If my tax dollars were used to get me top-notch voyeur pics of beautiful women, I'd certainly have a lot less reason to bitch about taxes. Of course I am am sensitive to women who don't want to be used as sex objects. Certain exhibitionist girls could wear a GPS-enabled bracelet, and then the government could use its spying power to get me awesome upskirt, downblouse, nude beach, bedroom, and shower pics and videos. Sounds like a fair return on my tax dollars to me.
--
The goatse guy for president. Win one for the gaper!
Re:Military Might
by
CausticWindow
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· Score: 5, Funny
This reminds me of a story from Sweden.
They had installed very expensive surveillance equipment along the whole Swedish coast, to monitor the baltic sea. The system was operated by drafted personell which were supposed to be looking for signs of Soviet submarine activity.
When it was uncovered that most of the time spent monitoring with the very expensive surveillance system was used to monitor hot chicks on the Swedish beaches, there were heads rolling.
-- How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
Re:Military Might
by
EverDense
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· Score: 1, Funny
the very expensive surveillance system was used to monitor hot chicks on the Swedish beaches
...and all I can think of is: "Can you blame them?"
-- http://jesus.everdense.com/
Re:Military Might
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DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
That's what happens when you send draftees in to do a soldier's job. The U.S. military stopped using conscription after Vietnam, due to the fact that units composed of these soldiers repeatedly failed in their missions. In addition, their poor discipline resulted in occasional atrocities. European militaries still persist with this outdated tradition for some strange reason.
Of course, if the conscript troops had spotted any submarines, the Swedish would have probably just blamed America. They had a long tradition of turning a blind eye to systematic Soviet provocations and instead blaming NATO forces...for example the famous Whiskey on the Rocks incident.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Military Might
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Glytch
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Funny, I thought the US military stopped using draftees after Vietnam because of the way that citizens were getting pissed off with the whole sordid mess.
Re:Military Might
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
typo, he meant to say bitches
Re:Military Might
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Ryan+Amos
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· Score: 2, Funny
Have you ever seen Swedish chicks? That would have been the best job in the world.
Re:Military Might
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lawpoop
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The U.S. is fortunate to have a population large enough to have a volunteer/recruited miliatary.
Small European countries are not in a simliar situation. Finland, for example, has no choice but to require every male of age (and healthy enough) to serve for 2 years. If the US and Russia fought, they would be ground zero. There simply aren't enough people to defend their country without mandatory conscription.
So it works out that basically every male has experince with rifles and camping out in Lappland, so that if the time came, Finland might stand a chance at coming out whole.
-- Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Re:Military Might
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DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
Nope. Had nothing to do with it. But hey, don't let dry, rational analysis get in the way of liberal slogan-shouting! Evaluating your army's performance is just too geeky to be stylish. It'll never get you a table at Studio 54.
It's pretty clear that almost the entire debacle can be laid at the feet of McNamara and Kissinger. These two (and others) need to be delivered up to war crimes tribunals for appropriate treatment.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Military Might
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DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
You'll have to forgive me, I get confused by all those tiny European countries whose security has been guaranteed by the U.S. Isn't Finland the European country that freely allied itself with Nazi Germany? Or maybe they're the ones who surrendered after a few weeks' resistance...maybe that was Belgium or Denmark or France or the Netherlands or Greece. I'm sorry, I received an American public school education, please excuse me if I learned my facts wrong.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Military Might
by
Durendal
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Scale is one of the huge advantages the USA enjoys. It helps us economically as well obviously. Smaller countries certainly have to make different choices. It is all in the Math.
I am an American and I have enourmous respect for Finland's performance in WW2.
Finland was in one of the hardest positions of WW2. Forced to ally with Germany or become a Soviet republic. Finns danced with the devil and came out with an independent nation.
Nopes.. it sucked.. the toy where fun for a while (no beaches in that area).. but then i found more enjoyment in bending paperclips.. , so don't mess with Sweden, or you'll have to deal with a Bending paperclipsoldier.. oooh!;)
Re:Military Might
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Now stop masturbating while wearing that 5-star general's uniform already! That's really sick!
Re:Military Might
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So tell me, do you consider your opinions are representative of an educated US citizen?
Google Partner Link
by
Ryan+Stortz
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· Score: 5, Informative
Here's the google partner link for those of you to lazy to register.
-- Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Re:Google Partner Link
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Thank for posting.
As often as I see news.google display slashdot stories and as often as slash links to both google and the NYT site I am still blown away by the fact that there is no/. partner link to the NYT site, come on guys its has been years and some thousands of articles... Please someone set that up already...
Re:Google Partner Link
by
ergonal
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· Score: 2, Funny
The slashdot team considered partnering up with NYT using the subscription funds, but instead decided to hire a satellite for photography at nudist beaches, so we'll have to eat more 'free reg reqd.' lines yet.
Short but interesting.
by
Flounder
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Short but interesting.
Kinda like the Slashdot article, just leave out the interesting part. C'mon guys, can maybe we get a bit verbose about what you choose to put up on/.?? Maybe a little cut and paste of an interesting piece of the article? Or maybe a little more witty repartee by the editors.
--
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
Or maybe a little more witty repartee by the editors.
If they want to get witty, they can use the comment system and open themselves up to moderation like everyone else. Most people read this site for the news*, not so they can see what CmdrTaco thinks about the news.
*Okay, so most people actually read this site for the trolls. But no one is reading it for michael's commentary on satellite imagery.
--
The goatse guy for president. Win one for the gaper!
Re:Short but interesting.
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Timesprout
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· Score: 4, Funny
Dont worry the article will have a much more interesting header in the dupe tomorrow.
-- Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth What truth? There is no dupe
Re:Short but interesting.
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Drakonian
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· Score: 1
Actually this approach might be decent. There is nothing to make fun of the editors for, there is no snide remark that gets everyone riled up. One of the only reasonable actions upon seeing this posted is to actually *read the article*! gasp!
-- Random is the New Order.
Re:Short but interesting.
by
cheese_wallet
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· Score: 2, Funny
"C'mon guys, can maybe we get a bit verbose about what you choose to put up on/.?"
It's the typo reduction system. It left out the misspelled words.
If the satellite monitoring is so good, how did they
manage to be so wrong abount WMD in Iraq. I can't help wondering if there was ever any real evidence...
Do us conservatives a favor, and wait 6 months before you make any more comments on WMDs that you can't prove. Just because we haven't found any yet (or possibly because the government isn't ready to revel the information) doesn't mean that they don't exist. Give us time, and I assure you that we'll discover that they had them, and they probably also moved them to other countries.
We have found quite a lot of evidence of WMD in Iraq. Even if we hadn't, freeing the people was worth it. That said, they're just taking picutes so the normal limitations of "can't see through things" are still there. If you think I'm wrong them post a picture of the inside of NORAD taken from a satalite to prove me wrong.
-- Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So we can use the satellite imagery and plant them plausibly;) ?
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Yet they found a billion dollars, in a matter of hours and days, something just doesnt add up, go figure...
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
So are you saying that no one should make comments implying that "WMD"s don't exist without being able to prove it? But starting a _war_ based on the idea that they do exist is OK without proof?
I am not knocking anyones right to free speech..
The French were perfectly entitled to express their opposition to the US approach to the war, and anyone can say what they like about the French
.
The war was not justified as a mission to free people (which I agree is a good thing), it was justified by saying that there was proof of WMD and that action needed to be taken to protect us from that.
It is much easier to prove that something exists than not exist. I fail to see why the US cannot produce something conclusive to shut people like me up. After all, they claimed to already have the information.
(or possibly because the government isn't ready to revel the information)
You have got to be kidding. If the goverment had that information it would be rammed down our throats 24/7 for the next month as justification for the war in the first place.
and they probably also moved them to other countries
Yeah I can just see the head of some bananna republic thinking to himself that despite the fact
that Sadam was universally hated in both east and west and the most powerful army in the world will invade on the even the assumption of possession of these weapons why not hide then for him. What harm could it do eh ?
Did Iraq have limited chemical weapon capability yes, probably developed from Antrax sold to them by the US. This is where the US certainty come in. They 'know' because they provided the foundation.
Did Iraq they have WMD? more than likely not. Does it matter? NO the US has access to the Oil, all else is irrelevant now.
-- Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth What truth? There is no dupe
Yes, I agree. We need to give the weapons inspectors more time! Don't rush them, they're doing their job.
Irony courtesy of The Daily Show.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Yes, those that wanted to give the inspectors "more time" after they'd been there for a decade are the ones that throw up their hands and say "see?" when the US has been in there for mere weeks.
Truly ironic.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
To those curious, that image is from the fantastic film: Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Long story short, even with the best survalenece(sp?) it can't find what doesn't exist. The problem the conservatives are running into is that, the US can't find WMD that were supposedly ready to use in 45 minutes. Basically they weren't hidden at all if they have to be readied so quickly and yet, there is no evidence of anything. Additionally, we supposedly had "Secret evidence" indictatin _exactly_ where those WMDs were, and lo and behold, now with unfettered access, we still aren't finding shit. We owe the UN inspectors an apology, they were did better with less, and a lot fewer dead bodies.
The best technology is worthless in the hands of people who are willing to lie to get what they want. Remember the farce that was Colin Powel going to the UN, satelite photos of tractor trailers, and warehouses.... can't image any country that was tractor trailers! They must be producing wepaons with them..
If the satellite monitoring is so good, how did they manage to be so wrong abount WMD in Iraq. I can't help wondering if there was ever any real evidence...
I agree completely. The war just ended recently, and we haven't exactly been able to search while the whole place was a war zone. Once things settle down, we'll be able to do a thorough search, and I assure you that they will find WMDs. Saddam's spent a decade unsupervised, and very pissed at a number of countries, expecially America and Israel. I find it very difficult to believe that he hasn't been spending any time and money on creating weapons. Not to mention, the government would not want to release it right away. First they would conduct a thorough investigation to make sure that what they found really was WMDs, that they were commissioned by Saddam, and that they posed a threat to us or our allies. Furthermore -- OH MY GOD, THEY FOUND WEAPONS! HA, EAT SHIT, LIBERALS!
Damnit, it was just fertilizer.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
It is much easier to prove that something exists than not exist
Correct. Saddam probably moved them to other countries, like say, Syria. Good thing we'll be bombing them next.
Your willingness to belive an obvious lie is stunning. I'm as happy as anyone to see Saddam's reign over, but he did not have WMD, had no connection to Bin Laden (or to any international terrorisim, beyond funds for PLO bombers families), and was not planning to suddenly rise up and destroy the U.S.
