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What Silicon Valley Can Do For Homeland Security
An anonymous reader writes "Small, agile development firms are just what security in the United States needs, argues an article on Ars Technica. The piece compares the processes used in small Silicon Valley firms to those used in security contractors retained by the U.S. Government. Mr. Stokes' conclusion? The U.S. has a lot to learn from small companies." From the article: "Whether it's nuke detection technology at ports, computer automated wiretapping and data traffic snooping, or massive government data mining operations, our present approach to homeland security is embodied for me in those 14-foot pillars: ponderous, expensive technologies designed by government-funded teams of scientists who're working in vain to outmaneuver not just the terrorists, but the surging global market for technological innovation in which those terrorists thrive. By way of contrast, the Sandia group's DIY nuke detector represents an attempt to fight fire with fire by harnessing the same market forces and entrepreneurial spirit that terrorists have learned to use so effectively."
What about lone coders like me?
Call me, Uncle Sam... I can help consult on your problems. Now please lay down on this couch and tell me about your mother.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Take a look at the following list of answers, and tell me which of these two questions they go with: (a) "what is the Cold War," or (b) "what is the GSAVE":
-It's a long, global struggle that pits freedom and democracy against an evil, oppressive ideology.
-It's a struggle that involves a series of conventional armed conflicts against state actors, as a way of staving off a nuclear catastrophe.
-It's a struggle that can be won by granting huge contracts to large, well-connected firms to develop advanced technology for surveillance and weapons.
-It's something that we could use a really expensive anti-ballistic missle shield for.
Answer: Regardless of whether you answered (a) or (b), you're right either way.
Ok, so it was a trick question, but still interesting article.
so now i can code to oppress. yay.
dhs = stasi. not something i really want to support.
i am against secret courts, secret searches and secret police.
i had my chane to code for the gov back in the 90's. i said pass then, i'll pass now.
-.no
While smaller firms may foster more rapid innovation, sub-contracting some of the nations most sensitive technical development significantly increases the exposure to infiltration.
I hate the term 'Sig'.
One of the reasons I left government contracting for the commercial software development world.
Government is more interested in your CMMI level (another flawed system but I'll leave that for another discussion) and how many PhD's your company has than the quality of your work and agility of your team.
Execute? [Y/N] _
I didn't know what to call it, so I just said 'culture.' We could call it defense, we could call it homeland security.
The culture for so long has been so immersed in expensive, bulky solutions, it will change slowly if at all. The government just doesn't feel right unless their dealing with a huge company and huge expenses. For one thing, in a way it justifies politicians existence to the voters. "Hey, look how much we're spending on security!" And truth to tell, there may be other dangers in dealing with smaller, nimbler companies.
On a lighter note, I thought this was amusing:
I know that geeks, /.ers in particular, are lining up to work with the government on wiretapping!
Dark Reflection
It's not just in security but in every domain. Small firms are the ones that innovate best. Big firms are best at exploiting a market.
This is one of the reasons that software patents - which hit small firms disproportionately - are so bad for innovation. Anything that makes life harder for small firms - red tape, software patents, litigation, etc. - is bad for the economy because small-to-medium firms are what keep our economies healthy.
My blog
I still think the US should simply pull it's military out of the world and make peace and free trade instead of trying to employ everyone with FUD and wars. It's so much cheaper and simpler.
our present approach to homeland security is embodied for me in those 14-foot pillars: ponderous, expensive technologies designed by government-funded teams of scientists who're working in vain to outmaneuver
This quote from the article makes it sound like government scientists are incompetent boobs. The ones I know aren't. This sounds more like a political screed for the privatization of security than anything else.
Although I agree with the basic premise that government can learn a lot from start ups small businesses, here's what life's like around the beltway.
...... but......why might you ask do companies invest at the end of the day....?
Note: I work for a consulting firm based out of the DC area. We have a combination of commercial and Federal / Public sector clients
From the small business side:
You can't imagine the procurement requirements and overhead costs to do business in the Federal sector. Here are some examples:
1) FSO - Security officer to manage the clearances of your employees and company. Can't live with out it
2) Contract Vehicles - GSA Schedules are expensive to maintain or outsource.
3) Contracting Officers - Specialist who deal with government Contracting Officers.
4) Low Rates - Combined with the large overhead requirements above, is a problem. Trying finding competent technical help in DC.
5) Accounts Receivable that can stretch to 180 days without blinking.
6) Can't leverage commerical sales, must hire a dedicated sales force that understands the market.
