One of the biggest problems for military specific PTSD patients is the feeling that no one around them understands. And in most cases, they are right. No one really does understand, nor could they.
Once someone is medically retired they lose the connection of having buddies around them who've been through the same or at least similar experiences. There aren't many people in civilian life to connect with.
I think using a Second Life style interface for soldiers and veterans (especially veterans for the reasons I've mentioned above) is a great idea. It provides an opportunity for people to connect with others who have similar experiences. I think it would probably be even more effective to have a game where people are actually doing something rather than just sitting around talking to each other; many veterans will reject something like this as just another "group therapy" session.
Now a PTSD only Halo server or something would be great. You could even have separate servers for guys blown up in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. You could have an "I hate MRAPs but I still have my legs" server. The possibilities are endless. If you allowed the soldiers/vets to make their own designations they would probably scandalize those who've never been in the military:-).
"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
The ability to suspend habeas corpus usually means martial law.
From wikipedia (Martial Law):
The martial law concept in the U.S. is closely tied with the right of habeas corpus, which is in essence the right to a hearing on lawful imprisonment, or more broadly, the supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary. The ability to suspend habeas corpus is often equated with martial law. Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion, the public Safety may require it."
In United States law, martial law is limited by several court decisions that were handed down between the American Civil War and World War II. In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids military involvement in domestic law enforcement without congressional approval. On October 1, 2002 United States Northern Command was established to provide command and control of Department of Defense homeland defense efforts and to coordinate defense support of civil authorities. [8].
You can argue that the right to declare martial law wasn't explicitly given to congress, but I think I can argue with much more effectiveness and precedent that it was implicitly given in the clause regarding Habeas Corpus.
1. You sent us there. If you don't like the government of the country then do something about it, but don't complain that the soldiers who swear to go wherever your government sends them are "glorified mercenaries". Verbally attacking the soldiers themselves is just childish.
2. Moral absolutism is comforting, especially when you're sitting in a comfortable chair in your favorite free-trade coffee shop talking to people who think just like you do. It doesn't work when people are trying to kill you. Try it some time on a dirt street with an open air sewer running through the middle and bullets cracking around you.
3. "So how many of these 'sand niggers'"... "did you 'put down' and then took pictures of so that you can masturbate to them later?" Umm, yeah, now people want to listen to you. Does it really seem highly likely to you that this practice *ever* took place? For the sake of argument say there was one person sick enough to do this. Do you really think it's likely that the practice is common enough to justify accusing a poster in an online forum of such a thing? Or do you think that what you said amounts to a fallacious (and ridiculous) ad-hominem/appeal to emotion...
Try getting out of your coffee shop a little more and you will see that there is a whole world of people who disagree with you with very good reason. And that doesn't even count the ones who would kill you on sight because you are American.
You have to remember that this was years ago, and I don't think that was an option then. It was much more akin to the "CD/Tape club" business at that time.
As I said, I don't know how the book club currently does business.
A method my parents used years ago to become members of the Science Fiction Book Club without having the unsolicited mailings of books was to write RETURN TO SENDER on all the books sent by the SF book club unsolicited.
After a short time (a few months I believe), they were added to the "No Unsolicited Mailings" list (I don't really know what the SF book club calls it). Now they get the catalogs and offers on well-priced books along with the early releases and omnibus editions that may be unavailable elsewhere, but not books they don't really want.
The book club's policies may have changed since that time, but I know that worked for them.
There are a couple of ways to hide your data; one is to have two Truecrypt volumes, one hidden and one standard. This is easy, but it still lets the customs agent know you are using Truecrypt. This may not be a problem in the US (right now) but what about other countries where simply knowing about a program like Truecrypt could look suspicious?
This post on the Truecrypt forums describes a way to install two OSes, one for show, and one hidden. Unless there is a Truecrypt rescue CD or bootable USB thumbdrive inserted the system will boot to a normal Windows desktop. This method would hold up to any casual sort of inspection, such as those customs agents carry out dozens of times per day. There are a couple of traces that would need to be removed in order to actually have "plausible deniability", but to me not having the questions asked in the first place is preferable to being able to deny one of the potential answers.
It's sad that you might need to do things like this, but there are often technological solutions to social problems.
I can attest to the fact that you can temporarily blind a dog at 200m with a high powered laser. Ask anyone who's been deployed as an infantryman and they'll tell you a story of the time they or their buddy kept dogs away from their position by lasing them with their PEQ-2.
