...but the important point is; are they better than flourescent? I use all flourescent light bulbs now, and they are all that LEDs seem to be according to the poster - but not too expensive.
I would assume that this device can also detect when the cell phone does its intermittent "reaffiliation" with the network, since (as others have pointed out) you would otherwise only be able to detect it when it's in use. At which point I wouldn't really need this detector to find out that they have a cell phone.
I do find it strange that they can detect the range to the mobile phone just by using the signal strength. All network standards worth mentioning include the ability for the transmitters to adapt their power depending on the signal strength at the receiver, so signal strength is not a good indicator of distance.
See this FAQ and look under Technology. For the lazy, it says:
Will the tech tree be larger than MOO2? Will there be a "creative" race?
Oh, yes, the tech tree will be a lot bigger. Even three times bigger. On "creative": there won't be quite such a racial trait that will allow you full access to the tech tree, but some races will have larger tech trees then the rest.
If non-GPL companies feel they can require users to install binary-only modules, why not simply requiring them to apply a kernel patch to remove this new limitation first?
Or, better still, why not delivering the whole product with an installer doing all this for them? It's not going to break GPL, as long as they publish the source code for the patch itself, which should be trivial.
I'm all for GPL, but this is not going to make that big an impact.
This has been concieved as a way of defeating stealth aircraft, and someobservers believe this was how the Serbs shot down the F117 stealth fighter during the Kosovo campaign.
Stealth aircraft work mostly by reflecting radar away from the transmitter. But when the transmitter and receiver are not located at the same site, this can be defeated. Mobile phone networks fill the air with electromagnetic radiation, and if any one transmitter is located at a "lucky" spot, the receiver will be able to pick up the reflection from an aircraft. Since the open air usually doesn't reflect any radiation, an aircraft will stand out from the background.
Of course, to aquire range information, you'd have to trangulate with another receiver. And you can hardly use the doppler effect to get rid of ground clutter, since you'll be listening to a wide range of frequencies from a number of base stations. Also, it puts a new perspective on the question of targeting civilian infrastructure or not.
It's really interesting that they'll launch it from a submarine. I wonder if a submarine launch is in any way better than a regular one, or if they do it just because they have some spare ballistic missiles to use.
Maybe the rocket gains some starting speed from floating up to the surface before ignition, but then again this speed should be very small in comparison to the final speed of the rocket...
Anyway - the rocket's name is Volna, not Cosmos - geez, submitters, read the article!
If they can make them powerful enough, I can imagine this being used in laser target designators to make them more immune to changes in the absorption properties of the atmosphere. Also, a lot of FSU tanks have optional laser warning receivers, which might not pick up this "spread spectrum" laser.
The poster seems to imply actual combat, but when I read the article more carefully, you seem to be right. For reconaissance, this could be really useful, especially since it seems small and light enough to be carried by hand a short distance. This would enable a much easier tactical use closer to the actual fighting, where a soldier could use it to fly just a few metres to se what's around the corner of a building.
I imagine these being smaller and lighter for military use, not larger and heavier as the article says.
This thing seems way too small to fit some kind of weapon. For this to be useful in combat, it'd have to carry a machinegun or maybe a small rocket launcher. A machinegun with 1000 rounds would weigh, say, 15-20 kg, and the recoil would probably be too big for this chopper.
The recoil of a rocket launcher, on the other hand, would be minimal. Problem is to aim the pod, since you can not adjust fire during firing in the same way - since you would carry only, say, 10 rockets. The aiming problem would mean you'd probably have to include hydraulics for tilting and rotating the pod, wich means more weight.
'course, you could just pack the thing with 15 kgs of plastic explosive, fly it into a building full of your opponents of choice, and set it off.
The Hellfire missile used on the Predator UAV, for example, weighs 45 kgs. Obviously, this is too much for this litte chopper.
I wonder how this extra weight affects flight performance. Does anyone have any more info on this?
I am currently studying to become a signals officer in the Swedish army, and I have experience with spread spectrum radio transmission.
There are several important things to consider when dealing with spread spectrum transmitters and their jamming. First, with regular spread spectrum devices, you don't have to jam all the frequencies involved. If you succeed in jamming, say, half of them, a lot of air time will be wasted for resend requests only, which will soon choke the link.
