1.There is a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies. These actions have consequences for human health, public safety, and community well-being.
2. There is strong documentation of a wideranging effort to manipulate the government's scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration's political agenda.
3. There is evidence that the administration often imposes restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about "sensitive" topics.
4. There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.
I must say that I'm *shocked* (*shocked*!) that anyone could suppose the Bush administration has ever been anything less than completely forthright about anything with the American public (cough, IRAQ, cough). I mean, they've never stretched or distorted facts to fit their preconceptions before, ever. Really!
I have seen some of the guts of VxWorks, and without getting into it too much (don't sue!), some of the low-level stuff is absolutely the most frightening shit I have ever seen. Now a lot of it was in our Board Support Package (BSP: the custom bit that is written for your exact hardware to provide a standard interface to the OS: I guess this is what non-embedded software people call a "HAL": Hardware Abstraction Layer (?)), but some of the headers and other library type bits (PCI stuff, mostly) is just quite amazingly hacked together. It's ifdef that, ifdef this other thing, hand-coded some value over there, blah de dah...
Given all this, though, I have to say that the thing holds together remarkably well once you get over the initial screwups. But, brrrrr!
No. Math in Java == slow, I believe because Java's specification has very strict standards about floating points results, etc., that cannot always be performed correctly in hardware, so you have to fall back to software.
I know that in even basic stuff that we do, I often try implmentations in both C++ and Java, and C++ whoops Java. Simple recursive Fiboannci:
C++ (well, C, too I guess)
int f(const int n) {
if( n <= 2) {
return 1;
} else {
return f(n-1) + f(n-2);
} }
>fib 42 Calling recursive fib for 42. Result == 267914296 Diff == 3.6250
public static int f(int n)
{
if( n <= 2) {
return 1;
} else {
return f(n-1) + f(n-2);
}
}
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.00.9466 for 80x86 and the Java stuff is v1.4.1. It only gets worse from here. This is simple integer math.
Uh, you know what the oil embargo was about, yes? Perhaps we should've rolled over and offered up Israel on a plate?
Here you go, Jew haters, we're gigantic pussies, like much of Europe, and we offer this country (invaded by your own Arab brethren) to you so that you don't hurt us. Can we purty please have our oil now?
Frankly, after all their provocation, I relish the day that oil is unimportant: then they will have absolutely no merit to us. I think that they're lucky they don't live in glass-bottomed, self-lighting parking lots, myself. *That* is our level of restraint. Bioplastics, a hydrogen economy that isn't based on petroleum: oh how I dream of their irrelevancy.
Of course, I'm sure they'll blame that on the West and blow themselves up some more. An entire subcontinent of victims!
No, it is 10 years unless otherwise stated. This was revised by Executive Order 12958 as you can see at:
http://www.dss.mil/seclib/eo12958.htm
a) At the time of original classification, the original classification authority shall attempt to establish a specific date or event for declassification based upon the duration of the national security sensitivity of the information. The date or event shall not exceed the time frame in paragraph (b), below.
b) If the original classification authority cannot determine an earlier specific date or event for declassification, information shall be marked for declassification 10 years from the date of the original decision, except as provided in paragraph (d), below.
Where (d):
# reveal an intelligence source, method, or activity, or a cryptologic system or activity; # reveal information that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction; # reveal information that would impair the development or use of technology within a United States weapon system; # reveal United States military plans, or national security emergency preparedness plans; # reveal foreign government information; # damage relations between the United States and a foreign government, reveal a confidential source, or seriously undermine diplomatic activities that are reasonably expected to be ongoing for a period greater than that provided in paragraph (b), above; # impair the ability of responsible United States Government officials to protect the President, the Vice President, and other individuals for whom protection services, in the interest of national security, are authorized; or # violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.
A higher level overview of such topics is at:
http://www.lib.msu.edu/foxre/declass.html
However, there're older documents under the guidance of Executive Order 12065 from 1978 where I think the period was supposed to be 20 years unless otherwise stated, so it's a bit of a muddle.
