Sorry dude, you missed the point.
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 1
The point is not the imminence of drones. The point is sensor technology and the ability to know where the other guy is and what he's doing, without revealing yourself.
Think about it. India and Pakistan almost came to blows. When fighting was imminent, both side were drawn up in trenches not all that different from what we saw in 1914 - 1918. Neither side could say for sure where the other guy might be, so both had to do the defense-in-depth thing, with assaults requiring massive amounts of artillery and frontal assaults.
Compare that to the U.S. in Afghanistan. IR cameras. LANTIRN to turn night and clouds into day. Laser designators. Satellites. You know, all that stuff the other side never had. We even had Mullah Omar in the crosshairs, but the commander didn't zap him for fear of legal repercussions.
Special Forces units are now training with robots loaded with sensors. It's cheaper to lose a sensing robot than a person.
In the end, we'll always want to go after people. Even if there are drones on the battlefield, they'll ultimately be getting orders from a person. Target that person and the drones fall dead. How do you target the person? Sensors.
The art mass-production industry is running headfirst into the consumer aftermarket reproduction industry.
What's interesting is that rather than raise their standards to the point where people will be willing to buy their products, their attitude is to try to destory the aftermarket reproduction industry.
It's interesting because it bespeaks two things:
1. Complete contempt for consumers. The assumption is that people will always prefer to make illegal copies, rather than buy at the store. I'm willing to pay for stuff if it's worth the price. I'm not willing to pay for one good track and a load of crappy tracks, so I don't buy, in the primary- or aftermarkets.
2. Complete arrogance on their part. the attitude is "take it or leave it because you can't get it elsewhere."
Personally, I say a pox on them. Encrypt your stuff as you will. Until you produce something worth buying, you won't get my dime.
America may well have the DMCA and the USA-Patriot Act, but it also has the ACLU, Alan Dershowitz, Johnny Cochrane, etc., etc.
In other words, we may have restrictive laws, but we also have a bunch of chiselers out to finess them.
Contract this with countries that
- like the former USSR, have great Constitutions in the abstract, and secret police to liquidate you if you attempt to exercise any "right" you may have.
- don't have Constitutions at all, just the will of the assorted ruling gerontocracies.
- have Constitutions, and strict laws derived therefrom, but with noting like the counter-balancing provided by, say, the ACLU
Things are strange right now in the U.S. There's change happening based on technology and terrorism and at such times over-reactions will occur. I have no doubt that things will free up in the next decade.
I recently bought a numebr of children's books at amazon. For aaaaaaages afterwards, all of amazon's targeted ads for me were of childrens books.
Nowadays I delete amazon's cookies and go anonymous until I want to buy something.
I think personalization should provide a "tabula rasa" option. Failing that, a "slap-upside-the-head" option that occasionally presents something way outside your normal range of interest.
If you're dealing with a problem that can be reduced to a mathematical formula or the like, you're probably better off looking in Numerical Recipes or the NAG libraries, or what have you.
In this case, you're dealing with a well-defined, well-understood problem. You could implement a solution using OO principals, but why bother. I mean, you're not going to be changing it or adapting it all that much.
The power of OO happens at a higher level, and with less-well understoof problems. In this case, you're modeling higher-level entities, with less well-understood properties that are much more liable to change. In this case, the ideas of modularity, pluggable behavious, cohesiveness, etc., become much more important.
I hope that didn't sound too much like a hand-waving explanation.
I watched the celebrations on TV and was struck by the almost religious fervour surrounding the conversion to the Euro.
Among other things, I noticed all the slagging of the U.K,, Denmark, and Sweden, complete with comments about the inevitability of conversion to the Euro. Failure to accept the Euro came across as a sort of heretical position. Reasons for accepting the Euro came across to me as a combination of hand-waving and proof-by-intimidation.
So, I started asking myself why. Why the Euro? I think it's all for historical reasons, but not the ones normally given.
