"... and in other news today: the Pentagon admitted that secret information was accessed when IBM's mainframe was hacked by the Chinese. Additionally, it seems that the designs for General Motor's new hydrogen car were stolen."
Yeah. Slightly suspect indeed. I'm about to publish my study... I've ploted the human use of the Earth's atmosphere in 3D. Our use amounts to a staggering 100% based on the fact that we breath the air, drive cars, and produce electricity. Of course, by my methods, a volcano would also show 100% usage. How can two things both use 100% of something? I dunno, send more grant money and I'll find out.
This is good news. Not unexpected, but good. We'll have to wait for later missions for verification. And maybe an official NASA announcement. In the meantime, I'd urge support for the Space Exploration Act of 2002:
I don't think it's ridiculous to consider friendly-fire as a proportion of total casualties. If you wanted to work to reduce troop casualties you'd focus on the largest percentage and the ones that are easiest to solve.
As friendly fire becomes a larger part of battle casualties it bears more attention. But is it easy to solve?
There was a great article in American Aerospace a while back that highlighted the military action in ex-Yugoslavia. Anyway, one of the major problems was the technology gap between the U.S. and allies, especially in communications and smart weapons. Both of which can reduce friendly-fire casualties. It really helps to be able to talk to all of your allies and then drop the bombs in the right spot. There were instances (far too many in fact) where effective communication was not possible. Some pilots didn't speak English (the NATO language) and allies didn't have radios compatible with newer U.S. technology.
In the U.S. we've done a better job at employing smart weapons and with great results. New communications equipment is also coming into use. Special forces are now being equipped with radios that can utilize 5 different standards. This was a major problem as specially forces were not able to talk to the people they needed to without carrying 5 radios.
The point of all this is that communication (as it has always been) is a problem on today's battle field. It's being worked on and if it's done right friendly fire incidents will decrease. You don't bomb someone if you know they're your allies and better information distribution and communication lets you know that they're your allies.
On information distribution: information sharing, between branches and nationalities, and levels of command has been an issue. But last I heard serious progress had been made in this area.
Also, improved communication will reduce enemy fire casualties. But, in my opinion, not as much as friendly fire casualties.
So, it makes sense to focus on improving battlefield communications and information distribution. It will certainly never eliminate friendly fire but it has great potential to reduce a large percentage of casualties cause by friendly fire incidents. Is it easy? No. There is a lot of expensive communication equipment in service and many procedures that need work. But the 'easy' fixes have been done already.
However, your perspective of the larger picture, that fewer and fewer U.S. troops are being lost in battle, is laudable.
Just curious, but how do you define "less of a problem"? 'Cause, percentage-wise, friendly fire is on the rise. Do you mean: less of our guys are being killed by us? Is that a good measure? Then again: is the percentage of friendly fire incidents being raise because we're so good are keeping the bad guys from killing us?
That's a very good point. Personally I think exploring Mars and the rest of space is a great idea. That's why I studied to become an aerospace engineer. But there are not enough people and will to do so, throughout the world.
Until standards of living and education are raised and hate is decreased I fear that humanity will never reach out to the stars. In the short term the best parts of humanity face a horrible enemy in this ignorant hate. A hate that is become ever more able to adversely affecting all of humanity. In the short term this hate must be guarded against. And that is why I work in the defense industry.
I hope that someday humanity will overcome this short term threat from ignorant hate. I spend a good part of my time considering how to turn children into well educated engineers that, with the benefit of their education, can defend against hate and build ships to the stars.
I apologize for using hate like a buzzword. I hope you all catch my meaning anyway.
You are in error. The only reason you believe that the only casualties for these two conflicts were friendly fire is because:
You're a moron.
The media gives greater coverage to friendly fire incidents.
Actually, friendly fire accounted for a large percentage (but by no means all) of the battle casualties during the Gulf War. The Allies lost many more than those 9 British soldiers that were mistakenly bombed. However, there were actually more non-battle deaths in the Gulf War than battle deaths. Furthermore, the U.S. military suffered more casualties outside the Persian Gulf than in it during the Gulf War (training accidents, etc) [DIOR Casualty Statistics]. Bet you never would have thought that more people died as a result of normal activities than battle. That's because non-battle casualties don't get the coverage and attention of battle casualties.
In Afghanistan friendly fire again seems to be to blame (finally figures are not yet available) for a large percentage of casualties.