Or, similarly, what if I have a GPS system and a laptop running a GPS-aware mapping system? Typically I'd keep the lid closed and only look at it at pit stops (but perhaps traffic lights when they're red!), but it would seem safe to take a glance on, say, I-10 in the flats of Texas or whatever. It's navigation functionality, just not built into the car.
I love that, as with everything else, none of the prohibitions apply to the people enforcing the law. What a sweet deal.
Just another reason to stay out of California: as if I needed any more of them!
Jamming would be cake, but as the heavy user of a system that simulates the GPS constellation and uses that information to generate the RF signals that a GPS system wants for position information, I can tell you that said system is $300k and sits in a chassis about 1 foot (high) by 2 feet (wide) by 3 feet (deep). Now, granted, a fair amount of that is empty space, but there are about 4 or 5 VME cards of the 6U form factor crunching the information.
I suppose miniaturization could compact this somewhat and volume bring down the price, but I don't see you getting one for $19.99 and powering it with a AA.
And remember, the next thing down the pipe is the Digital Millenium Don't Fuck With the GPS Cellphone or We'll Lock You Up Forever Act (DMDFWGCWLYUFA), which will make tampering with yet another piece of your own property a felony. Remember, Citizen, this is for your own good.
And shouldn't you be at the mall, consuming something? Scoot, now, scoot!
With hundreds of cell phones being used in any one region, the thought of somebody caring about your location is quite unrealistic.
If only. Listen, some people have creepily possessive boyfriends and/or girlfriends. Some people have invasive bosses or paranoid spouses. Some people just want to make phonecalls and would otherwise prefer to just be left the hell alone.
This "nothing to hide" thing is very damn tiring, too. Wait until the next terrorist attack, when suddenly cell phone location information becomes mandatory and perhaps more accurate via differential GPS or what have you.
Now you have a system that monitors everywhere you are every moment of the day (that you are with your cell phone). I'm sure the government would never be motivated to purchase this kind of information (as the FBI, etc. already buy databases that they aren't allowed to collect themselves from various companies), and that there would never be abuse or misuse. To me, this system is the very definition of a modern panopticon.
We already live in a world of near-constant scrutiny via cameras, and yet everyone seems comfortable in their fishbowls. It's frightening.
The whole basis of the GPS cell phone data is in the interest of public safety. To assist you when you need it most.
Perhaps it is now. But you know sooner or later (sooner, I'm guessing) it will be turned into another tool for investigation. They'll simply find out every person X who's been near location Y where something interesting has occured, then probe into their lives for behavior that they find suspicious (via information purchased from companies, above), and then hassle the shit out of those they find interesting, occasionally making a spectacular enough bust to quiet the fears of the bovine populance as they live under the all-seeing eye of the tyrannical Computer.
'Moo,' they'll say as they trundle off to McDonald's(tm) for a supersize fry in their Ford Excursions, 'boy it sure is good that they caught that guy stealing change from the Coke(tm) machine.' Because of course, the level of crime necessary to trigger the use of the system is lowered and lowered as people become more and more desensitized. And the radius of your life where you're allowed to make decisions is shrinking, shrinking, gone. Who will chance anything, will live the uncircumscribed life, when that will risk the Law's piercing gaze? Only the insane, as they will be classified, the suspicious. And *those* poor fools will never be allowed a security clearance or a position of prominence. What are they hiding, that they won't keep their Big Brother wrist watch on all the time? I say bring them in for questioning every couple of weeks, right? Maybe keep them under watch (har! punny!). You see, the absence of this tool will become sufficient for suspicion in a cruel, yet ironic twist of fate.
I'll trade safety for privacy any damn day of the week. I'll trade that off-chance of laying in a ditch somewhere unable to activate my emergency location system to the constant gaze of the Machine. It's like some LOTR where everyone *wants* Sauron's eye to always be on them, a warm, comforting presence in a hard land. All of them: pussies.
What is meant is that the position information needed by:
(a) 911
is the same information desired by:
(b) various other people.
Since it must be available for (a), it is presumably stored on the network or available via query. Therefore, (b) can obtain it if they can figure out how to overcome the restrictions limiting the information to (a).
