FLYING in his helicopter, Sgt. Frank Sheer of the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California can be literally miles from the action. But that does not mean that he and his co-pilot do not know what's going on. In fact, Sergeant Sheer says they often have a clearer picture of a crime scene than the officers who are there.
Advertisement
"We'll be tracking a suspect on a hillside from the helicopter," said Sergeant
Sheer, the chief pilot in the Orange County force, "and the deputies climbing up it will be saying to us, `There's nobody here.' We've actually had them step on a guy who pulled up a bush for cover."
It's not just having a bird's-eye view that gives Sergeant Sheer and many other airborne police officers, rescue workers, military personnel, and television news and movie crews almost paranormal vision. Nor is it simply advances in optics and cameras. Ultimately they all rely on complex camera stabilization systems that mix mechanical and electronic technologies to produce steady images, even at high magnification, from inherently unsteady craft like helicopters and boats.
When officers pursued O. J. Simpson along the freeways of Los Angeles eight years ago, a covey of police and television news helicopters tracked him with stabilized cameras hanging at the sides in their distinctive ball-shaped pods. But most helicopter surveillance is not that dramatic. If the Orange County Sheriff's Department needs a car discreetly followed, Sergeant Sheer can keep tabs on it from 3,000 feet up and a considerable distance behind -- a position that would leave most motorists unaware there was a helicopter around, let alone watching them.
New systems built around all-electronic motion-sensing technologies are so stable that only the horizon and haze limit how far away observers can be.
The use of airborne stabilized cameras to create films or follow athletes in action attracts little controversy. Nor does anyone dispute that the systems allow police officers to capture criminals or rescue people. Some privacy advocates, however, are concerned that the recent proliferation of airborne cameras and the growing capabilities of new systems may mean that anyone who steps outside may unknowingly be a target of an aerial eye. Outdoors, there may no longer be any place to hide.
"Because technology affords police what amounts to superhuman vision, that doesn't mean we lose all expectations of privacy," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on technology and liberty. "There are lots of innocent people who are going to have their privacy invaded -- observed naked in their backyard sunbathing from far away."
There is a long history of efforts to produce steady airborne pictures. But in the early years, the results were for the most part dismal.
Steven Poster, the president of the American Society of Cinematographers, recalls his first attempt at photography from a helicopter, in the late 1960's. "It was an Illinois State Fair, and the stabilization came from a rope tied around me to the helicopter," Mr. Poster recalled. "I quickly realized that this was not a very good system."
While more sophisticated systems existed back then, they did not differ much from Mr. Poster's rope. Known as side mounts, they generally relied on bungee cords and the user's body to isolate the camera.
By the 1980's Mr. Poster was a director of photography for feature films and television advertisements, and he had found an answer to his aerial photography problems with a system made by Wescam, a company now based in Burlington, Ontario.
"It's the best way to stabilize a camera," said Mr. Poster, who has used the system in films like "Stuart Little 2," which is to be released this summer.
The Wescam system used by Mr. Poster's film crews is remarkably similar to the original Wescam developed in the early 1960's by a Canadian subsidiary of Westinghouse as a battlefield surveillance tool for the Canadian military. (Wescam is short for Westinghouse camera.)
Eliminating the vibration from the helicopter was the first step and the easy part. The Wescam ball is attached to a helicopter or airplane through a shock absorber that uses springs and other damping materials. "It is tuned for the natural frequencies of helicopters," said Mark Chamberlain, a mechanical engineer who is president and chief executive of Wescam.
But eliminating the vibration does nothing to limit three other kinds of movement by the camera: pitch (plunging up and down), yaw (rotating around a vertical axis) and roll (the side-to-side rotation that creates a moving horizon).
To deal with these kinds of movements, inventors of the original Wescam turned to large gyroscopes, which create inertia. It is like strapping a large boulder to the camera to stabilize it, yet without all the weight that a boulder would add.
Inside the camera ball are three gyros oriented to offset each of the three types of unwanted motion. Motors attached to the camera mount allow an operator within the helicopter to view images from the camera on a video monitor and point the camera as needed.
The gyro stabilization system proved so steady that it has not significantly changed over the last three decades. But the system has one significant drawback: the gyros require frequent maintenance.
That is not a problem for the movie industry, which rents the camera systems for short periods. (Other companies, including Gyron Systems International, Tyler Camera Systems and Spacecam Systems, also offer stabilized motion picture cameras.) But the need for maintenance made the systems largely impractical for full-time use by police, the military and television stations.