Granted, normal laser pointers aren't as powerful, but it is certainly possible. If the beam was distorted in some way by the cockpit glass I could even see doing actual retinal damage.
But likely some of the other posters are right, and the guy was merely annoyed and tried to throw the book at the people. That doesn't mean it isn't a plausable thing.
You are wrong about the method Truecrypt uses to hide a volume. It is not detectable. The way they do it is by encrypting an entire partition; one volume starts at the beginning, one volume starts at the end. If Truecrypt tries a key at the beginning of the partition and fails, it then goes on to try at the end of the partition.
There are a couple of drawbacks to this method, one being that you can have two encrypted volumes start to corrupt each other if you fill the entire partition. If you plan ahead for this scenario you can avoid it, though. The other drawback is that you have to encrypt an entire partition to use it.
Even inserting a few lines in the Trucrypt code to tell you which end of the partition it is using can be combated by simply using the end of the partition as your hidden volume and the beginning as your RIPA/rubberhose volume. That way if you give them the rubberhose key the program acts exactly as it does for a partition with only one key.
It has plausible deniability, and makes it impossible to distinguish between a wiped partition, a single key partition, and a dual/"hidden" key partition.
None of this, however, helps in hiding the existence of a PGP key. If your opponent has access to your email servers and can see you sending messages encrypted by PGP you're gonna have some explaining to do when it comes to investigation time. I don't know of any steganographic programs with plausible deniability that are out at this time. If anyone's heard of any please let us know.
I LOVE new pieces of gear. I'm willing to accept a few flaws and glitches to get a better set of nods, and I love finding new gadgets to try on my rifle. I've switched weapon sights many times as new technology came out and loved each new one.
I have also used the Land Warrior system. It just plain sucks. You can see some of my other posts in this topic if you want more detail but the short list is: it's too heavy, it's unreliable, it attaches your weapon to you, it's WAY too complicated for the average soldier (it's too complicated for me, and I run OpenBSD on my home system, imagine what it's like for the guy whose only email account is his AKO and he has only accessed it once when someone walked him through it), and it distracts you from the things that will get you killed.
I'm not your regular technophobe soldier, but I want a piece of gear that I know will work and won't distract me from the fight.
This isn't just bitching about new gear; this is stuff that will sit at the back of the supply cage and be brought out only for command inventory.
I agree wholeheartedly. If we put one quarter as much money towards obtaining better (i.e. lighter, flexible) body armor, boots, and rifles, not to mention nods (the PVS-14's are what, 10 years old?), we'd be in much better shape.
I already hump 65 lbs or so before I even put my ruck on; don't give me even more crap to carry that isn't going to help in 95% of the situations I will face. Seeing around corners with my weaponsight is cool, but it's not cool when the weaponsight is bigger than a thermal scope and heavier to boot. Not to mention the ridiculous wire connecting me to my weapon. I'd rather carry a thermal scope, at least they can see through walls.
Not to mention the fact that any current model of heads up display will get guys killed. Try doing any kind of CQB with that ridiculous stuff on your head. If you have live opponents you'll find yourself dead pretty quickly. It gets in the way and distracts you. Not to mention the fact that the real threats we face on a day to day basis are from things that require our complete attention to detect: IEDs, snipers, and suicide bombers. I don't want to be distracted by the view from my gun's sight or my buddy's heart rate when I'm scanning. Scanning is how a soldier survives. If you're looking for the guy who's on mid-cycle leave from Iraq or Afghanistan, just find the guy who's moving his head and eyes constantly scanning and who gets tense and stops talking in large crowds. We don't need this crap distracting us from our jobs.
Give me the stuff that will actually help. Why does the 5.56 coming out of my personal weapon punch little tiny holes in people at 150 meters when it should make great big ones? Maybe we should fix that instead of spending umpteen billion dollars in order to attach a video camera to my helmet, which is already too freaking heavy. Why does my rifle malfunction if I don't treat it like a beloved little sister and baby it every 6 hours or so? Better rifle technology has been available for a decade at least. why don't I have it? Because we are spending our money jacking off the military contractors.
I'm in the US Army, and I agree. I'd like to have *lighter* body armor with flexible plates that cover more of my body, a more reliable rifle, and better issued boots.
As far as night operations go, the only thing I wish we could get is a set of nods that aren't as long as a toilet paper tube and don't look like you're looking through one. If we could have nods that covered both eyes like a pair of PVS-15's and were only 0.5-1 inch long I would be ecstatic.