Take the Irish, for example. They really want to be out of the U.K.'s economic orbit. They never will, for reasons of geography, but God, do they want to be. So, for them, conversion to the Euro is seen as a way to become closer to Berlin and Paris than to London. Mind you, they also went along with the Euro because they've received, and continue to receive, massive support from the EU.
The French want to bring Europe back to the time of Louis XIV. A common currency, open to meddling by the Enarcs is just the thing for them.
The Germans? Well, the whole "European Union" idea dates back to studies by Nazi economists during WWII. More recently, we've had one German Chancellor indicate that the EU had to succeed or the Germans would just go rampaging all over the continent once again.
As for the rest, well, the Greeks, the Spaniards, the Portugese are all in it for things like the Common Agricultural Policy (you know, taxing Germans to pay Greeks), and don't really have an option but to go along.
So, really, the impetus behind the Euro is all the historical animus, greed, and ambition that have characterized Europe for the last 400 years.
Personally, I give it 50 years before the whole thing falls to pieces. Rewind European history to about 1670 and hit "play" and you'll have a good predictor for the next 400 years.
I got a degree in Physics. Four years of mental masturbation, essentially. Not that it wasn't interesting - don't get me wrong - but it had no bearing on what I do now (hacking Java for food).
Nowadays, when I interview I'm usually first directed to a BrainBench instant quiz on EJB, or JMS, or XML, or whatever the particular job requires. Degree, past experience, etc., count for nothing in the original interview phase. It's all whether or not BrainBench judges me competent.
So, from a career perspective, I think you'd be better off getting certifications in the area where you work and keeping current on technology trends.
If you want an insider's view of the origins of the European Central Bank, run, don't walk, to amazon.com and order a copy of this book.
Attempting to track the flow of currency is fully in line with your typical French bureaucrat's view that all good comes from the state, and that the state must be in charge of all aspects of life.
IMHO, the voters of the UK, Denmark, and Sweden are going to look very smart in the very near future.
Most of what we do does not map to Dijkstra's Algorithm, or the Simplex Algorithm, or the Monte Carlo Method.
Most of what we do is solve practical automation problems for people. You know, the kinds of problems that are never going to get the attention of hundreds of Ph.D. students, all intent on outdoing each other in terms of elegance and brilliance.
Most automation problems get worked on by a series of programmers. There's the original developer, and after that person moves on to greener pa$ture$, maintenance staff. In a situation like that, if you can't say in the documentation that the original problem mapped to a certain well-known algorithm, the next best thing is to say that you implemented the algorithm using a set of patterns.
If you do so, then you'll clearly communicate what was done, making it more likely that proper maintenance decisions are made (including, perhaps, the decision to replace the poorly thrown together patterns of the original implementation).
Here in Atlanta AT&T Broadband has been playing a series of ads about cable theft. All well and good, but last week's Atlanta Journal/Constitution had a story about AT&T cutting off legitimate (i.e. paying) users and then having them arrested.
I used to have a cable modem from them (their RoadRunner service) and it *sucked*. Their customer service is equally sucky - just try any of their customer support lines.
Hmmmmm. An organization I that provides sucky service and causes innocent people to be arrested. Sounds like the IRS.
As a recently-layed-off Senior Architect, I'm here to warn you about the practice of "fleshing" or "purging".
On October 12 I delivered the prototype of a system that involved JSPs, fat Java clients, J2ME wireless clients, JMS messaging, XML, etc., etc. Complete with designs to justify the use of Queues vs. Topics, stateless session beans to provide pooled access to the JMS, etc.
My boss said thanks. And then explained to me that since the comany was transitioning from R&D to maintenance and sales, the services of the people who'd designed the company's systems were no longer required, here's two week's severance, sod off.
The maintenance people are still in place. The architects and senior developers are looking for work.
I know that karma will come back to bite them in the ass, but the present is still a bitch.
Microsoft wants everyone to be running a copy of their software that can be controlled by them.
