The real threat from hackers of this nature lies not in their ability to hack the command and control grid of the enemy, but in their ability to crash the opossitions economy.
Except that the enemies we're fighting now don't really have economies that would even be effected by hacking.
Heck, Iraq had a sophisticated air defense system linked by fiber optics (made mostly of US-made parts assembled by the Chinese). Of course, the poppycock aspect is that these types of networks are usually closed, hard-wired systems and (as you mentioned) wise commanders train their troops to operate such things manually. In the case of Iraq's IAD network, no amount of hacking would be as effective as a few properly aimed HARMs.
Actually the Iraqi IAD was Soviet designed and built, and they used the Soviets' highly rigid doctrine & tactics. That meant their command & control was highly centralized and they discouraged commanders from thinking outside the box.
That was a weakness we exploited in the Gulf War by severing the comm links between Baghdad and the four main air defense installations. F-117s destroyed them on the 1st night with 2000 lb laser guided bombs. Saddam and his generals didn't know what was happening and field commanders were reluctant to make any independent decisions.
The latter trait is a bad habit we're trying to break today among Iraqi officers. The current war in Iraq is being called a squad leaders' war, since they're making many of the crucial day-to-day decisions. NCOs and officers in the US military are given a lot of flexibility to accomplish their missions. This concept (called "empowerment" in the business world) is known as centralized command, decentralized execution.
Quite honestly, I've never heard somebody call "Housing and Urban Development" hud. HUD is Heads Up Display. Wouldn't you be confused if someone came up to you and said "Yeah, there's so much new HUD going on around here these days."
I think you only hear it in reference to the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Likewise, "HUD" in that sense is really only used "inside the beltway" and by commentators on federal government stuff (yawn).
HUD (for Housing & Urban Development) is a very common acronym in real estate. Pick up any listing of homes for sale (especially in cities) and you'll find HUD used several times.
Okay, now does anyone else agree with them? I'm fine with calling it that if there is consensus...
First, yes, he's right. Acronyms must be pronounceable. Each letter of an initialization is spoken.
Second, who cares if there's consensus or not? If what he wrote is correct, he's right. Consensus doesn't make something right or wrong, just accepted.
My understanding is that officers are usually tasked with creating acronyms for the projects they are responsible for. This would be in keeping with the fact that they have to do all the documentation and write ups on it.
Not necessarily, there are hundreds or even thousands of people involved with these types of programs. This is only one of a few Joint Functional Component Commands (JFCCs) under US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM). If you read the actual Senate testimony of General Cartwright, you'll learn there are also JFCCs for:
space and global strike
intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance
integrated missile defense
combating weapons of mass destruction
So something as intellectually neutered as JFCCNW is actually the kind of acronym that a smart person would like to see in their dossier. Over time, as an officers dossier is reviewed, part of the whole "reading the entrails" to see if an officer is suitable comes down to how well they work within the bureaucracy, and to this end I've known officers who have been promoted for such things. It's a whacked planet.
I am fascinated to hear that more gospels may be revealed.
They probably won't find any "new" gospels, just more manuscripts of ones we already know about.
The Gospel of Thomas was enlightening and actually led me to a better understanding of mainstream Christianity.
How did it help you understand mainstream Christianity? It isn't considered canonical by Christians.
Non-ecumenical gospels are fascinating because they haven't been highly tainted through interpretations and translations.
What do you mean by non-ecumenical? That doesn't quite make sense.
Also, the synoptic gospels aren't tainted by any stretch of the imagination. Many discoveries like this over the past couple centuries have given us more manuscripts. With over 5000 fragments of early manuscripts, the evidence is overwhelming that the original content of the New Testament has been remarkably well preserved. What is often tainted is how certain people interpret the meaning of the texts.
The ONLY outside reference to jesus that's roughly contemporaneous with his supposed lifespan is the account of Josephus, a jew. However his description seems to be largely copied from the gospel of luke, and edited by a later author. It cannot be seen as a primary source.
