Different parts of the military want different things. Contrary to popular thought, the military, heck, even the individual services, are NOT monolithic, especially in thought....
At Mach 5 +, a plane IS a missile
The real-eye opener on air defense is what has REALLY shot down the most aircraft. And the answer is. . . Guns. Not missiles. And at Mach 5 plus, all you have to do is NICK the jet, and it WILL explode quite memorably. The problem of getting a round, of whatever caliber, to the altitude and vicinity of the target jet will be a major problem, but not insoluble...
Re:. . .but it could be a GODSEND to development.
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Microchips That Evolve
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· Score: 1
Well, nature uses a variant of the same method, and has managed to develop a plethora of stable platforms.
I think of it as evolution in action. ..
. . .but it could be a GODSEND to development. . .
on
Microchips That Evolve
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· Score: 1
Imagine an array of these chips, all working away at a better solution to a given problem. Or several arrays, competing. Give it a week, then blank the least-performing arrays, load the software from the best-performing, and give 'em another week. Repeat until satisfied.
Result: a faster development cycle. Then take the design to silicon, and fab it. . . .
. ..does not translate into a requirement for anyone else to listen.
Moderation, while not perfect, is a useable technology for making sense out of chaos, whether it be here on/., on USENET, or on another medium.
Failures of moderation make a given medium less and less useful over time. Lack of moderation at all allows takeovers and spam. I've seen that numerous times over the years: the "Meowers" were one fairly well known example that spanned numerous groups.
Moderation is not anti-democratic, instead it is the only way **I** know of to prevent the so-called "Tragedy of the Commons" online. . .
. ..is 7-10 hits on my network at work per day, on the average (we have a Class C, but most stuff is NATed behind the firewall), and 3-4 hits a day at home on the DSL line... it all seems a lot, but then both my work and my home firewalls include footprinting exercises as an attack.....
I have no idea if those numbers are typical: the DSL ranges are well known, and so is my ISP's netblock. . . But I'd wager it's virtually ALL automated tools. . .
Reason I ask, is this: I recently bought, at auction, some recently-disposed-of IT gear from the US Gov. Several have "Property of the United States Senate" stickers. By far, the "best" box is a Pentium-133 with 64MB and a 2 GB drive, on a proprietary bus (it's a Compaq box). And I was also recently in my Senator's office. The basic boxen there were Pentium Pro's, in the 166-200 range. And, of course, they all run Windoze (in this case, Win 95 OSR2: the secretary had a minor problem, and I fixed it for her.)
While this may not be the general case, I ask the question: do they have the hardware for it ? Remember, the Congresscritters and Senators may have nice, new, shiny boxen, but the mail gets answered by admin types with old, slow boxen. And these are mostly political types, not techies. Can they handle it ??
The Constitution limits the ability of Government to do things. It puts no such limits on purely private activity. Most schools in the U.S. are public, i.e., run by a government (usually the local muncipal, county, or school district) funded by taxpayer dollars, and thus are limited by Constitutional strictures on what Government may and may not do.
It's just the same as businesses prohibiting certain expression by contract. Once you sign on the dotted line of an agreement, you're bound by it. In the case of a private school, both the parents pay the tuition and sign a contract stipulating that the student is to be educated in a given manner under given rules (this is usually a generic contract, but it still binds to the school rules. ..), and in may cases, the student is also required to sign a "contract" signifying receipt and understanding of the rules. . .
And Mao **WAS** correct: power does come from the barrel of a gun. A gun is the ultimate equalizer: your opponent may be a hulking brute who could physically tear you limb from limb, but that 9mm auto you're carrying alters the power structure.
Or, as a wag once put it. . .
God created all men equal,
but Sam Colt MADE them equal. . .
I'll also note the upswing in violent crime, and armed crime, in both the UK and Australia, since guns were confiscated. It's sooooo much safer now...
They were cross-bred from African Honeybees, and the native South American species. Humans have successfully cross-bred critters and plants for millenia.
All genetic engineering is, in the final analysis, is a more precise method of breeding things for desired characteristics. So, the barn door HAS been open for longer than any of us have been around. The point is, NOTHING is static, not breeds of a particular critter, not global temperature, not the average IQ of politicians (ok, maybe THAT is stable, but awfully low. ..)
Yes, we all know that the correct term for breaking into a system and having your way with it is cracking. Hacking is the old and honored art of extending technology (of any sort, not just computers and/or hardware) of crawling into the internals, and finding exactly what you can do with it, and then taking that hard-earned knowledge and doing something with it.
