Devil's+BSD
·
· Score: 2, Funny
The War of the Future:
Battlefield Food: MRE's (oh yeah, the indestructible sandwiches!)
Battlefield Gear: M4-MK, Glock 18, AT-4, Claymore, Kevlar Vest, MP5
Battlefield Entertainment: Live Fire Quake III Arena
Whoops, was that my commander or bin Laden that I just shot? I forgot to set my screen resolution to 2048x1536...
-- I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Re:But is war not a game for the commanders?
by
glwtta
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· Score: 2
Chess? Seems more like an FPS.
-- sic transit gloria mundi
Wanted: gamers
by
revbob
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
to visit exciting places, meet interesting people, and kill them.
so you mean that all this time i've been developing my hand/eye coordination i've been testing technologies that are now used in the military?
Yup.
Imagine yourself for a moment wearing a brass hat. You've got a stream of young civilians coming in to begin their military service. Your goal is to train those young people so that they:
Defeat the enemy,
Remain as safe as possible, and
Come back home
The US military folks have realized since before the Gulf War that young people are entering the military having spent hundreds or thousands of hours developing gaming skills.
This is potentially free training -- there's no way the military could possibly pay to train that many hours or train to that level of skill. And study after study has shown that gaming skills transfer over to combat situations, and that transfer of training is even more dramatic when combat displays and actions can be adapted to be more like their videogame counterparts.
What's more, military training is inherently dangerous, while videogaming seldom results in anything worse than a blister on your thumb.
Anybody who's thinking Ender's Game may be forgiven -- though Card had to spend an enormous amount of plot time developing a military and political situation where allowing Ender and friends to do their thing wasn't wildly improbable.
So keep on pushing them buttons. If you decide to help your country in warfare against its enemies, the skills you develop will raise your chances of coming back home.
This is potentially free training -- there's no way the military could possibly pay to train that many hours or train to that level of skill. And study after study has shown that gaming skills transfer over to combat situations, and that transfer of training is even more dramatic when combat displays and actions can be adapted to be more like their videogame counterparts.
That said, however, the money saved in training is offset by additional money spent in DE-training so as to stop the GI's from attempting to rocket jump up to the second floor of the barracks.
-- "Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Don't forget *why* the military does R&D
by
Aniquel
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The military - including agencies like DARPA, ONNR, etc - don't just choose products based on cost. This is a common misconception. One of the reasons gov't funded projects are so expensive is that they *TRY* to push the envelope. Think about it - Do you want your military to use the same quality components as your enemy? Or do you want them to use bleeding-edge (but very carefully verified) technology?
Don't believe me? We saw the same thing when NASA chose to fund Boeing's overbudget, delayed, and far-fetched next-gen reusable spacecraft, rather than selecting the already built and working prototype model by McDD. NASAs justification? The Boeing craft required alot of new technology to be developed.
The same thing is true in university research, btw.
Re:Wired ran a similar story in 97
by
mlk
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Real marines can look up/down AND jump! Thats an lie spred by the US media, inorder to ensure terrorists don't excape by hiding somewhere to high to get at.
-- Wow, I should not post when knackered.
Friendly fire
by
Mandelbrute
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
that improves safety in zero visibility conditions and a general improvement in situational awareness, reducing the risk of friendly fire casualties.
Something like this is needed, since bright orange reflective paint always doesn't work, orders from ground control are sometimes ignored, "extreme weather conditions" like a sunny desert day have an effect, and "extreme differences in language" between english and whatever A10 pilots from the USA speak (Ebonics?) take their toll. A heads up display that says "DON'T FIRE - IT'S A BRITISH TANK YOU ARSEHOLE" may be useful.
No one from the USA even bothered to turn up to the inquest. Somewhere out there is probably a couple of A10s with little union jacks painted on the side.
That's when the fur flies! The flight crew of an AWACS was court martialled when some US servicemen died in a friendly fire incident, but the other incidents were not seen as important enough for disiplinary action (as far as the public knows - but if there was some it most likely would have been announced) because only allies were killed.
The military has its own share of idiots like any organisation
Some of the idiots are a bit too high in the chain of command - or the more likely situation is that incidents like this are "political" and the chain of command is compromised by elected officials that should mind their own business. Seperation of powers is not just there to keep polititions from overuling judges or telling juries what to do.