Friendly fire accidents are horrible and they do need to be addressed (they are). I think we're seeing a general increase in the number of friendly fire deaths (percentage-wise) because we've gotten so much better at killing than our enemies. We've drastically reduced the casualty figures in recent conflicts. I've no doubts that our government is working to reduce casualties even further. And you can bet that they are giving friendly-fire and the bad coverage it gives them more than it's fair share of attention.
Interesting. I think that their operating range might be just a tad low. To the best of my knowledge these chemical lasers all work by mixing the gas components at high speeds. This creates temperatures on the order of thousands of Kelvins. In other words, the temperatures rival the surface of the sun.
Dale Brown wrote a rather interesting fiction book, Silver Tower on the use of a space station based laser. While it's not really all that technically sound, try finding a copy of the July 2001 issue of Aerospace America, it's a good read and quite frightening.
One of the biggest issues with these laser thingies is that they generate a lot of heat. Getting rid of that heat is key to continued operation. In this case, a 1MW COIL tends to produce 5MW of waste heat. That's a lot.
Eh. 2000 is much better. But, after having a rather large report in Word become unsavable after a lot of new content was added I lost all thoughts of stability in anything Microsoft does. The only way I managed to save the file was to cut and paste it into StarOffice. But I'm a real man so I suffer on.
From your post is sounds like you're solving single solution problems where you write a 'disposable' procedure (probably reusing some code) for each problem. OOP isn't designed for that.
OOP really starts to shine when you actually have objects to work with. If all you're doing is trying to solve a single solution problem a simple 'disposable' procedure is the best route. For larger, evolving, iterative projects OOP is a godsend. In my case, I'm designing a MAV (Micro Air Vehicle).
I'm using Python instead of C++ but the OOP example still holds. Aircraft design is a highly non-linear process, and for myself at least, counter-intuitive. I could write a single procedure to run the analysis but that's not nearly a flexible as an OOP solution.
Basically, I'm using off-the-self components (i.e. motor, batteries, propeller) as a starting point for my design. Each of these components is considered an object. These components are combined in such a way as to make another object: the entire MAV. By using OOP it's rather easy to try different component configurations and design conditions (flight altitude, cruise, loiter, velocity, etc).
If I was really cool (I'm not) I could add in some simulation stuff (Larger aerospace corporations do a lot of this, as it's cheaper and quicker than an experimental approach).
One thing that this sort of OOP approach lends itself towards (especially in my case, is genetic algorithms). Since aircraft deisgn is so non-linear, and counter-intuitive the best solution is not easy to find. So many different designs need to be analysed. OOP and genetic algorithms were born for just this sort of thing.
If you have a single problem that needs to be solved once for one set of conditions, then use a procedure. If you have a larger project that requires the solution of many smaller problems for various conditions (instances to use the OOP term) then OOP is an easier route. Anything in between is a judgment call and really depends a lot on your specific case.
Kind of neat that Mitch finds himself on the other side of the fence now. (Trying to break an established systems strangle hold). And that Bill is also on the other side of the fence. (Refusing to port Office to Linux). I guess we'll see whether it was teh men or the side.
Personally, the lack of a nice suite of productivity applications has kept me a windose freak. I'm looking forward to giving Mozilla, Evolution, Gnome, and StarOffice a go. Until recently, IMHO, such a transition was not in my best interests. (No, Mozilla, Evolution, or StarOffice 6).
Too bad we aren't learning from the British or Soviet mistakes?!?
Do you really think our military commanders are that dumb? There are two things that our military does better than anyone else:
Buy equipment that is ten years ahead of even our allies
Learn from mistakes
Don't think our troops are innovative and flexible? Go read something by Stephen Ambrose on WWII.
Don't think our commanders have prepared the troops for this kind of combat? Wrong. Units have been training for years for just this type of conflict because they know that since the Gulf War no one in their right mind would dare face our mechanized troops
We employ more Special Forces troops than any other nation. And they are damn good at what they do. I don't know how they do it and I don't want to. Remeber what happened in Somolia? A massive failure right? Do you know how many enemies those guys faced (and killed)? It was a failure becaue we lost soldiers at all.
We will lose men. Good men. But I'll tell you what, they will make a good counting for themselves. They will do their job and put their lives on the line so after some of them have died you can say it was a 'mistake'.
The Soviets lost 15,000 troops in ten years? We just lost 6,000 civilians in one day. We cannot and will not allow that to continue.
Read some Tom Clancy, do some research. Show some respect. And do not call something that hasn't happened yet a mistake. Especially when you seem to be completely blind to the fact that we have no intention of fighting the same kind of war the Soviets did. Or to the fact that the Northern Alliance is begging to help.
