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Google Maps Shows Chinese Nuclear Sub Prototype
mytrip writes "An image of what could be one of China's new nuclear ballistic missile submarines is available on the Google Maps and Google Earth satellite-image site, a defense blogger claimed Tuesday. The satellite picture was discovered by Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project for the Federation of American Scientists, and announced Tuesday on his blog. Kristensen believes the picture, taken by the Quickbird satellite late last year, reveals China's new Jin-class, or Type 094, nuclear ballistic missile sub. The new sub class is approximately 35 feet longer than its predecessor, the Xia-class, also known as Type 092, according to two images Kristensen compares on the blog. The Jin-class sub has an extended midsection that houses 12 missile tubes and part of the reactor compartment, Kristensen explains."
That the the family of the guy in charge of security just got a bill for a single 9mm round?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
If this is the kind of thing you can dig up with unclassified satellite imagery, imagine what classified material shows. Google Maps has a picture of my house where you can make out individual people walking down the road. It's not hard to imagine classified satellite imagery that can identify somebody if they happen to be looking upward.
I think it would be more likely that the next headlines would read: Google maps satellite suddenly stop working over China.
You mean it could of helped back when GW was proclaiming... "See those vans parked over there next to those 55 gallon drums, thats a chemical weapons factory!!"
I don't really find this to be a disturbing trend. The only reason why such a trend would be disturbing is if we try and apply old ways of thinking to the new reality.
Imagine a world where everything that happens in public space is recorded. We are close to that now with cell phone and security cameras, but as some point it will be even more true as people mount cameras on their bodies and run them non-stop. It is easy to imagine such a world as a nightmare where the most petty of laws are enforced with near perfection and anyone deviating from social norms is ostracized. There is an alternative though.
Imagine if we could catch every single person who has violated the law. What would happen? Every single one of us would be up to our necks in fines and well over half of the population would be in jail. Faced with such a threat, one would hope that a democracy would respond by rethinking laws. In such a world would you really want marijuana laws that we demand tossing half of the nation in jail? Would a $250,000 fine for downloading copywrite material really make sense if it sent the major of people in the nation into bankruptcy? Would a no drinking before 21 law really make sense if it meant drumming the vast majority of college students out of college?
There are a lot of dumb laws out there that are tolerated because we fail to catch even a small fraction of the violators. If you could catch everyone who violated the law, many laws would have to be abolished or we would need set up prison states to dump all the guilty.
So yeah, I can imagine the evil horrible dystopia where everyone follows the massive piles of inane laws that exist to the letter and people get thrown in jail at random for violating obscure laws... but I can also envision a utopia where worthless laws have been tossed, corruption is close to non-existent, hippies don't get their heads busted in for smoking weed in the park, copyright is seriously reworked, and police find something more productive to do with their time then busting under aged parties.
i wouldn't fly that satellite too close to china. they might shoot it down. :)
Don't be so hasty in your optimism. The only reason We The People can see google maps is because the government is allowing it; all the govt has to do is make it illegal for the public to access it, and poof the alleged hedge against tyranny evaporates.
Consider the extensive network of cameras in England. Can anyone see their contents? Nope. Just the government. Wanna bet who'll be able to access the views of the extensive camera network planned for Manhattan?
And pay attention: police in this country are increasingly trying their hand at suppressing/confiscating/outlawing citizen camera operation. Note the numerous stories about permits being required for operating cameras, about "illegal wiretap" laws being used to incarcerate people using cameras, and on and on.
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
Or "China asks Google to blur region".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
> the standard mythology is that cameras everywhere is all about the government controlling you. but with google maps, with cell phone cameras, etc., we are actually seeing the rodney king effect: that governments suddenly have to get used to a new democratic form of transparency that they never had to deal with before
While, this is partly true.. "Little Brother" in the form of ubiquitous camera phones provide evidence of a lot of things private, governmental, and natural. But, I don't think orbiting satellites run by governments or wealthy corporations fall into this same category.
Especially this example in the article.. superpower military vs. superpower military. The reality is that the Chinese submarine must not be considered too secret these days, or they would have built a simple roof structure for it. The Chinese are very aware of the satellite spying capabilities of the U.S. military, which we can safely assume is a whole lot more detailed than the pictures from Google Maps.