They don't want non-controlled and non-controllable software to exist, because they can't then turn you off if you don't do what they say.
One way to accomplish this is to tie the software to hardware that's rapidly obsolescing.
Anyway, eventually we'll all be part of the Borg^H^H^Hill, living on a cubic spaceship (incompatible with the spherical spaceship from that *other* company), and then a starship from the United Federation of Planets will liberate us.
And I can't wait to meet Geri Ryan! (Be still my beating heart.)
I happen to be (not) represented by Cynthia McKinney, the cutest little communist in Congress.
She's basically interested in:
1. Hanging in the aisle to greet the President when he does State of the Union speeches.
2. Using taxpayer money to bribe people to vote for her.
3. Getting streets named for herself.
4. Standing up for her father, Billy, when he threatens to assault Ward Connerly.
Since I don't care to meet the President, am not living on welfare, don't collect the EITC, don't really care about street names (except for navigation purposes), and don't attempt to incite race riots, I'm of no interest to her. I can write and write and write - electronically or on paper - about items that interest me, but the plain fact is that I simply don't count.
I listen to public broadcasting (PBS) on the way to work in the morning, and on the way home in the evening. Every day there's something to get me shouting back.
PBS is definitely taking the "moral equivalency" tack. "The US is just as much to blame....", etc. Well screw that. They use the US Government to extract money from me in order to tell me that US actions are to blame for the current "tragedy".
On PBS, this was not an attack, an act of war. This was a "tragedy".
On PBS, Islamic terrorists are never "terrorists". Instead, they're "militants".
On PBS, the root causes of this conflict are poverty and ignorance, caused in turn by US pillaging of the world, not a bunch of psychotics traveling under the cover of religion.
On PBS, US intervention to protect (mostly Islamic) people in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Somalia, Ethopia never happened. It's simply been written out of history.
On the morning of September 11, I was sitting in my cube when a co-worker showed up. First thing he said was that he'd heard on the radio that the WTC had been hit by a large aircraft.
After I got over my disbelief I dashed over to the break room, just in time to catch the second aircraft hitting.
Up until 11:00 AM, nobody left the room. We were glued to the TV by shock and disbelief. Afterwards, people would cycle through about once an hour to catch updates.
In the days after, I spent a fair amount of time going to various news and commentary sites. With the beginning of military activity over Afghanistan, I find myself back to the TV, CNN and FNN especially.
One thing I've noticed is my reaction to the major talking heads. I'm beginning to really despise Peter Jennings, who can't seem to do a piece on the war without slamming the US in some way. Last night his choice bit was to say the use of NATO E-3s to patrol American airspace is an indication of American weakness. FNN does a good job of reporting just the facts. And I'm glued to it. The immediacy of it all.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that in a couple of weeks I'll be reading summaries of the war to date, target lists, etc., on the Internet. And reflecting.
Recently, a copy of "JavaPro" arrived at my desk with an attached CD-ROM. Inside the (sealed) sleeve was a folded license agreement, partly, but by no means completely readable.
The seal on the back of the sleeve read as follows:
"Notice: By opening this envelope you agree to be bound by the Oracle Technology Network development license agreement contained inside."
(Actually, the notice was all in caps, but I don't want to offend the Gods of the lameness filter.)
Not knowing whether the license agreement requires the forking over of my firstborn, or a requirement that I never again code in anything but FORTRAN IV, the seal remains unbroken and the CD-ROM remains unused.
If anyone has the actual text of the license agreement inside the sleeve (brave soul!), I'd love to see what it says.
Slashdot Mirror
The point is not the imminence of drones. The point is sensor technology and the ability to know where the other guy is and what he's doing, without revealing yourself.
Think about it. India and Pakistan almost came to blows. When fighting was imminent, both side were drawn up in trenches not all that different from what we saw in 1914 - 1918. Neither side could say for sure where the other guy might be, so both had to do the defense-in-depth thing, with assaults requiring massive amounts of artillery and frontal assaults.