Soldiers don't like the Land Warrior setup because it sucks. It's big, heavy, unreliable, battery powered (which means you need to carry spares) and distracts from the real threats to our soldiers, i.e. suicide bombers, snipers, and IED's. You need all your senses to find these before they find you, and having a display in your eye telling you where your buddies are and what the ambient temperature is just distracts you from the things that are actually important.
Situational awareness is exactly what suffers here. You may know where people are and what their heart rate is, but you don't realize that the guy over there isn't holding a video camera, he's holding an rpg.
In Egyptian it's "Zibee". MSA doesn't really have many slang words, so "qadeeb" translates prety much to "penis", while "zibee" translates more closely to "dick" or similar.
Supporting what the parent poster is saying, diamonds are the only gemstones I know of that are artificially scarce. Thus, in my mind, they are a poor investment.
They are made scarce by the fact that the overwhelming majority of productive diamond mines are controlled by one company, which jealously guards that scarcity (literally, the "extra" diamonds are guarded in huge warehouses). In my mind diamonds are only a few productive non-DeBeers mines away from being made much less valuable.
If you really need to get gemstones to invest in, I would recommend rubies or sapphires (I know, they're the same stone). Star sapphires are especially prized. Otherwise stick to precious metals.
Wired did a much more in depth article on this subject a couple years ago.
One thing to keep in mind is that saying the lab-created diamonds possess the same qualities as natural diamonds is a little misleading. They are certainly diamonds, in that they are the same type of crystal form of carbon, but they *are* distinguishable from natural diamonds.
What I find very interesting is just how expensive and advanced equipment needs to be to tell the difference, and how much Debeers is shelling out to ensure that the biggest diamond testing labs have that equipment. Check out the linked article for more on that.
If you want to do something about challenging the DeBeers cartel and their questionable business practices, check out Canadian Diamonds, also here and here.
Before anyone jumps on the "Descriptive Grammar" wagon; yes, I am very familiar with the descriptive grammar concept in linguistics.
But it is one thing to violate the "don't end sentences with a prepostion" rule, and another thing entirely to take a word or phrase which has a very specific and nuanced meaning and try to make it apply to another situation through simple ignorance.
The best example I can come up with in the computer field is how most knowledgeable people will cringe when someone calls the computer itself the "hard drive" instead of a tower, box, or just "computer". "Hard drive" means something very specific, and calling something else by that name makes it very difficult for people to communicate. Language is an agreement by two people to use the same or at least similar conventions to aid in mutual understanding. People violating those conventions by laziness or ignorance gum up the works for everyone else.
This is slightly OT, but one of my major pet peeves is when people say something "begs the question..." when they mean that it implies a follow-on question.
"Begging the question" is a very simple fallacy made in a debate or discussion. It is when you assume your initial proposition to be true in order to "prove" that proposition. For example, you could say "Only idiots would go to Wal-Mart," and "prove" it by saying "Everyone in Wal-Mart is an idiot". If you expand the concept of this fallacy you can come to the "corellation does not equal causation" problem in modern statistics.
If anyone has better examples I'd love to hear them.
>But they leave you hanging up there all night instead of gliding to your target at aircraft speeds.
That's the one benefit of this technology over HAHO as I see it, assuming you can actually pack as much equipment as the developers say you can. I just know military equipment designers and I sincerely doubt that the amount they claim at this point in development is going to be the amount usable in practice.
Actually thinking about it, I think your radar signature would be bigger with this apparatus than with a standard chute.
And sending your extra equipment via UAV is starting to get a little... complex? KISS. I know I don't want mission critical gear crashing into the side of a mountain 100 miles away. It's bad enough fishing a bundle drop off the same DZ I landed on.
Where could you possibly put 200 lbs of actual military equipment on that setup? I read the article, but I'm sorry; there's no way you could fit any kind of rucksack or real equipment on the back of a high-tech delta wing, which is already sporting a parachute for landing.
Real equipment is bulky, not just heavy. Being able to carry a 200 lb brick of gold put directly in the center of gravity of the wing is very different from being able to carry a mission capable rucksack, laser target designator, and any heavy weapons that might be needed. These things take up space, not just mass.
I still say you'd be able to carry much less equipment than with HALO or HAHO, which is already way too little for a real mission.
And parachutes have almost nil radar signature. Radar picks up metal very well, and other thing less so.
I'm intimately familiar with this community, and I can tell you a few reasons why this will never be used.
This sounds a lot like one of the things that eggheads who never go to the front lines think would be super-cool or a "killer app".