Again for the big beltway bandits, these are small overhead items, but for a 150 person company, these are significant line items.
From the Government Side:
1) Risk adverse. If you screw up a small project or procurement, you could wind up on the cover of the Washington post. Not a good place to be if you're a GS12 bureaucrat waiting for your GS13.
2) Insane Budget Cycles: If you don't use it you lose it. There's a reason why so much gets done in late August / September around DC.
3) Preference for the "usual suspects" like Lockheed, Booz Allen, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Unisys, Titan etc. With items one and two, why try a new small untested company. Many companies around the beltway have gone out of business and screwed the gov. At least you know they are not going any where.
4) Compliance requirements that make SarbOX look like child's play.
That's just a small hint at the problems with doing business with the federal governement. I sure the UK or other Western Countries have the same issues.
There are not too many super enterprises that release contracts on a multi-year basis. Once you get over the moat, you are in.
"It's technical in a psychometric kind a way" -- C. Parish
Market forces? Terrorists haven't harnessed any market forces or entrepreneurial spirit! Our Western governments have already lost this so called "war on terror" by sailing our freedoms down the river on the basis that we are all supposed to be terribly afraid! That's the whole point of "terrorism"!! Al'qaida/Taliban/Eye-raq-ees/Space Monkeys won the moment we changed our way of life in direct response to their actions.
working in vain to outmaneuver not just the terrorists, but the surging global market for technological innovation in which those terrorists thrive.
Terrorists (or guerilla/civil war soldiers, or the new PC "no, Iraq isn't in civil war" term: "insurgents") don't thrive in a "surging global market for technological innovation"; they thrive when something polarizes/motivates people enough to dedicate their lives to killing other people or support those who will. Like a world superpower engaging in preemptive foreign policy. Just think back to how the US itself formed; we got tired of England telling us what to do and taxing us.
We wouldn't have to spend a dime on "fighting terrorism" if we simply minded our own damn business.
Yesterday, the Big Sloshed Cheese gave a speech about how we're at war, we didn't choose this war (bullshit, we started it all) and it's either or us or THEM. Don't believe the polarizing kool-aide, people.
Please help metamoderate.
If you assume the goal is to actually defend the US, perhaps there is some way to help. But that isn't really the goal. The real goal is to make lots of money for big corporations and the people controlling them. Being more efficient or cost-effective goes against those goals.
One of the major problems with our government is that was designed to be slow-moving in order to keep it stable. Unfortunately, that attitude has leaked into the smallest corners of government agencies over time, and it has become a major problem when we deal with issues or situations that require rapid response or immediate change of policy. Of course, that describes most issues and situations in these modern times, and we are all suffering as our country loses its edge.
Being an European and, therefore, more accostumed to live with terrorism than Americans, I believe that the whole approach is inherently wrong. I find extremely similar to the typical prevent/correct engineering design decision. There has never been a case of success when attempting to control terrorism by developing new methods to fight it. England has failed, Spain has failed, France has failed, Portugal has failed and so on... society is just has too many vulnerabilities for ANY protection plan to work flawlessly. Even if you control every airport, bridge and nuclear weapon, a terrorist will still easily access you water supply (you can control water quality easily on depots... try the same on the piping), use a needle to insert poison randomly into supermarket goods, get an Ebola infection and then walk around a crowded stadium... The ONLY way to avoid terrorism is to prevent it. And the way you do that is you find the reason that moves the terrorists in the first place and find a way to remove internal popular support for that sort of action. The Spanish government gave extended autonomy to Euskadia, England negotiated peace. If you want to END terrorism, stop messing with other nation's internal political activity. America gave Noriega a country, Noriega behaves badly, America takes down Noriega. America gave the taliban a country to face the USSR, the taliban behaves badly, America takes down the taliban. America gave Hussein a country to face the USSR in Iran, Hussein behaves badly, America takes down Hussein. America gave Pahlavi a country to get Iranian oil, Pahlavi behaves badly and Ayatollah get a country, what next?! Get the pattern?
The article makes the implicit assumption that the purpose of "homeland security" is actually to reduce our risk of getting injured or killed, but that is evidently not its purpose; it's trivial to see that we could save far more lives per dollar spent by improving traffic safety and preventive health care and just maintain pre-9/11 security. Even if the rate of terrorist attacks ended up being several per year, we'd still be saving far more lives that way.