Compare that to the U.S. in Afghanistan. IR cameras. LANTIRN to turn night and clouds into day. Laser designators. Satellites. You know, all that stuff the other side never had. We even had Mullah Omar in the crosshairs, but the commander didn't zap him for fear of legal repercussions.
Special Forces units are now training with robots loaded with sensors. It's cheaper to lose a sensing robot than a person.
In the end, we'll always want to go after people. Even if there are drones on the battlefield, they'll ultimately be getting orders from a person. Target that person and the drones fall dead. How do you target the person? Sensors.
...my "Death Star" (air quotations) and I will use my "Death Star" (air quotations) to blackmail the world for ONE MILLION DOLLARS!
Muhahahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
etc.
The art mass-production industry is running headfirst into the consumer aftermarket reproduction industry.
What's interesting is that rather than raise their standards to the point where people will be willing to buy their products, their attitude is to try to destory the aftermarket reproduction industry.
It's interesting because it bespeaks two things:
1. Complete contempt for consumers. The assumption is that people will always prefer to make illegal copies, rather than buy at the store. I'm willing to pay for stuff if it's worth the price. I'm not willing to pay for one good track and a load of crappy tracks, so I don't buy, in the primary- or aftermarkets.
2. Complete arrogance on their part. the attitude is "take it or leave it because you can't get it elsewhere."
Personally, I say a pox on them. Encrypt your stuff as you will. Until you produce something worth buying, you won't get my dime.
America may well have the DMCA and the USA-Patriot Act, but it also has the ACLU, Alan Dershowitz, Johnny Cochrane, etc., etc.
In other words, we may have restrictive laws, but we also have a bunch of chiselers out to finess them.
Contract this with countries that
- like the former USSR, have great Constitutions in the abstract, and secret police to liquidate you if you attempt to exercise any "right" you may have.
- don't have Constitutions at all, just the will of the assorted ruling gerontocracies.
- have Constitutions, and strict laws derived therefrom, but with noting like the counter-balancing provided by, say, the ACLU
Things are strange right now in the U.S. There's change happening based on technology and terrorism and at such times over-reactions will occur. I have no doubt that things will free up in the next decade.
Now wait for the lawsuits to come rolling in.
I recently bought a numebr of children's books at amazon. For aaaaaaages afterwards, all of amazon's targeted ads for me were of childrens books.
Nowadays I delete amazon's cookies and go anonymous until I want to buy something.
I think personalization should provide a "tabula rasa" option. Failing that, a "slap-upside-the-head" option that occasionally presents something way outside your normal range of interest.
If you're dealing with a problem that can be reduced to a mathematical formula or the like, you're probably better off looking in Numerical Recipes or the NAG libraries, or what have you.
In this case, you're dealing with a well-defined, well-understood problem. You could implement a solution using OO principals, but why bother. I mean, you're not going to be changing it or adapting it all that much.
The power of OO happens at a higher level, and with less-well understoof problems. In this case, you're modeling higher-level entities, with less well-understood properties that are much more liable to change. In this case, the ideas of modularity, pluggable behavious, cohesiveness, etc., become much more important.
I hope that didn't sound too much like a hand-waving explanation.
I watched the celebrations on TV and was struck by the almost religious fervour surrounding the conversion to the Euro.
Among other things, I noticed all the slagging of the U.K,, Denmark, and Sweden, complete with comments about the inevitability of conversion to the Euro. Failure to accept the Euro came across as a sort of heretical position. Reasons for accepting the Euro came across to me as a combination of hand-waving and proof-by-intimidation.
So, I started asking myself why. Why the Euro? I think it's all for historical reasons, but not the ones normally given.
Take the Irish, for example. They really want to be out of the U.K.'s economic orbit. They never will, for reasons of geography, but God, do they want to be. So, for them, conversion to the Euro is seen as a way to become closer to Berlin and Paris than to London. Mind you, they also went along with the Euro because they've received, and continue to receive, massive support from the EU.