A way to deal with this is to equip the devices with some kind of link level diagnostics, which continously evaluates which frequencies are jammed, and avoid them. With a hop rate faster than the jammer, this would significantly reduce jamming influence. It does, however, add to complexity and cost of a system, which might be hard to justify in a commercial civilian system.
Second, if you want to use a very wide frequency band, there will be a problem with designing the antenna. Normally, an antenna is designed for a very specific frequency, but it can be made a bit "more" wide band with some circuitry. A very wide band antenna usually tends to get quite bulky because it physically has to respond to all the frequencies it is going to be used for.
Remember the Pentium Pro? Intel thought consumers would eventually move to this platform, but since - like the Itanium - it was actually SLOWER than the regular processors executing consumer applications, this didn't happen until Intel "fixed" this with the Pentium II.
This is the exact same thing. We can not expect a majority of users to get new software for Itanium, when other processors run their present software faster.
Do not underestimate the power of backwards compatibility. You don't have to like it, though.
Ok, I hope I can make it a bit more clear like this:
The directive is not law. It is a DIRECTIVE for the national lawmakers on how to write the law in that particular country. So, if the directive says a member state MAY include exceptions for educational purposes, it means the member state probably WILL.
The wording MAY simply is a heads-up to the member state that it should be aware of the (unintended) effects of blindly adopting the exact wording of the directive itself, but instead phrase their national law so that these side effects are avoided. IF the member state phrases the law so that a special provision for educational (or whatever) purposes is not needed, then the state does not HAVE to include one.
Directives are written this way since judical culture differs considerably between the member states. It will allow more flexibility between the states.
Yes, but this is the way EU directives work. You could look at it another way: In the time before this directive, member states were free to do basically whatever they wanted in this area - including outlawing Braille copies or whatever. They still are, so nothing have actually changed here.
The writers of the directive could have practically outlawed encryption, but they chose not to. The fact that they did not outlaw the act of outlawing encryption does not mean they want encryption to be outlawed.
Did you read the directive at all? I followed the provided link, and look what I found:
(48) [...] In particular, this protection should not hinder research into cryptography.
Article 5
2. Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations to the reproduction right provided for in Article 2 [...] in respect of specific acts of reproduction made by publicly accessible libraries, educational establishments or museums, or by archives, which are not for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage.
3. Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations [...] in the following cases [...] uses, for the benefit of people with a disability, which are directly related to the disability and of a non-commercial nature, to the extent required by the specific disability.
(End qoute)
Which shows that neither teachers copying for students, nor Braille copies, nor encryption research will become illegal.
Why, oh, why doesn't the submitters read their own sources?
Also, it's important to note that the directive is not law, it's simply a template for the national lawmakers to make their own laws. It allows for considerable flexibility in interpreting, so no two coutries are likely to have the same laws anyway.
Two levels: a strategic, possibly turn-based (Panzer General?), and a tactic (Ground Control style).
The strategic level would allow you to move units the size of brigades and up, over basically the whole world. It would allow technology research and politics and building/training of tanks and troops. Once there is a battle somewhere, the game would switch to the tactical level. On this level, you would have to fight with what you put there earlier on. You would not be able to "build" tanks or troops at all. Artillery should be truly long range, and airstrikes should be available. Nukes should not be allowed, but arty should be about the equivalent of the "nukes" in todays RTS with regard to damage.
Of course, the terrain should be fully 3D, with true line-of-sight calculations. Troops do have to be more intelligent. Click-fests are just no fun, and in most RTS games of today troops regularly get clogged up when moving around close to each other.
I can't think of anything more at the moment.. just my 2 cents worth.
"National security" would actually have to be "international", since this is a joint project involving the whole of EU. There is not one single government who can affect this, there would have to be a majority of countries in Europe.
Why have different levels? Because they can earn more money this way. First, make the airlines, who can afford it, pay a lot of money for 3 meter accuracy. Then, instead of losing the hiker altogether who can't afford it, they sell a limited service to him and earn more money in the process.