P.S. The 9/11 bomers all came from Saudi Arabia.
-- "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I fail to see why the US cannot produce something conclusive to shut people like me up
Maybe because there are no WMD in Iraq?
-- "We make our world significant
by the courage of our questions
and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
OMG, a post that actually uses logic, and it gets modded as overrated.
If you want to get modded up, next time add in a few quotes from Marx, and perhaps mention how Stalin gave everyone bread.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Heh heh. Moved them to other countries along with all that nuclear material the occupying forces so stupendously failed to protect, eh?:-P
Lets start a war in order to prevent the spread of dangerous material to rogue groups... and forget to guard the dangerous material in the ensuing carnage. B for design, F for implementation.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Well, when you sell arms to Syria, they usually pay you money. What's the disconnect?
Actually, it's a Kubrick series satellite using "multipath photon interference" technology to reconstruct images from the apparent eye level of a six year old.
The images are created by sampling an evanescent photon field about 22 times per second and recording those images using AR coated optics onto a specially treated cellulose material. Those images are then digitized into a proprietary format, encoded using a 54 bit encryption scheme, and disseminated to the populace at large. I do believe the image was one in the series from the project codenamed "Dr. Strangelove".
NO!!! They had AL-UM-IN-UM centerfuges, dammit! If posession of aluminum isn't absolute proof of WMD, I don't know what is (thanks to the wonderful US news networks)!
{the message didn't start out this way but it's gotten to the point where i'm putting a disclimer on it for all you shrub dick suckers who can't handle a little truth... Go ahead and mod it as flamebait. Heavan forbid that there be any truth spread in this fucking shithole of an earth}
His willingness to believe an obvious lie is not stunning at all... Look at the regime he and millions of others have been living under.
A few weeks ago I might've been inclined to say that I was happy to see Saddam's regime end, but that would give credit to shrub and this motherfucking rumor mill fist up your ass godvernment. I'd just assume that those cocksuckers in washington keep their filthy fucking fingers out of other countries goods, not to mention my own. I'd have liked to seen Saddam's regime fall from the weight of it's own subjects as was done in amerika 200 and some odd years ago (you know, back when it was still America)... But then again, they'd probably do alright for about 200 years then turn into a bunch of fuck ups.
Oh, what the hell am i saying... amerika never was America. Nationality is just a heap of bullshit to hide the fact that there's a bunch of fucking assholes around who'll kill you to take your shit away. iran, iraq, russia, amerika - you'll go there only to find more assholes with the same mentality and maybe a few without.
A deserted island is the only answer. Unfortunately, all those are being scanned by commercial sattelites who's contents are being bought buy shady assed godvernments to make sure any of their herd isn't getting loose.
I think it'll be a PR problem if they don't find WMDs, but in the end we're already seeing it was the right thing to do. Just keep clicking "Reload" on news sites to see the current number of bodies that have been recovered from 3 mass grave sites. It appears that even if Saddam didn't have WMDs (a big if), he still appears to have been very effective at creating mass destruction anyway.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Riiiiiight. Talk about comments on WMDs that Dubya can't prove...interesting thing there is the White House listened to those who told 'em what they wanted to hear prior to the war, and ignored anybody else, including Iraqi defectors. Let me know when somebody other than Fox News has real proof of the devices...about the same time the new Duke Nukem will be out, right?
I'm as happy as anyone to see Saddam's reign over, but he did not have WMD
Saddam's regime freely admitted to having certain quantities of WMDs after Gulf War I. The regime could not account for even those it admitted to having previously. Essentially, they said "what we had we destroyed, but we forget what we did with the destroyed stuff." I find that suspicious. Don't you?
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
I heard Tony Blair say that they had AL-LOO-MIN-EE-UM centrefuges, which, as everyone knows, are MUCH WORSE that the garden variety AL-UM-IN-UM ones. Nasty stuff, that AL-LOO-MIN-EE-UM.
8-)
-- Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Erm, you are aware, aren't you, that at the time of the previous Gulf war, Sadam asked Iran if he could hide his airforce there in order to plead that he didn't have one and was being unfairly attacked.
This was the same Iran which he'd perviously been attacking for 10 years in the Iran-Iraq war.
Iran said "yes" and hid his ariforce for him.
(Oh, they then refused to hand any of them back afterwards, though:-D )
It is far from impossible that he woudl have successfully had other nations (who are sympathetic to him and his cause) hide WMDs on his behalf - he had plenty of time to arrange it afterall.
-- People should not be afraid of their governments -
Governments should be afraid of their people.
Re:WMD
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
One theory is that the war took place because Iraq was trading its oil in Euros rather than dollars, and had recently started doing quite well out of it. All other OPEC countries trade oil in $US. If this were to change, it would be disasterous for the $. For more info on this, take a look at this article.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Actually, the WMD were not determined to exist from satellite photos but from UN weapons insepctors before they were kicked out. Globalsecurity.org has detailed lists of Iraqs former WMD.
I just had to correct your use of the "conservatives" descriptor; you implied that all conservatives believe there are/were WMD in Iraq or were even pro-war. I believe the descriptor you meant to use is "neo-conservative hawk". The liberals have even come up with a catchy, shortened version, "neocon". So now you can grossly overgeneralize and group people into one umbrella political group while sounding more hip.
Conservative bashing is so last year... It's all about the neocons now! You damn hippies need to get with the program...
Or you could just go to lewrockwell.com and learn something...
Because of two factors. First, the satellites that provide good pictures are overhead for only a few minutes at a time. (Geosationary ones can only see things a meter across or more and can be fooled easily.) Second, WMD's can be made so small nowdays that they could be hidden in your average sedan. If I wanted to hide from all satelitte monitoring (or UN monitoring) enough smallpox biotoxin to wipe out the population of Earth, I'd need about twenty Peugots with dedicated boots. Think they could still be hiding in Iraq? Check the local freeway.
-- So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I fail to see why the US cannot produce something conclusive to shut people like me up.
Despite the constant whining about being "silenced", people like you never shut up.
Re:WMD
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Give us time... UPS doesn't ship there and it will take longer than normal for the WMD's to "turn up"
Give us time, and I assure you that we'll discover that they had them, and they probably also moved them to other countries.
Jeez, someone mod this "hilarious."
Was the war meant to prevent the use of these Weapons of Mass Destruction by terrorists to whom Saddam threatened to give them? Seems to me I recall Bush telling me it was... If waging the war has prompted the weapons to be neatly scurried across the border into Iran or Syria, how exactly does that prevent them from reaching the hands of terrorists, please?
Your alternative, of course, is to say they're just hard to find. That's what the administration's still basically saying. In that case, the war has merely created a vaccuum of power in which the secret underground facilities or whatever can be raided by exactly the sorts of radicals we've worried about with the former Soviet Union's stockpiles of chemical and biological agents. You remember how looters can break into stuff we aren't guarding, right? We aren't guarding these WMDs, 'cause we can't find them.
Thing is, the people objecting to this war weren't just meddlesome a-holes trying to spoil your groove. It isn't just about defending your rationale for the war on some right-wing talk show -- it's about the war actually exacerbating the risks it was supposedly trying to address. Telling me that Ansar al Islam or whoever ran across the border into Iran with the Anthrax might seem to you like a way to show the war was right after all, but I don't find it particularly reassuring, friend.
(Well, it's a little more reassuring than the "Bush has intelligence he just can't reveal to us" angle you threw out. We'll be invading Canada next based on these mysterious, unprovable intelligence sources. Or how about Nigeria, based on that forged document?)
-- "Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Except that the weapons inspectors hadn't been in country since '98 and were never really given a chance by the Bush administration to do their job. Bush was already making it very clear that it didn't matter what inspectors had to say anyway - he started one of the major thrusts for the war a full month before inspectors had given even their initial, "gut feeling" report to the UN - a report that ended up saying they hadn't had enough time to perform a true, factual assessment.
What I find ironic is the fact that it was demanded that the inspectors provide concrete proof that Iraq did NOT have WMDs in mere weeks, but get pissy when they're expected to prove that they were there in the same time frame - remember, proving something is possible given proper evidence. Disproving something is damn near impossible, since it assumes the given condition is true, you just haven't found "it" yet.
Of course you neglect that Bush stated during the 2000 campaign that American troops would not have gone into Kosovo had he been president. So Saddam, while a bad guy, but one that has been relatively dormant for years, is somehow more important to go after that Milosevic, who was actively and openly butchering thousands? Give me a break. Get off your moral high horse.
Obviously the satellite imagery isn't that good...
by
VTS
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· Score: 1, Funny
Or they would be able to find more to write about
Sorry couldnt resist:)
-- --- No 16-bit support in Vista? Half of our modules still use it! ---
Re:Karma Whoring
by
tfreport
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· Score: 3, Insightful
OK, so he didn't put anything about the article, does that justify posting the whole article here? It is not going to be slashdotted (if it is, the NYTimes is in a lot more trouble than I thought) and if what Michael said would not get someone to go read the article than this will not make it more likely to be read.
Why not simply help Michael out by giving the summary he could have made? Such as, "As technology advances the chances for government's foul use grow. Satallite imagery is beginning to be used for spying on common citizens without a warrant. This could be used to track down terrorists or those pesky hackers. For once I agree with Judge Scalia's position..." or something along these lines. For gosh sakes, don't try to karma whore and then not add anything to the discussion or do more work than Michael did.
Re:In the future...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Moderate parent up. This is exactly what this article represents; simple link posting. No witty, editorial comment, no submitted user review or feedback. Is this the future of/.? Maybe next they're disable those pesky user comment thingamajigs.
Haven't you people learned anything? The New York Times is obviously an untrusted news source. I mean, please, satelite imagery? Next thing you know, they'll tell us the Earth is round and the moon isn't made of cheese!
I thought it was interesting when I learned how long humans have known the Earth is round. In relatively modern (non-prehistoric) history, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth as 25,000 miles, which is basically correct. He did this in 230 B.C. He also used the fact that the sun is really far away, so the rays coming from it could be treated as parallel.
Another test you can do is to stand at about sea level and observe a ship. Then travel away from the ship on the ground and it will slowly go over the horizon. Then keep moving away but go up a mountain, and it will reappear. The simplicity of this experiment suggests people have known the Earth is round for as long as they could reason well enough to come up with this experiment.
Of course, maybe the Earth is rounded on top but flat on the bottom, like a Nilla(tm) wafer? You could argue this wasn't known for sure until Magellan circumnavigated the globe in 1524.
Haven't you people learned anything? The New York Times is obviously an untrusted news source. I mean, please, satelite imagery? Next thing you know, they'll tell us the Earth is round and the moon isn't made of cheese!