First, the two passages where Josephus mentions Jesus are generally accepted as authentic by scholars today, possibly edited by later copyists.
It will be interesting though if they dig up more evidence of the Gospels of Mary, and if they find clear evidence that Christ was married to Mary Magdelene.
Let me guess, you've read Dan Brown's book: "The DaVinci Code." But you seem to have missed the point that it's fiction.
Which exposes the elitist behavior of (some? many? nearly all?) linux programmers.
As opposed to the non-elitist behavior of commercial software developers? If someone asked Adobe to change their interface to match some other software, they'd have a similar response. At least the GIMP source code is available so this was possible.
I think it's a shame that it took a Mac user to make Gimp REALLY popular.
What? The GIMP was already popular. It might win a few converts from existing Photoshop users who don't want to pay for future upgrades (or people using pirated copies), but I doubt it will popularize the GIMP much more than it already is. GIMPshop was only released yesterday, so only time will tell what kind of an impact it'll have.
Something to ponder on: "Works for me" is NOT a good attitude. There's always room for improvement.
What's wrong with that attitude? If it works for one person and they release it, it'll probably work for other people. Software can always be improved, but at some point there must be a feature freeze and debugging or it'll never be released. One of the best aspects of free/open source software is that people can add to it or change it if they want, unlike proprietary software.
Now, I haven't RTFA (/.'ed), but I wonder if the GIMPShop can fully be turned into a cross-platform app by using WxWidgets... how much it would take to modify it?
The GIMP was already cross-platform! You can download binaries for Windows, MacOS, and several kinds of Unix and Linux; or download the source code and compile it yourself. I'm assuming GIMPshop is still just as portable. The Linux version was released by somebody else later the same day. It probably just needs to be compiled for other platforms.
And actually even the claim that Saddam gassed his own people in the 80s has been disputed.
Jude Wanniski (whose website you linked to), is quite alone in denying that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds. Slate has a good article that discusses the issue. Besides, several of his claims are clearly false:
To begin with there were never any victims produced.
A quick Google image search for Halabja belies that claim. There are numerous photos of the immediate after-effects of the attack. More recently, there was a study to investigate the long term effects of the chemical exposure. The victims of the attack suffer from high rates of respiratory problems, cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders, and skin and eye problems. Maybe part of the reason he claims victims can't be found is because they're some of the 300,000 bodies discovered in massgraves.
The claim rests solely on testimony of the Kurds who had crossed the border into Turkey, where they were interviewed by staffers of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The reports of the chemical bombing were not just from Kurds who crossed into Turkey. Some of the pictures linked above were from journalists flown in from Tehran the next day.
Wanniski even mentions the oft repeated myth: that at the very least our State Department gave a "green light" to Saddam Hussein to go into Kuwait in August 1990. According to this article from the Christian Science Monitor, that myth has been debunked by no less than Iraq's former Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz.
It may well have been Iran, and in either case it happened on a battlefield.
It is highly doubtful Iran was behind the attack. In the first place, their troops and allies were the ones attacked (see here). Secondly, there is no evidence of Iranian use of the type of chemicals at Halabja (see here).
In addition, although chemical weapons were used multiple times in the Iran-Iraq war, the reason the Halabja attack sticks out is precisely because it was not a battlefield. At the time, Halabja was a city with a population of about 80,000 which had just recently came under control of Iran and their Kurdish allies. Many of the approximately 5000 victims of that particluar attack were civilians. Most of the published photos were of women and children killed, for the simple reason that news media thrives on sensationalism.
We've managed to kill 100,000 civilians with our advanced "smart" bombs - is it surprising that primitive mortars would kill 5,000?
First, the claim of 100,000 dead is based on an extrapolation from a survey. I'd take the 100,000 figure with a grain of salt until a more extensive survey is done. There is a Slate article that dissects their methodology. A reliable number of civilians deaths reported can be found at the Iraq Body Count (IBC) website. As of Feb 10, 2005, they count less than 18,000 civilians reported killed.
