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Low Frequency Active Sonar Gains US Gov. Approval
burntout writes "According to bbc online the US government has finally approved the use of low frequency active sonar. Apparently the navy has been granted an exemption from the marine mammal protection act for this, which is apparently 'necessary because of new superquiet Chinese, Russian, and German subs'."
We taught them a lesson, in 1918,
and they've hardly bothered us since then. - tl
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Active sonar is only used in emergency situations.
Using an active sonar array advertises your position to any other submarines in 30-90 nm radius.
The most common use for active sonar is to acquire a definitive lock on a target after torpedoes have been launched.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
...how very sophisticated. Guess the Navy can add whale-watching trips to their recruitment literature now.
. . . good point DuffBeer; however, if you had read the article, you might have noticed that this is towed array sonar, based on ships. The issue here is not stealth, it is detection.
Though this issue is a bit overhyped, once in a while, the Navy does kill a few whales. For instance, in March, 2000, 17 beaked whales died due to getting battered with sonar. (Link to NOAA press release here.)
The Chinese, Russian, and German haven't reallye been developed the swedish, and dutch submarines are the really quiet ones using sterling engines, but this limits them to shallow, costal waters. Active mode is rarely used in historical systems, but this system is much lower in which a strong transmitter is used at a distance and closer sensors hear the echo so there isn't much chance of detection. I'm not quite sure how one knows if this is harmful to marine life, a loud noise to a creature that depends on sound for communications and navigation can't be too happy about someone yelling in thier ear.
Holy sheeet! Anyone know how much juice that must take? http://www.fas.org/irp/program/collect/lfa.htm The shallow-water acoustics problem has risen in importance due to the increased salience of regional conflicts where the US Navy may to encounter slow, diesel submarines close to shore. The shallow-water, slow submarine is significantly more difficult to detect and classify acoustically than the cold war threat, due to the complex propagation, high clutter, and low target Doppler. Effective sonar performance requires new processing algorithms which cannot be implemented on current Naval platforms due the high processing requirements. A Hybrid Digital/Optical Processor (HyDOP) is to demonstrate the feasibility of using embedded scalable high performance digital and optical processing to solve this problem. This requires application of computationally intensive algorithms which cannot be implemented in real time using conventional processors. A high-speed optical correlator being developed by the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) will act as a coprocessor to an Intel Paragon XP/S-25 computer.
Smoking is an expensive, slow, and unreliable method of suicide.
To provide excuses for any action. Destroying the world's most peaceful creatures because we want to kill each other is ironic and disgusting.
Karma:This parrot is dead! (and so is the joke.)
Yes... it causes whales and dolphins to die. Much of the experiments were carried out in the water around Hawaii, thanks to the military idiots that abound here.
And yes, they know that it cause havoc with the animals. It's sad, because whales travel thousands of miles each year to give birth to their babies off the coasts of our islands. Not only will this dissrupt their normal cycle of life, but also will drive them away (which also hurts our tourist industry as well as our scientific industries who try to study the whales).
But, like everything else... our government has it's preverbal head up it's ass and only thinks of itself with it's MIGHT MAKES RIGHT mentality.
I think personally, it is time for Hawaii to secceed the US... kick out the military, and bring back a balance to life on these beautiful islands.
Why don't we just destroy all subs and weapons and just get the fuck along ? It seems every day the US Army is looking for a fight and it's just pathetic.
It's about time someone said it! I mean, really, we've put with the ruse long enough. It's no longer funny. We should just end all these shennanigans and get back to the peace, love, and well-being that was all of human history before the Illuminati talked everyone into starting up the Great Generational Gag of 1937. Come on, soon no one will be alive to remember that it was all just a big joke, and people will think things like hunger, famine, and disease were meant to be taken seriously or, even worse, were the natural order of human history!
Let's just put an end to it all.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Though obviously half baked it's hardly overhyped. It's very different from past sonars. Did you look at the decibel level of the output? The frequencies are also the same the ones the whales actively uses. ie. their ears are best tuned to.
Whales and many other large sea animals depend on having good ears / sonar to go on living. As an urbanized human you technically don't need your ears for survival, but having the sound equivalent of jet engines go off unexpectedly behind your ears would have adverse effect on your fitness. In a worst case, this will mung the ears of large groups of animals rendering them unfit for survival. In the best case it will drown out or interfere with their communication (mating and food finding) and lower their survival fitness.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.