Or worse, that rockets can move in a vacuum with reaction engines - engines that need something better than a vacuum to react against...
The problem with spy satellites is predictability.
by
cheesybagel
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· Score: 4, Insightful
The satellites often use well defined orbits and hence are easily trackable. This means someone using deception techniques can hide their actions.
They have their uses. But you will always get higher resolution using aircraft (they are closer to the ground). Not to mention aircraft can actually be easily directed to a target.
In my opinion, in a few years all of america would be blanketed by satellites that archives everything that we do. However, ideally the archives would be encrypted and only a court order could enable enforcement agencies to see what people are up to.
For example, imagine if we could trace back the steps of the 9/11 terrorists right up to the point where they entered the country, I am sure that would give valuable information.
Nevertheless I am strong advocate for privacy (aren't we all?) therefore, its best that we put the laws in place before its been abused.
Re:Ethical Issues
by
Wyatt+Earp
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· Score: 4, Informative
The logistics of that would be very hard to do.
In a few years there will be 300 million people in the United States with roughly a 140 million autos on 6.7 million km of roads and nearly 15,000 airstrips.
There is no way that in a few years there will be any way anyone can track the movements of all those people and vehicles.
Thats the beauty of it.. you do not have to track it.. it would be like this giant security camera, and when a problem arises you can go back to the archives and trace back steps...
Ofcourse this would require extreme amounts of storage space, but I do not think technology will be the barrier..
Re:Ethical Issues
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
would or should? If you meant to say "should", then should the gov't also perform blanket wiretaps and internet snooping? I sure hope not.
Given the current average of 2 "bad guys" to every 1000 people in the US (The other 998 people, hereafter known as the "moral majority"), that shouldn't be a problem. The logistical problems of tracking 600,000 "bad guys" throughout the U.S. will be a aided by the introduction of mandatory "Neighbourhood watch" schemes. (Brown shirts will be optional).
And how many hundreds of birds would it take to cover the contiental United States?
Plus theres the problem that Keyhole can't see through clouds, so then you deal with lower resolution Lacrosse SAR imaging.
It'd take hundreds or thousands of birds in low earth orbit over the US to cover everything from every angle, plus in urban centers it would be next to worthless, so then you have to cover them with UAVs. I'd expect LA would take a couple hundred UAVs to cover completely.
will be a aided by the introduction of mandatory "Neighbourhood watch"
What are you, some sort of commie? We spell it neighborhood in the free world.
Re:Ethical Issues
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
HAHA, it is funny when a brit talks about some sort of surveillence taking over America, when there are thousands of cameras watching everyone in London.
Re:Ethical Issues
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
i don't see why tracking their steps back to when they entered into the country would help. it has already happened....and i don't see how we can stop a crime that hasn't already been commited with out lossing ALL or most of our rights...
Not to mention data mining. How do they know that the top of that black Cavalier is my car and not some other Cavalier? (Assuming they can tell it's a Cavalier, of course.) I guess if they followed it every second, they could pull it off, but you're talking about a LOT of data, and a lot of satellites that are in geosynchronos orbit with sufficient resolution to know that they're looking at a black Cavalier. There are also a lot of boring trips to the grocery store, fast food joints, and the skating rink to sift through. Not to mention the occasional days when I just drive around aimlessly (usually to test something on the vehicle, like a recent repair).
It's not the license plate--in my cars, the rear plate is almost hidden under the bumper, making it difficult to see from any direction except behind, while the front one (I live in Virginia) is angled slightly downward.
This makes me wonder: I was in an accident today where someone hit me from behind. If I need it, and there was a satellite overhead, do you think I could get that imagery to show the accident?:)
ideally the archives would be encrypted and only a court order could enable enforcement agencies to see what people are up to.
That might be doable, but what's the point really? It just puts law enforcement at a serious disadvantage, when any private-secotor indvidual can get all of that information with a few bucks, no need for a court order... Quite troubling when these satellites are privately owned and have no regulations what-so-ever.
Soon we'll find out that they all have infra-red cameras as well, and they have been spying on you while you are indoors as well... Quite a serious situation.
or better yet, lets not waste hundreds of billions of dollars on the countless satelites, bandwidth, & maintenance. lets not waste it on that in the first place, so we don't need laws to be written to stop the big bad brother from watchin over our shoulder at a hundred miles up....
besides, the agencies you would REALLY be fearing seeing these pictures, wouldn't necesarily have a problem with bending the laws in the first place.
Re:Ethical Issues
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
HAHA, it is funny when people who use a corrupted spelling that added unnecessary u's to perfectly good English words in an effort to make them look more French think that they're using "decent" spelling.
The original English spellings are neighborhood, color, and honor. Look it up.
Re:Ethical Issues
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
For chrissakes, just dump the Cherrios out if you notice piss in them.
Cheers,
Ian
Donald Rumsfeld's poem about satellite imagery
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Miguel+de+Icaza
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· Score: 0
The Digital Revolution ================
Oh my goodness gracious, What you can buy off the Internet In terms of overhead photography!
A trained ape can know an awful lot Of what is going on in this world, Just by punching on his mouse For a relatively modest cost! -June 9, 2001, following European trip
(i found this on kuro5hin)
-- Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
Re:Donald Rumsfeld's poem about satellite imagery
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Privacy vs. Technology
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HidingMyName
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· Score: 1
As technology becomes more powerful, tracking of people and their actions is facilitated. Now, some technologies (e.g. the Telephone) have regulations that restrict use/disclosure of the information gathered (e.g. wire tapping requires a court issued warrant in the U.S.). Given that GPS informatoin and satellite information exists, what usages restrictions would be appropriate? Perhaps non disclosure except under court order?
news.google url
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towster
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· Score: 2, Informative
"Us conservatives?"
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Don't lump us all together with you. I'm a staunch conservative and considered the justifications for the Iraq "war" more or less fabricated (including the WMD charges.) The world is not as black and white as you seem to think.
I'd worry about this.
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joeszilagyi
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
How did we know the reporter actually went up into space for this story? He may have Jayson Blaired it.
Have you any idea the amount of space required to store this stuff? Bandwidth costs?
Let's say you have a (currently non-existant) 1mm imaging platform on a satellite. 1mm per pixel of resolution allows you to identify most things fairly well, but you still might have trouble reading a newspaper's body clearly. Headlines would come through okay - keeping in mind, of course, that you have to make the shot obliquely to get some sort of an angle on it - straight down doesn't help here. Now take a picture of a square 200km by 200km. How many pixels is that? Let's say you take that picture with 24 bits per pixel denoting colour (and not, say, the way you would do it which is with more than three bands... but I digress). How many bits is that?
It's easier, by far, to do things like fly over the area you want at a less sexy height, like 20,000 feet, with a high-end remote imaging and sensing platform mounted inside your medium-to-low end plane. 500TB cartridges store a good amount of images, and you can jack them directly into your central machine back home while the computers go to work analysing the data they contain.
It's a good point, (the NYT article discusses total real-time surveillence, and this is not sensible with satellites, unless you have a large, maybe 1km, pixel size) but you're missing some key details.
First of all, a lot of these images are shot of hostile territory, and we can't fly over them. Think N. Korea, China, Russia, etc.
Second, if 1mm pixel resolution existed, why would you use it to shoot an area 200km x 200km? If you needed that much detail, you'd zoom in. If you wanted an overview, you'd zoom out. What technology you'd use doesn't affect that.
If you used a plane to shoot a 200km x 200km area at 1mm resolution, it'd take up just as much space, although bandwidth is more abundant at the lower altitudes. Even with that, at 3 bytes/ pixel * 200km * 200km * 1,000,000 mm/km *1,000,000 mm/km * 1 pixel/mm^2, that's a big number, 120,000 Terabytes! So you could use 240 500TB cartridges to take these pictures at a 1mm resolution. That amount of data of unwieldy at any altitude!
Finally, as far as using satellite photos of pedestrian locations (LAX, Washington DC, etc) that we could image using airplanes, I think it's more a matter of cost and convenience. For one-time site surveys, an airplane is clearly the way to go. But for sites that need to be re-imaged daily (highway and building construction, coastal erosion, etc), satellite imaging is probably both easier and cheaper.
You couldn't take a picure 200km by 200km with 1mm resolution.
That would be a resolution of 40,000,000Mega-pixels.
Currently the highest resolution available is 20MP.
Re:real-time satellite imagery analysis?
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Audiophyle
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· Score: 1
If you do your homework, you'd realize that aerial imagery is MUCH more expensive than satellite imagery currently out. The coverage of a satellite's is extremely huge. One satellite can target nearly any place on the earth every day. One satellite can task hundreds of images daily all over the globe because it's up there 24/7.
Re:real-time satellite imagery analysis?
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spiritu
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· Score: 1
Sure, sure. What I'm saying is that fears of "real-time" "satellite" monitoring of everything are a bit silly, given the current exorbitant costs of putting platforms into space. If someone really wanted to spy on you, they'd do it differently.
And, I have done my work. Since, say, I'm employed to do such things. Satellites make sense for doing long-term analysis. Real-time high-resolution imaging of everything is still a ways off even for governments. Hence, the NYTimes article's premise is a bit silly.
Satellite imagery for analysis of things that change gradually, like vegetation, forests, areas of ozone depletion, cities, etc., is great and is an area in which satellite imagery really shines. Well, at least since Ikonos, Landsats 4,5 and 7, and some other sensing platforms were launched. Haven't gotten many good images from Landsat 6, though.;-)
Re:Obviously the satellite imagery isn't that good
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
They obviously don't want the article to be seen from space...
Privacy Violation
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 5, Funny
The president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, keeps one on him at all times in case he is kidnapped or is the target of an assassination attempt.
The growth of the technology-enabled police state is shocking. You can't even kidnap a guy anymore without worrying the victim might violate your privacy by hiding some beeper up his butt. We better think long and hard before letting this genie out of it's bottle.
Does that make Taco Bell a circumvention device?:)
Re:The problem with spy satellites is predictabili
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darkmeridian
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· Score: 1
Assuming that no one has created a stealth telescope coated with optical and radar stealth. Or side-scanning satellites. The US government has not demonstrated these capacities at all.....
-- A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Hmm...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Can I opt-out on having my property photographed?
Dear Michael:
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
I think you owe us 984 words.
Satellite Imagery at Home
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Yupnik
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· Score: 4, Interesting
If you like playing around with satellite images from Microsoft's Terraserver, try USAPhotoMaps. This (Windows only) software will download multiple images from Terraserver and stitch them together seamlessly. You can also switch between photo images and USGS topo map images.