First and formost, this would add surprisingly little in the way of capabilities to the units that already insert from high altitude aircraft. A HAHO (High Altitude, High Opening) jump has nearly this glide range anyway, and uses tried and true, proven technology. The standard "killer app" of HAHO is the ability to fly the plane in or near commercial lanes in the airspace of another country and glide across the border into the place where we aren't supposed to be. You might be able to guess how often this is actually used outside Tom Clancy novels.
Second and probably most damning, the major problem with HALO and HAHO insertions is the fact the you can't bring very much gear with you on the jump; extra gear screws up the aerodynamics something fierce. You can jump some gear, but the more you jump the more trouble you'll have. Now take a look at the guy in the picture in TFA. This guy could jump in with a sidearm and a first aid kit, maybe adding a cell phone if he wanted to get froggy.
Do you know the average weight of the gear carried on insertion by SF teams in the opening days of Afghanistan? Including weapons, ammo, body armor, hundreds of thousands of dollars cash, water, food, and clothing, it often exceeds the operator's body weight until the team has a chance to cache some of their gear. The things that make an SF team useful in a modern warfare environment are heavy and bulky.
Do you wonder at all why most units insert on helicopters almost exclusively now?
These wings will be used often in movies and books, and almost never in real life by real soldiers who have to deal with their limitations.
Scientific Atlanta has to have the absolute worst cable boxes I have ever experienced. I have never had an electronic device of any sort overheat and malfunction as much as my cable boxes from them have done.
You'll note that I said "boxes"; the reason is that I've gone through about 4 or 5 before finally giving up and accepting that my cable was going to be nearly useless until I move again. The worst of the worst have been the HD DVR ones. Behind those were the regular DVR boxes, and coming in at nearly operable were the regular HD and regular digital cable boxes.
I have never had a program I recorded not skip and get pixelated for the first few minutes, and I've had quite a few be nearly unwatchable for the entire program. Forget about it if you actually want to watch a show while one is recording; neither the one you are watching nor the one recording will be watchable at all. This is the case whether or not the channels are actual HD channels.
I can't even listen to the music channels on these boxes, although this might be my local Time Warner Cable operator's fault.
I've never had these problems from another cable provider or another box manufacturer.
I was in a unit which replicated Marxist/Viet Cong style guerrillas, and we were able to use methods like this to great effect. Since we were replicating low-tech guerrillas, most of our radios were Vietnam-era, with controls like Fisher Price's My First Radio (PRC-77 for those interested). However, we were able to confound our opponents (the regular Army) on a regular basis using very simple codes, while at the same time penetrating their networks almost as regularly.
We had a pre-defined encryption scheme that radio operators were required to memorize. Mostly it was just simple word substitution, along with a simple way of encoding numbers. The key was that we all new each other and used knowledge common to all that the enemy had no way of knowing. We would avoid giving out locations more detailed than "300m South of that place we had lunch last week".
The reason these methods worked was twofold. First, the information was only useful for a limited amount of time. So even if you figured out that "Beaker plus one, minus 5, Donkeypunch plus 3 plus 1 Boomhauer minus 6 plus 2" was really grid VQ 606 419, it wouldn't do you much good because we weren't there anymore. Second, the people who were actually capable of figuring this stuff out were way in the rear, and the overhead of getting the information to the grunts (or crunchies as we always called them) on the ground was so much that it basically never happened.
To tell you the truth, I've pretty much gotten fed up with the DVR version I have. I just got a new HDTV, and I was going to trade my DVR for an HD-DVR, but I heard those are just as bad if not worse.
I think my "solution" is going to be cancelling my DVR service with TWC and just going with a plain vanilla box. I might decide to get an HD-Tivo.
The unplugging it bit can work if you have something important that you really want to watch, but as a rule it gets slightly ridiculous.
I have the same box, and I'm convinced the problem is heat. I bet you have the DVR version, right? The digital video processing is getting bogged down. Try this: unplug it when you aren't using it. You can't just turn it off because it doesn't really turn off, it just dims the picture. I bet that for the first hour or so you won't get any jumps. On analog stations (below 70 or so) you can also try changing the channel up and then down again. This turns off the digital playback.
Those SciAm boxes really do suck. I wish Time Warner would switch to something more ready for market.
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I work in the military as a health care provider.
One of the biggest problems for military specific PTSD patients is the feeling that no one around them understands. And in most cases, they are right. No one really does understand, nor could they.
