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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."
The have the Xia and the Jin class submarines. As long as they don't go Super-XiaJin, we should be ok. /who needs karma..
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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?
So is it true that they have screen doors?
having google maps during the cuban missle crisis or the cold war would've been bad ass...
"dude....call JFK...I think I see a launcher!"
*goes back to playing pong*
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.
It's just there to draw our attention from the real threat. Flooding the world with these
http://www.leftlanenews.com/chinese-sedan-flunks-g erman-crash-test-with-video.html/
Of course who cares about the Chinese government but it shows that whilst human nature hasn't changed in thousands of years technology has and privacy is going straight to hell. What used to be non-existant or only available to governments with multi-billion $ defence budgets is quickly becoming available to every man and his dog as Google Earth shows. The bad thing is without human nature changing we're all going to end up in a screwed society where we must all watch our words and actions like politicians in case there being recorded or publically posted in ways that could ruin our careers for the crime of being human once in a while.
...but the article doesn't seem to have an actual link to the map. It's here.
If I owned that many Treasury bonds AND a nuclear submarine I'd unfurl a big legible banner in English across the top of it:
PAY UP
This was on Drudge Report last week... Slashdot's new moniker:
"all the news that was fit to print yesterday"
-rt
how quiet will this boat be submerged? SSBN's are the chickens of the sea - they run away from the slightest noise in order to stay undetected; the attack boats like to trail them in order to kill them if needed. Unless these new ones are extra quiet they'll be less a strategic threat than a symbol of power. They could, for example, be used to try to forestall a US response to move against the Republic of China, depending how credible the US viewed such a threat. For China, it means they've added a new threat to many of their neighbors - it could get a bit busy with Russian, Taiwanese, and Japanese subs and ASW forces looking to track them.
That said, I'd love to be on the first boat to track one...
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
because i believe the future is not 1984, but instead, reverse big brother
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
george orwell is bullshit. the future of cameras everywhere is that they can be used AGAINST big government
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If it's like other stuff they make it's likely to get recalled. So no reason to worry.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
In other news, the Chinese govt just announced plans for the world's largest, submarine-based advertising campaign.
The 220 foot banners, visible from space and deployed in the world's oceans, will read "Come to Beijing for having best memorable Olympics."
i wouldn't fly that satellite too close to china. they might shoot it down. :)
Or "China asks Google to blur region".
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
You can see the sailors running around on deck, almost like they're having a fire drill.
1984 is not so much a work of intelligence as it is mental pornogrpahy for paranoids
kind of like ayn rand's work is mental pornography for the simply selfish
they even have a fancy philosophical term for this selfishness: libertarianism. uh, no, what ayn rand wrote is just about being a selfish dickwad
1984, atlas shrugged: these 2 works are mythological touchstones for certain subcultures of society. such that i know i am going to be modded into oblivion by saying these words. i know what i say here is deeply offensive to a certain subset of morons and wackjobs
orwell/ rand aren't enlightening at all. they just reinforce a preexisting bias already present in certain readers, such that those biased readers get really excited about these works. there preexisting biases are radically reinforced. those biases being either:
1. the government is out to get me. i know it. you say otherwise? you must work for them (1984)
2. it's ok to be totally selfish. because it's actually a really deep and rich philosophy, not just a shallow shortsighted instinct of the simple minded(atlas shrugged)
ayn rand and george orwell rank right up there with l ron hubbard in terms of biggest purveyors of pseudoreligious clap trap from the last century. "dianetics", "1984", "atlas shrugged": the 20th century's champs of pseudointellectual, pseudoreligious snake oil
but don't let my cries of "bullshit" sway you when i point at these hucksters. you may now pillory me with the passion of a scientologist told that there is nothing wrong with psychology
sorry to rock your mythology, crackpots
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
paranoid fruit loops are annoying, and need to be made fun of
but you can ignore my caustic attitude towards you and your 1984 mythology, dear paranoid fruitloops. i'm obviously a secret servant of the illuminati
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The speed of sound in air is ~760mph.
The speed of sound in water is ~3,355mph.
What was that you were saying? Something about blathering about things you don't know about?
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
a cell phone camera or google maps is not the complete answer, just a new tool in a swiss army knife of tools to use against autocracy. you thought that the struggle was ever going to be answered definitively or completely with one technological tool or idea?
the struggle against those who wish to restrict your rights and freedoms is a struggle that has always been waged, in all societies, and always will be waged, for all time. because you can't use google maps to spy on dick means it's pointless to try? or to not celebrate the transparency these new tools suddenly offer?
what if activists followed dick around as much as they could everywhere he went with cellphone cameras? you don't think they wouldn't find something embarassing at least once or twice, even with all the secret service flak they would get? you think this struggle requires no sacrifice? you think it's one technological trick or doodad and SNAP, the desire of some assholes to control everyone else will just magically disappear?
it's a struggle, forever. celebrate the new tool handed you in the struggle. or you don't really understand what is going on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You mean, someones going to go ballistic?