Billing-wise, I guess it *is* the same thing if you could somehow convince the cell phone system that every call you make to non-911 numbers is worthy of the same treatment as 911 calls, but I think this is a much less likely situation, since it is very easy to special-case calls to 911 (less room for error, probably easier to check for it being abused), whereas the position information can be used by many different people, meaning that there is more margin for error due to the complexity.
Companies cannot legislate that their incompatible standards be used in a country with a population of over a billion people. I think that's a substantial and not particularly subtle difference.
Think his cruise missile can be stored for years in a container with no maintenance and yet work when the trigger is pulled?
Think his missile would accept in-flight retargeting from a satellite?
Think his missile can carry 1000 lbs of explosive 1500-2000 miles?
Think his cruise missile can hit with single-digit meter accuracy after this flight of 1500-2000 miles?
Think his missile can be launched from a submarine?
Tactical Tomahawk, the next generation of Tomahawk, is undergoing Operational Evaluation with the Navy, and will cost on the order of $600k per: this is about half the cost of the last generation.
It's all well and good to poke fun at defense contractors, but at least put a *little* thought into it.
I'll bite, though: please give us the names and dates of the European missions to the Moon, or of any particularly interesting achievements made by your space program. I *think* they might have a space station module, but I'm not sure.
In short, what do you *do*? Except bitch and moan about American achievement, I mean.
Sheep, huh? Isn't there some dictator you should be appeasing or surrendering to right now?
In defense, there's a lot of interest in LADAR as well, because with an actual 3D image of the target area you can do autonomous target recognition and acquisition off something like a UAV. I think most LADARs right now are raster scan (i.e., one beam that sweeps left to right and then down, like a TV), but I've seen that people are working on flash LADAR (one big "pop" like a flashbulb and then all the info comes back at once).
For the record, the ABL (AirBorne Laser) is looking at a range on the order of 100 miles. I believe their current system uses 3 lasers.
1) For measuring atmospheric conditions along the firing vector: used to modulate the "death" beam. This can also measure thermal blooming effects and try to compensate (adaptive optics).
2) One beam to paint the target or something. I forget.
3) Beam-o'-death. For making things go boom.
Also: ABL is flying around, so thermal blooming is not a huge problem, since you fly past the air you just super-heated.
Also: ABL flies pretty high (35k-40k feet, I think), so atmospheric effects aren't as problematic.
Yes. I saw an article in EE Times talking about 42V systems: apparently car designers have to be *much* more careful about arcing in these newer cars, in addition to your point about water-proofing.
Uhm, no. Lots of companies are starting to outsource law work overseas. I saw an article last week that talked about a company that was using 4 overseas lawyers (3 of whom had degrees from American universities) to do some of their simpler filings and so on. There was more detail about the legality stuff about how they could practice law in this way, but I didn't really focus on it.
It's coming to lawyers, too. About time, I think.
Most of the rest of the article talked about how companies (like, say, Intel or whomever) were learning to streamline their use of outside counsel, etc., cutting legals costs by huge factors. So hopefully legal work will become a lot less profitable. That's my hope anyway.
No, it will not be more accurate than GPS. By the time these satellites get up (if ever they do), GPS will have added another frequency (L5) for civilian navigation purposes. Galileo might be slightly more accurate than what GPS provides to the military (via Y-code) right now. Big whoop.
Of course, and I'll display a bit of peevishness right now from reading the sentiments of Yuropeens in other comments, the whole damn Galileo system basically runs in the ruts created by TWENTY years of GPS (even more by the time Galileo is launched), to the extent that one of Galileo's frequencies overlays the primary frequency of GPS (L1 - 1575MHz). It is this overlay and concerns about regulations that are the U.S.'s primary concerns with the system. To whit, this blurb. There's a slighty more reactionary piece at CNN. Note however, that the military is notoriously conservative, and if there is even the possibility of interference, they can get all uppity.
This is a bit more information about the frequency allocations and gives a bit of info about the accuracy of both systems. Certainly a dual-mode system using both Galileo and GPS should be more accurate than a single system, but if you're in the continental U.S. you can probably get differential GPS anyway, and the next GPS system is supposed to be up in the 2012 timeframe if we're lucky.
