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
·
· 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
Glytch
·
· 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
by
Ryan+Amos
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Have you ever seen Swedish chicks? That would have been the best job in the world.
Re:Military Might
by
lawpoop
·
· 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
by
Durendal
·
· 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.
Google Partner Link
by
Ryan+Stortz
·
· 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
by
ergonal
·
· 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
·
· 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
Re:Short but interesting.
by
Timesprout
·
· 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.
by
cheese_wallet
·
· 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...
(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
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..
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
Does it matter? NO the US has access to the Oil, all else is irrelevant now.
The flaw in your argument is that the US also had access to any iraqi oil fields it wanted in 1991, but didn't take it.
Re:Karma Whoring
by
tfreport
·
· 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.
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.
Damn it that green patch is not my dope!
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Ignore any vegetation at:
Latitude: 45 53S. Longitude: 170 30E
Thank you.
Re:Damn it that green patch is not my dope!
by
Derg
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The problem with spy satellites is predictability.
by
cheesybagel
·
· 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
·
· 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.
news.google url
by
towster
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"Us conservatives?"
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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.
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.
Privacy Violation
by
Anonymous Coward
·
· 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.
Satellite Imagery at Home
by
Yupnik
·
· 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.
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.
too many secrets
by
darkitecture
·
· 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.
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.
Games to play with surveillance
by
zakezuke
·
· 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.