My apologies but I am sick and tired of the this feeling that the people who's job and life's work it is to make keep this country safe doesn't know how to do it as well as some guy who reads slashdot.
As storage space increases at a disproportionate rate to bandwidth. We can make use of that by being proactive with bandwidth use and trying to do some pre-fetching like processors do now.
Say for instance there are a few guys on your block that really love to read slashdot. Now say that slashdot is distributed. You go and download a page. Instead of downloading just that one page... you might pre-fetch a few more while you read it (like any links on the page... especially if other/.ers have clicked 'em).
In addition, if one of those other/.ers on you block decided to read up on the latest nerd news his local machine wouldn't have to go very far to get it.. thus reducing the latency. You'd end up with your block being your very own slashdot server with the people who access it the most storing most of the content.
Take it even further and imagine your block as a little 'group' that's trying to grab all kinds of information that it thinks it's users will like and shuffling it to those most likely to want to see it.
Lets say you'd really like Max Payne if the bad guys weren't so damn dumb. How to make them more realistic with the limited processing power you have locally? How about using some cycles from your neighbors computer to make the AI think and learn better. Beyond that, how about analyzing data on the play of all the owners of Max Payne and making general improvement to the AI?
Well, granted you could end up with AI that's pretty much unbeatable but you could dumb that down and just be left with an AI that can do something different every time!
Now I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that there a one or two small barriers to this happening tomorrow. But I think it could be cool. Maybe. I'm glad somebody smarter than I is researching it.
And oh yeah. The speed of light is getting kinda fuzzier every day. For instance if you shine some light through some cesium atoms under the right conditions and it'll come out the other side faster than the speed of light.... Who knows what'll be around in another 30 year?
Actually, we're not sure. Europa is the Jupiter moon that may have liquid water: its surface is icy but has cracks. This leads us to conclude that there may be liquid water underneath that is cause the crust to move and crack much like the tectonic plates on earth. We won't be positive until Europa Orbiter and Europa Lander get there:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/europaorbiter/.
Still it's rather irritating and finally (for all the talk) real, bias against open source.
This and those (*#@^%@(#&% 'dumb' tags in the new IE are gonna be enough to drive me over the edge... and use openBSD... hey it supports all kinds of cool stuff fresh off the wire now:)
Slashdot Mirror
"... and in other news today: the Pentagon admitted that secret information was accessed when IBM's mainframe was hacked by the Chinese. Additionally, it seems that the designs for General Motor's new hydrogen car were stolen."
So much for expanding the market.
Yeah. Slightly suspect indeed. I'm about to publish my study ... I've ploted the human use of the Earth's atmosphere in 3D. Our use amounts to a staggering 100% based on the fact that we breath the air, drive cars, and produce electricity. Of course, by my methods, a volcano would also show 100% usage. How can two things both use 100% of something? I dunno, send more grant money and I'll find out.
I don't think it's ridiculous to consider friendly-fire as a proportion of total casualties. If you wanted to work to reduce troop casualties you'd focus on the largest percentage and the ones that are easiest to solve.
As friendly fire becomes a larger part of battle casualties it bears more attention. But is it easy to solve?
There was a great article in American Aerospace a while back that highlighted the military action in ex-Yugoslavia. Anyway, one of the major problems was the technology gap between the U.S. and allies, especially in communications and smart weapons. Both of which can reduce friendly-fire casualties. It really helps to be able to talk to all of your allies and then drop the bombs in the right spot. There were instances (far too many in fact) where effective communication was not possible. Some pilots didn't speak English (the NATO language) and allies didn't have radios compatible with newer U.S. technology.
In the U.S. we've done a better job at employing smart weapons and with great results. New communications equipment is also coming into use. Special forces are now being equipped with radios that can utilize 5 different standards. This was a major problem as specially forces were not able to talk to the people they needed to without carrying 5 radios.
The point of all this is that communication (as it has always been) is a problem on today's battle field. It's being worked on and if it's done right friendly fire incidents will decrease. You don't bomb someone if you know they're your allies and better information distribution and communication lets you know that they're your allies.
On information distribution: information sharing, between branches and nationalities, and levels of command has been an issue. But last I heard serious progress had been made in this area.
Also, improved communication will reduce enemy fire casualties. But, in my opinion, not as much as friendly fire casualties.
So, it makes sense to focus on improving battlefield communications and information distribution. It will certainly never eliminate friendly fire but it has great potential to reduce a large percentage of casualties cause by friendly fire incidents. Is it easy? No. There is a lot of expensive communication equipment in service and many procedures that need work. But the 'easy' fixes have been done already.
