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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
"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've been interviewed as part of background checks for friends, and they are really quite lame. No, they don't talk to everyone you've met in the last 10 years. No, they don't have s3kr3t information about you that they research. And I very much doubt (based on what I've seen) that they tap phones or read email (except perhaps your official work email).
Basically, they interview your neighbors and ask you for a list of friends. Then they interview a few of your friends.
Questions were like:
- How long have you known him?
- Does he do drugs?
And my favorite:
- Would you trust him with the fate of the Country?
To that one I said "as much as I'd trust anyone", while thinking "which is not very much".
By the way, this particular friend is a left-wing pot smoking stoner. And yep... he got his Top Secret clearance.
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.