So, if the purpose of "homeland security" is not actually to save lives, what is it? It's fairly simple: to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt in the population in order to induce them to vote for certain politicians. After all, what better way to induce FUD in people than to humiliate them when they travel anywhere in the name of security and remind them constantly that they could be blown up at any minute? 9/11 and the terrorist scare was godsent for an administration that had no direction, no plan, no leadership, and no clue. I don't want to suggest that this is a carefully planned strategy of the administration, but when 9/11 happened, Bush had found his calling--raving against the "axis of evil" and terrorists simply doesn't require much intelligence or strategy. Of course, a secondary purpose of "homeland security" is that it's a great pretext to funnel taxpayer money from the government to just those "big, ponderous" companies the article is criticizing.
So, arguing about whether homeland security is well-implemented is pointless if the purpose of homeland security is to be "big, ponderous" and wasteful in the first place.
What people should be talking about is what the point of homeland security as-we-know-it is in the first place. There were doubtlessly some straightforward and overdue changes to airline security that should have been implemented after 9/11, but two wars, hundreds of billions of dollars, and a dismantling of our constitutional rights are going to far.
Am I the only one to read terrorists = free market, US-Gov = centralistic ?
Makes you wonder even more...
As I was reading this article i was reminded of a novel here & here , that Bruce Sterling wrote back in 2004. The story is set right after 9/11, and stars Derek "Van" Vandeveer, an aging dot bomber who does internet security. He is hired by the government to create new computing power for the government. What popped into my mind though was something that I think the government really needs to learn, and was told to Vandeveer by his cranky, crackpot grandfather who also did work for the government, on the SR71 Blackbird, as well as other black budget projects. The grandpa says to act fast, and work in small groups; the effectiveness of this method is seen in this story, and could be seen as a possibility for future government projects.
I think that the government would be well off to invest more time and money into smaller, more off the wall brainstorming sessions with the thinkers that are far outside the normal trains of thought. We just might find ourselves a bit safer.
You defeat terrorists through intelligence and ideology.
Deleted
Small companies more efficient than large bureaucracies! Further shocking news as events warrant!
Seriously, though, how is this surprising? Small companies, by their nature, are more able to come up with good solutions to a narrowly defined problem, such as 'build a nuke detector falling within these parameters,' this should surprise no one.
However, you still need someone to oversee this host of small companies. Privatizing any large-scale project (such as 'homeland security') into a host of tiny companies is inviting all kinds of intractable integration issues, waste and outright fraud. There's a reason the government is the way it is - the bureacracy exists to minimize these problems. It's not perfect, obviously, but it mostly works.
It's always tempting to say "you know, this is broken, let's start fresh with a whole new way of doing things," but it often leads to simply trading one set of problems for another.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
I can't disagree with this. There is much that is useful in the experience, culture and skill sets of small companies.
However, I would caution about overstating what those companies bring to the table, or underestimating the degree to which government is already tapping that resource.
I've worked with government agencies and personnel. They run the gamut of professionalism, dedication and intelligence just like the private sector does. But even the best of them are hampered in doing new, creative things by this simple fact: government is huge. Not only is it huge, it is composed of constitutionally separate and independent layers (federal, state, local).
It's not that nothing new gets done. In fact, if anything, there may be too much creativity, and not enough coherence. For example, the kind of whizzy-bangy stuff TFA talks about is commonly funded by SBIRs: Small Business Innovative Research grants. The SBIR program is a great boon to small businesses, to be sure, but it is like a black box into which money is pourted and from which few useful, although many interesting results come out.
All kinds of great research gets done under these programs, but somehow it never amounts to an effective coordinated response. And since terrorism is by its nature opportunistic, it doesn't matter how exceedingly well you respond to any single technological challenge. You need big picture strategy.
This is a big difference with a tech startup, which only has to solve one technological problem better than the competitors to make its fortune.
The problem that plagues government are the things that everyone agrees need to be done, but whose organizational complexities are impossible to navigate. Do you think that FEMA bureaucrats don't want Katrina victims to get the money which has been allocated to them? The problem is the reorganization that sucked them into DHS, while billed as making response more agile, did the worst possible thing: it buried them inside a much larger agency.
Bureaucracies are, as an organizaional structure, designed to do repetitive execution of routine tasks. All the Kafkaesque aspects of them we hate result from them encountering situations that are outside their assigned tasks, not covered by policy, or all too common made worse by policies. That's what's holding up Katrina relief. Policies are in place that are conceived around a zero tolerance for waste and fraud (as if this was achievable), and values the smallest increment in that direction greater than any level of increment of humanitarian relief.