So yeah, go to all the expense you want to create a dual system or whatever brings a tear of Continental Pride to your eye, but in my mind it's billions of dollars resulting in some nice lessons but without providing any additional capability. For fuck's sake, you should be happy that the American taxpayer is footing the damn bill to provide you with such accurate information now and for the forseeable future. But please, continue bitching about how evil and reckless America is, I almost can't get to sleep anymore without that constant low-level whining.
How do 'freed' people (like Trinity and Neo, et al.) who have mental disorders like, umh, body dismorphic disorders or anorexia see themselves in the Matrix? Surely some of these people must exist in a city of 250,000.
Do anorexic women appear as fat in the Matrix, because that's how they envision themselves in real time in contrast to how they really look?
How about doing hallucinagens and then getting the Matrix? Are there four-armed purple mushrooms tripping around in the streets?
Rats. I read the documentation finally and it *is* 32-bits per color channel: 128-bit overall (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). Well, that's less good but probably still sufficient, and a step up over 8-bits of unsigned int per channel.
Not true. Newer cards appear to be IEEE 'extended' (there isn't a definition of the bitsize of extended from the spec, so even Intel's 80-bit format is considered 'extended') at 128 bits wide per color channel. This is pretty much the last word in accuracy as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps numerical analysts can come up with scenarios where 128 bits aren't sufficient, but I don't want to hear about them.
For some of the stuff that we do, we would kill for a slightly faster card. Right now, for simulation of IR imagery, we have to prefly a scenario where the sensor-carrying vehicle (use your imagination) flys a trajectory and we render the imagery along this path. This rendering consists of doing convolutions of background scenes with target information to generate a final image. At the end we have a 'movie'. This can take a few hours to run.
Afterwards, we run the simulation in realtime and play frames from this movie (adjusted in rotation and scaling, etc. because real-time interactions can result in flight paths subtly different from the movie) and show it to a *real* sensor and see what happens.
The point: if we could do real time convolution inside a graphics card and then get the data back out some way (we usually need to go through some custom interface to present the data to the sensor), then a lot of pain would be saved. First, we could move the video-generating infrastructure into the real time simulation, which would be simpler, we wouldn't have to worry about rotating and scaling the result since we'd be generating exactly correct results in the fly, we wouldn't have to worry about allocating huge amounts of memory (Gigabytes) to hold the video and all the concerns about memory latency and bandwidth and problems with NUMA architectures, and finally (maybe) we could change scenarios on the fly without having to worry about whether we already had a video ready to use.
I think the computational horsepower is almost there, but right now there's no good way to get the data back out of the card. On something like an SGI you get stuff after it's gone through the DACs, which mean you now have at most 12-bits per channel (less than we want, although you can use tricks for some stuff to get up to maybe 16-bits for pure luminosity data). What would be sweet in the extreme is to get a 128-bit floating point value of each pixel in the X*Y pixel scene. So if the scene were 640x480 then we'd get about 4.5Meg of data per frame at say 60Hz then we'd get about 281Meg a second to convert and send out.
Life would be sweet. Sadly, this is a pretty special purpose application, so I'm not too hopeful. What's weird is that only NVidia (and perhaps ATI) are coming up with this horsepower because of all the world's gamers, and vendors like SGI are left with hardware that is many, many generations old (although it does have the benefit of assloads of texture memory).
In short: need 1GB of RAM on the card and a way to get stuff back out after we've done the swoopty math.
Slashdot Mirror
My gateway box:
[+] kernel 2.2.25 vulnerable: YES exploitable NO
cerberus:~$ uptime
11:32:26 up 353 days, 12:09, 1 user, load average: 0.02, 0.02, 0.00
cerberus:~$ uname -a
Linux cerberus 2.2.25 #3 Wed Mar 19 22:23:56 MST 2003 i586 unknown
Argh, now it'll be another 1.5 years before I can watch it roll over.
Here
Here are their main findings:
1.There is a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush administration political appointees across numerous federal agencies. These actions have consequences for human health, public safety, and community well-being.
2. There is strong documentation of a wideranging effort to manipulate the government's scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration's political agenda.
