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Skynet Means More Bandwidth for British
pcnetworx1 writes "A new £3.6bn project to upgrade the space communications network for British forces including the Army, Royal Navy, and RAF has gone underway. The first craft, Skynet 5A was launched from Kourou in French Guiana on 11 March 2007. There will be a constellation of three satellites in total. This system is also not an exclusive project for the armed forces, it is actually outsourced to a company called Paradigm Secure Communications. They work with NATO, France, Germany, Canada, Portugal and the Netherlands. They are also seeking new business in the US, Australia, and the Middle East."
20.38: Skynet becomes aware
20.39: Skynet gives more bandwidth
20.40: ????
20.41: Profit!
"Oh boy"
1969: Series of UK military satellites called "Skynet" first launched
1997: Skynet, a neural net-based artificial intelligence built by Cyberdyne Systems,
brought online and given control over the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal
2007: UK military ridiculed for choice of name for latest high-bandwidth series of "Skynet" satellites
Time travel's a bitch..
...90% of slashdotters are coming to this article to either make a terminator joke or to read other people's terminator jokes.
They are also seeking new business in the US, Australia and the Middle East.
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Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
I'm finally vindicated after all these years! Everyone kept claiming the Terminator's accept was Austrian, or some such rot, but I knew it was British.
Error:
The interesting part is that it's ip aware and is basically a big router in the sky. This is new-ish stuff. It has other cool tech but software people wouldn't be terribly interested in e.g. the snazzy electronically steerable antenna etc.
It's a slight shame the Hollywood has given everyone unrealistic expectations of, among other things, the state of the art in military satellite systems. It's rather like the Stealth Fighter - an awesome achievement despite the fact that it was far from having the all-aspect stealth that it is generally portrayed to have. Another example would be those f***ng moronic films where someone breaks "128-bit encryption" in 60 seconds because he has a gun to his head (or whatever).
The interesting part of it is that Satellites of the Skynet 4 era need teams of people to fly them and make constant adjustments to their orientation and orbit but that commercial satellite tech has become so good now that one person can fly many satellites and each satellite can manage itself for up to 28 days. I never knew how much effort it was until hearing this.
This is all just my personal opinion.