This may have been very true 10-15 years ago, but certainly not now. In fact, millions of Taiwanese (including 5 from my own family) have moved to the mainland to live and work permanently. It's the mainlanders who are the ruthless capitalist running dogs these days.
Which is the biggest threat to the leadership's control - as more people get money they start to want to do things with it; and get ideas about how the government should deal with them, as opposed to how the government wants to deal with them. Then, those that haven't enjoyed the economic boon start wanting a piece as well while those that have start getting less willing to see more of their money go to the government to be redistributed.
The Chinese leadership may think they can pull off keeping themselves in power and free up the economy; but given the size and divergent cultures within China I doubt they can pull it off.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Then I suggest you check again, because over here, 0.3<0.33<1
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
having google maps during the cuban missle crisis or the cold war would've been bad ass...
Check out this one which is about a mile or so from the South side check point of the coastal DMZ.
Thats a building, but its been painted to match the terrain. I suspect they are afraid of DPRK flying around their border. If you scroll through to the north, you can see the trench fences (the last parking lot) and then opposing that the North Korean side. If you keep scrolling west you can follow the trench fence system to the west coast. There are a lot of interesting things such as trenches and border forts and hidden nooks and cranies you can only see from the air.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Why is there such a big fuss over China launching a new boomer?
China is already in possession of an outdated ballistic missile sub, they are simply building a replacement class. Yet news sites and the 'omg China' crowd seem to be thinking it's a sign of aggression, and similar nonsense. Here in the UK the govenment has recnetly raised a bill for ~£20 Billion for a replacement SSBN system.
As to it's secrecy, I've seen models and diagrams of it for years on various blogs and military tech sites, the fact they were building a new submarine was not secret. It was also know that it would look (unsurprisingly) just like the current russian boats. All China has managed to do is keep it's construction somewhat secret. China can track satellites, and it's not hard to hide a sub (most facilities have hangers for them) - this is not an intelligence coup, it's simply China showing the West their new toy. We do it via public launches and bottle smashing, China simply parks theirs outside and waits for someone to notice.
...Only in Soviet Russia...
...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.
I've seen a satellite taken picture of a man reading newspaper at the east germany streetcorner and you can read recognize paper, headlines and pictureframes so that you know then what date that picture was taken.
I'm pretty sure you haven't. You may have seen such a picture taken from a plane, but not from a satellite.
...China is testing anti-satellite laser weapons.
I was looking around the Google Earth imagery in the DPRK recently. There's weirder stuff than that on the North Korea side -- airports with rows of MIG fighters (real or just props? Why left out in the open instead of in hangars?); half the hilltops near a major towns seem to have trenches and anti-aircraft sites on them, whether there is a military base nearby or not; roads and railways near the border for no particularly good reason go underground (i.e. are covered with thick layers of trucked in-dirt -- I'm guessing they would blow the tunnel with explosives and collapse the transport routes), etc.
Three things really stood out when I was looking around
1. In west-central North Korea there is a dam feeding an ENORMOUS irrigation canal that stretches across a quarter of the country -- winding its way over the terrain and through multi-kilometre-long tunnels through whole mountains (yes, those are west and east ends of the same tunnel -- zoom out to see them both -- and there are dozens of tunnels along this thing!). It's one freaking huge and expensive irrigation project.
The second thing was near one of the military airports where there are 4 huge circular landing pads with 30m-wide helicopters parked in the middle. The blades are so big they could only be the Russian-built Mil Mi-26 or something similar. There are at least a dozen other, smaller helicopters parked in the same area.
The third weird observation was this set of two enormous mansions tucked away in a forested valley, complete with its own private "end of line" train station, and a double security wall along the crest of the valley ridges. Gee, I wonder who lives there? The contrast with the state of the rest of the country is pretty shocking. I can see why the mansions are hidden away from view in a valley.
They've got some amazing stuff out in the open. One thing is for sure. This is not a country that should be starving with that much military and other assets out in the open on display.
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.
It's just a cheap Chinese imitation.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
What do you think they're going to do next poison our dog food??
As the U.S. government, the U.N and most of countries in this world stated, Taiwan is a PROVINCE of China. It is separated from mainland China because of a civil war (called the third civil war between 1945-1949). During that time most Chinese people supported the communist party and banished the KMT party the U.S. supported to Taiwan in 1949.
The communist party were planning to continue attacking KMT in Taiwan as the final war and make the whole China as a single unity. However, the Korean war was broken out and H. Truman asked the U.S. navy _invaded_ (since they did not ask Chinese people if agreed) Taiwan Strait to prevent the communist party's plan. The new government has no choice but sent army to North Korean as a kind of "revenge" leading to a long time hostile status until the end of Vietnam war (all the officers of Vietnam army were trained in China military academies).
Before 1949 after Japanese force surrendered, every Chinese CAN go Taiwan as a RIGHT as go to everywhere in China. Chinese people, even army coming to Taiwan, are to use their rights. So Chinese people called this "the war of unify". It is nothing about ideologies but similar to the civil war in the U.S. How can we say "invade"?