Second, most of the deaths are not from our precision guided munitions, the so-called "smart bombs." In fact, most of them
Heck, with my video card I can only play Doom3 at 800x600 anyhow.
You must have a really ancient video card. Even my sister's old eMachine (1996!) can do better than that.
That's BS! NO video card from 1996 could run Doom 3. My ATI Radeon 7500 won't even run it. The minimum requirements listed on id Software's website are a 100% compatible DirectX 9.0b card with 64 MB. The oldest supported chipsets are the Radeon 8500 or nVidia GeForce 3.
Nowadays, 800x600 is the base resolution you get if you don't bother to configure your system. (XP won't do 640x480 without hacking the registry.)
Strike 2, you're wrong again! XP will display at 640x480 (VGA) just fine. You must have a really obscure driver. My mom manages to set her screen at VGA easily by herself, and she doesn't know what a driver is, or that the registry even exists. She has to call me for tech support all the time.
China gaining nuclear superpower status at some point will certainly scare the Hell out of Russia. Given China's significant investment in their space program (and all that signifies), as well as the apparent theft of weapons data from the U.S., I expect they will eventually have some missile silos of their own if they don't already.
China has been a nuclear superpower since the early 1970s. They just don't have nearly as many weapons or warheads as the US or Russia.
In my experience AS2.0 runs identically on any platform with a MMFlash7.0 plugin MORE reliably than applet code runs on any machine with a JVM.
This is due to M$'s dilution of the JVM field by making crappy ones and installing it by default for lots of users.
I agree, this is because Macromedia writes the Flash plug-in for each platform. OTOH, JVMs written are by Microsoft (like you said) and many others. Some were written without access to Sun's source code, like the original Blackdown JDK on Linux, by reverse engineering to avoid licensing issues.
Obviously, this leaves out the numerous other really cool things you can do with Java - like that there are more than 3 platforms with plugins available. In fact, my flash apps talk to CFMX servers which run using precisely this capability of Java.
Using Java because it's cool is usually a bad reason. Sometimes Java is the ideal solution, or the best possible solution given the constraints of a project. But ultimately, you should choose the right tool for the job.
For client-side web application development, though, none of that matters and the whole range of competition is basically Java applets and MMFlash. For someone who is programming Java _applets_ I believe that Flash/AS2.0 generally does the same thing in a similar way only better in many cases, even if it's less "pure".
It's extremely rare to see a Java applet that couldn't be done better in Flash or just a web-based application that serves plain or dynamic HTML. I used to disdain Flash, but since then I've seen it used well in numerous applications. Unfortunately, there are still some idiots using it as the interface to simple websites. Worse still are Flash advertisements, which aren't quite as easy to get Mozilla to block as images.
AS1.0 was like Javascript - it was the flash interpretation of an ancestor shared with Javascript. This is Actionscript's lineage.
The ancestor you're referring to is ECMA-262, which is a standard based on JavaScript. Macromedia has a page detailing ActionScript 2.0's compliance with the ECMA-262 Edition 4 proposal, which is a subset of JavaScript 2.0.
But AS2.0 is intended to be Java-like in syntax, and they considerably souped up the class-based OO programming interfaces.
The syntax of Java was meant to be like C and C++, since they were the most widely used programming languages when Java was being developed. Then programmers could leverage their existing skills, and not have to learn entirely unfamiliar language. Unsurprisingly, this was the same aim of Brendan Eich when he designed JavaScript at Netscape. (The name was merely a marketing scheme, since they have very little to do with each other, although Sun owns both trademarks.) There are several other languages with similar syntax, perl and PHP among others.