3. There is evidence that the administration often imposes restrictions on what government scientists can say or write about "sensitive" topics.
4. There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.
I must say that I'm *shocked* (*shocked*!) that anyone could suppose the Bush administration has ever been anything less than completely forthright about anything with the American public (cough, IRAQ, cough). I mean, they've never stretched or distorted facts to fit their preconceptions before, ever. Really!
I have seen some of the guts of VxWorks, and without getting into it too much (don't sue!), some of the low-level stuff is absolutely the most frightening shit I have ever seen. Now a lot of it was in our Board Support Package (BSP: the custom bit that is written for your exact hardware to provide a standard interface to the OS: I guess this is what non-embedded software people call a "HAL": Hardware Abstraction Layer (?)), but some of the headers and other library type bits (PCI stuff, mostly) is just quite amazingly hacked together. It's ifdef that, ifdef this other thing, hand-coded some value over there, blah de dah...
Given all this, though, I have to say that the thing holds together remarkably well once you get over the initial screwups. But, brrrrr!
So what?
No. Math in Java == slow, I believe because Java's specification has very strict standards about floating points results, etc., that cannot always be performed correctly in hardware, so you have to fall back to software.
I know that in even basic stuff that we do, I often try implmentations in both C++ and Java, and C++ whoops Java. Simple recursive Fiboannci:
C++ (well, C, too I guess)
int
f(const int n)
{
if( n <= 2) {
return 1;
} else {
return f(n-1) + f(n-2);
}
}
>fib 42
Calling recursive fib for 42.
Result == 267914296 Diff == 3.6250
public static int f(int n)
{
if( n <= 2) {
return 1;
} else {
return f(n-1) + f(n-2);
}
}
>java fib 42
Computing Fib #42
result == 267914296 diff == 5282.0
Ratio is ~1.46:1.
This is:
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.00.9466 for 80x86 and the Java stuff is v1.4.1. It only gets worse from here. This is simple integer math.
Uh, you know what the oil embargo was about, yes? Perhaps we should've rolled over and offered up Israel on a plate?
Here you go, Jew haters, we're gigantic pussies, like much of Europe, and we offer this country (invaded by your own Arab brethren) to you so that you don't hurt us. Can we purty please have our oil now?
Frankly, after all their provocation, I relish the day that oil is unimportant: then they will have absolutely no merit to us. I think that they're lucky they don't live in glass-bottomed, self-lighting parking lots, myself. *That* is our level of restraint. Bioplastics, a hydrogen economy that isn't based on petroleum: oh how I dream of their irrelevancy.
Of course, I'm sure they'll blame that on the West and blow themselves up some more. An entire subcontinent of victims!
No, it is 10 years unless otherwise stated. This was revised by Executive Order 12958 as you can see at:
http://www.dss.mil/seclib/eo12958.htm
a) At the time of original classification, the original classification authority shall attempt to establish a specific date or event for declassification based upon the duration of the national security sensitivity of the information. The date or event shall not exceed the time frame in paragraph (b), below.
b) If the original classification authority cannot determine an earlier specific date or event for declassification, information shall be marked for declassification 10 years from the date of the original decision, except as provided in paragraph (d), below.
Where (d):
# reveal an intelligence source, method, or activity, or a cryptologic system or activity;
# reveal information that would assist in the development or use of weapons of mass destruction;
# reveal information that would impair the development or use of technology within a United States weapon system;
# reveal United States military plans, or national security emergency preparedness plans;
# reveal foreign government information;
# damage relations between the United States and a foreign government, reveal a confidential source, or seriously undermine diplomatic activities that are reasonably expected to be ongoing for a period greater than that provided in paragraph (b), above;
# impair the ability of responsible United States Government officials to protect the President, the Vice President, and other individuals for whom protection services, in the interest of national security, are authorized; or
# violate a statute, treaty, or international agreement.
A higher level overview of such topics is at:
http://www.lib.msu.edu/foxre/declass.html
However, there're older documents under the guidance of Executive Order 12065 from 1978 where I think the period was supposed to be 20 years unless otherwise stated, so it's a bit of a muddle.