The critical missing factor is at the political level. Believe it or not there's a lot of talent, passion and dedication in government, but below the political level those people can't change policy. The political level can change policy, as well as create an environment where common sense bending of rules to meet the greater goals is tolerated. If the political level is brain dead, then each organ of government will continue to do its routine homestatic functions, but won't be part of a purposeful response to new challenges.
If government fails to respond to a big challenge, it isn't because it doesn't tap private sector expertise. Nor is it because it lacks people with talent and dedication. It's because the people we elect don't care enough about the problem to make things happen.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
In a small firm the managers do more of their best to make the company grow. Later on, as the company grows and becomes more stable, they tend to care less about growth and more about stability.
However, small companies (=95% of the cases young companies) can not guarantee the same quality as ones with lots of experience. Small companies usually have not-so-experienced managers, not-so-experienced system architects and programmers. Which small (=young) company could write such a reliable code as Siemens does (several years of development, several years of testing, 20 years warranty)? A firm's project background (as a new employee's) is a good starting point for a reliable code.
What they should do is refuse to assist in improving computer automated wiretapping and data traffic snooping, [and] massive government data mining operations. That the methods "Homeland Security" uses to violate our rights) are currently ponderous, expensive technologies designed by government-funded teams is a good thing for the safety of our democracy.
The borg: "You will assist us."
Hue: "I will not assist you."
i'll tell you what they can't do, and that's screw it up any more than it already is...
abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
From TFA:
"Contrast the Sandia group's work to the high-dollar nuclear detectors described in the same article, detectors designed by big defense labs under government contract:"
Hate to break it to this guy, but Sandia is not one of those "small agile development firms".
From Sandia's web site:
"Sandia is a government-owned/contractor operated (GOCO) facility. Sandia Corporation, a Lockheed Martin company, manages Sandia for the U.S. Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration."
BTW, Sandia has 8,500 employees.
Now what was that he was saying about "big defense labs under government contract"?
... is that although it's difficult to spell, the correct spelling is bureaucracy. Look at it in two pieces "bureau cracy" and it's easier.
How about looking at every cargo container at every port before it goes to sea and before it's brought ashore? After all, by the time the bomb gets where it's going it's too late. Brilliant. Yes, an array of NaI detectors costs a lot more than a crummy little 1x1 crystal but the proximity gives directional information that really deals with background and false positives. Yes, competent people are working on the problem and solutions are on the way. No, the world never will be safe.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The removal of incompetent Pointy Haired Bureaucrats (sorry for the redundancy) would be of immense benefit. Major select selection criteria would be:
1) running a Windows operating system
2) recommending any MS application in a security sensitive enviroment
There is no right to feel safe thru security vaudeville at the expense of everyone's freedom, privacy and tax money.
The government already does this. It is called the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. About 2-5% of all research budget goes to that fund. A few billion dollars atleast a year. NSF, DARPA, DOD, NIST, Department of transportation, Department of Energy are some of the govt orgnizations that have the program. Link to an accumulation of all SBIR programs www.sbirworld.com
But on the other hand, who's easier to infiltrate, a 10,000-person Beltway Bandit or a startup where everybody knows everybody else?
Bend over and grab our ankles.
"No, no, no, don't tug on that! You never know what it might be attached to."
What always cracks me up when I order hardware with Dell (others probably have the same thing), is the agreement that you will not use the hardware for doing stuff with weapons of mass destruction, or something like that. Like someone who is up to no good with it will sit behind his pc... ordering a Dell server... arrives at the page with the agreement.. and goes 'DAMN' and goes buy his hardware somewhere else... It's all fake security, like most anti-terrorism measures.
However... maybe Saddam always ordered Dell and therefor they never found any WOMD !!
Sandia Labs is a huge government-sponsored lab. Some of those tax dollars go to Sandia's expert P.R. machine, which is very slick and no doubt had a hand in promoting the story about their "DIY detector". Their device might be just fine, but how does that make them an example of small business entrepreneurship harnessing market forces? That's just stupid on the face of it.
Who's homeland?
"Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal."
and
"Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding."
They promise you everything, deliver vapourware and screw up over in the process.