After Mr. Chamberlain led a management buyout in 1987 of the engineering company that had come to control the Wescam technology, he turned its attention to introducing a technology that was more robust.
Instead of providing stability, its three gyros wobble slightly when the rig changes directions. Sensors measure the wobbling and feed the data to microprocessors that in turn use high-speed electric motors to move the camera and offset the unwanted motion.
he second-generation technology -- what Mr. Chamberlain calls a sense- and-react system -- has only about half the stability of the original Wescam, so it cannot be used with lenses with very high magnification. But for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, it is unquestionably an improvement over using hand-held binoculars from a helicopter.
"At 1,500 feet we're not reading license plates, but we can tell if it's a man or a woman on the ground," Sergeant Sheer said.
Advertisement
Like many systems used by police forces, one of the two Wescam systems
owned by Orange County has a night vision camera that creates images by capturing the infrared radiation emitted by warm objects, including people.
But a United States Supreme Court ruling last June has forced the Orange County Sheriff's Department and other police forces to change the way they use those thermal imaging cameras. The court said that the police could not train thermal imaging cameras on private homes without a warrant.
Mr. Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. said he would like to see legislators, rather than the courts, come up with specific rules for police use of helicopter camera systems. The A.C.L.U. does not oppose the use of cameras "under the rare circumstance that the police might be legitimately in pursuit of a hot suspect," he said.
"But in the end, that's not how it's going to be used," he added. "It's going to be used in ordinary law enforcement, and that's very different."
It is also being used from ever greater distances. Four years ago Wescam introduced a third stabilization system that combines the reliability of cameras like those used by the Orange County Sheriff's Department while offering even greater stability than the original system. It replaces the spinning mechanical gyroscopes with fiber-optic gyros, which use bursts of laser light to calculate movements by the camera system in each direction.
Once measured, the movement is also offset with a new technology known as magnetic torque motors that can apply a force in a specific direction but allow free movement in all other directions.
Not only is the new system much faster, said Steven Tritchew, Wescam's chief technology officer, but it will also provide a steady image with the magnification of "any lens being made." Practically speaking, atmospheric haze and, ultimately, the impossibility of seeing beyond the horizon are the only limits on how far it can see. "We call it the ground-based Hubbell -- we can see a long way," Mr. Chamberlain said.
Certainly Lt. Keith Howland, a mission commander and tactical coordinatorbased at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Me., noticed a big difference after an old system in his P-3 Orion surveillance airplane was replaced by a turret with Wescam's new technology about a year ago. "You wouldn't even place them in the same universe," he said.
While on patrol, Lieutenant Howland said, he can watch events on the ground "well outside of visible range."
Like many civilian cameras, the Wescam on the P-3 can be aimed by punching in Global Positioning System coordinates. Software allows it to track moving objects on the ground more or less automatically.
While his aircraft's camera system cannot match the broad sweep of surveillance satellites, Lieutenant Howland said that it had many other advantages. "Basically we can be in real time on a target, see things at the moment they happen, and report it," he said. "It's live video versus a picture."
The systems can be costly, with the most advanced models costing as much as $650,000. But Wescam plans gradually to introduce variations on the new technology into all its markets, potentially giving police departments the same farsightedness. (The Raytheon Company recently introduced a fiber-optic gyro-stabilization system of its own. FLIR Systems of Portland, Ore., is also among the companies that make stabilization systems for police and military use.)
Mr. Chamberlain suggested that the most advanced technology might next go to an even more demanding customer than a police department chasing criminals or a military unit tracking terrorists: the broadcast news industry.
"From a pure image point of view, the military want uninterrupted imagery," he said, "but if it bounces a little bit once in a while or there's a little bit of fuzz on it from interference for a second or two, that's O.K. In the broadcast industry, if it jiggles a little bit or has a bit of fuzz when someone's crossing the finish line, well, you might not get invited back."
"the U.S. was the first of all colonial states to fight and win independence from a european monarchy?"
Ahh... so the fact that Sweden was under Danish rule from 1397 to 1521, and then broke free doesn't count, because Sweden wasn't a colony? I see.
What next? Claims that the US is the oldest democracy, when it's a republic? Or that it is the biggest "democracy", even though such countries as India and Malaysia are far bigger?
