There's no reason to get a journalist visa unless you're a bonafide journalist. I saw that you took pictures of the toilets - no serious journalist would pull stuff like that, it's a guaranteed mark of the China greenhorn.
Ah, thanks for your astute commentary on something you obviously know bollocks about. I have some "news" for you... that is my personal blog and I can put anything I want in it. What gets published in the press is another story entirely.
I have some more "news" for you. This problem you cite of people not wanting to return to China is a demographic one. I am seeing educated people returning to China in droves. They have seen the promise and prosperity possible there and are making a killing. The sight of Porsches and BMWs filling the streets in Chengdu was a surprise to say the least.
You obviously have a bias against the press or know absolutely nothing about the profession. Either that or you get all your news from Fox, because most journalists I know are remarkably unbiased in their reporting in all corners of the world. China is changing and while they used to have more problems than they currently do with issues of transparency related to human rights, they have much to show the rest of the world now. Granted there are problems with such rapid growth, but the country is so different from what it was just 10 years ago.
Its about time. On my last trip to China just a couple of months ago, I did not even bother trying to get a media visa even though I'd been asked to cover/photograph a story for the military press. I declined that story offer simply because getting the press visa was too much of a hassle and you had to undergo extra hassles for all of the camera equipment. Traveling on a tourist visa through China is much easier and they don't give you any grief for even lots of camera equipment.
In fact, the whole visa issue always is a hassle. If countries wanted to ensure that people come and spend money, then why to they (US included) make getting a visa so difficult? I had to either travel to Washington DC to the Chinese embassy or pay a special travel office $140 to broker the visa on my passport for me.
"What information sources and social networking sites will you be using to supplement the election coverage on TV next Tuesday? I am ready with a big HDTV with Comcast, a Mac mini, and and an Xbox 360. I also have two laptops (one good for websites and one for streaming video), an old-school Blackberry, a 'regular' cell phone, a Nokia N810, a Squeezebox, and finally Sirius Satellite Radio. Which websites should I watch for live county results? I already know about the Twitter Vote Report for tracking and reporting voting issues and I already watch 'CNN Reporters' on Friendfeed for the national flair. What other Twitter accounts should I follow? Which urgent ones should I send to my phones? Which YouTube accounts or keywords I should subscribe to in Miro? What are the most popular sites for posting 'on-scene' videos â" iReport, Flickr, something else? I know most local Fox affiliates are great about streaming, but is there a page that lists all of the streams, in case I need to quickly focus on one city or area? Basically, how would you configure all those gadgets?"
........... Ummmm...... my suggestion to you is to vote, then leave all the gadgets behind. Go outside. Breathe some air. Find someone to throw a baseball back and forth to for a couple of hours. The election will turn out the way it will turn out regardless of how many feeds you keep.
I voted a couple of weeks ago, so plan on biking to work as usual, working then coming home, eating dinner with my wife, watching a few minutes of election coverage, then am going to bed. When I wake up on Wednesday morning, my fervent hopes are that this election is a blowout and will not have to be decided again by the courts.
Heh, somehow I knew you'd say that John. Ideally, I'd like to see a return to fee for service medicine with insurance only reserved for catastrophic coverage. I'd bet that this sort of thing combined with a deregulation of the health care industry would help fix some of these problems.
One of the better arguments I've seen for fixing the current health care crisis can be seen here
Of course, the insurance companies (who have very powerful lobbies) will attempt to shoot this plan down as they stand to lose. Though it really can be forcefully argued that insurance companies really do bring nothing to the table in terms of health care. Fundamentally, the idea is a good one when constrained. However, insurance companies have become too powerful and they now function as parasites on the system, making it less efficient and more expensive for the end user. Ask yourself: "what product do insurance companies offer in terms of health care?" What do they create? How do they contribute to health care? When it comes down to it, health insurance companies are not in business to provide health care or help you pay for health care. They are in business to provide insurance, collect money, minimize any payout and answer to their shareholders who expect the system to turn a healthy profit. Any reduction in what they have to pay out is money earned for them.