Once someone is medically retired they lose the connection of having buddies around them who've been through the same or at least similar experiences. There aren't many people in civilian life to connect with.
I think using a Second Life style interface for soldiers and veterans (especially veterans for the reasons I've mentioned above) is a great idea. It provides an opportunity for people to connect with others who have similar experiences. I think it would probably be even more effective to have a game where people are actually doing something rather than just sitting around talking to each other; many veterans will reject something like this as just another "group therapy" session.
Now a PTSD only Halo server or something would be great. You could even have separate servers for guys blown up in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. You could have an "I hate MRAPs but I still have my legs" server. The possibilities are endless. If you allowed the soldiers/vets to make their own designations they would probably scandalize those who've never been in the military :-).
"The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
The ability to suspend habeas corpus usually means martial law.
From wikipedia (Martial Law):
The martial law concept in the U.S. is closely tied with the right of habeas corpus, which is in essence the right to a hearing on lawful imprisonment, or more broadly, the supervision of law enforcement by the judiciary. The ability to suspend habeas corpus is often equated with martial law. Article 1, Section 9 of the U.S. Constitution states, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion, the public Safety may require it."
In United States law, martial law is limited by several court decisions that were handed down between the American Civil War and World War II. In 1878, Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids military involvement in domestic law enforcement without congressional approval. On October 1, 2002 United States Northern Command was established to provide command and control of Department of Defense homeland defense efforts and to coordinate defense support of civil authorities. [8].
You can argue that the right to declare martial law wasn't explicitly given to congress, but I think I can argue with much more effectiveness and precedent that it was implicitly given in the clause regarding Habeas Corpus.
By your writing style you are from the US.
1. You sent us there. If you don't like the government of the country then do something about it, but don't complain that the soldiers who swear to go wherever your government sends them are "glorified mercenaries". Verbally attacking the soldiers themselves is just childish.
2. Moral absolutism is comforting, especially when you're sitting in a comfortable chair in your favorite free-trade coffee shop talking to people who think just like you do. It doesn't work when people are trying to kill you. Try it some time on a dirt street with an open air sewer running through the middle and bullets cracking around you.
3. "So how many of these 'sand niggers'"... "did you 'put down' and then took pictures of so that you can masturbate to them later?" Umm, yeah, now people want to listen to you. Does it really seem highly likely to you that this practice *ever* took place? For the sake of argument say there was one person sick enough to do this. Do you really think it's likely that the practice is common enough to justify accusing a poster in an online forum of such a thing? Or do you think that what you said amounts to a fallacious (and ridiculous) ad-hominem/appeal to emotion...
Try getting out of your coffee shop a little more and you will see that there is a whole world of people who disagree with you with very good reason. And that doesn't even count the ones who would kill you on sight because you are American.
You have to remember that this was years ago, and I don't think that was an option then. It was much more akin to the "CD/Tape club" business at that time.
As I said, I don't know how the book club currently does business.
A method my parents used years ago to become members of the Science Fiction Book Club without having the unsolicited mailings of books was to write RETURN TO SENDER on all the books sent by the SF book club unsolicited.
After a short time (a few months I believe), they were added to the "No Unsolicited Mailings" list (I don't really know what the SF book club calls it). Now they get the catalogs and offers on well-priced books along with the early releases and omnibus editions that may be unavailable elsewhere, but not books they don't really want.
The book club's policies may have changed since that time, but I know that worked for them.
There are a couple of ways to hide your data; one is to have two Truecrypt volumes, one hidden and one standard. This is easy, but it still lets the customs agent know you are using Truecrypt. This may not be a problem in the US (right now) but what about other countries where simply knowing about a program like Truecrypt could look suspicious?
This post on the Truecrypt forums describes a way to install two OSes, one for show, and one hidden. Unless there is a Truecrypt rescue CD or bootable USB thumbdrive inserted the system will boot to a normal Windows desktop. This method would hold up to any casual sort of inspection, such as those customs agents carry out dozens of times per day. There are a couple of traces that would need to be removed in order to actually have "plausible deniability", but to me not having the questions asked in the first place is preferable to being able to deny one of the potential answers.
It's sad that you might need to do things like this, but there are often technological solutions to social problems.
I can attest to the fact that you can temporarily blind a dog at 200m with a high powered laser. Ask anyone who's been deployed as an infantryman and they'll tell you a story of the time they or their buddy kept dogs away from their position by lasing them with their PEQ-2.
Granted, normal laser pointers aren't as powerful, but it is certainly possible. If the beam was distorted in some way by the cockpit glass I could even see doing actual retinal damage.