And if language was a logical process, that would be the end of it. But language is NOT a logical process: it's fluid, changes constantly, and is primarily defined by what the masses think is correct, as opposed to the technically correct definition.
Friends, I don't mean to start a flame war, but we've lost the public definition of "hacker". WE know the difference, but to the world at large, it doesn't matter. Thank Matthew Broderick, any number of uniformed journalists and government officials, and the Entertainment industry in general for it, but they won this particular semantic war, and we lost. Can we move on to more important issues ???
Kindly leave your prejudice by the door. Yes, the Borg Collective, excuse me, the Xtian Coalition, have sunk their claws into the GOP. But no more than other pressure groups on the other end of the ideological spectrum have sunk THEIRS into the Democrats.
. ..as I marked my ethnicity as Other, and filled in the blank with "Human". They actually sent somebody around afterwards for more detail.
My wife told them "Human", and dared them to prove otherwise.
If they wanted a sub-ethnic group, we had "Geek-American" already planned. . .
I wouldn't call 60-odd aircraft the "core" of the USAF: I know, I flew B-52's for 6 years.
The reason they haven't been entirely replaced, is that there aren't enough heavy bombers around for that mission to completely retire them. However, the heavy/conventional "D" models were retiredin the early 1980s, and the "G" models were retired in the early-mid 90's ("G"-model BUFFs were the primary heavy bomber in the Gulf War...).
This leaves approximately 4 squadrons of 12 or so "H" models, and the training Squadron, plus a few in Depot Maintenance.
I was involved with one of the original studies that fed into the TTAPS paper (the "mother lode" of the Nuclear Winter concept). We were mapping the "fallout" from the Mount Saint Helens explosion.
Several points:
The TTAPS study has been fairly discredited as an over-simplistic analysis. ..
Specifically:
It assumes far longer "hang times" for atmospheric particulates than observed reality
It assumes far higher levels of small particulates than found in observed reality
Worst of all, it was a one-dimensional static analysis
In short, it was great copy, but lousy science.
The most likely outcome of a massive nuclear conflict would approximate that of the Thera Explosion or Krakatoa: one season with a short, cold summer, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, where, oddly enough, 90+ % of the targets are. ..
There's an interesting page on Nuclear Winter, Nuclear Summer, and other variants here.
Mind you, I saw things from two perspectives: as a student geologist from the early 1980's, and as a Strategic Air Command Bomber Crew member in the mid- and late-1980's. . .
Actually, that is USGov policy. The Feds are REQUIRED to use recycled paper. Sort of appropriate, considering the sheer amount of totally useless paper it uses on a daily basis (I used to work at the Pentagon. ***ONE*** USAF copy center went through a pallet of paper a day....The office I worked in, 15 people, went through two boxes, or 20,000 pages every two weeks or so...).
I do use a firewall. But I don't depend on it. Second and third layers of defense help. IF i worried about processing power and memory going to waste, then I'd also ban Winamp, Windoze Media Player, Napster et al, and Solitaire from the boxen. ..
But I **NEVER** leave a Windoze box configured as default. . .
It did, a year ago. I found it, turned my shares off, and got a nastygram from @Home several weeks later about it. Which is one of MANY reasons I now do DSL, with Speakeasy.net.
But then, @Home isn't exactly designed for the power user, much less the security-conscious one. Heck, they claimed Linux wouldn't work on @Home, either. . .
. ..on Windoze networks, I always install an additional protocol on top of TCP/IP, and modify the bindings such that file sharing only works on the alternate protocol.
It also works as a brute-force, extremely porous firewall. But lacking security on the filesystem, binding sharing to a non-routable protocol is an acceptable, if not optimal solution....
Slashdot Mirror
. . . or perhaps it's a subterfuge: the real target may be France
. . .will they take the movie back ??? It seems to work for the Chinese....
. . . in check-in, boarding, and luggage recovery. . . followed by several more hours in traffic outside the airports. . . .
I think of it as evolution in action. . .
Result: a faster development cycle. Then take the design to silicon, and fab it. . . .
Moderation, while not perfect, is a useable technology for making sense out of chaos, whether it be here on /., on USENET, or on another medium.
Failures of moderation make a given medium less and less useful over time. Lack of moderation at all allows takeovers and spam. I've seen that numerous times over the years: the "Meowers" were one fairly well known example that spanned numerous groups.
Moderation is not anti-democratic, instead it is the only way **I** know of to prevent the so-called "Tragedy of the Commons" online. . .