Spy on you your neighbors. Check out the 6 pixels representing the car you owned 5 years ago. Really cool.
Where can I find images of Canadian cities? I know there is terraserver and lots of resources for American cities..
Like this one for Mac OS X, Terrabrowser.
So anyone have any ideas about Canadian cities?
I think Terraserver has some Canadian images if you pay for it. Speaking as a penny-pinching Canadian (I want to hang onto the five cents that our government taxes leave me per year), it'd be nice to see some free resource for this. I'm not sure I want to buy my own satellite to do it, though.
Canadian Landsat stuff is here:
http://geodiscover.cgdi.ca/gdp/hmi/rs/code/HMI_RS_ SearchForm.jsp?isNewSearch=true&language=en&entryS earch=2634%3D%3DLandsat+7+Level+1-G+Imagery+Over+C anada%3D%3Den
If that link does not work, then use this and navigate through:
http://geogratis.cgdi.gc.ca/clf/en
Of course you'll need software to view these images........try FreeView:
http://www.rockware.com/catalog/pages/geomatfreevi ew.html
Wow, I cannot find a thing on that canadian site.... go figure:) thanks though-
Does anyone actually take the times seriously
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McAddress
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
After last week, does anyone take the NYT seriously anymore. Sure, today its sattelite images, tommorow they'll try to convince us that the patriot act is a bad thing, and then they'll try to tell us that we kind of failed in Afganistan..
damn, hold on a second......
Re:Does anyone actually take the times seriously
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Concerned+Onlooker
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· Score: 1
So, what you're saying is that they're still hitting two-thirds of the time?
The US govt. has been using commercial imagery and widely available(http://www.rockware.com/catalog/pages/ge omatica.html) commercial software to process imagery for some time now. Does anyone think that since NIMA is a large classified civilian institution with numerous trusted workers, it is being forced to move to commercial technology for a large portion of its operations in order to "cover more ground" without exposing the "more classified" portion of its activities..........Weird eh?
satellite imagery transition
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Geodetic
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· Score: 1
The United States govt. has been using commercial imagery and widely available(http://www.rockware.com/catalog/pages/ge omatica.html) commercial software to process imagery for some time now. Does anyone think that since NIMA is a large classified civilian institution with numerous trusted workers, it is being forced to move to commercial technology for a large portion of its operations in order to "cover more ground" without exposing the "more classified" portion of its activities?
Just wondering......
Damn they are on to me!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
P.S. NZ law enforcement this was a joke. Too cold to grow the green stuff down here;)
Re:Damn they are on to me!
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
That's why you grow it inside under flourescent or growing lamps. You get better pot that way anyway because you can control the hours of sunlight to let the plants grow large before they start to flower (thus equals more thc.) A few flourescent lights should be enough. You can grow the shit in antarctica if you had the right tools (and they probably do, those long cold nights would get mighty boring otherwise.)
Good conspiracy theory...
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
There's a good conspiracy theory to go with Hubble and spy satellites actually.
Basically, the theory is that the reason that the Hubble mirror was ground "incorrectly" is that it was actually the wrong mirror. It was accidentally switched with a similar mirror that was ground for focusing at a much shorter distance (i.e. orbital distance from Earth) intended for a military version of Hubble.
There were two DOD shuttle missions after Hubble, one of which was supposedly to launch the military spy Hubble (STS 38 or 44, I can't remember which one). That was set back from the original schedule due to the mixup of mirrors though.
Just a theory, but a good one.
Re:Good conspiracy theory...
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ScottKin
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· Score: 1
That's a pretty good theory - considering the fact that the newer surveilance satellites, the KH-12 "Keyhole" series (successors to the veneralbe KH-11) are virtually indistinguishable from the HST.
IIRC, Lockheed was the primary contractor on the HST and all NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) satellites.
Some links (non-classified, publicly-available knowledge):
In the home, Justice Scalia added, "all details are intimate details, because the entire area is held safe from prying government eyes."
And it had better stay that way too.
Big brother is here and big father is waiting to bust into our rooms. The day when the whole planet is constantly watched and individuals are tracked without their knowlege will be a very sad day indeed.
It's only 1 px/mm. I don't think that's fine enough for an AC's...
-- If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Re:WMD - the real story
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
Offtopic but what the heck. USA went to war because (among other reasons) Iraq stopped using USD to sell gas. It decided to use Euro instead. This is no secret and widely known. Now one can quickly realise the issues involved here. Any country buying gas from Iraq would require euro's instead of USD. So they would have to start selling all those USD and slowly start flooding the market with USD. Market goes down. Bad economy. USA doesn't have enough gold to payback countries (and current debts), etc. You get the idea...USA is sinking!
It's not about the "WMD" (where's that HOT intelligence that Bush had a few months ago??). You don't spend 75BUSD to get rid of a leader, you spend 75BUSD to prevent your economy from falling to it's knees. What Bush did just bought the USA a few extra years. But the worse has yet to arrive!
Re:all i gotta say is-Your butt is bugged.
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
"The day when the whole planet is constantly watched and individuals are tracked without their knowlege will be a very sad day indeed."
It's possible.
But the problem with aircraft. . .
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scatter_gather
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· Score: 1
with cameras, well, ask Francis Gary Powers.
Re:But the problem with aircraft. . .
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Dun+Malg
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· Score: 1
with cameras, well, ask Francis Gary Powers.
Pfff! You do realize that that was 43 years ago, yes? Saying that's the problem with reconnaisance aircraft is like saying that the problem with guns on fighter aircraft is that they shoot their own propeller off.
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Re:But the problem with aircraft. . .
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jerryasher
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· Score: 1
And their planes, missiles and computers haven't gotten any better.
Re:But the problem with aircraft. . .
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Dun+Malg
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· Score: 1
Gosh, Dun Malg's right. I mean Powers was flying a U2, and we don't fly *those* any more. And we haven't had a propeller driven spy plane shot down in over two years now!
And their planes, missiles and computers haven't gotten any better.
First of all, that Navy EP-3E wasn't "shot down", it was hit by a jackass chinese fighter jock. He was playing Tough Guy and trying to scare them by disturbing the airflow over the wing by pulling up in front of it and got caught in the prop. Besides, I never said anything about prop-driven spy planes; I was making an analogy.
Second, you've missed my point regarding the U-2. While the US does indeed use what is essentially the same aircraft that Powers was shot down flying, they no longer arrogantly assume that whomever they are overflying "doesn't have missiles that go that high". It wasn't bad luck that got Powers, it was the hubris of the DOD/CIA thinking they were invincible at that altitude. The fact that no U-2's have been shot down since is my point-- like the first guy to put a machine gun on his biplane shooting the propellor, it was a ridiculously stupid mistake the first time and not something one does twice.
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Last week, in an effort to increase satellite intelligence coverage of high-priority targets, President Bush ordered spy agencies to begin buying as much imagery as possible from private companies. The reason was quality and quantity. The close-up resolution of today's commercial imaging satellites is comparable to that of the spy world, and their numbers are constantly growing.
Nonsense. The reason is big defense contractors spent billions on commercial imaging satillites. They are NOT commnerically viable. This is welfare for corporate bums.
Incidently, the commerical space imaging satillites are launched into "polar orbit". If you can launch a spy satillite into one of these, you have an ICBM. US,Russia, France,Israel,China and India can all launch them and test out their nuclear holocaust toys.
At what altitude does a nations airspace end and space begin?
Just kind of curious, b/c what if North Korea (somehow) managed to shoot down an American sattelite, and then claimed it was in their airspace... Are there international treaties/laws (that only some nations have signed) that dictate this, or is it just common sense (which doesn't hold any legal ground at all)?
IANAL - however, there was a treaty signed which declared that "space" could not be owned by any one country. I'm sure someone more ambitious than I could find the text.
Well, one interpretation from the US FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is 50km. That figure is probably based on ITU (International Telecommunications Union) resolutions. That's the altitude at which the priviledges of my Amateur Radio License peter out. Operation higher than 50km puts you in the Amateur Space Service.
-- Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
too many secrets
by
darkitecture
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· Score: 2, Interesting
"or possibly because the government isn't ready to revel the information"
I can't remember who said it exactly (any fellow slashdotters out there who can help me out with that?) but in reply to some conspiracy nut who was ranting and raving about how the US Government didn't have the right to keep secrets from him, he said words to the effect of, "The US Government isn't in the habit of keeping secrets from it's people. They keep secrets from enemies of the state. Now if only the US population could keep their mouths shut and not tell anyone else who might be an enemy, then we wouldn't care less".
Now I know I winged that quote immensely... but you get the "oeuvre"... the basic "mise-en-scene"... *ahem*... Thank you The West Wing.
European militaries still persist with this outdated tradition for some strange reason.
The "strange reason" is that European militaries stopped engaging in extraterritorial adventures. It makes perfect sense to use draftees to defend your own country, and you don't have to worry about "atrocities" either when your military is only defending your own territory.
But, you are right, for the kinds of actions the US military engages in, you do need a professional military; you couldn't do it with draftees. Draftees would not be well enough trained to handle it, and US voters wouldn't go along with wars like those in Iraq if they knew that their sons and daughters might just get drafted, sent over there, and killed.
Of course, if the conscript troops had spotted any submarines, the Swedish would have probably just blamed America.
To Europeans, US involvement in Europe was both a gamble and a mixed blessing. The gamble worked and resulted in great wealth and freedom for Europeans, but if it had failed, it would have turned Europe into a nuclear wasteland. To Americans, sitting comfortably in their living rooms thousands of miles away, that threat was much less immediate.
and you don't have to worry about "atrocities" either when your military is only defending your own territory.
Really. I'm sure all the corpses in the Nazi and Soviet death camps will be glad to hear it, as will all the ones in the Balkans.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 1
Er...hm. The USA was only 30 minutes away. The missiles took the closest path...across the pole. Europeans educated with substandard Mercator projection maps throughout their schooling can possibly be excused for missing this point, along with the point that the USA repeatedly put its ass on the line for Europe, only to receive lukewarm thanks at best, and outright hostility at worst. Ever wonder why the Soviets withdrew their medium-range missiles? Nah, better not investigate that subject, it might bring some skeletons out of the closet.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
The USA was only 30 minutes away. The missiles took the closest path...across the pole.