On this side of the ocean, we are working on our very own satellite positioning system, Galileo, which will be accurate down to 3 meters (last time I looked). It will be all civilian, with several QoS levels - so hikers can get one level of reliability and airplanes another. Unlike GPS, the Galileo consortium will guarantee a certain level of accuracy, which should help in critical areas of operation such as airplane navigation. If there is an accident due to Galileo malfunction, the consortium will accept liability.
Also, since it's civilian, the military will not have a "Selective Availability" feature.
128 kbps MP3 isn't CD quality at all. You can easily hear the difference. Use some classical music, which is generally harder to compress, rip and encode it and compare for yourself. If you use headphones it's even easier.
I have no idea why people call 128 kbps CD quality. You can never get to CD quality with MP3, since no matter how many kbps, the encoding process still removes data.
We've got Air Independent Propulsion on some of our subs in the Swedish Navy... (well, as some of you would point out, it's only independent for a period of time.) The trick is to use liquid O2 and a diesel burner to drive a Stirling engine, and use enough pressure during combustion to be able to feed the exhaust out into the water. Since it's mostly CO2 it dissolves quickly. For the burner to get "air-like" oxidizer the O2 is mixed with a small back feed of reused exhaust. There is a more thorough explanation on Kockums website.
This is not as clean as the drone in the original article, but OTOH, the collected exhaust in the drone has to be disposed of somewhere - it's not gonna disappear just because it's not in the atmosphere.
I liked the old series better... back when men were real men, 2D was king, and sound effects were scarce. Back then, you didn't need the challenge of LAN gaming. Playing a game with a friend ment one did the killing, as the other stood behind and watched.
I feel sad for the teens of present, not knowing the roots of gaming today..:-/
Slashdot Mirror
If we're going to convert it to CO2 anyway, why not simply burn it in the first place? Then we'd get some heat as a bonus, too.
Samba 4 will integrate nicely with btrfs and do previous versions for you. To get redundancy, just put the btrfs volume on RAID, perhaps?
currently on an A-340
ltn02r03-vlan25.connexionbyboeing.net
Anyone else smelling something fishy? I have a hard time believing he's really on an Airbus plane...
...but the important point is; are they better than flourescent? I use all flourescent light bulbs now, and they are all that LEDs seem to be according to the poster - but not too expensive.
I would assume that this device can also detect when the cell phone does its intermittent "reaffiliation" with the network, since (as others have pointed out) you would otherwise only be able to detect it when it's in use. At which point I wouldn't really need this detector to find out that they have a cell phone.
I do find it strange that they can detect the range to the mobile phone just by using the signal strength. All network standards worth mentioning include the ability for the transmitters to adapt their power depending on the signal strength at the receiver, so signal strength is not a good indicator of distance.
That has got to be a very remote hole if it took the International Space Station to find it...
See this FAQ and look under Technology. For the lazy, it says:
Will the tech tree be larger than MOO2? Will there be a "creative" race?
Oh, yes, the tech tree will be a lot bigger. Even three times bigger. On "creative": there won't be quite such a racial trait that will allow you full access to the tech tree, but some races will have larger tech trees then the rest.
That's three times for ya!
If non-GPL companies feel they can require users to install binary-only modules, why not simply requiring them to apply a kernel patch to remove this new limitation first?
Or, better still, why not delivering the whole product with an installer doing all this for them? It's not going to break GPL, as long as they publish the source code for the patch itself, which should be trivial.
I'm all for GPL, but this is not going to make that big an impact.
This has been concieved as a way of defeating stealth aircraft, and some observers believe this was how the Serbs shot down the F117 stealth fighter during the Kosovo campaign.
Stealth aircraft work mostly by reflecting radar away from the transmitter. But when the transmitter and receiver are not located at the same site, this can be defeated. Mobile phone networks fill the air with electromagnetic radiation, and if any one transmitter is located at a "lucky" spot, the receiver will be able to pick up the reflection from an aircraft. Since the open air usually doesn't reflect any radiation, an aircraft will stand out from the background.