However, your perspective of the larger picture, that fewer and fewer U.S. troops are being lost in battle, is laudable.
Just curious, but how do you define "less of a problem"? 'Cause, percentage-wise, friendly fire is on the rise. Do you mean: less of our guys are being killed by us? Is that a good measure? Then again: is the percentage of friendly fire incidents being raise because we're so good are keeping the bad guys from killing us?
That's a very good point. Personally I think exploring Mars and the rest of space is a great idea. That's why I studied to become an aerospace engineer. But there are not enough people and will to do so, throughout the world.
Until standards of living and education are raised and hate is decreased I fear that humanity will never reach out to the stars. In the short term the best parts of humanity face a horrible enemy in this ignorant hate. A hate that is become ever more able to adversely affecting all of humanity. In the short term this hate must be guarded against. And that is why I work in the defense industry.
I hope that someday humanity will overcome this short term threat from ignorant hate. I spend a good part of my time considering how to turn children into well educated engineers that, with the benefit of their education, can defend against hate and build ships to the stars.
I apologize for using hate like a buzzword. I hope you all catch my meaning anyway.
You are in error. The only reason you believe that the only casualties for these two conflicts were friendly fire is because:
Actually, friendly fire accounted for a large percentage (but by no means all) of the battle casualties during the Gulf War. The Allies lost many more than those 9 British soldiers that were mistakenly bombed. However, there were actually more non-battle deaths in the Gulf War than battle deaths. Furthermore, the U.S. military suffered more casualties outside the Persian Gulf than in it during the Gulf War (training accidents, etc) [DIOR Casualty Statistics]. Bet you never would have thought that more people died as a result of normal activities than battle. That's because non-battle casualties don't get the coverage and attention of battle casualties.
In Afghanistan friendly fire again seems to be to blame (finally figures are not yet available) for a large percentage of casualties.
Friendly fire accidents are horrible and they do need to be addressed (they are). I think we're seeing a general increase in the number of friendly fire deaths (percentage-wise) because we've gotten so much better at killing than our enemies. We've drastically reduced the casualty figures in recent conflicts. I've no doubts that our government is working to reduce casualties even further. And you can bet that they are giving friendly-fire and the bad coverage it gives them more than it's fair share of attention.
Will the X-45 have an impact on casualties? Who knows ... it has yet to be tested.
Interesting. I think that their operating range might be just a tad low. To the best of my knowledge these chemical lasers all work by mixing the gas components at high speeds. This creates temperatures on the order of thousands of Kelvins. In other words, the temperatures rival the surface of the sun.
Dale Brown wrote a rather interesting fiction book, Silver Tower on the use of a space station based laser. While it's not really all that technically sound, try finding a copy of the July 2001 issue of Aerospace America, it's a good read and quite frightening.
One of the biggest issues with these laser thingies is that they generate a lot of heat. Getting rid of that heat is key to continued operation. In this case, a 1MW COIL tends to produce 5MW of waste heat. That's a lot.
Eh. 2000 is much better. But, after having a rather large report in Word become unsavable after a lot of new content was added I lost all thoughts of stability in anything Microsoft does. The only way I managed to save the file was to cut and paste it into StarOffice. But I'm a real man so I suffer on.
From your post is sounds like you're solving single solution problems where you write a 'disposable' procedure (probably reusing some code) for each problem. OOP isn't designed for that.
OOP really starts to shine when you actually have objects to work with. If all you're doing is trying to solve a single solution problem a simple 'disposable' procedure is the best route. For larger, evolving, iterative projects OOP is a godsend. In my case, I'm designing a MAV (Micro Air Vehicle).
I'm using Python instead of C++ but the OOP example still holds. Aircraft design is a highly non-linear process, and for myself at least, counter-intuitive. I could write a single procedure to run the analysis but that's not nearly a flexible as an OOP solution.
Basically, I'm using off-the-self components (i.e. motor, batteries, propeller) as a starting point for my design. Each of these components is considered an object. These components are combined in such a way as to make another object: the entire MAV. By using OOP it's rather easy to try different component configurations and design conditions (flight altitude, cruise, loiter, velocity, etc).
If I was really cool (I'm not) I could add in some simulation stuff (Larger aerospace corporations do a lot of this, as it's cheaper and quicker than an experimental approach).
One thing that this sort of OOP approach lends itself towards (especially in my case, is genetic algorithms). Since aircraft deisgn is so non-linear, and counter-intuitive the best solution is not easy to find. So many different designs need to be analysed. OOP and genetic algorithms were born for just this sort of thing.