Or, similarly, what if I have a GPS system and a laptop running a GPS-aware mapping system? Typically I'd keep the lid closed and only look at it at pit stops (but perhaps traffic lights when they're red!), but it would seem safe to take a glance on, say, I-10 in the flats of Texas or whatever. It's navigation functionality, just not built into the car.
I love that, as with everything else, none of the prohibitions apply to the people enforcing the law. What a sweet deal.
Just another reason to stay out of California: as if I needed any more of them!
Unlikely, at least in the near future.
Jamming would be cake, but as the heavy user of a system that simulates the GPS constellation and uses that information to generate the RF signals that a GPS system wants for position information, I can tell you that said system is $300k and sits in a chassis about 1 foot (high) by 2 feet (wide) by 3 feet (deep). Now, granted, a fair amount of that is empty space, but there are about 4 or 5 VME cards of the 6U form factor crunching the information.
I suppose miniaturization could compact this somewhat and volume bring down the price, but I don't see you getting one for $19.99 and powering it with a AA.
And remember, the next thing down the pipe is the Digital Millenium Don't Fuck With the GPS Cellphone or We'll Lock You Up Forever Act (DMDFWGCWLYUFA), which will make tampering with yet another piece of your own property a felony. Remember, Citizen, this is for your own good.
And shouldn't you be at the mall, consuming something? Scoot, now, scoot!
If only. Listen, some people have creepily possessive boyfriends and/or girlfriends. Some people have invasive bosses or paranoid spouses. Some people just want to make phonecalls and would otherwise prefer to just be left the hell alone.
This "nothing to hide" thing is very damn tiring, too. Wait until the next terrorist attack, when suddenly cell phone location information becomes mandatory and perhaps more accurate via differential GPS or what have you.
Now you have a system that monitors everywhere you are every moment of the day (that you are with your cell phone). I'm sure the government would never be motivated to purchase this kind of information (as the FBI, etc. already buy databases that they aren't allowed to collect themselves from various companies), and that there would never be abuse or misuse. To me, this system is the very definition of a modern panopticon.
We already live in a world of near-constant scrutiny via cameras, and yet everyone seems comfortable in their fishbowls. It's frightening.
Perhaps it is now. But you know sooner or later (sooner, I'm guessing) it will be turned into another tool for investigation. They'll simply find out every person X who's been near location Y where something interesting has occured, then probe into their lives for behavior that they find suspicious (via information purchased from companies, above), and then hassle the shit out of those they find interesting, occasionally making a spectacular enough bust to quiet the fears of the bovine populance as they live under the all-seeing eye of the tyrannical Computer.
'Moo,' they'll say as they trundle off to McDonald's(tm) for a supersize fry in their Ford Excursions, 'boy it sure is good that they caught that guy stealing change from the Coke(tm) machine.' Because of course, the level of crime necessary to trigger the use of the system is lowered and lowered as people become more and more desensitized. And the radius of your life where you're allowed to make decisions is shrinking, shrinking, gone. Who will chance anything, will live the uncircumscribed life, when that will risk the Law's piercing gaze? Only the insane, as they will be classified, the suspicious. And *those* poor fools will never be allowed a security clearance or a position of prominence. What are they hiding, that they won't keep their Big Brother wrist watch on all the time? I say bring them in for questioning every couple of weeks, right? Maybe keep them under watch (har! punny!). You see, the absence of this tool will become sufficient for suspicion in a cruel, yet ironic twist of fate.
I'll trade safety for privacy any damn day of the week. I'll trade that off-chance of laying in a ditch somewhere unable to activate my emergency location system to the constant gaze of the Machine. It's like some LOTR where everyone *wants* Sauron's eye to always be on them, a warm, comforting presence in a hard land. All of them: pussies.
Thus endeth the rant.
Uhm, no.
What is meant is that the position information needed by:
(a) 911
is the same information desired by:
(b) various other people.
Since it must be available for (a), it is presumably stored on the network or available via query. Therefore, (b) can obtain it if they can figure out how to overcome the restrictions limiting the information to (a).