HTH
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Right... if only we hadn't kept military stationed in Saudi Arabia, Al Qaeda wouldn't have attacked us! Well maybe if we pulled out of Saudi Arabia, and also Germany and Japan, which we are bound by law to protect, maybe then? Well, maybe if we then denounced Israel and called for their destruction? Ok, well if we nuked Isreal, and passed a law requiring universal conversion of Americans to Islam. Ok, then we'd be in even more trouble... make that universal conversion to SUNNI Islam. I think that should do it. Of course then Iran would nuke us and we'd all be dead, so we wouldn't have to worry about it. Try not to be a complete appeasing idiot.
What can SV do for HS? Probably not much. Unless HS is serious about stopping terrorists which it appears they aren't: http://www.gregpalast.com/palast-charged-with-jour nalism-in-the-first-degree#more-1487
Boy I feel so much safer now that Exxon can call the department of Homeland Insecurity and have journalists arrested.
Detective Pananepinto confirmed that, "Louisiana is still part of the United States," subject to the first amendment and he was therefore required to divulge my accuser.
Not surprisingly, it was Exxon Corporation, one of a handful of companies not in love with my investigations: http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=269
What a wonderful way to protect us from terrorists. Round up all the journalists at the behest of big corporations.
Of course they won't do anything about the thousands of people walking into the USA over the open border with Mexico because no muslim terrorist would ever think of doing that. They are too busy eating
pork, drinking booze, paying prostitutes for services and going to strip clubs when they aren't flunking flying lessons.
Instead of handing out government contracts to big companies for every little job, why not put out a list of requirements along with the amount that will be paid after the project is completed. If it's a small job, this would make more sense than the whole business with awarding contracts. (I'm not saying that we should do this with all of the bigger jobs, (i.e. fighter planes, buildings) but the smaller jobs that are possible for a small company to do.)
Yes, when Scipio got the permission to destroy the Carthaginians it was more like a merciless slaughter than a battle. The reason he called for it was that Hannibal, who caused the Romans so much trouble saw the horrors of the first punic war when he was a child. This drove his will for revenge - the same thing we see in any country that was forcefully conquered, people don't forget so easily and unless you are willing to kill indiscriminately there will be an uprising against the occupier. Alexander's empire fell apart, the Mongol empire fell apart, the Soviet Union fell apart - in each of these cases this was a major element; people don't like to be told what to do by a foreign power.
The thing with annihilation is that it can only be employed if 1) you can shun your populace from the horrific acts your army performs (or have a populace that's indifferent towards killing others) and 2) you won't be needing those people for your own gain. This approach worked with the Carthaginians and the Romans as well as the Indians and the Americans.
"Modern" wars no longer offer this option. That's because they are waged not to gain territory, but to gain control - usually over ressources such as oil. To reap the profits of your military conquest you will have to keep the country's infrastructure to a certain degree intact. Things like pipelines and roads can easily be rebuilt. Workforce on the other hand (i.e. the locals you killed) can not be rebuilt within weeks.
Oh yes - and there is the ethical issue of genocide: evil begets evil. This is why Jesus turns the other cheek. If my people kill unscrupulously, why would other people hesitate to act the same way towards us? In addition, a loss of these ethical values will accelerate the downfall of society.
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
Rome vs. the Huns/Vandals/Goths/Visigoths/et al. might be a more enlightening comparison. Rome's army was still pretty good at "killing people and breaking things" (a phrase I heard from Rush Limbaugh, but apparently the Army uses it a lot to describe what they do.) But Roman society was decaying, militarism and Empire had replaced the values of the Republic, hiring troublemakers to be police in other locations was getting to be standard policy, the government was run by a succession of decadent rich people and militarists who had to continually provide welfare and entertainment for an increasingly urban population.
It's certainly not a perfect analogy to today - most of the invader groups didn't particularly have ideologies either, they just liked to take goods and land, and Rome, Gaul, and Germania had better goods, land, and weather than the places they were from. But it's at least as good as your "Rome vs. Carthage" analogy, which was singularly inappropriate here :-)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Don't know why, but somehow the title reminded me of Starship Troopers.. Here some quotes (I think they are on topic, no? ;)
"Young people are joining up to fight for the future. They're doing their part - are you? Join the Mobile lnfantry and save the world. Service guarantees citizenship."
"Every day, Federal scientists are looking for new ways to kill bugs. - Everyone's doing their part. Are you?"
Oh yea - and this one on how to eliminate bugs:
"Hey, shoot a nuke down a bug hole, you got a lot of dead bugs."
And when you gaze long enough into the code, the code will also gaze into you.
