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Virtual Earth Exposes Nuclear Sub's Secret
NewsCloud alerts us to a story a few months old that has been getting a lot of play recently. A Seattle blogger, Dan Twohig, was browsing in Microsoft's Virtual Earth when he accidentally came across a photo of a nuclear sub in dry-dock. Its propeller is clearly visible — this was a major no-no on the part of someone at the Bangor Sub Base. The designs of such stealth propellers have been secret for decades. Twohig blogged about the find and linked to the Virtual Earth photo on July 2. The debate about security vs. Net-accessible aerial photography has been building ever since. The story was picked up on military.china.com on Aug. 17 — poetic justice for the Chinese sub photo that had embarrassed them a month before. On Aug. 20 the Navy Times published the article that most mainstream media have picked up in their more recent coverage. Twohig's blog is the best source to follow the ongoing debate. No one has asked Microsoft, Google, or anyone else to blur the photo in question. Kind of late now.
I like eclipse. It's plugin architecture is quite good, the code completion stuff great. The thing that really irks me though it's too bloated and slow. I have a laptop with 1.5Gb RAM and the truth of the matter is, eclipse sometimes hangs my laptop, or slows it down to a crawl, and there are instances where I run out of memory just editing a bunch of java classes which I made (after which I have to restart my computer because it seems to suck all resources even when it's closed). The thing needs optimization on this end. Other than that, it works great, even as a php editor.