Billing-wise, I guess it *is* the same thing if you could somehow convince the cell phone system that every call you make to non-911 numbers is worthy of the same treatment as 911 calls, but I think this is a much less likely situation, since it is very easy to special-case calls to 911 (less room for error, probably easier to check for it being abused), whereas the position information can be used by many different people, meaning that there is more margin for error due to the complexity.
Companies cannot legislate that their incompatible standards be used in a country with a population of over a billion people. I think that's a substantial and not particularly subtle difference.
Government > corporations
Don't be dumb.
Think his cruise missile can be stored for years in a container with no maintenance and yet work when the trigger is pulled?
Think his missile would accept in-flight retargeting from a satellite?
Think his missile can carry 1000 lbs of explosive 1500-2000 miles?
Think his cruise missile can hit with single-digit meter accuracy after this flight of 1500-2000 miles?
Think his missile can be launched from a submarine?
Tactical Tomahawk, the next generation of Tomahawk, is undergoing Operational Evaluation with the Navy, and will cost on the order of $600k per: this is about half the cost of the last generation.
It's all well and good to poke fun at defense contractors, but at least put a *little* thought into it.
> September
> October
> November
March is going to be a hoot, I think. Study up on the adjectives.
Wow: ferocious trollbait there.
I'll bite, though: please give us the names and dates of the European missions to the Moon, or of any particularly interesting achievements made by your space program. I *think* they might have a space station module, but I'm not sure.
In short, what do you *do*? Except bitch and moan about American achievement, I mean.
Sheep, huh? Isn't there some dictator you should be appeasing or surrendering to right now?
There's the Centibots stuff at SRI:
http://www.ai.sri.com/centibots/
which also uses LADAR-bots.
In defense, there's a lot of interest in LADAR as well, because with an actual 3D image of the target area you can do autonomous target recognition and acquisition off something like a UAV. I think most LADARs right now are raster scan (i.e., one beam that sweeps left to right and then down, like a TV), but I've seen that people are working on flash LADAR (one big "pop" like a flashbulb and then all the info comes back at once).
It's all very cool, I gotta say.
Not correct.
For the record, the ABL (AirBorne Laser) is looking at a range on the order of 100 miles. I believe their current system uses 3 lasers.
1) For measuring atmospheric conditions along the firing vector: used to modulate the "death" beam. This can also measure thermal blooming effects and try to compensate (adaptive optics).
2) One beam to paint the target or something. I forget.
3) Beam-o'-death. For making things go boom.
Also: ABL is flying around, so thermal blooming is not a huge problem, since you fly past the air you just super-heated.
Also: ABL flies pretty high (35k-40k feet, I think), so atmospheric effects aren't as problematic.
Indeed:
. 022 r eally, no]@cerberus:~$ exit
[uh, no]@cerberus:~$ dc
2
96
^
p
79228162514264337593543950336
6
10
23
^
p
100000000000000000000000
*
p
602200000000000000000000.000
/
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There you go, 131,564kg of matter. Your subtraction was a little wrong (1E5 not 1E7).
Corvette.
Yes. I saw an article in EE Times talking about 42V systems: apparently car designers have to be *much* more careful about arcing in these newer cars, in addition to your point about water-proofing.
Uhm, no. Lots of companies are starting to outsource law work overseas. I saw an article last week that talked about a company that was using 4 overseas lawyers (3 of whom had degrees from American universities) to do some of their simpler filings and so on. There was more detail about the legality stuff about how they could practice law in this way, but I didn't really focus on it.
It's coming to lawyers, too. About time, I think.
Most of the rest of the article talked about how companies (like, say, Intel or whomever) were learning to streamline their use of outside counsel, etc., cutting legals costs by huge factors. So hopefully legal work will become a lot less profitable. That's my hope anyway.
No, it will not be more accurate than GPS. By the time these satellites get up (if ever they do), GPS will have added another frequency (L5) for civilian navigation purposes. Galileo might be slightly more accurate than what GPS provides to the military (via Y-code) right now. Big whoop.