Shouldn't they be trying to swim around it before the light turns green?
and allow me to continue my original rant by pointing out to you that this isn't a polite debate society, and i am free to say anything i wish. if you wish to consider my reply incoherent, so be it
meanwhile, my take is that i find what the other guy said boring and typical and not worthy of a reply, mainly because i'm not paranoid. you're free to see it otherwise. different agendas for different minds. some of which are hobbled by concerns not driven by reality, but driven by overactive imaginations fueled by a psychotic inability to trust. an inability to trust not just big government, which is healthy, but an inability to trust other human beings in general
there is such a thing in this world as being too trusting. this is dangerous. it is also true that some people in this world have a shortcircuit in their ability trust. this is just as impoverishing to the mind, this social deficit. the idea is to trust a little, distrust a little, and ignore the poisonous thoughts of those who trust too much or trust too little
both ends of that spectrum of trust are populated by morons and wackjobs
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I have seen the later more than the former, especially on the parent example of drugs. The drug laws do appear to tilted toward heavier enforcement for lower class drugs. Likewise, I see many drug users who can't handle themselves in public school go to private school where they can be "protected", and go to expensive group activities where they can equally be protected. And even if we can see everywhere, are we really going to be looking too closely at the private clubs?
Not to be a conspiracy theorist, but increased incarceration is only going to cause a problem if the wrong type of people are incarcerated. The US already has a huge number of people in jail for no apparent reason. These people are not, as we read between the lines of the Libby commutation, a danger to society. Many could equally be punished with community service and probation, or weekend jail time. However, for some reason, we want to keep a large part of our population in jail, out of the job market, and off the voting roles. For some reason, this is valuable enough that we spend enormous amounts of money to support the system of incarceration.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
...except the video distracted pretty much everyone (especially you) from the full story surrounding this situation. You just fixated on the video. You just fixated on the end of the story and decided to completely ingore everything else. The video is still a big fat red herring, pretty much a complete distraction from any meaningful details of the case.
Nevermind the high speed chase and the ensuing struggle afterwards.
If I acted like Rodney King I would expect to get bludgeoned by the police. This is why (as a sensible non-idiot) I choose not to engage in those sorts of anti-social shenanigans.
This is why a suburban jury didn't crucify the cops involved.
They considered the fact that the guy was acting like a j*ck*ss. This is something that his "supporters" never bothered to consider.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
having a death penalty implies that life is cheap [see China's roving vans of death]
places where life is cheap tend to not be very civilized [see Baghdad, Darfur, Texas]
arguments like "if we just kill all the killers, then the rest of us will be safe" (which i believe you are implying) unfortunately ignores the fact that any of us, given the wrong circumstances, is capable of dire deeds
what the world needs is more compassion, not more death chambers
and hey, if you're not into compassion (and you don't seem to be), ask yourself this: do you think murderers enjoy being locked up for life or might they prefer a quick out? do you really want to give them what they want, the quick out?
-- How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.
If I understand it correctly
Not really special, just that the joke only works for people who understand mandarin.
Basically XiaJin is a (somewhat valid) homonym for penis in mandarin, tho more commonly known as XiaYin or YinJin.
The economic development of China is significant, but still being VASTLY overblown. They are a major economic power, and they have a huge population, but I still see absolutely no reason to believe they will become a superpower. It's a lot of fear from westerners, and of course is being fueled by China at every opportunity.
Economically, they are still far, far behind Japan and Germany (which are both far behind the USA) and neither of them is considered a superpower. What's more, the economic development of China is highly dependent on the USA and other NATO nations, which will surely cut-off trade and other support should China start pushing for further military development.
Militarily, China lacks many of the necessary high-tech capabilities needed in the modern equipment and weaponry. They're developing low-tech manufacturing on a huge scale, but are seriously lacking in high-tech development. They make the occasional PR move to try and convince the world they are able to developed advanced technology on their own, but it's commonly based on stolen tech from the west, or extremely primitive by today's standards. They're struggling just to make fuel-efficient engines, and develop pollution controls (rather than having to buy them from western nations).
Now, it's quite possible (in the distant future) China will make that leap, but it seems rather unlikely, and anything-but a foregone conclusion. I'd give better odds on India making that jump, and before China if at all. Their proximity and totalitarian vs. democratic government makes that a very interesting prospect.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
...China is testing anti-satellite laser weapons.
That's the line I've been giving people too. The Hubble Space Telescope with a 2.4 meter mirror was designed to maximize the mirror size for the Shuttle's cargo bay, and this is the same Shuttle which has launched a KH-12 for the NRO. So the KH-12 probably has a mirror about the same diameter as the HST.
But then it occurred to me. You only need a big mirror if you're looking at dim objects in space. Stuff on Earth is pretty well-lit, so the only real problem is resolution. If you want resolution, you don't need all that surface area. All you need are two or more smaller scopes separated by a large distance to create an interferometer. The design is tricky since the individual mirrors have to be aligned to within a wavelength of light. But it's been done many times here on Earth. When done successfully, you get a scope with the light-gathering power of just the sum of the mirrors, but the resolving power is that of a mirror whose diameter is the distance between the individual mirrors.