You want evidence?
by
neksys
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Please see Men Against Fire (1946, 1978), by Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall, which I have open right in front of me. Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. In 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall's conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training, which eventually replaced firing at targets with deeply ingrained conditioning, using realistic, man-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit. Psychologists assert that this kind of powerful operant conditioning is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being. This application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam (Grossman, 1995).
Equally high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning techniques can be seen in Richard Holmes' (Soldiers, 1985) observation of British firing rates in the Falklands and FBI data on law enforcement firing rates since the nationwide introduction of modern conditioning techniques in the late 1960s.
For additional info and further statistics please consider the following selections:
Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1963 John Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976 Jim Goodwin, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders: A Handbook for Clinicians, 1988 Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, 8th ed., 1996
Re:Virtual violence begets actual violence
by
stefanlasiewski
·
· Score: 2
Virtual violence does NOT lead to real violence.
That's a pretty bold statement. Do you have actual, scientific evidence to back this up?
Are you saying that the increased displays of violence in the media (computer games, news shows, movies, etc) DOES NOT make people more suseptable and accepting of violence in real life?
Clearly we can't place ALL the blame on violent video games, but you can't completely ignore their impact either.
DId you know they have tapes is REAL, ACTUAL combat they show to soldiers to train them? Ban all VCRs and TVs!
Now YOUR the one making a jump in logic. At no point did the previous poster say "Let's ban computers because of the violent video games" as you suggest. He clearly suggested that we, as citizens, need to question the impact of these games on our society.
Or did the Erfurt shootings NOT just happen in your little universe?
-- "Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The Geneva convention would just ban "camping" and take all the fun out of them...
-- "Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
why games develop combat skills
by
labradore
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Most of the computer and console games played today require one of the following three skill sets (often there is overlap):
Attack, dodge and maneuver.
Navigate and maneuver.
Strategize, direct (or engage) and react.
It also happens that these are the skill sets employed by soldiers in modern battles. The biggest difference between the real battlefield and a game is that the battlefield traditionally has required strength, endurance and discipline. The modern battlefield also requires a level of coodinated communication not yet matched in computer gaming.
Even further off topic: It is interesting that the we as a human species have survived and prospered by devloping and exploiting complex hunting skills and strategies. Most of the pre-history of the species was a 75,000 year territorial expansion over the over the surface of the dry earth. Humans did not develop agricultural resources until the climate and our populations stabilized enough to make farming an "obvious" alternative to hunting. Therefore we are the descendants of the last, most successful terrestrial hunters (note: we are not necessarily the most successful terrestrial hunters of all time because we just don't know). Our games frequently mimic hunting activities and our wars are the natural results of our competitive nature and our aptitude to kill. All predatory social species will develop conflicts between individuals AND groups.
It is easy to see that our games and our predatory activity and our conflicts will probably always be very similar. The other conclusion available from these details is that we are not really predisposed to live peaceful, stress-free lives. In fact, the pressure to live in an ordered, peaceful, structured society is fairly contrary to our natural tendencies. Perhaps this is one reason why societies tend to decay? It seems to me pretty comical that we have achieved total superiority over the other species on the planet and now we have turned our domination and predation against ourselves. Do the animals that were once our prey now quietly giggle among themselves when they see us kill eachother instead of them? Now we are consigned to struggle against our own nature and against our own wills to make peace. It seems almost an abomination to smother our greatest virtues. If we must make peace then I suppose we can use our skill to play games. In that light the playing of games is an extordinary savior of civilization. Our tendencies can be subverted. Civility can be maintained. Is this the noble role of the video game? Time will tell.
potentially dangerous trend
by
small_dick
·
· Score: 2
no offense to the money savers and dumbing downers, but suppose it gets to the point where something like.NET is used to control the nukes and guide the nuclear warhead equipped drones...and the technicians and programmers in asia and india are far more familiar with the protocols, strengths and weaknesses of the system, and the hacks and the bug reports are all floating across their screens...
well, it would be kind of a shitty legacy for america to go down in history as having been completely overwhelmed and lost the big one because a foreign power simply pointed our own weapons, which we paid for, at our major cities and said one thing:
Surrender, biyatch.
--
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
Re:WTF is the "ebonics" comment about?
by
Mandelbrute
·
· Score: 3, Informative
WTF is the "ebonics" comment about?