Which candidate will be better positioned to answer the problem? It will be the one who is able to make some hard decisions and stand up to powerful lobbyists. It will be the candidate who is able to apply creative thought and novel solutions to problems that we've been creating for ourselves for decades now. it will be the candidate who is able to rationally apply logic and recruit, retain and manage in their administration, unbiased and reasoned people who are willing to work hard on solutions that will benefit Americans and the wider global population.
Oh, please. You said it yourself: "The basic principles are the same"...
Of course it is not *exactly* the same in terms of the interface and some hardware specific calls, but the core code for the kernel is *essentially* the same.
Argh, too many windows open on the desktop and I clicked submit accidentally before elaborating.
My first concern is that this little "story" or press release has been either re-released or duplicated on various sources verbatim for weeks if not months and I've yet to see anything in the scientific literature about it. Publishing scientific progress in the popular press before peer review typically means bogus science to me.
There certainly are photoreceptive skin cells in "lower" vertebrates and invertebrates that do transduce photosensitive information. However, any experiments I've seen in the literature or in popular press (or even weird Soviet 1960s "dermo optical" experiments that have attempted to evaluate "skin vision" in humans have failed or not accounted for temperature or other confounds.
I am totally with you here my friend and agree completely. Eventually the technology will be equalized, but initially, those who can afford it will wield it against those who do not have the technology. What we can hope for is a change in the political winds while these technologies mature.
This has been in the works for a while now, but I should mention that this is not the first all-drone USAF wing. The 432nd is. Last year when I visited Creech AFB and the 432nd wing, I was briefed on the Air Force's plans to start transitioning a number of wings to unmanned wings and the ANG wing from Syracuse was the first one on the list. Interestingly, it will not be the last either as the UAV mission has become the Air Forces single most requested asset. Additional ANG wings in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Alabama, Texas and Nevada are next. Look for additional changes at March AFB and Minot AFB.
Welll..... Lets just say that the delay is 2 seconds and that pilots train with even the local machines to deal with that 2 second delay. Needless to say that the first time or two you fly it is most disconcerting. Which is why they resort to local control for take off and landing, but even then you absolutely cannot "feel" the aircraft when it is taking off or landing.
I have to disagree with you here. While I believe that our current policy with respect to Afghanistan and the export of the war on drugs to that region of the world is remarkably short sighted, indeed even foolish in both the long and short terms. I would also agree with you in that the current war in Iraq is a disaster of epic historical proportions that has been mismanaged by members of our government who have lied to the American public to further their own goals.
However, characterizing the work of the 432nd as equivalent to terrorist bombings is hyperbolic extremism. The work that I witnessed was remarkable in that the UAV squadrons have the time and take the effort to minimize collateral damage to both civilians and religious institutions. For instance, I watched while crews waited and followed confirmed roadside bombers while they left a Mosque crowded with other people. The crews waited patiently for those bombers to get to a safe distance before engaging them, preserving the life of everyone else in the mosque. This sort of thing happens every day and I'd argue that UAV operations are far more surgical, minimizing collateral damage because of the time that the crews are allowed to invest in their mission.
So, while this has received some criticism, I visited Creech AFB a little while ago and the missions being flown from there in the Middle East and South America are more taxing and complex than you might expect.
Loiter times and length of engagements for these aircraft are not measured in minutes like with traditional fighter jets or helicopters. Rather they are measured in hours with the Predator A airframes capable of loitering over a combat area for 10-13 hours at a time. The Reaper has a slightly shorter loiter time, but those airframes also carry the same combat load as an F-16 and the missions being carried out are just as complex if not more demanding than with piloted missions.
Because UAV missions can last quite a bit of time, the pilots are expected to multi-task with ground troops for extended periods of time, tracking targets and managing data in a way that traditional piloted aircraft crews are not expected to. I observed a number of missions including missions that involved oversight for ground troops and elimination of targets that were active threats to those soldiers on the ground and even though the missions were being piloted from the other side of the globe, the tension in the "cockpit" was palpable. There is no celebration when a target has been engaged successfully and you are very much an intimate observer of what transpires and able to see more than you might expect.
The final telling statistic in this comment thread anyway, has been that the 432nd wing has become in the last couple of years, the Air Force's number one most requested asset and the toll rapid build ups like that take on any organization can be significant.