The Webb Space Telescope will have a 6.5 meter mirror by designing it in separate cells which will fold and stack for launch. Again, since astronomy is primarily concerned with light-gathering ability, and a circle represents the most surface area for a given perimeter, astronomical scopes tend to have roundish mirrors. But a spy satellite wouldn't need light-gathering ability. They could arrange the cells differently, creating a mirror which is wide but narrow. Like the interferometer, resolution along the wide axis would be much higher.
I am not the conspiracy theory type, but the publicity over HST / JWST strikes me as similar to Asimov's short story, The Dead Past. In that story, [spoiler] the government is covering up a chronoscope, a machine which can view the past, by publicizing it as studying ancient history - ancient Greeks, ancient Egyptians building the pyramids, etc. The deader the better. It turns out that the machine can't view more than several decades into the past. But what the public doesn't realize is that while the chronoscope is useless for studying ancient history, it is the perfect spying machine, able to remotely view events which happened just a few hours or even a few seconds ago.[/spoiler]
I suspect this is part of the reason for the success (and problems) of Hubble. How the mirror wasn't tested before launch resulting in a near-fatal flaw. (How many KH-11 and KH-12 mirrors were manufactured before Hubble? Surely someone who had overseen construction of those mirrors was given some sort of advisory role in Hubble's manufacture.) How the pictures from HST are released to the public, spruced up in color and saturation so they're beautiful. How we let the gyros die until it was one failure away from uselessness. All this drama and publicity keeps Hubble in the eye of the public, and solidifies the stereotype in everyone's mind that a space telescope has got a big round mirror. Even the final maintenance mission for the HST being canceled, then restored, then funding being lost, and then restored again, serves to put the JWST in the public's mind. It too is a roundish mirror design (hexagonal cells). They even have technically knowledgeable people like us ridiculing movies which show spy satellites with extraordinary zooming capability.
My hunch is the NRO probably has at
Spending five years as a Lutheran in a Catholic school has made me one of the Devil's most hard-working advocates...
Yeah, because they didn't seem heartless regarding Tianemen,
If a host of minority political movements flooded Washington D.C., shut down its legislative branch, and demanded that, not only the administration, but the form of government be changed, I'd expect some heads to get busted. And, I'd also expect a considerable number of dead, even though we, unlike the troops involved in Tiananmen, are properly equipped for riot control. In fact, I'd venture to guess that a large part of the country would support it enthusiatically. Though, whether "a large part" has good judgment in such matters is doubtful (and fairly irrelevant in a democratic republic).
Political individuals certainly don't have the same avenues for communication to their fellow citizens in China, but that doesn't make the problem any different. Or the solution.
or during the Tibet take over,
Alternately, "the liberation of a people under the heal of a backwards, feudal theocracy which used slavery and serfdom into the mid-Twentieth Century." Tibet's suffering through the Cultural Revolution was in many ways no worse than what fell Han China. The big difference is to whom the flotsam and jetsam of these countries appealed. The Nationalists could appeal to our foreign policy and our pocketbook, but, for the average person, they are just the losers in some far away conflict.
Tibet, on the other hand, has managed to reinvent itself into some kind of New Age Sugarcandy Mountain to the Western Left and as a victim par excellence in the eyes of the Western anti-Communist. According to them, they didn't just annex what had been part of the Chinese sphere of influence since before there was a Dalai Lama, they destroyed a harmonious mountaintop kingdom which had no greater desire than its own and the World's spiritual well-being. Tibet is no longer a physical place; it's an idea. An idea which was created in the image of Victorian pulp literature. The Tibet in exile we now have has turned into a circus which is fully prepared to lie to its strongest supporters about the annexation and the Cultural Revolution's impact on the region--not in a frantic effort to retake the country in which they once lived, but to keep the circus moving.
Tell me, as a theocrat, would you rather jet-set around the world to be venerated by wealthy Westerns who can be made to believe anything out of their naïve spiritualism, or resume the day-to-day rule of a mountain theocracy which governs the lives of people who've spent the last thirty years in comparative economic, if not political, liberalism.
or in killing Falun Gong members, or...
These people follow a man who claims to be "the god of gods," fly, and become invisible at will, yet he doesn't dare return to the Mainland. Can you imagine what kind of person it takes to believe in a religion like that without it being deeply rooted in their culture and daily lives? I don't think we're losing any the great minds of our time with this action, regardless of its heartlessness.
The same way that we said General Sherman invaded the south during the U.S. Civil war. When one group of people shoot everyone trying to stop them from entering somewhere they're not wanted, we usually call it an 'invasion'
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