Of course, and I'll display a bit of peevishness right now from reading the sentiments of Yuropeens in other comments, the whole damn Galileo system basically runs in the ruts created by TWENTY years of GPS (even more by the time Galileo is launched), to the extent that one of Galileo's frequencies overlays the primary frequency of GPS (L1 - 1575MHz). It is this overlay and concerns about regulations that are the U.S.'s primary concerns with the system. To whit, this blurb. There's a slighty more reactionary piece at CNN. Note however, that the military is notoriously conservative, and if there is even the possibility of interference, they can get all uppity.
This is a bit more information about the frequency allocations and gives a bit of info about the accuracy of both systems. Certainly a dual-mode system using both Galileo and GPS should be more accurate than a single system, but if you're in the continental U.S. you can probably get differential GPS anyway, and the next GPS system is supposed to be up in the 2012 timeframe if we're lucky.
So yeah, go to all the expense you want to create a dual system or whatever brings a tear of Continental Pride to your eye, but in my mind it's billions of dollars resulting in some nice lessons but without providing any additional capability. For fuck's sake, you should be happy that the American taxpayer is footing the damn bill to provide you with such accurate information now and for the forseeable future. But please, continue bitching about how evil and reckless America is, I almost can't get to sleep anymore without that constant low-level whining.
How do 'freed' people (like Trinity and Neo, et al.) who have mental disorders like, umh, body dismorphic disorders or anorexia see themselves in the Matrix? Surely some of these people must exist in a city of 250,000.
Do anorexic women appear as fat in the Matrix, because that's how they envision themselves in real time in contrast to how they really look?
How about doing hallucinagens and then getting the Matrix? Are there four-armed purple mushrooms tripping around in the streets?
Enquiring minds...
Rats. I read the documentation finally and it *is* 32-bits per color channel: 128-bit overall (Red, Green, Blue, Alpha). Well, that's less good but probably still sufficient, and a step up over 8-bits of unsigned int per channel.
Not true. Newer cards appear to be IEEE 'extended' (there isn't a definition of the bitsize of extended from the spec, so even Intel's 80-bit format is considered 'extended') at 128 bits wide per color channel. This is pretty much the last word in accuracy as far as I'm concerned. Perhaps numerical analysts can come up with scenarios where 128 bits aren't sufficient, but I don't want to hear about them.
For some of the stuff that we do, we would kill for a slightly faster card. Right now, for simulation of IR imagery, we have to prefly a scenario where the sensor-carrying vehicle (use your imagination) flys a trajectory and we render the imagery along this path. This rendering consists of doing convolutions of background scenes with target information to generate a final image. At the end we have a 'movie'. This can take a few hours to run.
Afterwards, we run the simulation in realtime and play frames from this movie (adjusted in rotation and scaling, etc. because real-time interactions can result in flight paths subtly different from the movie) and show it to a *real* sensor and see what happens.
The point: if we could do real time convolution inside a graphics card and then get the data back out some way (we usually need to go through some custom interface to present the data to the sensor), then a lot of pain would be saved. First, we could move the video-generating infrastructure into the real time simulation, which would be simpler, we wouldn't have to worry about rotating and scaling the result since we'd be generating exactly correct results in the fly, we wouldn't have to worry about allocating huge amounts of memory (Gigabytes) to hold the video and all the concerns about memory latency and bandwidth and problems with NUMA architectures, and finally (maybe) we could change scenarios on the fly without having to worry about whether we already had a video ready to use.
I think the computational horsepower is almost there, but right now there's no good way to get the data back out of the card. On something like an SGI you get stuff after it's gone through the DACs, which mean you now have at most 12-bits per channel (less than we want, although you can use tricks for some stuff to get up to maybe 16-bits for pure luminosity data). What would be sweet in the extreme is to get a 128-bit floating point value of each pixel in the X*Y pixel scene. So if the scene were 640x480 then we'd get about 4.5Meg of data per frame at say 60Hz then we'd get about 281Meg a second to convert and send out.
Life would be sweet. Sadly, this is a pretty special purpose application, so I'm not too hopeful. What's weird is that only NVidia (and perhaps ATI) are coming up with this horsepower because of all the world's gamers, and vendors like SGI are left with hardware that is many, many generations old (although it does have the benefit of assloads of texture memory).
In short: need 1GB of RAM on the card and a way to get stuff back out after we've done the swoopty math.