A very senior US military spokesman blamed a maverick missile attack on some british tanks behind the lines on a variety of factors - including bad weather conditions (the reality was that it was a warm sunny day with zero humidity and very good visability), and "the extreme differences in the languges of the forces". The reality about the language would be that anyone that is flying an A10 for the USA would be a fluent english speaker - so the "Ebonics?" comment could be better phrased as "who do you think you're fooling by talking about language differences - it's not as if they are going to be talking in ebonics". The A10 pilots screwed up, but their bosses really screwed up, and showed what they personally thought of their military allies.
But do us all a favor and keep the racist crap on your side of the Atlantic.
Maybe I've missed something here, but from where I am I've heard ebonics is some sort of pigin spanish/english mix that was proposed to be taught in schools in parts of California. What has racism got to do with it? If the schools haven't got their shit together enough to teach the kids english in an english speaking country then those kids are going to be screwed when they start looking for work.
offerors should emphasize
radical concepts that may contain high technical risk but
if enabled would have commensurate high military payoff.
These are typical words for a DARPA solicitation. The last thing DARPA wants to hear about is something you're pretty sure will work.
The problem space for this one is fairly prosaic in comparison to some recent ones (nanotech, weird biology, real AI), but the problems addressed (being absolutely sure you can communicate in a hostile and confusing environment, fighting on any randomly chosen battlefield like it's your home field, and weapons that will kill the bad guys but not the good guys) are first class Hard Problems.
Notice also that the amount of money they've got to spend on all three projects in this area is US$5M. Chicken feed. Shrinking budgets and a proper insistence that defense dollars show up on the battlefield preclude much else.
Hampster ball for the military
by
jafuser
·
· Score: 2
I've been waiting for someone (maybe the military) to build a large "hampster ball" environment, where you can not only see everything in 3D, but you can walk around in it too. Of course the "ball" would have to be fairly large to be able to walk around on what would feel like fairly flat ground, and that means more mass to torque against to keep the person "centered" inside the bottom, but I'd imagine there'd be a lot of potential in such a setup, if it could be done.
I'd be a lot more realistic (but much more difficult to implement) than the "CAVE" projects that I've heard about. Also, If the sphere were some sort of a mesh, you might even find a way to project peripheral background images onto the inside of the sphere (cloud texture, ground texture, etc), so that it seems to better fill your peripheral vision.
-- Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Re:Virtual violence begets actual violence
by
Fulcrum+of+Evil
·
· Score: 2
Or did the Erfurt shootings NOT just happen in your little universe?
Given what I've heard about Korean players (especially regarding Starcraft), there should be at least a couple school shootings over there every week. Or maybe video game violence isn't the main cause...
-- "We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala,
it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It's not just compulsive overspending that caused the military to spend $100 million on developing their own proprietary techs, they DO have some legitimate needs that the civil market simply doesn't address.
One of many examples is EMP-hardening. I read the article fairly quickly, but it didn't seem to me that the chip in the F22 Raptor is EMP hardened. Sure, in our post-cold-war world it seems unlikely, but if someone pops even a small nuclear weapon in a high altitude burst, suddenly the control circuits on every F22 in a 600+ mile radius go on the fritz? In a fly-by-wire aircraft, that simply can't happen.
At that point, it's a little late to say "Whoops, I guess the saving of a few million$ wasn't ultimately worth it...."
From classical field theory [1] I'd guess EMP shielding consists of putting the electronics inside a conducting box, and having some sort of surge protectors on all external cables. Or maybe even optical cables, they don't have any problems with an EMP. Nothing to do with the chip itself.
[1] J.D. Jackson, Classical Electrodynamics 3e
Re:Virtual violence begets actual violence
by
arkanes
·
· Score: 2
The Singapore police actually created a special department to deal specifically with RL crimes inspired by net stuff. There's some MMORPG there where the company running it had to hire special paramilitary security, because there were so many attempted breakins. Now, this has nothing to do with the idea that video violence desensitizes (It can, in the right circumstances, but normal game playing is not indoctrination), but it does say something about how caught up in games people can get.
The news definition and the street definition
by
Infonaut
·
· Score: 2
OK, point taken about the "language differences" - that's just ass-covering by the Pentagon. I took your comment a bit too literally, I think.