The French want to bring Europe back to the time of Louis XIV. A common currency, open to meddling by the Enarcs is just the thing for them.
The Germans? Well, the whole "European Union" idea dates back to studies by Nazi economists during WWII. More recently, we've had one German Chancellor indicate that the EU had to succeed or the Germans would just go rampaging all over the continent once again.
As for the rest, well, the Greeks, the Spaniards, the Portugese are all in it for things like the Common Agricultural Policy (you know, taxing Germans to pay Greeks), and don't really have an option but to go along.
So, really, the impetus behind the Euro is all the historical animus, greed, and ambition that have characterized Europe for the last 400 years.
Personally, I give it 50 years before the whole thing falls to pieces. Rewind European history to about 1670 and hit "play" and you'll have a good predictor for the next 400 years.
I got a degree in Physics. Four years of mental masturbation, essentially. Not that it wasn't interesting - don't get me wrong - but it had no bearing on what I do now (hacking Java for food).
Nowadays, when I interview I'm usually first directed to a BrainBench instant quiz on EJB, or JMS, or XML, or whatever the particular job requires. Degree, past experience, etc., count for nothing in the original interview phase. It's all whether or not BrainBench judges me competent.
So, from a career perspective, I think you'd be better off getting certifications in the area where you work and keeping current on technology trends.
'nuff said.
If you want an insider's view of the origins of the European Central Bank, run, don't walk, to amazon.com and order a copy of this book.
Attempting to track the flow of currency is fully in line with your typical French bureaucrat's view that all good comes from the state, and that the state must be in charge of all aspects of life.
IMHO, the voters of the UK, Denmark, and Sweden are going to look very smart in the very near future.
Most of what we do does not map to Dijkstra's Algorithm, or the Simplex Algorithm, or the Monte Carlo Method.
Most of what we do is solve practical automation problems for people. You know, the kinds of problems that are never going to get the attention of hundreds of Ph.D. students, all intent on outdoing each other in terms of elegance and brilliance.
Most automation problems get worked on by a series of programmers. There's the original developer, and after that person moves on to greener pa$ture$, maintenance staff. In a situation like that, if you can't say in the documentation that the original problem mapped to a certain well-known algorithm, the next best thing is to say that you implemented the algorithm using a set of patterns.
If you do so, then you'll clearly communicate what was done, making it more likely that proper maintenance decisions are made (including, perhaps, the decision to replace the poorly thrown together patterns of the original implementation).
Where's RAW when you need him?
Here in Atlanta AT&T Broadband has been playing a series of ads about cable theft. All well and good, but last week's Atlanta Journal/Constitution had a story about AT&T cutting off legitimate (i.e. paying) users and then having them arrested.
I used to have a cable modem from them (their RoadRunner service) and it *sucked*. Their customer service is equally sucky - just try any of their customer support lines.
Hmmmmm. An organization I that provides sucky service and causes innocent people to be arrested. Sounds like the IRS.
As a recently-layed-off Senior Architect, I'm here to warn you about the practice of "fleshing" or "purging".
On October 12 I delivered the prototype of a system that involved JSPs, fat Java clients, J2ME wireless clients, JMS messaging, XML, etc., etc. Complete with designs to justify the use of Queues vs. Topics, stateless session beans to provide pooled access to the JMS, etc.
My boss said thanks. And then explained to me that since the comany was transitioning from R&D to maintenance and sales, the services of the people who'd designed the company's systems were no longer required, here's two week's severance, sod off.
The maintenance people are still in place. The architects and senior developers are looking for work.
I know that karma will come back to bite them in the ass, but the present is still a bitch.
I had a professor who used to make trays of this stuff and then film flies blowing up on touchdown.
I think he'd sniffed a bit too much benzene over the years.
Yet.
Microsoft wants everyone to be running a copy of their software that can be controlled by them.