You are preoccupied with the only scenario that mattered to the Americans: a missile attack. What was a real threat to the Europeans was a ground war in Europe that did not involve any direct hostilities between the US and the USSR. And that was a fairly likely scenario: the US and USSR knew that it would have been the end of both countries to send off their missiles, but a ground war in Europe would have been acceptable to both.
along with the point that the USA repeatedly put its ass on the line for Europe, only to receive lukewarm thanks at best,
And why do you think the US did that? Out of nobility? Out of humanitarian instincts? I don't think so. The US got involved in Europe because if Europe had fallen to the Nazis or to the Soviet Union, the US would have been in very deep trouble, economically and politically.
While Americans have delusions of grandeur because of a huge military-industrial complex, the reality of it all is that the US needs Europe at least as much as Europe needs the US. And until American politicians and voters come to appreciate that, there will be a lot more "hostility" because 600 million Europeans don't like having their foreign and defense policy dictated to them by 300 million US voters. That was vaguely acceptable in the decades after WWII, but it is coming to an end now. You'll just have to deal with it.
"Really. I'm sure all the corpses in the Nazi and Soviet death camps will be glad to hear it, as will all the ones in the Balkans."
Nazi atrocities were committed by the SS, not by the military, and certainly not by draftees. At one point, the German military actually tried to assassinate Hitler to put a stop to the madness.
You know, it is really scary to think that people like you, people without a clue about world history or politics, probably vote people like Bush into office.
You probably don't even realize how deeply insulting and offensive your remarks are, equating German teenagers drafted out of high school and forced to go to the front and Nazi war criminals.
The US understood the difference back then, which is why the occupation forces made a clear distinction between German soldiers and members of the SS. Even today, past membership in the SS still is grounds for exclusion from the US, while having served as a soldier in Hitler's army has no special status at all.
People like you are a prime example why Europeans should be deeply distrustful of US foreign policy: most Americans simply don't know what's going on in the world and can't be expected to make rational, or even compassionate, decisions.
The US reduces its military presence in Europe because it doesn't serve US strategic interests anymore. How does that show that the Europeans "need" the US?
>>To Europeans, US involvement in Europe was both a gamble and a mixed blessing. The gamble worked and resulted in great wealth and freedom for Europeans, but if it had failed, it would have turned Europe into a nuclear wasteland. To Americans, sitting comfortably in their living rooms thousands of miles away, that threat was much less immediate.
Bull.
With the range of Soviet missles, the US could have been turned into a wasteland too. We help you out, and now with prosperity you complain.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 1
Uh, no direct hostilities between the USSR and USA? Are you nuts? Ever heard of that NATO alliance, in which an attack on one is an attack on all? What about the thousands of U.S. bases in Europe? I suppose they just would have waved to the oncoming Soviets.
Man, you're really out out touch. It's France and Germany that are out of touch with the rest of Europe, not the other way around. Their power is waning, they don't like it one bit, and they just wanted to show off to the world that they're not irrelevant any more. Doesn't even matter in the long run, as Europe will culuturally cease to exist in about another 100 years due to unstoppable demographic trends.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Europeans stopped something else
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ScottKin
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· Score: 1
Hmmm...let me see if I've got this correct:
1) America placing it's troops and systems in harm's way in Europe benefited who?
2) American soldiers working and living in Europe and spending American dollars against the Franc, Mark & Pound boosted who's economy?
3) NATO was all an American plot to somehow subvert "European culture"?
4) Who were driving all of those tank platoons with US Army ensignias all over Germany?
5) Why did European governments whine when the US ans the USSR agree to pull "theater nuclear weapons) out of Europe; removing what Europe saw as it's major line-of-defence against Soviet incursion into Europe.
6) Which nation brought the USSR to the point of collapse and causing the Berlin Wall to fall? Do the words "Mr. Gorbachev: TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!!" ring a bell?
Where would Europe be without the support from the USA?
Where would Europe be without the USA pumping BILLIONS in foreign aid into Europe?
You want to be on your own and without the support of the USA? Fine - when the next border skirmish or "ethnic cleansing" spat happens, you can fscking be on your own..Go figure it out yourself...and go fight your own wars. Screw NATO. We'll just go and call all of our loans to European nations as "Due and Immediately Payable" - your economy would crumble to nothing in a single day.
If it wasn't for America's "envolvement" in Europe, the USSR (not today's Russia) would have continued in Czechoslovakia and Poland, wound their way down and east, taken Germany, France, Spain and the rest of Europe. American threats of force against the USSR and the creation of NATO forced the USSR to re-evaluate their military expansionist policies.
In regards to Europe "falling" to the Nazis - I hate to burst your "euro-centric" bubble-think, but Europe DID fall to Nazi Germany - or did you forget the Swastika flying underneath the Arc de Triomphe? Perhapse you enjoy the idea of having to suffer through memorizing "Mein Kamph", or learning how to goose-step? Did you conveniently forget the US GI's marching through Paris, and the people cheering them as their rescuers and saviours?
Germany and France are now the laughing-stock of the free world - their politics of secretly supporting a dictatorial state in direct violation of UN sanctions while threatening to veto UN Security Council actions against that state has made France and Germany as trustworthy as the Enron CFO.
Do us all a favor and drop the snooty-nosed "We're-better-because-we've-been-around-longer" bullcrap; it smells of spoiled fromage.
The utter ignorance of "Socialistas" just makes me chuckle.
ScottKin
-- I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
HuguesT
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· Score: 1
At the time of Reagan it was pretty clear that he was preparing for a ground war in Europe against the USSR. He restarted tactical nuke programs, and various other military development, etc and there was the slight crisis about Pershing vs. SS20 missiles. I was a kid in Europe then and I can tell you everybody was very scared, the feeling was that the US was going to abandon us. This was also the time of the Solidarity union movement in Poland, everybody could see a new Prague coming (it didn't) ; this is also the time when the US dollar was so high that there was an energy crisis, oil was so expensive -- the US was flaunting its new buying power everywhere (from tourists to businesses acquisitions).
All the newspapers and magazines were showing maps of the respective military powers, there was a scent of doom in the air. It didn't seem as if the NATO alliance would matter all that much. Sure the US would fight by remote and by proxy, but the battlefield would be our homes, not yours. Germany in particular, it seems, would be completely razed. France wasn't in NATO anymore anyway.
Sure the gamble was to make the USSR bow to a new arms race. It worked, but it was a gamble, and Europe was the chip. While the US population was enjoying their new wealth, their new strong willed president and was slowly emerging as the winner of the cold war, Europe was suffering its worst crisis in 40 years.
Somehow some of this was partly blamed on the US. The people now in power in Europe remember this period very well -- It's not solely a question of relevance: there is a lot of resentment.
In 100 years we'll see where the US is too. If the human race make it that far it will be amazing.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
g4dget
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· Score: 1
Where would Europe be without the USA pumping BILLIONS in foreign aid into Europe? [...] We'll just go and call all of our loans to European nations as "Due and Immediately Payable" - your economy would crumble to nothing in a single day.
What planet are you from? The US is $2.7 trillion in debt to the rest of the world, much of it to Europe and Japan. The entire US economy is built on foreign debt and foreign investments.
And the US is one of the stingiest nations when it comes to foreign aid, to the point that it really is offensive. And the notion that Europeans receive "foreign aid" from the US is absolutely laughable.
You want to be on your own and without the support of the USA? Fine - when the next border skirmish or "ethnic cleansing" spat happens, you can fscking be on your own..Go figure it out yourself...and go fight your own wars.
I think that's actually what the Europeans are asking for.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
wganz
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· Score: 1
600 million Europeans don't like having their foreign and defense policy dictated to them by 300 million US voters
Then they need to vote with their pocket books to have a military that could do something about some of these two bit tyrannts running around instead of whining crying and sniveling in their bistros. Oh, you are too civlized for that? Then just piss & moan about the results. How many resolutions do you think that the UN would have to pass before the former tyrannt of Iraq would have surrendered and given up? Hell would have frozen over before he would have willing stepped down unless it was to give power to one of his sons.
You are absolute fools to believe that you can talk these monsters out of power. I don't know what kind of dope you are smoking to believe that line of shit, but it must be a hell of a lot better than the Mexican weed here in Dallas.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 1
It's just funny how the antinuclear faction in Europe never spoke a whisper against the Soviet short-range missiles in the DDR, and yet came out by the thousands against the logical American response to the Soviet deployment of these weapons. It almost makes you think they actually wanted to become Communist...nah, that's crazy talk. Europeans were never that insane. I mean, heck, the Communist parties in Europe fell apart after the Soviet Union saw the error of its ways and dissolved itself.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 1
It should also be worth mentioning that the Soviet forces in the DDR and Ukraine drilled for months rehearsing an invasion of Poland. The Soviets should have repeated Prague, too, because the Solidarity movement was the hole in the dike of Communism that eventually led to the whole system coming apart. Of course, Reagan gave the whole thing a few blows with a wrecking ball to help the process along.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"It's just funny how the antinuclear faction in Europe never spoke a whisper against the Soviet short-range missiles in the DDR,"
What utter rubbish. Of course, the "antinuclear faction in Europe" spoke out strongly against nuclear weapons on both sides.
But, hey, you probably couldn't locate Europe on a map, let alone have any clue about what people in Europe thought or said. No wonder you have to resort to making up things.
You are absolute fools to believe that you can talk these monsters out of power.
You are an absolute fool if you think that Iraq was about freeing a country from an evil dictator. That was a nice side-effect, but the main reasons were political, economic, and strategic.
If the US was so interested in getting monsters out of power, there are plenty of other countries that are far worse than Iraq.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
HuguesT
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· Score: 1
Look, like I said what Reagan did was right in hindsight, no question about it, but at the time it was felt that he was applying pressure on the USSR to increase its military pressure in turn and that thing would come to a showdown, a so-called limited nuclear conflict in Europe.
It was not obvious to the population in Europe that the USSR would bow to that pressure like it had for for the Cuba missile crisis. Maybe Reagan had top-notch intelligence that was telling him that his course of action was safe, but that was never told to anybody in Europe or anywhere AFAIK.
As a result Reagan may have been regarded as a hero in the US (for displacing the pressure from the homeland to somewhere else, and then the following success with the cold war), but in the `somewhere else' he is not remembered fondly.
All I'm saying is that this is a piece of the puzzle in the US-Europe relations. Sure we're allies and everything, but that sort of thing does not get forgotten lightly.
Sure the USSR was by all measures a worse villain, and we hated them too.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 1
We're allies? Really?
A worse villain, huh? Great. Thanks.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
HuguesT
·
· Score: 1
Yes, allies don't mean we agree on everything. It doesn't mean friend either -- During WWII the US and the USSR were allies, remember? We're still allies because we have signed treaties together such as NATO's. Maybe it doesn't mean anything anymore.