In my experience, "ebonics" is used in two ways here in the US. The first is the narrow definition of a form of language that was going to be taught (thankfully after a firestorm of controversy the idea was dropped) in Oakland, California schools. The idea was that it would be a form of language that more closely resembled African-American vernacular. Of course, this is a ludicrous concept - that somehow these kids need to be taught this way because they can't handle standard American English.
The second and more prevalent use of the term "ebonics" is as a derogatory nod to differences in speech between urban African-Americans and other Americans. Thus if a white kid from Brentwood started using ghetto slang, a parent might say, "I don't want you using 'ebonics' in this house!"
Of course, like any discussion of class and language, interpretation is the key. My interpretation of the term is likely different from that of many other people. I apologize for jumping the gun.
And btw, I didn't mean to make light of the tragic "friendly fire" incident you were referring to. The Pentagon's handling of it was definitely a black mark on America.
All this on a thread about graphics cards! Mark me down for being offtopic.
Supposedly there is an actual working prototype, and you are right about the torquing issue - it has to do with making a sphere big enough for a human to walk in, while keeping it light enough (thinness of sphere walls) to allow the projectors to penetrate for display. These two problems tend to mutually exclusive at this point, and so the material tends to be thicker than you would want it, and thus the sphere is heavy.
I tend to wonder if they have thought about active dampening of movement (which could also allow the ability to have "hills" and such). They also don't seem to talk about it, but I wouldn't doubt you could use wireless 3D shutter-glasses like that used in CAVE systems to complete the 3D simulation...
That is pretty awesome. The only major differences I had imagined was a much bigger sphere, so that the ground would feel more "flat", and the projectors would augment some sort of 3D glasses that you wear, so that you would have depth in the projections.
Thanks for the link!
-- Please consider making an automatic monthly recurring donation to the EFF
Lots of info is important & some off topic stu
by
Mandelbrute
·
· Score: 2
OK - I got way off topic.
Emotive history lessons aside, I think it is a very good thing to be able to give to pilot huge amounts of well presented info. the cheaper the baseline is, the better the cutting edge will be, since military budgets are not infinite either. The incident I mentioned was to highlight that even with a variety of checks and balances, pilots sometimes disobey orders and fire at unknown targets in situations where there is no hostile threat to an aircraft. The info was all there, but was not presented to the pilots, only to the ground control officer that they should have contacted. Better display of position information may have solved the entire problem.
The Pentagon's handling of it was definitely a black mark on America.
It was a black mark on the people involved, who invoked "secret" status just to cover themselves. The British Ministry of Defence actually knew the names of the pilots (from radio logs) but refused to disclose them to the inquest. Ultimately the responsibility for the rather botched cover up lay with the British Ministry of Defence and Dick Cheney, then minister of defence under George Bush Snr, who said there was no way that he was going to make the pilots available for a "media circus". It looks like my comment about the chain of command was incorrect, since he was in it.
The inquest recommended that no joint military actions ever be taken with the USA until an agreement was made that the USA will co-operate with inquests in Britain. No such agreement was made with Britan or any other allies of the USA, but the reaction to September 11 is more important.
Slashdot Mirror
The military, even the US military, has a limited R&D budget. Why go to the trouble of developing a chipset from scratch, when you can just use one that's already been developed? I can guarantee that the amount of money spent on commercial research and development in the area of graphics far exceeds that of any military research into the same area.
Really, this is no different than the US military using Intel or AMD CPUs in their computer systems - there's no doubt that these consumer-driven products give them more than enough bang for their buck. Why spend $100 million on a new CPU when you can buy one for $99 at CompuSmart? It's not "surprising". Its good business.
Next thing we know we'll be arming soldiers with nail guns.
Does it mean I will finally get my "emotion engine" PS2 guided atomic bomb I ordered on Ebay last year?
Sometime soon this military stuff will be availible for consumers wishing to build heavily ruggidized systems for their cars and ATVs. This is a very Good Thing, especially because it takes technology beyond what the main 90% need.
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
Nvidia up after restatement, CFO splits
By Chris Kraeuter, CBS.MarketWatch.com
Last Update: 4:15 PM ET April 29, 2002
SANTA CLARA, Calif. (CBS.MW) - Shares of Nvidia
jumped 17 percent Monday after announcing an
upward revision of earnings for the last
three years and better than expected targets
for the current quarter.