Yeah.... You have nothing to fear except fear itself..... and incompetence. So, just hand your data over to us and we'll verify that you are who you are which really does nothing for national security anyway because there is nothing that prevents someone from getting "cleared", then carrying out a crime later.
To have a company intimately involved with *security* not apparently able to manage their own security in a manner that protects the country and their customers is a joke. Fine... having a laptop stolen is common enough and I don't fault them, but having unencrypted data of 33,000 of your customers on that laptop is a crime.
I never liked the idea of handing over private information in the security theatre that our nation has become, but events like this where private companies motivated by the lowest common denominator really get under ones skin. Why the data was stored in unencrypted formats is inexcusable. I don't know what the penalty should be for something like this, but it should be commensurate with the potential damage it could cause.
The whole point of outsourcing information and jobs like this to the private sector is to get the job done better and more efficiently. When the government then has to police these private companies like the TSA is apparently having to now do, the concept is made moot. So.... our options are to continue to live the security theatre with private companies like this or turn the job back over to the government (who's job it to ensure safety of travel and should not have been in the business of verifying identity for air travel anyway).
Or... we could go back to the way things were when I could carry pocket knives on planes. (I also remember when you could carry long guns on planes back in the late 80's/early 90's.)
That is just it... I can load just about anything I want into my private plane and fly anywhere in the US without having to go through security, without having to provide biometric ID, without having to take my shoes off, without having to wear shock collars, etc...etc...etc...
Flying into this country is becoming more and more of a hassle and every time that I fly outside the US, it is apparent that the DHS is completely corrupting business and pleasure travel at the expense of our freedoms and economy.
If our government seriously thinks this is a viable option, then we have truly lost and the slide towards a fascist government will be complete. Yeah, go waaaay beyond "papers please" and treat *all* of your citizens as criminals when they travel.
What I suspect will happen is that this is a trial idea floated to the media and will be explained away as saying "Oh, well.... we intended this to be used for transporting criminals" or some such nonsense like that. This idea is one of the most absurd and dangerous ideas I've heard from my government in a long time and it moves us dangerously close to a threshold that will destabilize this country.
I don't know which cities are listed as the Popsci servers seem to be down, but a couple of weeks ago flying out of Los Angeles, the pollution seemed pretty bad as can be seen in this picture of the afternoon sun over the San Gabriel Mountains.
From some of my other travels throughout the world, I am guessing that L.A. is not even close to how dirty some cities can get particularly in Russia. If the air is worse than it is in L.A., then it should really, really make you worry.
Yeah, when you consider that the DOD unclassified budget is around $408 Billion, appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan are another ~$170 Billion and DOD classified projects are another ~$35 Billion.... in comparison, $300 Million is a *tiny* drop in the bucket. But $300 million might help some labs to avoid closing down...
Additionally, UAVs are principally successful because one of the first companies, General Atomics (GA), that produced the successful Predator and Reaper aircraft, developed the Predator design to a functional platform on their own dime and then asked the DOD if they were interested (they obviously were). Frontline Aerospace only has a concept right now and many folks in the defense industry are expressing a healthy skepticism at some of Frontline Aerospace's claims. Admittedly, the fact that GA essentially owns the show with Predator and Reaper does lead to some problems and the pilots are not entirely happy with all of the solutions from GA, but at least GA came to the game with a working system before making substantial claims about performance and capabilities.
I'll be looking forward to what this design potentially has, but as of right now, my eyebrows are a bit raised.
I mean come on now... what good can an Internet connected coffee maker really do? No security conscious office will ever want a Windows enabled appliance around. Just imagine the scene:
Special Agent Wilkins: How the Hell did they get in?
Special Agent Thompson: Sir..... I... uh, think they got in through the coffee maker.
Special Agent Wilkins: The What?
Special Agent Thompson: Sir, the coffee maker that we got you for your birthday... the one that you wanted to be able to brew up a cup o joe from your office?
Slashdot Mirror
There's no reason to get a journalist visa unless you're a bonafide journalist. I saw that you took pictures of the toilets - no serious journalist would pull stuff like that, it's a guaranteed mark of the China greenhorn.
Ah, thanks for your astute commentary on something you obviously know bollocks about. I have some "news" for you... that is my personal blog and I can put anything I want in it. What gets published in the press is another story entirely.