In the case of the cold war there were two warring parties none of which had any other interest in mind than their own. Both were willing to lay waste to any part of the world as long as it furthered their interest, and they did too. Both were aggressive and ruthless. Both had (and still have actually) the power to destroy all life on Earth. The issue was control and dominance. It does not matter that much that one claimed to be a democracy and that the other didn't even try. From the point of view of the pawn in the middle who doesn't get a word in edgeways anyway, neither was friendly. So villain, yeah, sorry.
Things haven't changed much except there is only one big power now. But it's not friendly to anyone, it's just the biggest bully and we have to go along or be crushed.
"You are either with us or against us". How friendly is that?
Before I stop I must say that the villain is not the American People. They are one of the most amazing people on Earth, no doubt. The villain is the American Government, and particularly its foreign policies. Look around and you will find a lot of American who agree with that sentiment, not to mention a lot of foreigners who have been at the receiving end of a US missile, cluster bomb, anti-personal mine still active after 40 years after the conflict ended, or more simply policy.
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
DNS-and-BIND
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· Score: 1
So a careful look at the record indicates that the USA and USSR were the same? The American system and the Communist system could hardly be more different. I was merely disagreeing with you before; now I can safely dismiss you as a total crank.
-- Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
ScottKin
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· Score: 1
That's really interesting.
Do you know anything about Accounting practices? Do you know that in Accounting, you have two sides - debit and credit - and that even though data may show a US$2.7 Trillion Trade Debt that there also is a balancing side to that known as Trade Income (aka Exporting)?
It looks like the commentator for the Observer plainly picked a statistic that he liked - one that supported his view - and forgot to include details like Foreign debt owed to the US that has not been paid or has been "forgiven". Pretty convenient, I think.
Some salient facts:
- The US Government dumps BILLIONS of dollars into the IMF to help impoverished nations, and hardly ever sees a penny of that paid back into the IMF. IMF debt is regularly forgiven.
- The US Government has a long history of regularly forgiving foreign debt. If you balanced the forgiven debt against the so-called "foreign debt", the US$2.7 Trillion in foreign debt would end-up being about a US$3.7 Trillion dollar surplus. No other nation in the world "forgives" the debts owed to them, but the US does this almost like clock-work.
- Europe DID receive foreign aid from the US, which was used to rebuild Europe after WWII - oh, but that's not relevant because it's not today. If the foreign aid given to Europe to help it rebuild - not to mention the manpower/labor costs and material costs - were taken in 2001 dollars, the ammount would be staggering...and none of that was paid back to the US.
Why did Europe come to the UN and ask for the US to help in Kosovo? Because it couldn't do it itself!!! The French military is a joke - they're such prima-donnas that they left the Eurofighter 2000 project to build their Dassault "Rafalle" fighter - which, thanks to their charateristic near-sightedness, ballooned to over twice it's planned budget and was nearly cancelled, whereas the Eurofighter 2000 is progressing forward nicely. The German military isn't as bad-off as the French military, but it's not as far in front of the French as it should be.
Regardless of what the Observer article shows, Europe needs the US much more than the US needs Europe. Deal with it.
ScottKin
-- I don't give a rat's behind about "karma" here or anywhere else. Don't like what I have to say here? Deal with it!
Re:Europeans stopped something else
by
HuguesT
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· Score: 1
So you don't like what I'm telling you?
With respect, they are different for the people living in the respective country, but they are the same if you happen to be oppressed by either. The European (both Eastern and Western) got a very good deal compared to other parts of the world. Try reading the non-US news sometimes. Would you have liked to be a Vietnamese in the 60's? Would it have been appreciately different to being an Afghani in the 80's?
May I remind you what happened in Chile on Tuesday the 11th of September 1973? Here is a 9/11 you may never have heard about. Like I said, the US domestic political model is good, life is great in the US, its democracy and its economic model has been a model for the rest of the world, but its foreign policies are as callous as they come. In the past other dominant Western nation did no better (France, Germany, Spain, Portugal or England had pretty drastic and often inhumane colonization policies), but the US is deluded if it thinks it's doing things any better.
Maybe the most positive thing the US ever did was help reconstruct Japan after WWII. Even then things aren't rosy, I suggest you read the book "Blowback", by fellow American Chalmers Johnson for an illustration of how things are at there at the moment (and why the Japan democracy really isn't working all that well, among other things). In that book you will learn that the US is running an empire behind the back of its population. I can't recall the number of nice Americans who told me in person: "you European should be ashamed of the way you conducted your affairs before and just after WWII (true enough), *WE* will never do the things you have done". Well there you go, read for yourself and see if I'm a crank.
BTW blowback is a CIA term. They know the consequences of what they do. although not often to the fullest extent.
Please understand that what the US is doing has nothing to do with the content of domestic policies, it's all about maintaining the US world economic position at whatever cost the US population will accept (so the people in power will be re-elected). There is no need for conspiracy theories to find out that the media in the US (like everywhere else) is biased. To find out what is being done in your name requires a bit of an effort, but it might be worth it.
Sorry for the rant.
Re:WMD - the real story
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0
USA went to war because (among other reasons) Iraq stopped using USD to sell gas. It decided to use Euro instead.
Sure thing. Remember, the hat only works if you put the shiny side of the foil on the outside.
By the way, the amount of gold is irrelevant. Dollars haven't been redeemable for gold for over 30 years.
43 years on, the US is still using the same basic spyplane that Gary Powers flew - the U-2. Sure, they've been improved over that time quite a bit, but they're still basically the same craft. Missiles have improved too...
I presume that the Global Hawk will replace it at some stage. Similar sort of plane, really - take pictures from very high altitudes, except no pilot. If it gets shot down, it's not nearly as big a deal - and it can do duty cycles way longer than any human pilot could.
--
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo --Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
43 years on, the US is still using the same basic spyplane that Gary Powers flew - the U-2. Sure, they've been improved over that time quite a bit, but they're still basically the same craft. Missiles have improved too...
True, the U-2R is essentially the same airframe. The point I was trying to make (somewhat unclearly, I admit) was that Powers was shot down because the DOD/CIA/whomever assumed that the U-2 flew so high it was invincible. Like the first guy to shoot his own propellor off in a biplane, you only need to make that error once to really learn your lesson!
-- If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Games to play with surveillance
by
zakezuke
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· Score: 2, Funny
Some years ago, police made very common sweeps of this region looking for UV sources commonly found with indoor pot production. This wasn't satalite mind you, but standard aircraft. In order to protest this form of surveillance, basicly under the weirdo impression that you needed a warrent to do such things, I and a few friends wanted to setup small piping in the lawn, and put neato catch phrases like, "Eat at Joes". However, this would have been costly and time consuming, so the best thing I could do was arange the hose in cursive letters... "RARE" popular spoof of the phrase, "Rare to keep kids off drugs". Needless to say the resolution enough on their IR cameras was high enough to actually spy the hose tangled lettering, enough to get the cops to ask a few questions about what's going on in the back yard.
But in order to prevent satalight spy cams from seeing you, there is a hightech solution known as an umbrella that's quite effective.
-- There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary.
SHUT UP!
There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
Didn't satellite surveillance captured Bin Laden?
by
cruachan
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· Score: 1
-- OH NOES!!! IT APPEARS YUO DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR DIS HERE PIZZA! WAHT EVER ARE YOU GOING TO DO!?!?
Re:Home of the Brewster Buffalo
by
JJ
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· Score: 1
The Finnish Air Force also purchased several dozen (about 60) outmoded Brewster Buffalo fighter aircraft and defeated the Soviet Air Forces in battles for their own airspace. The Buffalo was the front line US fighter at the start of the Pacific war and was massacered by the Zero. It was the primary defense fighter for Midway. I have great respect for the Finnish military and the elan with which they fought.
-- So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Re:WMD - the real story
by
rosie_bhjp
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· Score: 1
Seems to me like Europe has a bit more to be worried about when it comes to sinking.
I think its funny that people say, $x is why the US invaded Iraq, as though there is some one reason that is being kept a secret. Truth is, there were lots of reasons. Not all of them are good reasons, mind you, but the decision wasn't as cut and dry as people suggest (either for or against the war).
Re:The problem with spy satellites is predictabili
by
Anonym0us+Cow+Herd
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· Score: 1
Assuming that no one has created a stealth telescope coated with optical and radar stealth. Or side-scanning satellites. The US government has not demonstrated these capacities at all
Just for the sake of argument...
If the US government had such capabilities, hypothetically, do you think they would demonstrate them?
When did we first start hearing lots of speculation about stealth aircraft, and when were they first flying?
Hold on a second, I seem to recall seeing some of the video footage of some rallys Hitler put on and I know the 10's of thousands of chanting people weren't all part of the SS. They were mostly regular German citizens I would imagine.
Hitler did not rise to power through a coup with a few people. He did it through
massive popularity generated with his incredible innate charisma,
his perfect manipulation of the feelings of humiliation Germany felt from the defeat and subsequent reparations after WW1,
and the intense poverty that was rampant for which he found the perfect scapegoat, the Jews.
In the early years of the WW2 the Nazis didn't need to draft, the German people fully supported the war due to their Hitler fueled mass hysteria. It wasn't until later when the hysteria wore off and after they started running out of able bodied men to throw into the melee that they needed to draft.
The Allies made a distinction between the SS and regular soldiers because while regular soldiers may not have deserved special prosecution and it would have been impossible to distinguish between willing soldier and forced soldier, the SS were clearly in the Devil's entourage. That does not mean that regular German soldiers were innocent or were forced to fight. The SS was a small elite group made up mostly of Hitler's early supporters in his political career. There certainly weren't enough SS to shove 6 million Jews into those ovens. Why don't you go find one of the few elderly Jews left that have a barcode on their wrist how innocent the regular German soldier was? It was probably not the average German who made lampshades out of Jewish skin but they supported the ones who did and let that level of attrocity happen. It was certainly lots of regular German soldiers who caused THIS MANY TO DIE.
I may be wrong here but you seem to be a liberal living in dream world here. Most Americans don't know what's going on in the world, you are correct, but don't fool your Euro-loving self into thinking that the average European is any better informed. Ignorance knows no geographic borders. Apparently there is still plenty of ignorance in Germany.
Compassionate? This country donates more money to worldwide charity than all others combined. Don't even bring that into the picture.
