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Soldiers Call for Engineering Tech Support
chuckfucter writes "Wired news writes that soldiers in the battlefield now have their own army of geek advisers whom they can contact whenever they need technical support. The stakes are much higher here, with troops asking about the structural integrity of bridges, roads, dams and airfields: Can this structure be safely used after sustaining damage from bombings?"
Actually, if you read the article, they're doing USACE type stuff. Examples given were load-bearing estimates, structural damage estimates, trajectory calculations, etc. Absolutely none of the stuff your average PC geek would do. It seems that when Wired picked up the story they decided that it needed more of a "geek" spin to it. *shrug*
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You may not know of this, but there is something called a "background check". They go and visit all the people you've met for the past ten years of your life and interview them. They peruse records you don't even know that exist. They tap your phones, watch your email, know when and what you are doing at all times.
I'm sorry, but you can't slip through this unless you are bona fide an American citizen who has never said anything bad about the country and has never associated with those who have.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
"MOAB penetrates deep underground"
Massive Ordinance AERIAL Burst.
Most of the rest of what you've said, the AWACS thing with facial recognition, is a bunch of fake shit too.
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
Hundreds of thousands...LOL. Where do you get your numbers, Michael Moore?
No, the figures come from the well respected medical journal The Lancet
Here is the article
The army uses toughbooks when not on the front line. There ARE special laptops which are horrid to use, have the worst rubber keyboards and impossible to use d-pad mouse controllers and weigh a tonne. They're fairly splash proof and you can drop them as much as you want without a problem. Toughbooks are just not that robust, they're splashproof (sort of) and mostly used on a desk rather than in the field, dropping them isn't adviasble.
I spent ages trying to think of sig, but never did
I work for the US DOD in the area of communications. Most of the techniques and communications architectures are unclassified. To prevent intercept you usually use a spread spectrum type system (freq. hopping or even better something direct sequence - read CDMA). Also some sytems have beam shaping antennas. Typically you assume most comm is interceptable so everything is encrypted - even the military IFF system uses encryption for positive ID.
The system I work on, Link 16, is frequency hopped - faster than you can imagine at 1GHz and 200W, and the signal has both TRANSEC (CDMA and other measures) and COMSEC applied. Beyond that the information is very redundant with lots of error correction encoding.
The US military recognizes that battlefield information is one of the things that gives US forces a huge advantage. The "problem" of intercept and jamming is accounted for. I have seen sytems that have plenty of power and antenna gain yet operate at incredibly slow data rates to ensure the information gets through.
As a former Army Engineer officer, and former structural engineer, I'm a little skeptical of this article.
Engineer units and officers, who are already organic to Battalion (500ish troops) and above, are trained to do this sort of thing (bridge load surveys). For very complicated structures, I can see a need to contact a consultant "in garrison" somewhere who can do a more advanced structural model, but I'd think that would be quite the exception.
I think the article is misleading. The Army has had to evaluate the strength of existing bridges for years--since WWI or before--and has trained and integrated units and leaders with the capability to do so. Before 2004, tank commanders didn't just guess about whether a given friendly or enemy bridge would hold their vehicle.