But likely some of the other posters are right, and the guy was merely annoyed and tried to throw the book at the people. That doesn't mean it isn't a plausable thing.
You are wrong about the method Truecrypt uses to hide a volume. It is not detectable. The way they do it is by encrypting an entire partition; one volume starts at the beginning, one volume starts at the end. If Truecrypt tries a key at the beginning of the partition and fails, it then goes on to try at the end of the partition.
There are a couple of drawbacks to this method, one being that you can have two encrypted volumes start to corrupt each other if you fill the entire partition. If you plan ahead for this scenario you can avoid it, though. The other drawback is that you have to encrypt an entire partition to use it.
Even inserting a few lines in the Trucrypt code to tell you which end of the partition it is using can be combated by simply using the end of the partition as your hidden volume and the beginning as your RIPA/rubberhose volume. That way if you give them the rubberhose key the program acts exactly as it does for a partition with only one key.
It has plausible deniability, and makes it impossible to distinguish between a wiped partition, a single key partition, and a dual/"hidden" key partition.
None of this, however, helps in hiding the existence of a PGP key. If your opponent has access to your email servers and can see you sending messages encrypted by PGP you're gonna have some explaining to do when it comes to investigation time. I don't know of any steganographic programs with plausible deniability that are out at this time. If anyone's heard of any please let us know.
I LOVE new pieces of gear. I'm willing to accept a few flaws and glitches to get a better set of nods, and I love finding new gadgets to try on my rifle. I've switched weapon sights many times as new technology came out and loved each new one.
I have also used the Land Warrior system. It just plain sucks. You can see some of my other posts in this topic if you want more detail but the short list is: it's too heavy, it's unreliable, it attaches your weapon to you, it's WAY too complicated for the average soldier (it's too complicated for me, and I run OpenBSD on my home system, imagine what it's like for the guy whose only email account is his AKO and he has only accessed it once when someone walked him through it), and it distracts you from the things that will get you killed.
I'm not your regular technophobe soldier, but I want a piece of gear that I know will work and won't distract me from the fight.
This isn't just bitching about new gear; this is stuff that will sit at the back of the supply cage and be brought out only for command inventory.
From a grunt-
I agree wholeheartedly. If we put one quarter as much money towards obtaining better (i.e. lighter, flexible) body armor, boots, and rifles, not to mention nods (the PVS-14's are what, 10 years old?), we'd be in much better shape.
I already hump 65 lbs or so before I even put my ruck on; don't give me even more crap to carry that isn't going to help in 95% of the situations I will face. Seeing around corners with my weaponsight is cool, but it's not cool when the weaponsight is bigger than a thermal scope and heavier to boot. Not to mention the ridiculous wire connecting me to my weapon. I'd rather carry a thermal scope, at least they can see through walls.
Not to mention the fact that any current model of heads up display will get guys killed. Try doing any kind of CQB with that ridiculous stuff on your head. If you have live opponents you'll find yourself dead pretty quickly. It gets in the way and distracts you. Not to mention the fact that the real threats we face on a day to day basis are from things that require our complete attention to detect: IEDs, snipers, and suicide bombers. I don't want to be distracted by the view from my gun's sight or my buddy's heart rate when I'm scanning. Scanning is how a soldier survives. If you're looking for the guy who's on mid-cycle leave from Iraq or Afghanistan, just find the guy who's moving his head and eyes constantly scanning and who gets tense and stops talking in large crowds. We don't need this crap distracting us from our jobs.
Give me the stuff that will actually help. Why does the 5.56 coming out of my personal weapon punch little tiny holes in people at 150 meters when it should make great big ones? Maybe we should fix that instead of spending umpteen billion dollars in order to attach a video camera to my helmet, which is already too freaking heavy. Why does my rifle malfunction if I don't treat it like a beloved little sister and baby it every 6 hours or so? Better rifle technology has been available for a decade at least. why don't I have it? Because we are spending our money jacking off the military contractors.
Hear hear.
I'm in the US Army, and I agree. I'd like to have *lighter* body armor with flexible plates that cover more of my body, a more reliable rifle, and better issued boots.
As far as night operations go, the only thing I wish we could get is a set of nods that aren't as long as a toilet paper tube and don't look like you're looking through one. If we could have nods that covered both eyes like a pair of PVS-15's and were only 0.5-1 inch long I would be ecstatic.