If you have a single problem that needs to be solved once for one set of conditions, then use a procedure. If you have a larger project that requires the solution of many smaller problems for various conditions (instances to use the OOP term) then OOP is an easier route. Anything in between is a judgment call and really depends a lot on your specific case.
Let's see: 400 tons is 800,000 lbs and at NASA's goal by 2025 of $100/lb that is $80,000,000. That's just launch costs alone. Ouch.
Off topic but interesting:
The one of the largest contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary was locked away in an asylum.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1358.htm
Personally, the lack of a nice suite of productivity applications has kept me a windose freak. I'm looking forward to giving Mozilla, Evolution, Gnome, and StarOffice a go. Until recently, IMHO, such a transition was not in my best interests. (No, Mozilla, Evolution, or StarOffice 6).
If you have a problem with my second statment you really ought to have a problem with all three.
I think you misunderstand what I'm saying. I'm actually trying to make the same point you are.
Do you really think our military commanders are that dumb? There are two things that our military does better than anyone else:
Don't think our troops are innovative and flexible? Go read something by Stephen Ambrose on WWII.
Don't think our commanders have prepared the troops for this kind of combat? Wrong. Units have been training for years for just this type of conflict because they know that since the Gulf War no one in their right mind would dare face our mechanized troops
We employ more Special Forces troops than any other nation. And they are damn good at what they do. I don't know how they do it and I don't want to. Remeber what happened in Somolia? A massive failure right? Do you know how many enemies those guys faced (and killed)? It was a failure becaue we lost soldiers at all.
We will lose men. Good men. But I'll tell you what, they will make a good counting for themselves. They will do their job and put their lives on the line so after some of them have died you can say it was a 'mistake'.
The Soviets lost 15,000 troops in ten years? We just lost 6,000 civilians in one day. We cannot and will not allow that to continue.
Read some Tom Clancy, do some research. Show some respect. And do not call something that hasn't happened yet a mistake. Especially when you seem to be completely blind to the fact that we have no intention of fighting the same kind of war the Soviets did. Or to the fact that the Northern Alliance is begging to help.
My apologies but I am sick and tired of the this feeling that the people who's job and life's work it is to make keep this country safe doesn't know how to do it as well as some guy who reads slashdot.
As storage space increases at a disproportionate rate to bandwidth. We can make use of that by being proactive with bandwidth use and trying to do some pre-fetching like processors do now.
Say for instance there are a few guys on your block that really love to read slashdot. Now say that slashdot is distributed. You go and download a page. Instead of downloading just that one page ... you might pre-fetch a few more while you read it (like any links on the page ... especially if other /.ers have clicked 'em).
In addition, if one of those other /.ers on you block decided to read up on the latest nerd news his local machine wouldn't have to go very far to get it.. thus reducing the latency. You'd end up with your block being your very own slashdot server with the people who access it the most storing most of the content.
Take it even further and imagine your block as a little 'group' that's trying to grab all kinds of information that it thinks it's users will like and shuffling it to those most likely to want to see it.
Lets say you'd really like Max Payne if the bad guys weren't so damn dumb. How to make them more realistic with the limited processing power you have locally? How about using some cycles from your neighbors computer to make the AI think and learn better. Beyond that, how about analyzing data on the play of all the owners of Max Payne and making general improvement to the AI?
Well, granted you could end up with AI that's pretty much unbeatable but you could dumb that down and just be left with an AI that can do something different every time!
Now I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that there a one or two small barriers to this happening tomorrow. But I think it could be cool. Maybe. I'm glad somebody smarter than I is researching it.
And oh yeah. The speed of light is getting kinda fuzzier every day. For instance if you shine some light through some cesium atoms under the right conditions and it'll come out the other side faster than the speed of light. ... Who knows what'll be around in another 30 year?
It's gonna be a while before my computer gives me an upgrade.
Maybe they should have used a Python search. Crush '$'s.
Actually, we're not sure. Europa is the Jupiter moon that may have liquid water: its surface is icy but has cracks. This leads us to conclude that there may be liquid water underneath that is cause the crust to move and crack much like the tectonic plates on earth. We won't be positive until Europa Orbiter and Europa Lander get there:
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/europaorbiter/.
Still it's rather irritating and finally (for all the talk) real, bias against open source. ... hey it supports all kinds of cool stuff fresh off the wire now :)
This and those (*#@^%@(#&% 'dumb' tags in the new IE are gonna be enough to drive me over the edge... and use openBSD
John Wheeler "live[s] for the day when [he] can see a drop of liquid positronium (electrons and positrons)". As do I.