I don't trust any politician and I certainly don't agree with some US foreign policy. Still it is clear to me that our country is getting shit on from all sides and based on the cold, hard facts that Colin Powell laid out before we invaded Iraq, that we had every right to stomp that little would be Hitler. Furthermore, it really makes me angry when Europeans and especially people in this country think we shouldn't have taken him down when it should be clear after 10+ years of toying with U.N. weapons inspections playing bait and switch games and an open supporter of terrorism.
So, please tell me Mr. Anonymous Coward poster, what is rational in this world? Would you interview a Kurd or a Kuwaiti and ask if the US is compassionate? Why don't you move to France please and conduct your own form of ignorance with people that will like you.
"PR Problem" != undermining US foreign policy
by
ianscot
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· Score: 1
I think it'll be a PR problem if they don't find WMDs, but in the end we're already seeing it was the right thing to do.
When, as a US President, you go about explicitly undermining the UN, saying it'll be irrelevant if it doesn't rubber-stamp your own controversial, aggressively unilateral policies, that's more serious than a "PR problem." There's a colossal difference between the domestic take on this issue and the international one. "PR" doesn't adequately describe the damage.
In world opinion, the question was "Why attack Iraq now?" The answers the Bush administration gave were a) there's a 9/11 or Al Quaeda link, Saddam's sponsoring terrorism; and b) Saddam's got weapons of mass destruction, so he could give those to the terrorists. Well, the Al Quada link to Ansar al Islam doesn't get mentioned much now, maybe because that intelligence was iffy or maybe because the war had the effect of letting Ansar al Islam slip easily out of the country during the chaos. (Duh.) Nobody at the UN seriously bought the Al Quaeda thing, even the CIA was forced by Rumsfeld to "reassess" its earlier memos dismissing that possibility in order to back the administration's arguments. The supposed 9/11 connection seems to have been a total, utter reach; all the European intelligence agencies were totally unconvinced by that argument.
So, we were left with the WMD option, and Colin Powell went to the security council and puffed it up, and some of what he said was based on a forgery we already knew about... and now we haven't found anything but equivocal evidence of a much smaller program than we were making claims about.
And if those WMDs were so easy to shuttle out of the country, if they're so hard to find now, who's to say the current post-war chaos in Iraq hasn't given the sorts of radicals and terrorists we were afraid of access to them? That's exactly what the dissent here has been saying forever -- that a war would only destabilize the middle east, making terrorist attacks more likely. We've been worried about stores of biological and chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union forever for exactly those reasons.
Not exactly a "PR problem" we can ignore because Fox News says we did the right thing. The question wasn't whether Saddam was a brutal guy, it was whether the war would make it worse.
-- "Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Re:The problem with spy satellites is predictabili
by
darkmeridian
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· Score: 1
Crazy people with ground based telescopes track satellites upon launch. Remember, during ascent, everything is basically ballistic. Some years ago, some people found that a satellite "disappeared", that is, it didn't show up where it's orbit should have continued. Everyone assumed it was moved away using fuel. But then someone took a picture of it and it was basically covered in a really dark material, something similar to Martin Black. It would flicker in and out depending on where the sun was and stuff.
Incidentally, two lens were made for the Hubble Space Telescope, a flawed one and a perfect one. The flawed one ended up on Hubble. The government claimed to have lost the second one.
Slashdot Mirror
Billions of dollars of military spending, all to be able to look down a large breasted woman's cleavage.
Our tax dollars at work!
"Why did they cancel my favorite Sci-Fi show? I downloaded ALL the episodes!"
Here's the google partner link for those of you to lazy to register.
Bugs are just features that have been fixed.
Kinda like the Slashdot article, just leave out the interesting part. C'mon guys, can maybe we get a bit verbose about what you choose to put up on /.?? Maybe a little cut and paste of an interesting piece of the article? Or maybe a little more witty repartee by the editors.
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
If the satellite monitoring is so good, how did they manage to be so wrong abount WMD in Iraq. I can't help wondering if there was ever any real evidence...
Or they would be able to find more to write about
:)
Sorry couldnt resist
--- No 16-bit support in Vista? Half of our modules still use it! ---
OK, so he didn't put anything about the article, does that justify posting the whole article here? It is not going to be slashdotted (if it is, the NYTimes is in a lot more trouble than I thought) and if what Michael said would not get someone to go read the article than this will not make it more likely to be read.
Why not simply help Michael out by giving the summary he could have made? Such as, "As technology advances the chances for government's foul use grow. Satallite imagery is beginning to be used for spying on common citizens without a warrant. This could be used to track down terrorists or those pesky hackers. For once I agree with Judge Scalia's position..." or something along these lines. For gosh sakes, don't try to karma whore and then not add anything to the discussion or do more work than Michael did.
Hate ta break it to ya guys, but that's never a good thing to hear ;-)
Yeah, it does justify it. The NY Times requires a membership, and I'm too lazy to sign up for it, even if it is free.
Haven't you people learned anything? The New York Times is obviously an untrusted news source. I mean, please, satelite imagery? Next thing you know, they'll tell us the Earth is round and the moon isn't made of cheese!
Ignore any vegetation at:
Latitude: 45 53S. Longitude: 170 30E
Thank you.
The satellites often use well defined orbits and hence are easily trackable. This means someone using deception techniques can hide their actions.
They have their uses. But you will always get higher resolution using aircraft (they are closer to the ground). Not to mention aircraft can actually be easily directed to a target.
For example, imagine if we could trace back the steps of the 9/11 terrorists right up to the point where they entered the country, I am sure that would give valuable information.
Nevertheless I am strong advocate for privacy (aren't we all?) therefore, its best that we put the laws in place before its been abused.
The Digital Revolution
================
Oh my goodness gracious,
What you can buy off the Internet
In terms of overhead photography!
A trained ape can know an awful lot
Of what is going on in this world,
Just by punching on his mouse
For a relatively modest cost!
-June 9, 2001, following European trip
(i found this on kuro5hin)
Before adopting WHATWG, read the moonlight.NET EULA [http://www.microsoft.com/interop/msnovellcollab/moonlight.mspx]
As technology becomes more powerful, tracking of people and their actions is facilitated. Now, some technologies (e.g. the Telephone) have regulations that restrict use/disclosure of the information gathered (e.g. wire tapping requires a court issued warrant in the U.S.). Given that GPS informatoin and satellite information exists, what usages restrictions would be appropriate? Perhaps non disclosure except under court order?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/weekinreview/18B AMF.html?ex=1053835200&en=afbf9e2309015f72&ei=5062 &partner=GOOGLE
Don't lump us all together with you. I'm a staunch conservative and considered the justifications for the Iraq "war" more or less fabricated (including the WMD charges.) The world is not as black and white as you seem to think.
How did we know the reporter actually went up into space for this story? He may have Jayson Blaired it.
Dude, where's my packet?
Have you any idea the amount of space required to store this stuff? Bandwidth costs?
Let's say you have a (currently non-existant) 1mm imaging platform on a satellite. 1mm per pixel of resolution allows you to identify most things fairly well, but you still might have trouble reading a newspaper's body clearly. Headlines would come through okay - keeping in mind, of course, that you have to make the shot obliquely to get some sort of an angle on it - straight down doesn't help here. Now take a picture of a square 200km by 200km. How many pixels is that? Let's say you take that picture with 24 bits per pixel denoting colour (and not, say, the way you would do it which is with more than three bands... but I digress). How many bits is that?
It's easier, by far, to do things like fly over the area you want at a less sexy height, like 20,000 feet, with a high-end remote imaging and sensing platform mounted inside your medium-to-low end plane. 500TB cartridges store a good amount of images, and you can jack them directly into your central machine back home while the computers go to work analysing the data they contain.
It also costs signficantly less.
They obviously don't want the article to be seen from space...
The president of Colombia, Álvaro Uribe, keeps one on him at all times in case he is kidnapped or is the target of an assassination attempt.
The growth of the technology-enabled police state is shocking. You can't even kidnap a guy anymore without worrying the victim might violate your privacy by hiding some beeper up his butt. We better think long and hard before letting this genie out of it's bottle.
Assuming that no one has created a stealth telescope coated with optical and radar stealth. Or side-scanning satellites. The US government has not demonstrated these capacities at all.....
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Can I opt-out on having my property photographed?
I think you owe us 984 words.
If you like playing around with satellite images from Microsoft's Terraserver, try USAPhotoMaps. This (Windows only) software will download multiple images from Terraserver and stitch them together seamlessly. You can also switch between photo images and USGS topo map images.
Spy on you your neighbors. Check out the 6 pixels representing the car you owned 5 years ago. Really cool.
Where can I find images of Canadian cities? I know there is terraserver and lots of resources for American cities..
Like this one for Mac OS X, Terrabrowser.
So anyone have any ideas about Canadian cities?
damn, hold on a second ......
The US govt. has been using commercial imagery and widely available(http://www.rockware.com/catalog/pages/ge omatica.html) commercial software to process imagery for some time now. Does anyone think that since NIMA is a large classified civilian institution with numerous trusted workers, it is being forced to move to commercial technology for a large portion of its operations in order to "cover more ground" without exposing the "more classified" portion of its activities..........Weird eh?
The United States govt. has been using commercial imagery and widely available(http://www.rockware.com/catalog/pages/ge omatica.html) commercial software to process imagery for some time now. Does anyone think that since NIMA is a large classified civilian institution with numerous trusted workers, it is being forced to move to commercial technology for a large portion of its operations in order to "cover more ground" without exposing the "more classified" portion of its activities?
Just wondering......
P.S. NZ law enforcement this was a joke. ;)
Too cold to grow the green stuff down here
There's a good conspiracy theory to go with Hubble and spy satellites actually.
Basically, the theory is that the reason that the Hubble mirror was ground "incorrectly" is that it was actually the wrong mirror. It was accidentally switched with a similar mirror that was ground for focusing at a much shorter distance (i.e. orbital distance from Earth) intended for a military version of Hubble.
There were two DOD shuttle missions after Hubble, one of which was supposedly to launch the military spy Hubble (STS 38 or 44, I can't remember which one). That was set back from the original schedule due to the mixup of mirrors though.
Just a theory, but a good one.
In the home, Justice Scalia added, "all details are intimate details, because the entire area is held safe from prying government eyes."
And it had better stay that way too.
Big brother is here and big father is waiting to bust into our rooms. The day when the whole planet is constantly watched and individuals are tracked without their knowlege will be a very sad day indeed.
It's only 1 px/mm. I don't think that's fine enough for an AC's...