Of course, to aquire range information, you'd have to trangulate with another receiver. And you can hardly use the doppler effect to get rid of ground clutter, since you'll be listening to a wide range of frequencies from a number of base stations. Also, it puts a new perspective on the question of targeting civilian infrastructure or not.
It's really interesting that they'll launch it from a submarine. I wonder if a submarine launch is in any way better than a regular one, or if they do it just because they have some spare ballistic missiles to use.
Maybe the rocket gains some starting speed from floating up to the surface before ignition, but then again this speed should be very small in comparison to the final speed of the rocket...
Anyway - the rocket's name is Volna, not Cosmos - geez, submitters, read the article!
If they can make them powerful enough, I can imagine this being used in laser target designators to make them more immune to changes in the absorption properties of the atmosphere. Also, a lot of FSU tanks have optional laser warning receivers, which might not pick up this "spread spectrum" laser.
Comments, anyone?
The poster seems to imply actual combat, but when I read the article more carefully, you seem to be right. For reconaissance, this could be really useful, especially since it seems small and light enough to be carried by hand a short distance. This would enable a much easier tactical use closer to the actual fighting, where a soldier could use it to fly just a few metres to se what's around the corner of a building.
I imagine these being smaller and lighter for military use, not larger and heavier as the article says.
This thing seems way too small to fit some kind of weapon. For this to be useful in combat, it'd have to carry a machinegun or maybe a small rocket launcher. A machinegun with 1000 rounds would weigh, say, 15-20 kg, and the recoil would probably be too big for this chopper.
The recoil of a rocket launcher, on the other hand, would be minimal. Problem is to aim the pod, since you can not adjust fire during firing in the same way - since you would carry only, say, 10 rockets. The aiming problem would mean you'd probably have to include hydraulics for tilting and rotating the pod, wich means more weight.
'course, you could just pack the thing with 15 kgs of plastic explosive, fly it into a building full of your opponents of choice, and set it off.
The Hellfire missile used on the Predator UAV, for example, weighs 45 kgs. Obviously, this is too much for this litte chopper.
I wonder how this extra weight affects flight performance. Does anyone have any more info on this?
...old news from 1997. This older article is much better than the submitted one, so check it out.
I am currently studying to become a signals officer in the Swedish army, and I have experience with spread spectrum radio transmission.
There are several important things to consider when dealing with spread spectrum transmitters and their jamming. First, with regular spread spectrum devices, you don't have to jam all the frequencies involved. If you succeed in jamming, say, half of them, a lot of air time will be wasted for resend requests only, which will soon choke the link.
A way to deal with this is to equip the devices with some kind of link level diagnostics, which continously evaluates which frequencies are jammed, and avoid them. With a hop rate faster than the jammer, this would significantly reduce jamming influence. It does, however, add to complexity and cost of a system, which might be hard to justify in a commercial civilian system.
Second, if you want to use a very wide frequency band, there will be a problem with designing the antenna. Normally, an antenna is designed for a very specific frequency, but it can be made a bit "more" wide band with some circuitry. A very wide band antenna usually tends to get quite bulky because it physically has to respond to all the frequencies it is going to be used for.
Remember the Pentium Pro? Intel thought consumers would eventually move to this platform, but since - like the Itanium - it was actually SLOWER than the regular processors executing consumer applications, this didn't happen until Intel "fixed" this with the Pentium II.
This is the exact same thing. We can not expect a majority of users to get new software for Itanium, when other processors run their present software faster.
Do not underestimate the power of backwards compatibility. You don't have to like it, though.
Ok, I hope I can make it a bit more clear like this:
The directive is not law. It is a DIRECTIVE for the national lawmakers on how to write the law in that particular country. So, if the directive says a member state MAY include exceptions for educational purposes, it means the member state probably WILL.
The wording MAY simply is a heads-up to the member state that it should be aware of the (unintended) effects of blindly adopting the exact wording of the directive itself, but instead phrase their national law so that these side effects are avoided. IF the member state phrases the law so that a special provision for educational (or whatever) purposes is not needed, then the state does not HAVE to include one.
Directives are written this way since judical culture differs considerably between the member states. It will allow more flexibility between the states.