I have some more "news" for you. This problem you cite of people not wanting to return to China is a demographic one. I am seeing educated people returning to China in droves. They have seen the promise and prosperity possible there and are making a killing. The sight of Porsches and BMWs filling the streets in Chengdu was a surprise to say the least.
You obviously have a bias against the press or know absolutely nothing about the profession. Either that or you get all your news from Fox, because most journalists I know are remarkably unbiased in their reporting in all corners of the world. China is changing and while they used to have more problems than they currently do with issues of transparency related to human rights, they have much to show the rest of the world now. Granted there are problems with such rapid growth, but the country is so different from what it was just 10 years ago.
Its about time. On my last trip to China just a couple of months ago, I did not even bother trying to get a media visa even though I'd been asked to cover/photograph a story for the military press. I declined that story offer simply because getting the press visa was too much of a hassle and you had to undergo extra hassles for all of the camera equipment. Traveling on a tourist visa through China is much easier and they don't give you any grief for even lots of camera equipment.
In fact, the whole visa issue always is a hassle. If countries wanted to ensure that people come and spend money, then why to they (US included) make getting a visa so difficult? I had to either travel to Washington DC to the Chinese embassy or pay a special travel office $140 to broker the visa on my passport for me.
"What information sources and social networking sites will you be using to supplement the election coverage on TV next Tuesday? I am ready with a big HDTV with Comcast, a Mac mini, and and an Xbox 360. I also have two laptops (one good for websites and one for streaming video), an old-school Blackberry, a 'regular' cell phone, a Nokia N810, a Squeezebox, and finally Sirius Satellite Radio. Which websites should I watch for live county results? I already know about the Twitter Vote Report for tracking and reporting voting issues and I already watch 'CNN Reporters' on Friendfeed for the national flair. What other Twitter accounts should I follow? Which urgent ones should I send to my phones? Which YouTube accounts or keywords I should subscribe to in Miro? What are the most popular sites for posting 'on-scene' videos â" iReport, Flickr, something else? I know most local Fox affiliates are great about streaming, but is there a page that lists all of the streams, in case I need to quickly focus on one city or area? Basically, how would you configure all those gadgets?"
I voted a couple of weeks ago, so plan on biking to work as usual, working then coming home, eating dinner with my wife, watching a few minutes of election coverage, then am going to bed. When I wake up on Wednesday morning, my fervent hopes are that this election is a blowout and will not have to be decided again by the courts.
Heh, somehow I knew you'd say that John. Ideally, I'd like to see a return to fee for service medicine with insurance only reserved for catastrophic coverage. I'd bet that this sort of thing combined with a deregulation of the health care industry would help fix some of these problems.
One of the better arguments I've seen for fixing the current health care crisis can be seen here
Of course, the insurance companies (who have very powerful lobbies) will attempt to shoot this plan down as they stand to lose. Though it really can be forcefully argued that insurance companies really do bring nothing to the table in terms of health care. Fundamentally, the idea is a good one when constrained. However, insurance companies have become too powerful and they now function as parasites on the system, making it less efficient and more expensive for the end user. Ask yourself: "what product do insurance companies offer in terms of health care?" What do they create? How do they contribute to health care? When it comes down to it, health insurance companies are not in business to provide health care or help you pay for health care. They are in business to provide insurance, collect money, minimize any payout and answer to their shareholders who expect the system to turn a healthy profit. Any reduction in what they have to pay out is money earned for them.
Which candidate will be better positioned to answer the problem? It will be the one who is able to make some hard decisions and stand up to powerful lobbyists. It will be the candidate who is able to apply creative thought and novel solutions to problems that we've been creating for ourselves for decades now. it will be the candidate who is able to rationally apply logic and recruit, retain and manage in their administration, unbiased and reasoned people who are willing to work hard on solutions that will benefit Americans and the wider global population.
Oh, please. You said it yourself: "The basic principles are the same"...
Of course it is not *exactly* the same in terms of the interface and some hardware specific calls, but the core code for the kernel is *essentially* the same.
The cool thing about developing for the iPhone is that you are *essentially* also developing for OS X. So its almost a twofer.
Argh, too many windows open on the desktop and I clicked submit accidentally before elaborating.