Also, the graphics chipmaker named Corporate
Controller Mary Dotz as interim CFO as
Christine Hoberg takes a "leave of absence."
Nvidia said it will conduct a search for a
permanent CFO.
Shares (NVDA: news, chart, profile) rose
$5.06 to $35.43 on Monday.
For the quarter ended in April, Nvidia said
it expects earnings of $79 million to $84
million, or 45 to 48 cents a share, on
revenue of $570 million to $580 million. This
outlook is ahead of Wall Street's consensus
projections for a profit of 42 cents a share
and revenue of $533.7 million.
As for the restatement, Nvidia will adjust
results for the first three quarters of 2002
and fiscal 2001 and 2000 upward by a total of
$1.3 million.
The restatement follows a review by the
company's independent audit committee. The
SEC had asked Nvidia to conduct a review.
If your not buying Nvidia products - you are supprting the terrorists!
So does this mean that the new Dell laptops woth the Quadro4 Go chips in them could be called weapons?
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
Battlefield Food: MRE's (oh yeah, the indestructible sandwiches!)
Battlefield Gear: M4-MK, Glock 18, AT-4, Claymore, Kevlar Vest, MP5
Battlefield Entertainment: Live Fire Quake III Arena
Whoops, was that my commander or bin Laden that I just shot? I forgot to set my screen resolution to 2048x1536...
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
Chess? Seems more like an FPS.
sic transit gloria mundi
Yup.
Imagine yourself for a moment wearing a brass hat. You've got a stream of young civilians coming in to begin their military service. Your goal is to train those young people so that they:
The US military folks have realized since before the Gulf War that young people are entering the military having spent hundreds or thousands of hours developing gaming skills.
This is potentially free training -- there's no way the military could possibly pay to train that many hours or train to that level of skill. And study after study has shown that gaming skills transfer over to combat situations, and that transfer of training is even more dramatic when combat displays and actions can be adapted to be more like their videogame counterparts.
What's more, military training is inherently dangerous, while videogaming seldom results in anything worse than a blister on your thumb.
Anybody who's thinking Ender's Game may be forgiven -- though Card had to spend an enormous amount of plot time developing a military and political situation where allowing Ender and friends to do their thing wasn't wildly improbable.
So keep on pushing them buttons. If you decide to help your country in warfare against its enemies, the skills you develop will raise your chances of coming back home.
The military - including agencies like DARPA, ONNR, etc - don't just choose products based on cost. This is a common misconception. One of the reasons gov't funded projects are so expensive is that they *TRY* to push the envelope. Think about it - Do you want your military to use the same quality components as your enemy? Or do you want them to use bleeding-edge (but very carefully verified) technology?
Don't believe me? We saw the same thing when NASA chose to fund Boeing's overbudget, delayed, and far-fetched next-gen reusable spacecraft, rather than selecting the already built and working prototype model by McDD. NASAs justification? The Boeing craft required alot of new technology to be developed.
The same thing is true in university research, btw.
Real marines can look up/down AND jump!
Thats an lie spred by the US media, inorder to ensure terrorists don't excape by hiding somewhere to high to get at.
Wow, I should not post when knackered.
No one from the USA even bothered to turn up to the inquest. Somewhere out there is probably a couple of A10s with little union jacks painted on the side.
Please see Men Against Fire (1946, 1978), by Brig. Gen. S. L. A. Marshall, which I have open right in front of me. Based on his post-combat interviews, Marshall concluded in his book Men Against Fire (1946, 1978) that only 15 to 20 percent of the individual riflemen in World War II fired their own weapons at an exposed enemy soldier. In 1946, the US Army had accepted Marshall's conclusions, and the Human Resources Research Office of the US Army subsequently pioneered a revolution in combat training, which eventually replaced firing at targets with deeply ingrained conditioning, using realistic, man-shaped pop-up targets that fall when hit. Psychologists assert that this kind of powerful operant conditioning is the only technique that will reliably influence the primitive, midbrain processing of a frightened human being. This application and perfection of basic conditioning techniques increased the rate of fire to approximately 55 percent in Korea and around 95 percent in Vietnam (Grossman, 1995).