The new Actionscript 2.0 syntax is just following JavaScript 2.0, which already had class-based OO programming interfaces. Remember, the unique thing about Java is not its syntax (see above), but that it compiles to bytecode and runs identically on any platform with a Java Virtual Machine. ActionScript, like JavaScript, is still a scripting language, meaning it is executed in an interpreter at runtime.
With FLash MX 2004 it now defaults to Actionscript 2.0 with is a Java-like OO programming language that is quite powerful and has a significant toolbox.
Not Java, JavaScript. And not like JavaScript, it's just Macromedia's implementation of JavaScript.
Too late for karma, but actually we've had a missle designed to destroy satilites in orbit for quite a while its called peguses, launched from an F-15 at about 60k feet if I remember correctly.
The Pegasus is not a weapon, nor is it launched from an F-15. It's a small payload, air-launched rocket, built by Orbital Sciences. They were first launched by B-52s in early testing, but now by a specially modified L-1011.
The weapon F-15s tested were part of the ASAT (anti-satellite) program. Officially known as the Air-Launched Miniature Vehicle (ALMV), it's more commonly known as just ASAT. There's a good picture of an F-15 launching one here
As far as precision, any standard handheld today can be accurate to 3m. The weak link in most low-end GPS models is the clock they use, usually a cheap quartz clock.
With WAAS, 1m accuracy is easy. But for 10cm accuracy like you mentioned, 2 antennas aren't going to do it, since they're both unknown points. Using survey grade GPS equipment with a base station over a known geographical point and another roving unit can get you 1 cm accuracy.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree wholeheartedly.
That was a weakness we exploited in the Gulf War by severing the comm links between Baghdad and the four main air defense installations. F-117s destroyed them on the 1st night with 2000 lb laser guided bombs. Saddam and his generals didn't know what was happening and field commanders were reluctant to make any independent decisions.
The latter trait is a bad habit we're trying to break today among Iraqi officers. The current war in Iraq is being called a squad leaders' war, since they're making many of the crucial day-to-day decisions. NCOs and officers in the US military are given a lot of flexibility to accomplish their missions. This concept (called "empowerment" in the business world) is known as centralized command, decentralized execution.
Second, who cares if there's consensus or not? If what he wrote is correct, he's right. Consensus doesn't make something right or wrong, just accepted.
- space and global strike
- intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance
- integrated missile defense
- combating weapons of mass destruction
You have no idea what you're talking about!How did it help you understand mainstream Christianity? It isn't considered canonical by Christians.
What do you mean by non-ecumenical? That doesn't quite make sense.
Also, the synoptic gospels aren't tainted by any stretch of the imagination. Many discoveries like this over the past couple centuries have given us more manuscripts. With over 5000 fragments of early manuscripts, the evidence is overwhelming that the original content of the New Testament has been remarkably well preserved. What is often tainted is how certain people interpret the meaning of the texts.
Second, there are other extra-biblical references to Jesus, including:
Yeah, then the next version could be: Mac OS XI v11.0 "Spinal Tap"
What? The GIMP was already popular. It might win a few converts from existing Photoshop users who don't want to pay for future upgrades (or people using pirated copies), but I doubt it will popularize the GIMP much more than it already is. GIMPshop was only released yesterday, so only time will tell what kind of an impact it'll have.
What's wrong with that attitude? If it works for one person and they release it, it'll probably work for other people. Software can always be improved, but at some point there must be a feature freeze and debugging or it'll never be released. One of the best aspects of free/open source software is that people can add to it or change it if they want, unlike proprietary software.
The GIMP was already cross-platform! You can download binaries for Windows, MacOS, and several kinds of Unix and Linux; or download the source code and compile it yourself. I'm assuming GIMPshop is still just as portable. The Linux version was released by somebody else later the same day. It probably just needs to be compiled for other platforms.
There wasn't a B-60, and the predecessor to the B-1 was the B-52 (although the XB-70 would've been an intermediate if it hadn't been cancelled).