They don't want non-controlled and non-controllable software to exist, because they can't then turn you off if you don't do what they say.
One way to accomplish this is to tie the software to hardware that's rapidly obsolescing.
Anyway, eventually we'll all be part of the Borg^H^H^Hill, living on a cubic spaceship (incompatible with the spherical spaceship from that *other* company), and then a starship from the United Federation of Planets will liberate us.
And I can't wait to meet Geri Ryan! (Be still my beating heart.)
However, I think Lisp will never be more than a niche language, for reasons Richard P. Gabriel has made all too obvious.
My question, for what it's worth, is "Why bother?"
I happen to be (not) represented by Cynthia McKinney, the cutest little communist in Congress.
She's basically interested in:
1. Hanging in the aisle to greet the President when he does State of the Union speeches.
2. Using taxpayer money to bribe people to vote for her.
3. Getting streets named for herself.
4. Standing up for her father, Billy, when he threatens to assault Ward Connerly.
Since I don't care to meet the President, am not living on welfare, don't collect the EITC, don't really care about street names (except for navigation purposes), and don't attempt to incite race riots, I'm of no interest to her. I can write and write and write - electronically or on paper - about items that interest me, but the plain fact is that I simply don't count.
"IIS"? Am I the only one wondering what son of Nimda will do to this thing? Should I be buying space station repellent?
I listen to public broadcasting (PBS) on the way to work in the morning, and on the way home in the evening. Every day there's something to get me shouting back.
PBS is definitely taking the "moral equivalency" tack. "The US is just as much to blame....", etc. Well screw that. They use the US Government to extract money from me in order to tell me that US actions are to blame for the current "tragedy".
On PBS, this was not an attack, an act of war. This was a "tragedy".
On PBS, Islamic terrorists are never "terrorists". Instead, they're "militants".
On PBS, the root causes of this conflict are poverty and ignorance, caused in turn by US pillaging of the world, not a bunch of psychotics traveling under the cover of religion.
On PBS, US intervention to protect (mostly Islamic) people in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Somalia, Ethopia never happened. It's simply been written out of history.
Thanks, Winston Smith.
On the morning of September 11, I was sitting in my cube when a co-worker showed up. First thing he said was that he'd heard on the radio that the WTC had been hit by a large aircraft.
After I got over my disbelief I dashed over to the break room, just in time to catch the second aircraft hitting.
Up until 11:00 AM, nobody left the room. We were glued to the TV by shock and disbelief. Afterwards, people would cycle through about once an hour to catch updates.
In the days after, I spent a fair amount of time going to various news and commentary sites. With the beginning of military activity over Afghanistan, I find myself back to the TV, CNN and FNN especially.
One thing I've noticed is my reaction to the major talking heads. I'm beginning to really despise Peter Jennings, who can't seem to do a piece on the war without slamming the US in some way. Last night his choice bit was to say the use of NATO E-3s to patrol American airspace is an indication of American weakness. FNN does a good job of reporting just the facts. And I'm glued to it. The immediacy of it all.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure that in a couple of weeks I'll be reading summaries of the war to date, target lists, etc., on the Internet. And reflecting.
Recently, a copy of "JavaPro" arrived at my desk with an attached CD-ROM. Inside the (sealed) sleeve was a folded license agreement, partly, but by no means completely readable.
The seal on the back of the sleeve read as follows:
"Notice: By opening this envelope you agree to be bound by the Oracle Technology Network development license agreement contained inside."
(Actually, the notice was all in caps, but I don't want to offend the Gods of the lameness filter.)
Not knowing whether the license agreement requires the forking over of my firstborn, or a requirement that I never again code in anything but FORTRAN IV, the seal remains unbroken and the CD-ROM remains unused.
If anyone has the actual text of the license agreement inside the sleeve (brave soul!), I'd love to see what it says.
Chicks dig me when I'm drunk!
And he even looked like a helper monkey.
(Sorry, somehow your post struck a cord...)