Equally high rates of fire resulting from modern conditioning techniques can be seen in Richard Holmes' (Soldiers, 1985) observation of British firing rates in the Falklands and FBI data on law enforcement firing rates since the nationwide introduction of modern conditioning techniques in the late 1960s.
For additional info and further statistics please consider the following selections:
Konrad Lorenz, On Aggression, 1963
John Keegan, The Face of Battle, 1976
Jim Goodwin, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders: A Handbook for Clinicians, 1988
Dave Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, 8th ed., 1996
Virtual violence does NOT lead to real violence.
That's a pretty bold statement. Do you have actual, scientific evidence to back this up?
Are you saying that the increased displays of violence in the media (computer games, news shows, movies, etc) DOES NOT make people more suseptable and accepting of violence in real life?
Clearly we can't place ALL the blame on violent video games, but you can't completely ignore their impact either.
DId you know they have tapes is REAL, ACTUAL combat they show to soldiers to train them? Ban all VCRs and TVs!
Now YOUR the one making a jump in logic. At no point did the previous poster say "Let's ban computers because of the violent video games" as you suggest. He clearly suggested that we, as citizens, need to question the impact of these games on our society.
Or did the Erfurt shootings NOT just happen in your little universe?
"Can of worms? The can is open... the worms are everywhere."
The Geneva convention would just ban "camping" and take all the fun out of them...
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
Most of the computer and console games played today require one of the following three skill sets (often there is overlap):
It also happens that these are the skill sets employed by soldiers in modern battles. The biggest difference between the real battlefield and a game is that the battlefield traditionally has required strength, endurance and discipline. The modern battlefield also requires a level of coodinated communication not yet matched in computer gaming.
Even further off topic: It is interesting that the we as a human species have survived and prospered by devloping and exploiting complex hunting skills and strategies. Most of the pre-history of the species was a 75,000 year territorial expansion over the over the surface of the dry earth. Humans did not develop agricultural resources until the climate and our populations stabilized enough to make farming an "obvious" alternative to hunting. Therefore we are the descendants of the last, most successful terrestrial hunters (note: we are not necessarily the most successful terrestrial hunters of all time because we just don't know). Our games frequently mimic hunting activities and our wars are the natural results of our competitive nature and our aptitude to kill. All predatory social species will develop conflicts between individuals AND groups.
It is easy to see that our games and our predatory activity and our conflicts will probably always be very similar. The other conclusion available from these details is that we are not really predisposed to live peaceful, stress-free lives. In fact, the pressure to live in an ordered, peaceful, structured society is fairly contrary to our natural tendencies. Perhaps this is one reason why societies tend to decay? It seems to me pretty comical that we have achieved total superiority over the other species on the planet and now we have turned our domination and predation against ourselves. Do the animals that were once our prey now quietly giggle among themselves when they see us kill eachother instead of them? Now we are consigned to struggle against our own nature and against our own wills to make peace. It seems almost an abomination to smother our greatest virtues. If we must make peace then I suppose we can use our skill to play games. In that light the playing of games is an extordinary savior of civilization. Our tendencies can be subverted. Civility can be maintained. Is this the noble role of the video game? Time will tell.
no offense to the money savers and dumbing downers, but suppose it gets to the point where something like .NET is used to control the nukes and guide the nuclear warhead equipped drones...and the technicians and programmers in asia and india are far more familiar with the protocols, strengths and weaknesses of the system, and the hacks and the bug reports are all floating across their screens...
well, it would be kind of a shitty legacy for america to go down in history as having been completely overwhelmed and lost the big one because a foreign power simply pointed our own weapons, which we paid for, at our major cities and said one thing:
Surrender, biyatch.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
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Make Tetris, not War!
26d6173bbc9af7cfdb7ce60600e6aded518bfe51acca9a84a
Note the relevant words:
These are typical words for a DARPA solicitation. The last thing DARPA wants to hear about is something you're pretty sure will work.
The problem space for this one is fairly prosaic in comparison to some recent ones (nanotech, weird biology, real AI), but the problems addressed (being absolutely sure you can communicate in a hostile and confusing environment, fighting on any randomly chosen battlefield like it's your home field, and weapons that will kill the bad guys but not the good guys) are first class Hard Problems.
Notice also that the amount of money they've got to spend on all three projects in this area is US$5M. Chicken feed. Shrinking budgets and a proper insistence that defense dollars show up on the battlefield preclude much else.