Jude Wanniski (whose website you linked to), is quite alone in denying that Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iraqi Kurds. Slate has a good article that discusses the issue. Besides, several of his claims are clearly false:
A quick Google image search for Halabja belies that claim. There are numerous photos of the immediate after-effects of the attack. More recently, there was a study to investigate the long term effects of the chemical exposure. The victims of the attack suffer from high rates of respiratory problems, cancer, birth defects, neurological disorders, and skin and eye problems. Maybe part of the reason he claims victims can't be found is because they're some of the 300,000 bodies discovered in mass graves.
The reports of the chemical bombing were not just from Kurds who crossed into Turkey. Some of the pictures linked above were from journalists flown in from Tehran the next day.
Wanniski even mentions the oft repeated myth: that at the very least our State Department gave a "green light" to Saddam Hussein to go into Kuwait in August 1990. According to this article from the Christian Science Monitor, that myth has been debunked by no less than Iraq's former Foreign Minister, Tariq Aziz.
It is highly doubtful Iran was behind the attack. In the first place, their troops and allies were the ones attacked (see here). Secondly, there is no evidence of Iranian use of the type of chemicals at Halabja (see here).
In addition, although chemical weapons were used multiple times in the Iran-Iraq war, the reason the Halabja attack sticks out is precisely because it was not a battlefield. At the time, Halabja was a city with a population of about 80,000 which had just recently came under control of Iran and their Kurdish allies. Many of the approximately 5000 victims of that particluar attack were civilians. Most of the published photos were of women and children killed, for the simple reason that news media thrives on sensationalism.
First, the claim of 100,000 dead is based on an extrapolation from a survey. I'd take the 100,000 figure with a grain of salt until a more extensive survey is done. There is a Slate article that dissects their methodology. A reliable number of civilians deaths reported can be found at the Iraq Body Count (IBC) website. As of Feb 10, 2005, they count less than 18,000 civilians reported killed.
Second, most of the deaths are not from our precision guided munitions, the so-called "smart bombs." In fact, most of them
Using Java because it's cool is usually a bad reason. Sometimes Java is the ideal solution, or the best possible solution given the constraints of a project. But ultimately, you should choose the right tool for the job.
It's extremely rare to see a Java applet that couldn't be done better in Flash or just a web-based application that serves plain or dynamic HTML. I used to disdain Flash, but since then I've seen it used well in numerous applications. Unfortunately, there are still some idiots using it as the interface to simple websites. Worse still are Flash advertisements, which aren't quite as easy to get Mozilla to block as images.
The syntax of Java was meant to be like C and C++, since they were the most widely used programming languages when Java was being developed. Then programmers could leverage their existing skills, and not have to learn entirely unfamiliar language. Unsurprisingly, this was the same aim of Brendan Eich when he designed JavaScript at Netscape. (The name was merely a marketing scheme, since they have very little to do with each other, although Sun owns both trademarks.) There are several other languages with similar syntax, perl and PHP among others.
The new Actionscript 2.0 syntax is just following JavaScript 2.0, which already had class-based OO programming interfaces. Remember, the unique thing about Java is not its syntax (see above), but that it compiles to bytecode and runs identically on any platform with a Java Virtual Machine. ActionScript, like JavaScript, is still a scripting language, meaning it is executed in an interpreter at runtime.
The weapon F-15s tested were part of the ASAT (anti-satellite) program. Officially known as the Air-Launched Miniature Vehicle (ALMV), it's more commonly known as just ASAT. There's a good picture of an F-15 launching one here
The date SA was turned off was May 1, 2000.
As far as precision, any standard handheld today can be accurate to 3m. The weak link in most low-end GPS models is the clock they use, usually a cheap quartz clock.
With WAAS, 1m accuracy is easy. But for 10cm accuracy like you mentioned, 2 antennas aren't going to do it, since they're both unknown points. Using survey grade GPS equipment with a base station over a known geographical point and another roving unit can get you 1 cm accuracy.