Yes, but this is the way EU directives work. You could look at it another way: In the time before this directive, member states were free to do basically whatever they wanted in this area - including outlawing Braille copies or whatever. They still are, so nothing have actually changed here.
The writers of the directive could have practically outlawed encryption, but they chose not to. The fact that they did not outlaw the act of outlawing encryption does not mean they want encryption to be outlawed.
Get my point?
Did you read the directive at all? I followed the provided link, and look what I found:
(48) [...] In particular, this protection should not hinder research into cryptography.
Article 5
2. Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations to the reproduction right provided for in Article 2 [...] in respect of specific acts of reproduction made by publicly accessible libraries, educational establishments or museums, or by archives, which are not for direct or indirect economic or commercial advantage.
3. Member States may provide for exceptions or limitations [...] in the following cases [...] uses, for the benefit of people with a disability, which are directly related to the disability and of a non-commercial nature, to the extent required by the specific disability.
(End qoute)
Which shows that neither teachers copying for students, nor Braille copies, nor encryption research will become illegal.
Why, oh, why doesn't the submitters read their own sources?
Also, it's important to note that the directive is not law, it's simply a template for the national lawmakers to make their own laws. It allows for considerable flexibility in interpreting, so no two coutries are likely to have the same laws anyway.
...a game built like this:
Two levels: a strategic, possibly turn-based (Panzer General?), and a tactic (Ground Control style).
The strategic level would allow you to move units the size of brigades and up, over basically the whole world. It would allow technology research and politics and building/training of tanks and troops. Once there is a battle somewhere, the game would switch to the tactical level. On this level, you would have to fight with what you put there earlier on. You would not be able to "build" tanks or troops at all. Artillery should be truly long range, and airstrikes should be available. Nukes should not be allowed, but arty should be about the equivalent of the "nukes" in todays RTS with regard to damage.
Of course, the terrain should be fully 3D, with true line-of-sight calculations. Troops do have to be more intelligent. Click-fests are just no fun, and in most RTS games of today troops regularly get clogged up when moving around close to each other.
I can't think of anything more at the moment.. just my 2 cents worth.
"National security" would actually have to be "international", since this is a joint project involving the whole of EU. There is not one single government who can affect this, there would have to be a majority of countries in Europe.
Why have different levels? Because they can earn more money this way. First, make the airlines, who can afford it, pay a lot of money for 3 meter accuracy. Then, instead of losing the hiker altogether who can't afford it, they sell a limited service to him and earn more money in the process.
On this side of the ocean, we are working on our very own satellite positioning system, Galileo, which will be accurate down to 3 meters (last time I looked). It will be all civilian, with several QoS levels - so hikers can get one level of reliability and airplanes another. Unlike GPS, the Galileo consortium will guarantee a certain level of accuracy, which should help in critical areas of operation such as airplane navigation. If there is an accident due to Galileo malfunction, the consortium will accept liability.
Also, since it's civilian, the military will not have a "Selective Availability" feature.
128 kbps MP3 isn't CD quality at all. You can easily hear the difference. Use some classical music, which is generally harder to compress, rip and encode it and compare for yourself. If you use headphones it's even easier.
I have no idea why people call 128 kbps CD quality. You can never get to CD quality with MP3, since no matter how many kbps, the encoding process still removes data.
We've got Air Independent Propulsion on some of our subs in the Swedish Navy... (well, as some of you would point out, it's only independent for a period of time.) The trick is to use liquid O2 and a diesel burner to drive a Stirling engine, and use enough pressure during combustion to be able to feed the exhaust out into the water. Since it's mostly CO2 it dissolves quickly. For the burner to get "air-like" oxidizer the O2 is mixed with a small back feed of reused exhaust. There is a more thorough explanation on Kockums website.
This is not as clean as the drone in the original article, but OTOH, the collected exhaust in the drone has to be disposed of somewhere - it's not gonna disappear just because it's not in the atmosphere.
I liked the old series better... back when men were real men, 2D was king, and sound effects were scarce. Back then, you didn't need the challenge of LAN gaming. Playing a game with a friend ment one did the killing, as the other stood behind and watched. I feel sad for the teens of present, not knowing the roots of gaming today.. :-/