There's a theory of government called the "Unitary Executive" that a lot of them like, where the military and civilian power are controlled by a strong leader and supported by Congress, as opposed to the model where the Parliament tells the civil service and military what to do and the courts limit the scope of their actions, and many of Bush's supporters stronly believe in that. American used to have a governmental system like that; we dumped it in 1776 and the following years of the revolution, though the executive branch got some of its power back with the current Constitution adopted in 1787-1789.
The Bush administration may not be very competent, but one thing they've been extremely good at is managing their Message, staying strongly focused on whatever political goals they're trying to accomplish. The two big failures that are hurting them right now are Hurricane Katrina and Abu Ghraib, the first because it was extremely obvious that The Strong Leader was totally incompetent at protecting the Homeland, which is what you *want* a strong leader for, and the second because it was so appallingly over-the-top wrong that even Bush's right-wing supporters couldn't support it (plus the sexual element annoyed his religious supporters.) Cindy Sheehan was a big problem for a long time, because she represented an archetypal Mother whose child had not been protected by Stong Father Leader, and because Bush absolutely would not take Responsibility for it. He's probably successfully outlasted her; she got far more than her 15 minutes of fame.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
It's been a couple days since I read the article about the Scandia guys, but if memory serves me correctly, the impression was the guy built it on his own rather than as some "officialy" sanctioned project. Wouldn't surprise me if some of the parts he used weren't "liberated" from one of the "junk" piles over at scandia, some of the coolest shit i've ever seen were in some junk piles over at the Marshal Space Flight Center, NASA junk piles are a geek treasure troves.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
is to assume the government has any interest in making things more secure. Their only interest is creating a perception of increased security, as a cover for the latest pork barrel.
Insurance companies, who are masters at estimating and handling risk, can write the necessary "terrorism" clauses into insurance policies, spreading risk appropriately. If you want terrorism clause, you can pay for it. If you don't, you can keep your money and take the (vanishingly small) risk.
Europe has dealt successfully with terrorism for more than 40 years. We should emulate their model. To do otherwise is a tremendous waste of money, personnel and time better spent elsewhere.
IOW the "War on Terror" is at bottom an utterly wrong-headed approach.
I see a ton of untested technology claiming to solve world hunger. I see a bunch of salespeople pushing something with no support tail. I see a federal procurement process that requires, REQUIRES, competition to save the taxpayer money. I see technology evolving faster than i can deploy and train people to use it. I see terrorists using technology that they only need to work once. I need technology that I need to never fail. I see terrorists that only need to get one bomb into one place once. I see a federal system that has to get thousands of reliable devices into thousands of places that can be operated by well-intentioned high school graduates. If you want to help, donate your patents and let us open source and compete your products. Better yet, go to FEDBIZ http://www.fedmarket.com/bidProducts/fbn/ and look at what we are looking for.
Don't you mean ex-representative Cunningham?
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
What caused my eyebrows to shoot up was the claim that he could pick up gammas from uranium at one mile and also in the presence of shielding. Three problems with that assertion, one is that a mile of air at sea level isroughly equivalent to 3 feet of concrete, two the 1/r**2 fall-off in intensity is HUGE at 1 mile and three, uranium doesn't have much of a gamma line that stands out (only thing I could find that put out high energy gammas was the 234Pa decay product of 238U).
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
This country is loaded with solutions - from database systems that actually work, to communications that would empower first responders to actually be able to communicate with each other during an emergency. Doing business with Uncle Sam however is a challenge than no successful small business has every found a solution for - the red tape and big dogs that feed off the inability of the government to actually make a good decision make the process unworkable. Until the political system actually empowers GSA to bypass its own red tape the system will remain broke - and these great solutions will continue to only benefit the private sector.
Mark Hewitt mark(at)mark-hewitt.com
a mile of air at sea level isroughly equivalent to 3 feet of concrete
Interesting, I would guess that's why underground nuclear detonations are so disapointing, they can't vaporize and superheat enough rock if a 1 mile air fireball is equivelent to a 3 foot rock fireball!
The other thing is these gov types are perfectly happy to let us believe things that aren't actualy true when it suits their porposes. I live in the city that has the country's fourth busiest boarder crossing and when I had my thallium stress test, the sign in the doctor's office said to expect delays when crossing the border for 4 days, due to the radiation being detected by customs! I think it's pretty obvious that we're better at detecting radiation at the border than the government is letting on.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The Canadians were installing radiation detectors back in the 90's to detect smuggled cigarrettes - tobacco has a high concentration of potassium.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.