Soldiers don't like the Land Warrior setup because it sucks. It's big, heavy, unreliable, battery powered (which means you need to carry spares) and distracts from the real threats to our soldiers, i.e. suicide bombers, snipers, and IED's. You need all your senses to find these before they find you, and having a display in your eye telling you where your buddies are and what the ambient temperature is just distracts you from the things that are actually important.
Situational awareness is exactly what suffers here. You may know where people are and what their heart rate is, but you don't realize that the guy over there isn't holding a video camera, he's holding an rpg.
The animals are rendered insensate with a bolt gun before slaughter. It is no more barbaric than any other form of slaughter.
In Egyptian it's "Zibee". MSA doesn't really have many slang words, so "qadeeb" translates prety much to "penis", while "zibee" translates more closely to "dick" or similar.
Supporting what the parent poster is saying, diamonds are the only gemstones I know of that are artificially scarce. Thus, in my mind, they are a poor investment.
They are made scarce by the fact that the overwhelming majority of productive diamond mines are controlled by one company, which jealously guards that scarcity (literally, the "extra" diamonds are guarded in huge warehouses). In my mind diamonds are only a few productive non-DeBeers mines away from being made much less valuable.
If you really need to get gemstones to invest in, I would recommend rubies or sapphires (I know, they're the same stone). Star sapphires are especially prized. Otherwise stick to precious metals.
Wired did a much more in depth article on this subject a couple years ago.
One thing to keep in mind is that saying the lab-created diamonds possess the same qualities as natural diamonds is a little misleading. They are certainly diamonds, in that they are the same type of crystal form of carbon, but they *are* distinguishable from natural diamonds.
What I find very interesting is just how expensive and advanced equipment needs to be to tell the difference, and how much Debeers is shelling out to ensure that the biggest diamond testing labs have that equipment. Check out the linked article for more on that.
If you want to do something about challenging the DeBeers cartel and their questionable business practices, check out Canadian Diamonds, also here and here.
Before anyone jumps on the "Descriptive Grammar" wagon; yes, I am very familiar with the descriptive grammar concept in linguistics.
But it is one thing to violate the "don't end sentences with a prepostion" rule, and another thing entirely to take a word or phrase which has a very specific and nuanced meaning and try to make it apply to another situation through simple ignorance.
The best example I can come up with in the computer field is how most knowledgeable people will cringe when someone calls the computer itself the "hard drive" instead of a tower, box, or just "computer". "Hard drive" means something very specific, and calling something else by that name makes it very difficult for people to communicate. Language is an agreement by two people to use the same or at least similar conventions to aid in mutual understanding. People violating those conventions by laziness or ignorance gum up the works for everyone else.
This is slightly OT, but one of my major pet peeves is when people say something "begs the question..." when they mean that it implies a follow-on question.
"Begging the question" is a very simple fallacy made in a debate or discussion. It is when you assume your initial proposition to be true in order to "prove" that proposition. For example, you could say "Only idiots would go to Wal-Mart," and "prove" it by saying "Everyone in Wal-Mart is an idiot". If you expand the concept of this fallacy you can come to the "corellation does not equal causation" problem in modern statistics.
If anyone has better examples I'd love to hear them.
Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beg_the_question
>But they leave you hanging up there all night instead of gliding to your target at aircraft speeds.
That's the one benefit of this technology over HAHO as I see it, assuming you can actually pack as much equipment as the developers say you can. I just know military equipment designers and I sincerely doubt that the amount they claim at this point in development is going to be the amount usable in practice.
Actually thinking about it, I think your radar signature would be bigger with this apparatus than with a standard chute.
And sending your extra equipment via UAV is starting to get a little... complex? KISS. I know I don't want mission critical gear crashing into the side of a mountain 100 miles away. It's bad enough fishing a bundle drop off the same DZ I landed on.
Where could you possibly put 200 lbs of actual military equipment on that setup? I read the article, but I'm sorry; there's no way you could fit any kind of rucksack or real equipment on the back of a high-tech delta wing, which is already sporting a parachute for landing.
Real equipment is bulky, not just heavy. Being able to carry a 200 lb brick of gold put directly in the center of gravity of the wing is very different from being able to carry a mission capable rucksack, laser target designator, and any heavy weapons that might be needed. These things take up space, not just mass.
I still say you'd be able to carry much less equipment than with HALO or HAHO, which is already way too little for a real mission.
And parachutes have almost nil radar signature. Radar picks up metal very well, and other thing less so.
I'm intimately familiar with this community, and I can tell you a few reasons why this will never be used.