My first concern is that this little "story" or press release has been either re-released or duplicated on various sources verbatim for weeks if not months and I've yet to see anything in the scientific literature about it. Publishing scientific progress in the popular press before peer review typically means bogus science to me.
There certainly are photoreceptive skin cells in "lower" vertebrates and invertebrates that do transduce photosensitive information. However, any experiments I've seen in the literature or in popular press (or even weird Soviet 1960s "dermo optical" experiments that have attempted to evaluate "skin vision" in humans have failed or not accounted for temperature or other confounds.
As a vision scientist, my eyebrows are raised. I am highly skeptical for a variety of really, very good reasons...
I am totally with you here my friend and agree completely. Eventually the technology will be equalized, but initially, those who can afford it will wield it against those who do not have the technology. What we can hope for is a change in the political winds while these technologies mature.
This has been in the works for a while now, but I should mention that this is not the first all-drone USAF wing. The 432nd is. Last year when I visited Creech AFB and the 432nd wing, I was briefed on the Air Force's plans to start transitioning a number of wings to unmanned wings and the ANG wing from Syracuse was the first one on the list. Interestingly, it will not be the last either as the UAV mission has become the Air Forces single most requested asset. Additional ANG wings in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Alabama, Texas and Nevada are next. Look for additional changes at March AFB and Minot AFB.
Welll..... Lets just say that the delay is 2 seconds and that pilots train with even the local machines to deal with that 2 second delay. Needless to say that the first time or two you fly it is most disconcerting. Which is why they resort to local control for take off and landing, but even then you absolutely cannot "feel" the aircraft when it is taking off or landing.
Jeremiah,
I have to disagree with you here. While I believe that our current policy with respect to Afghanistan and the export of the war on drugs to that region of the world is remarkably short sighted, indeed even foolish in both the long and short terms. I would also agree with you in that the current war in Iraq is a disaster of epic historical proportions that has been mismanaged by members of our government who have lied to the American public to further their own goals.
However, characterizing the work of the 432nd as equivalent to terrorist bombings is hyperbolic extremism. The work that I witnessed was remarkable in that the UAV squadrons have the time and take the effort to minimize collateral damage to both civilians and religious institutions. For instance, I watched while crews waited and followed confirmed roadside bombers while they left a Mosque crowded with other people. The crews waited patiently for those bombers to get to a safe distance before engaging them, preserving the life of everyone else in the mosque. This sort of thing happens every day and I'd argue that UAV operations are far more surgical, minimizing collateral damage because of the time that the crews are allowed to invest in their mission.
So, while this has received some criticism, I visited Creech AFB a little while ago and the missions being flown from there in the Middle East and South America are more taxing and complex than you might expect.
Loiter times and length of engagements for these aircraft are not measured in minutes like with traditional fighter jets or helicopters. Rather they are measured in hours with the Predator A airframes capable of loitering over a combat area for 10-13 hours at a time. The Reaper has a slightly shorter loiter time, but those airframes also carry the same combat load as an F-16 and the missions being carried out are just as complex if not more demanding than with piloted missions.
Because UAV missions can last quite a bit of time, the pilots are expected to multi-task with ground troops for extended periods of time, tracking targets and managing data in a way that traditional piloted aircraft crews are not expected to. I observed a number of missions including missions that involved oversight for ground troops and elimination of targets that were active threats to those soldiers on the ground and even though the missions were being piloted from the other side of the globe, the tension in the "cockpit" was palpable. There is no celebration when a target has been engaged successfully and you are very much an intimate observer of what transpires and able to see more than you might expect.
The final telling statistic in this comment thread anyway, has been that the 432nd wing has become in the last couple of years, the Air Force's number one most requested asset and the toll rapid build ups like that take on any organization can be significant.
Yeah.... You have nothing to fear except fear itself..... and incompetence. So, just hand your data over to us and we'll verify that you are who you are which really does nothing for national security anyway because there is nothing that prevents someone from getting "cleared", then carrying out a crime later.
To have a company intimately involved with *security* not apparently able to manage their own security in a manner that protects the country and their customers is a joke. Fine... having a laptop stolen is common enough and I don't fault them, but having unencrypted data of 33,000 of your customers on that laptop is a crime.