I have no idea if those numbers are typical: the DSL ranges are well known, and so is my ISP's netblock. . . But I'd wager it's virtually ALL automated tools. . .
While this may not be the general case, I ask the question: do they have the hardware for it ? Remember, the Congresscritters and Senators may have nice, new, shiny boxen, but the mail gets answered by admin types with old, slow boxen. And these are mostly political types, not techies. Can they handle it ??
< Martha Stewart mode > .a GOOD thing ???
. .
</Martha Stewart mode>
It's just the same as businesses prohibiting certain expression by contract. Once you sign on the dotted line of an agreement, you're bound by it. In the case of a private school, both the parents pay the tuition and sign a contract stipulating that the student is to be educated in a given manner under given rules (this is usually a generic contract, but it still binds to the school rules. . .), and in may cases, the student is also required to sign a "contract" signifying receipt and understanding of the rules. . .
Or, as a wag once put it. . .
I'll also note the upswing in violent crime, and armed crime, in both the UK and Australia, since guns were confiscated. It's sooooo much safer now...
All genetic engineering is, in the final analysis, is a more precise method of breeding things for desired characteristics. So, the barn door HAS been open for longer than any of us have been around. The point is, NOTHING is static, not breeds of a particular critter, not global temperature, not the average IQ of politicians (ok, maybe THAT is stable, but awfully low. . .)
And if language was a logical process, that would be the end of it. But language is NOT a logical process: it's fluid, changes constantly, and is primarily defined by what the masses think is correct, as opposed to the technically correct definition.
Friends, I don't mean to start a flame war, but we've lost the public definition of "hacker". WE know the difference, but to the world at large, it doesn't matter. Thank Matthew Broderick, any number of uniformed journalists and government officials, and the Entertainment industry in general for it, but they won this particular semantic war, and we lost. Can we move on to more important issues ???
Frankly, I think the far right and the far left are BOTH nuts. . .
Kindly leave your prejudice by the door. Yes, the Borg Collective, excuse me, the Xtian Coalition, have sunk their claws into the GOP. But no more than other pressure groups on the other end of the ideological spectrum have sunk THEIRS into the Democrats.
And they wonder why I'm Libertarian. . .
If they wanted a sub-ethnic group, we had "Geek-American" already planned. . .
The reason they haven't been entirely replaced, is that there aren't enough heavy bombers around for that mission to completely retire them. However, the heavy/conventional "D" models were retiredin the early 1980s, and the "G" models were retired in the early-mid 90's ("G"-model BUFFs were the primary heavy bomber in the Gulf War...).
This leaves approximately 4 squadrons of 12 or so "H" models, and the training Squadron, plus a few in Depot Maintenance.
Not exactly a "core" anymore...
Where's a mine-shaft gap when you REALLY need it ??? (evil grin)
Several points:
- The TTAPS study has been fairly discredited as an over-simplistic analysis. .
.
- Specifically:
- It assumes far longer "hang times" for atmospheric particulates than observed reality
- It assumes far higher levels of small particulates than found in observed reality
- Worst of all, it was a one-dimensional static analysis
- In short, it was great copy, but lousy science.
- The most likely outcome of a massive nuclear conflict would approximate that of the Thera Explosion or Krakatoa: one season with a short, cold summer, primarily in the Northern Hemisphere, where, oddly enough, 90+ % of the targets are. .
.
There's an interesting page on Nuclear Winter, Nuclear Summer, and other variants here.Mind you, I saw things from two perspectives: as a student geologist from the early 1980's, and as a Strategic Air Command Bomber Crew member in the mid- and late-1980's. . .
Actually, that is USGov policy. The Feds are REQUIRED to use recycled paper. Sort of appropriate, considering the sheer amount of totally useless paper it uses on a daily basis (I used to work at the Pentagon. ***ONE*** USAF copy center went through a pallet of paper a day....The office I worked in, 15 people, went through two boxes, or 20,000 pages every two weeks or so...).
. . .Learn the C Programming Language. Learn UNIX. NT/2000 is a somewhat useful skill, but Unix is more important. . .
But I **NEVER** leave a Windoze box configured as default. . .
But then, @Home isn't exactly designed for the power user, much less the security-conscious one. Heck, they claimed Linux wouldn't work on @Home, either. . .
It also works as a brute-force, extremely porous firewall. But lacking security on the filesystem, binding sharing to a non-routable protocol is an acceptable, if not optimal solution....