This sounds a lot like one of the things that eggheads who never go to the front lines think would be super-cool or a "killer app".
First and formost, this would add surprisingly little in the way of capabilities to the units that already insert from high altitude aircraft. A HAHO (High Altitude, High Opening) jump has nearly this glide range anyway, and uses tried and true, proven technology. The standard "killer app" of HAHO is the ability to fly the plane in or near commercial lanes in the airspace of another country and glide across the border into the place where we aren't supposed to be. You might be able to guess how often this is actually used outside Tom Clancy novels.
Second and probably most damning, the major problem with HALO and HAHO insertions is the fact the you can't bring very much gear with you on the jump; extra gear screws up the aerodynamics something fierce. You can jump some gear, but the more you jump the more trouble you'll have. Now take a look at the guy in the picture in TFA. This guy could jump in with a sidearm and a first aid kit, maybe adding a cell phone if he wanted to get froggy.
Do you know the average weight of the gear carried on insertion by SF teams in the opening days of Afghanistan? Including weapons, ammo, body armor, hundreds of thousands of dollars cash, water, food, and clothing, it often exceeds the operator's body weight until the team has a chance to cache some of their gear. The things that make an SF team useful in a modern warfare environment are heavy and bulky.
Do you wonder at all why most units insert on helicopters almost exclusively now?
These wings will be used often in movies and books, and almost never in real life by real soldiers who have to deal with their limitations.
Hey, just to let you know, "droogs" means "friends" not dogs.
Scientific Atlanta has to have the absolute worst cable boxes I have ever experienced. I have never had an electronic device of any sort overheat and malfunction as much as my cable boxes from them have done.
You'll note that I said "boxes"; the reason is that I've gone through about 4 or 5 before finally giving up and accepting that my cable was going to be nearly useless until I move again. The worst of the worst have been the HD DVR ones. Behind those were the regular DVR boxes, and coming in at nearly operable were the regular HD and regular digital cable boxes.
I have never had a program I recorded not skip and get pixelated for the first few minutes, and I've had quite a few be nearly unwatchable for the entire program. Forget about it if you actually want to watch a show while one is recording; neither the one you are watching nor the one recording will be watchable at all. This is the case whether or not the channels are actual HD channels.
I can't even listen to the music channels on these boxes, although this might be my local Time Warner Cable operator's fault.
I've never had these problems from another cable provider or another box manufacturer.
Spot on. I agree with everything the parent said.
I was in a unit which replicated Marxist/Viet Cong style guerrillas, and we were able to use methods like this to great effect. Since we were replicating low-tech guerrillas, most of our radios were Vietnam-era, with controls like Fisher Price's My First Radio (PRC-77 for those interested). However, we were able to confound our opponents (the regular Army) on a regular basis using very simple codes, while at the same time penetrating their networks almost as regularly.
We had a pre-defined encryption scheme that radio operators were required to memorize. Mostly it was just simple word substitution, along with a simple way of encoding numbers. The key was that we all new each other and used knowledge common to all that the enemy had no way of knowing. We would avoid giving out locations more detailed than "300m South of that place we had lunch last week".
The reason these methods worked was twofold. First, the information was only useful for a limited amount of time. So even if you figured out that "Beaker plus one, minus 5, Donkeypunch plus 3 plus 1 Boomhauer minus 6 plus 2" was really grid VQ 606 419, it wouldn't do you much good because we weren't there anymore. Second, the people who were actually capable of figuring this stuff out were way in the rear, and the overhead of getting the information to the grunts (or crunchies as we always called them) on the ground was so much that it basically never happened.
To tell you the truth, I've pretty much gotten fed up with the DVR version I have. I just got a new HDTV, and I was going to trade my DVR for an HD-DVR, but I heard those are just as bad if not worse.
I think my "solution" is going to be cancelling my DVR service with TWC and just going with a plain vanilla box. I might decide to get an HD-Tivo.
The unplugging it bit can work if you have something important that you really want to watch, but as a rule it gets slightly ridiculous.
Good luck with yours, though.
I have the same box, and I'm convinced the problem is heat. I bet you have the DVR version, right? The digital video processing is getting bogged down. Try this: unplug it when you aren't using it. You can't just turn it off because it doesn't really turn off, it just dims the picture. I bet that for the first hour or so you won't get any jumps. On analog stations (below 70 or so) you can also try changing the channel up and then down again. This turns off the digital playback.
Those SciAm boxes really do suck. I wish Time Warner would switch to something more ready for market.