I never liked the idea of handing over private information in the security theatre that our nation has become, but events like this where private companies motivated by the lowest common denominator really get under ones skin. Why the data was stored in unencrypted formats is inexcusable. I don't know what the penalty should be for something like this, but it should be commensurate with the potential damage it could cause.
The whole point of outsourcing information and jobs like this to the private sector is to get the job done better and more efficiently. When the government then has to police these private companies like the TSA is apparently having to now do, the concept is made moot. So.... our options are to continue to live the security theatre with private companies like this or turn the job back over to the government (who's job it to ensure safety of travel and should not have been in the business of verifying identity for air travel anyway).
Or... we could go back to the way things were when I could carry pocket knives on planes. (I also remember when you could carry long guns on planes back in the late 80's/early 90's.)
That is just it... I can load just about anything I want into my private plane and fly anywhere in the US without having to go through security, without having to provide biometric ID, without having to take my shoes off, without having to wear shock collars, etc...etc...etc...
That is why this whole thing is security theatre.
Flying into this country is becoming more and more of a hassle and every time that I fly outside the US, it is apparent that the DHS is completely corrupting business and pleasure travel at the expense of our freedoms and economy.
If our government seriously thinks this is a viable option, then we have truly lost and the slide towards a fascist government will be complete. Yeah, go waaaay beyond "papers please" and treat *all* of your citizens as criminals when they travel.
What I suspect will happen is that this is a trial idea floated to the media and will be explained away as saying "Oh, well.... we intended this to be used for transporting criminals" or some such nonsense like that. This idea is one of the most absurd and dangerous ideas I've heard from my government in a long time and it moves us dangerously close to a threshold that will destabilize this country.
Doh! *smacks forehead*.
I'll fix that next blog update. Thanks.
I don't know which cities are listed as the Popsci servers seem to be down, but a couple of weeks ago flying out of Los Angeles, the pollution seemed pretty bad as can be seen in this picture of the afternoon sun over the San Gabriel Mountains.
From some of my other travels throughout the world, I am guessing that L.A. is not even close to how dirty some cities can get particularly in Russia. If the air is worse than it is in L.A., then it should really, really make you worry.
Now if companies would pull their heads out and either/or/both go to a 4 day work week and re-implement telecommuting...
Yeah, when you consider that the DOD unclassified budget is around $408 Billion, appropriations for Iraq and Afghanistan are another ~$170 Billion and DOD classified projects are another ~$35 Billion.... in comparison, $300 Million is a *tiny* drop in the bucket. But $300 million might help some labs to avoid closing down...
While unmanned aerial vehicles are the future of the military, there are some serious concerns in the defense industry about the company Frontline Aerospace that is making noise about this particular drone. Specifically, the CEO appears to be all over the place in terms of his interests and talents as well as some of his claims and there are some substantial criticisms of the packaging and design.
Additionally, UAVs are principally successful because one of the first companies, General Atomics (GA), that produced the successful Predator and Reaper aircraft, developed the Predator design to a functional platform on their own dime and then asked the DOD if they were interested (they obviously were). Frontline Aerospace only has a concept right now and many folks in the defense industry are expressing a healthy skepticism at some of Frontline Aerospace's claims. Admittedly, the fact that GA essentially owns the show with Predator and Reaper does lead to some problems and the pilots are not entirely happy with all of the solutions from GA, but at least GA came to the game with a working system before making substantial claims about performance and capabilities.
I'll be looking forward to what this design potentially has, but as of right now, my eyebrows are a bit raised.
Yeah, well.... I don't know whether to laugh or to roll my eyes. Your post is exquisitely lame, yet somehow.... amusing. :-)
I mean come on now... what good can an Internet connected coffee maker really do? No security conscious office will ever want a Windows enabled appliance around. Just imagine the scene:
Special Agent Wilkins: How the Hell did they get in?
Special Agent Thompson: Sir..... I... uh, think they got in through the coffee maker.
Special Agent Wilkins: The What?
Special Agent Thompson: Sir, the coffee maker that we got you for your birthday... the one that you wanted to be able to brew up a cup o joe from your office?
Special Agent Wilkins: Oh fsck me....