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Offtopic but what the heck. USA went to war because (among other reasons) Iraq stopped using USD to sell gas. It decided to use Euro instead. This is no secret and widely known. Now one can quickly realise the issues involved here. Any country buying gas from Iraq would require euro's instead of USD. So they would have to start selling all those USD and slowly start flooding the market with USD. Market goes down. Bad economy. USA doesn't have enough gold to payback countries (and current debts), etc. You get the idea...USA is sinking!
It's not about the "WMD" (where's that HOT intelligence that Bush had a few months ago??). You don't spend 75BUSD to get rid of a leader, you spend 75BUSD to prevent your economy from falling to it's knees. What Bush did just bought the USA a few extra years. But the worse has yet to arrive!
"The day when the whole planet is constantly watched and individuals are tracked without their knowlege will be a very sad day indeed."
It's possible.
with cameras, well, ask Francis Gary Powers.
Yeah, that's right. It's a freakin' SHEEP.
Whatever you're on, can I have some?
Last week, in an effort to increase satellite intelligence coverage of high-priority targets, President Bush ordered spy agencies to begin buying as much imagery as possible from private companies. The reason was quality and quantity. The close-up resolution of today's commercial imaging satellites is comparable to that of the spy world, and their numbers are constantly growing.
Nonsense. The reason is big defense contractors
spent billions on commercial imaging satillites.
They are NOT commnerically viable. This is
welfare for corporate bums.
Incidently, the commerical space imaging
satillites are launched into "polar orbit".
If you can launch a spy satillite into
one of these, you have an ICBM. US,Russia,
France,Israel,China and India can all launch
them and test out their nuclear holocaust toys.
At what altitude does a nations airspace end and space begin?
Just kind of curious, b/c what if North Korea (somehow) managed to shoot down an American sattelite, and then claimed it was in their airspace... Are there international treaties/laws (that only some nations have signed) that dictate this, or is it just common sense (which doesn't hold any legal ground at all)?
"or possibly because the government isn't ready to revel the information"
I can't remember who said it exactly (any fellow slashdotters out there who can help me out with that?) but in reply to some conspiracy nut who was ranting and raving about how the US Government didn't have the right to keep secrets from him, he said words to the effect of, "The US Government isn't in the habit of keeping secrets from it's people. They keep secrets from enemies of the state. Now if only the US population could keep their mouths shut and not tell anyone else who might be an enemy, then we wouldn't care less".
Now I know I winged that quote immensely... but you get the "oeuvre"... the basic "mise-en-scene"... *ahem*... Thank you The West Wing.
European militaries still persist with this outdated tradition for some strange reason.
The "strange reason" is that European militaries stopped engaging in extraterritorial adventures. It makes perfect sense to use draftees to defend your own country, and you don't have to worry about "atrocities" either when your military is only defending your own territory.
But, you are right, for the kinds of actions the US military engages in, you do need a professional military; you couldn't do it with draftees. Draftees would not be well enough trained to handle it, and US voters wouldn't go along with wars like those in Iraq if they knew that their sons and daughters might just get drafted, sent over there, and killed.
Of course, if the conscript troops had spotted any submarines, the Swedish would have probably just blamed America.
To Europeans, US involvement in Europe was both a gamble and a mixed blessing. The gamble worked and resulted in great wealth and freedom for Europeans, but if it had failed, it would have turned Europe into a nuclear wasteland. To Americans, sitting comfortably in their living rooms thousands of miles away, that threat was much less immediate.
USA went to war because (among other reasons) Iraq stopped using USD to sell gas. It decided to use Euro instead.
Sure thing. Remember, the hat only works if you put the shiny side of the foil on the outside.
By the way, the amount of gold is irrelevant. Dollars haven't been redeemable for gold for over 30 years.
I presume that the Global Hawk will replace it at some stage. Similar sort of plane, really - take pictures from very high altitudes, except no pilot. If it gets shot down, it's not nearly as big a deal - and it can do duty cycles way longer than any human pilot could.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Some years ago, police made very common sweeps of this region looking for UV sources commonly found with indoor pot production. This wasn't satalite mind you, but standard aircraft. In order to protest this form of surveillance, basicly under the weirdo impression that you needed a warrent to do such things, I and a few friends wanted to setup small piping in the lawn, and put neato catch phrases like, "Eat at Joes". However, this would have been costly and time consuming, so the best thing I could do was arange the hose in cursive letters... "RARE" popular spoof of the phrase, "Rare to keep kids off drugs". Needless to say the resolution enough on their IR cameras was high enough to actually spy the hose tangled lettering, enough to get the cops to ask a few questions about what's going on in the back yard.
But in order to prevent satalight spy cams from seeing you, there is a hightech solution known as an umbrella that's quite effective.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
It's *that* good.
This is certainly not a troll.
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
YOU FAIL IT.
Another vote from me to have parent modded further up.
Just like this post.
OH NOES!!! IT APPEARS YUO DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO PAY FOR DIS HERE PIZZA! WAHT EVER ARE YOU GOING TO DO!?!?
The Finnish Air Force also purchased several dozen (about 60) outmoded Brewster Buffalo fighter aircraft and defeated the Soviet Air Forces in battles for their own airspace. The Buffalo was the front line US fighter at the start of the Pacific war and was massacered by the Zero. It was the primary defense fighter for Midway. I have great respect for the Finnish military and the elan with which they fought.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Seems to me like Europe has a bit more to be worried about when it comes to sinking. I think its funny that people say, $x is why the US invaded Iraq, as though there is some one reason that is being kept a secret. Truth is, there were lots of reasons. Not all of them are good reasons, mind you, but the decision wasn't as cut and dry as people suggest (either for or against the war).
A radio maverick jumps to internet only. The Future of Rock n Roll
Assuming that no one has created a stealth telescope coated with optical and radar stealth. Or side-scanning satellites. The US government has not demonstrated these capacities at all
Just for the sake of argument...
If the US government had such capabilities, hypothetically, do you think they would demonstrate them?
When did we first start hearing lots of speculation about stealth aircraft, and when were they first flying?
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Hold on a second, I seem to recall seeing some of the video footage of some rallys Hitler put on and I know the 10's of thousands of chanting people weren't all part of the SS. They were mostly regular German citizens I would imagine.
Hitler did not rise to power through a coup with a few people. He did it through
In the early years of the WW2 the Nazis didn't need to draft, the German people fully supported the war due to their Hitler fueled mass hysteria. It wasn't until later when the hysteria wore off and after they started running out of able bodied men to throw into the melee that they needed to draft.
The Allies made a distinction between the SS and regular soldiers because while regular soldiers may not have deserved special prosecution and it would have been impossible to distinguish between willing soldier and forced soldier, the SS were clearly in the Devil's entourage. That does not mean that regular German soldiers were innocent or were forced to fight. The SS was a small elite group made up mostly of Hitler's early supporters in his political career. There certainly weren't enough SS to shove 6 million Jews into those ovens. Why don't you go find one of the few elderly Jews left that have a barcode on their wrist how innocent the regular German soldier was? It was probably not the average German who made lampshades out of Jewish skin but they supported the ones who did and let that level of attrocity happen. It was certainly lots of regular German soldiers who caused THIS MANY TO DIE.
I may be wrong here but you seem to be a liberal living in dream world here. Most Americans don't know what's going on in the world, you are correct, but don't fool your Euro-loving self into thinking that the average European is any better informed. Ignorance knows no geographic borders. Apparently there is still plenty of ignorance in Germany.
Compassionate? This country donates more money to worldwide charity than all others combined. Don't even bring that into the picture.
I don't trust any politician and I certainly don't agree with some US foreign policy. Still it is clear to me that our country is getting shit on from all sides and based on the cold, hard facts that Colin Powell laid out before we invaded Iraq, that we had every right to stomp that little would be Hitler. Furthermore, it really makes me angry when Europeans and especially people in this country think we shouldn't have taken him down when it should be clear after 10+ years of toying with U.N. weapons inspections playing bait and switch games and an open supporter of terrorism.
So, please tell me Mr. Anonymous Coward poster, what is rational in this world? Would you interview a Kurd or a Kuwaiti and ask if the US is compassionate? Why don't you move to France please and conduct your own form of ignorance with people that will like you.
FYI, link to an up-to-date Remote Sensing Imagery Summary Table. Taken from the Applied-GIS-RS mailing list website.
24h after original post.. late.. but worthed I guess
Animoog.org
When, as a US President, you go about explicitly undermining the UN, saying it'll be irrelevant if it doesn't rubber-stamp your own controversial, aggressively unilateral policies, that's more serious than a "PR problem." There's a colossal difference between the domestic take on this issue and the international one. "PR" doesn't adequately describe the damage.
In world opinion, the question was "Why attack Iraq now?" The answers the Bush administration gave were a) there's a 9/11 or Al Quaeda link, Saddam's sponsoring terrorism; and b) Saddam's got weapons of mass destruction, so he could give those to the terrorists. Well, the Al Quada link to Ansar al Islam doesn't get mentioned much now, maybe because that intelligence was iffy or maybe because the war had the effect of letting Ansar al Islam slip easily out of the country during the chaos. (Duh.) Nobody at the UN seriously bought the Al Quaeda thing, even the CIA was forced by Rumsfeld to "reassess" its earlier memos dismissing that possibility in order to back the administration's arguments. The supposed 9/11 connection seems to have been a total, utter reach; all the European intelligence agencies were totally unconvinced by that argument.
So, we were left with the WMD option, and Colin Powell went to the security council and puffed it up, and some of what he said was based on a forgery we already knew about... and now we haven't found anything but equivocal evidence of a much smaller program than we were making claims about.
And if those WMDs were so easy to shuttle out of the country, if they're so hard to find now, who's to say the current post-war chaos in Iraq hasn't given the sorts of radicals and terrorists we were afraid of access to them? That's exactly what the dissent here has been saying forever -- that a war would only destabilize the middle east, making terrorist attacks more likely. We've been worried about stores of biological and chemical weapons in the former Soviet Union forever for exactly those reasons.
Not exactly a "PR problem" we can ignore because Fox News says we did the right thing. The question wasn't whether Saddam was a brutal guy, it was whether the war would make it worse.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Crazy people with ground based telescopes track satellites upon launch. Remember, during ascent, everything is basically ballistic. Some years ago, some people found that a satellite "disappeared", that is, it didn't show up where it's orbit should have continued. Everyone assumed it was moved away using fuel. But then someone took a picture of it and it was basically covered in a really dark material, something similar to Martin Black. It would flicker in and out depending on where the sun was and stuff.
Incidentally, two lens were made for the Hubble Space Telescope, a flawed one and a perfect one. The flawed one ended up on Hubble. The government claimed to have lost the second one.
Hmmmm....
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/