I'd be a lot more realistic (but much more difficult to implement) than the "CAVE" projects that I've heard about. Also, If the sphere were some sort of a mesh, you might even find a way to project peripheral background images onto the inside of the sphere (cloud texture, ground texture, etc), so that it seems to better fill your peripheral vision.
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Or did the Erfurt shootings NOT just happen in your little universe?
Given what I've heard about Korean players (especially regarding Starcraft), there should be at least a couple school shootings over there every week. Or maybe video game violence isn't the main cause...
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
It's not just compulsive overspending that caused the military to spend $100 million on developing their own proprietary techs, they DO have some legitimate needs that the civil market simply doesn't address.
One of many examples is EMP-hardening. I read the article fairly quickly, but it didn't seem to me that the chip in the F22 Raptor is EMP hardened. Sure, in our post-cold-war world it seems unlikely, but if someone pops even a small nuclear weapon in a high altitude burst, suddenly the control circuits on every F22 in a 600+ mile radius go on the fritz? In a fly-by-wire aircraft, that simply can't happen.
At that point, it's a little late to say "Whoops, I guess the saving of a few million$ wasn't ultimately worth it...."
-Styopa
The Singapore police actually created a special department to deal specifically with RL crimes inspired by net stuff. There's some MMORPG there where the company running it had to hire special paramilitary security, because there were so many attempted breakins. Now, this has nothing to do with the idea that video violence desensitizes (It can, in the right circumstances, but normal game playing is not indoctrination), but it does say something about how caught up in games people can get.
In my experience, "ebonics" is used in two ways here in the US. The first is the narrow definition of a form of language that was going to be taught (thankfully after a firestorm of controversy the idea was dropped) in Oakland, California schools. The idea was that it would be a form of language that more closely resembled African-American vernacular. Of course, this is a ludicrous concept - that somehow these kids need to be taught this way because they can't handle standard American English.
The second and more prevalent use of the term "ebonics" is as a derogatory nod to differences in speech between urban African-Americans and other Americans. Thus if a white kid from Brentwood started using ghetto slang, a parent might say, "I don't want you using 'ebonics' in this house!"
Of course, like any discussion of class and language, interpretation is the key. My interpretation of the term is likely different from that of many other people. I apologize for jumping the gun.
And btw, I didn't mean to make light of the tragic "friendly fire" incident you were referring to. The Pentagon's handling of it was definitely a black mark on America.
All this on a thread about graphics cards! Mark me down for being offtopic.
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Those Limey bastards were probably trying to sneak up and take the colonies back!
The Cybersphere
Supposedly there is an actual working prototype, and you are right about the torquing issue - it has to do with making a sphere big enough for a human to walk in, while keeping it light enough (thinness of sphere walls) to allow the projectors to penetrate for display. These two problems tend to mutually exclusive at this point, and so the material tends to be thicker than you would want it, and thus the sphere is heavy.
I tend to wonder if they have thought about active dampening of movement (which could also allow the ability to have "hills" and such). They also don't seem to talk about it, but I wouldn't doubt you could use wireless 3D shutter-glasses like that used in CAVE systems to complete the 3D simulation...
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Emotive history lessons aside, I think it is a very good thing to be able to give to pilot huge amounts of well presented info. the cheaper the baseline is, the better the cutting edge will be, since military budgets are not infinite either. The incident I mentioned was to highlight that even with a variety of checks and balances, pilots sometimes disobey orders and fire at unknown targets in situations where there is no hostile threat to an aircraft. The info was all there, but was not presented to the pilots, only to the ground control officer that they should have contacted. Better display of position information may have solved the entire problem.
It was a black mark on the people involved, who invoked "secret" status just to cover themselves. The British Ministry of Defence actually knew the names of the pilots (from radio logs) but refused to disclose them to the inquest. Ultimately the responsibility for the rather botched cover up lay with the British Ministry of Defence and Dick Cheney, then minister of defence under George Bush Snr, who said there was no way that he was going to make the pilots available for a "media circus". It looks like my comment about the chain of command was incorrect, since he was in it.The inquest recommended that no joint military actions ever be taken with the USA until an agreement was made that the USA will co-operate with inquests in Britain. No such agreement was made with Britan or any other allies of the USA, but the reaction to September 11 is more important.