*sigh*
"it's early history is truely significant"
So? The same can be said of Denmark. Up until the late 1500s, early 1600s, Denmark was one the foremost countries in Europe with regards to naval power and supremacy. Now it's just a puny little country with some of the highest taxes in the world. In comparison, the US was once regarded as a guardian of democracy and freedom, but that was a loong time ago - and it's not getting better, I'm sad to say.
So to get back to the point - why choose July 4th as "independence day"? I have no idea - why not pick something more symbolic; what day was MSFT introduced on the stockmarket? What day was Microsoft founded? What day was Windows introduced? What day did Linus start working on Linux?
Tying it to a national independence day (no matter what nation) will only deter the participation of nationalists across the world "because my country is MUCH better than the other countries - I know because I was born in THIS country and that makes it better than the piece of land 10 yards away!!!".
Of course if what you want is to promote the use of Windows, be sure to place Windependence Day on such a day...
Oh wait - too late.
And placing Tux in an Uncle Sam hat? Nich touch. Who arranged this? Microsofts PR-department?
Just out of curiosity, how do you debug an applet, that uses network-access?
An applet can only access the server it was loaded from (ie. 192.168.1.101). If you run if from your workstation (ie 192.168.1.102) as I assume you would when debugging it, you can't get it working, as it won't allow you to access.101, where you have your needed variables etc.
It might be, if I was targeting a pure windows-environment and ms' jvm, but it's not in this case.
Also, when run-time-testing on say a FreeBSD workstation, just how the devil do you intend to pop into VS?
Granted, I haven't put much effort into VS for java, for two reasons:
1) I was far more comfortable with another IDE 2) It seemed to be working against me, in that some times it wouldn't allow me to do things my way. I can't remember the details, but I remember one specific instance, where it would claim to compile the file, but the class-file not reflecting the changes I had made. Deleting the class-file and trying again did not cure the problem. I think this was the specific reason I dropped it.
As mentioned in a post above this one, it works because programmers target the MS JVM.
I'm personally working on an applet that CANNOT target that JVM for several reasons:
1) MS' JVM has no support for PNG. The applet is using a multitude of images, and they're too large to be in GIF; it runs off a webserver with a total of 256 KB storage, and the images take up 258 KB as max compressed GIF.
2) Making network-connections is a pain in the ass with MS' JVM, and due to time constraints, this was the main reason we dumped the MS JVM.
3) Things that work in Suns JVM doesn't always work in MS' JVM - even when targeting the same version. Using selective applet loading, you can work around this, but not when you only have 256 KB to play around with.
4) Tracking bugs in MS' JVM is also a pain, since it doesn't give you the line-number in stackTrace(). This is not a problem, when you're only working with small methods, but when you are working with complicated methods, it gets old really fast, to the point of litterally hurling a mouse through the office, and nearly incapacitating a PHB.
5) It is possible to crash IE when using MS' JVM. I'm not entirely sure how or why, since the applet worked flawlessly when using Suns JVM and this was around the time we dumped MS' JVM. It wasn't a local problem - it happened on every single machine we tried it on.
Yes, this is an applet that is to be sold to companies, and yes - we WILL be shipping it with the current JVMs for all platforms we can think of.
"A self-contained package, Phalanx automatically carries out functions usually performed by multiple systems -- including search, detection, threat evaluation, tracking, engagement, and kill assessment."
Well, if a rogue pilot decides to go banzai agains an acc, the Phalanx doesn't know it's a hostile target, since it would be a US plane (and if they get shot down just for getting close, it'd kinda defeat the purpose of an acc);-)
"The avenger could probbably put a few holes in the hull of a carrier, but it has no chance of sinking it"
Why not? Let's just assume for a second, that the acc won't defend itself, wouldn't a couple of 2 second burst right below the waterline wreak havoc with the balance of the ship?
If not (and again assuming a no defence policy), then what kind of ship would it be able to sink? Anything smaller than a row boat obviously, but I'm thinking warships here:-)
Why yes, I do own an A10 and all of us are quite insane; why do you ask?
"A mil or two for a turbofan, or serious $$$ for a whole plane, plus getting the pilot's ass back..."
Well, getting the pilots ass back might be an issue even if the A10 manages to limp back to base, as the unfortunate A10 pilot, who had his plane blown all over the desert but still managed to land in less than one piece during the Gulf War. Now, I'm not entirely sure he litterally lost his ass over the desert, but I have a feeling he lost part of his lunch... one way or the other (yes, that was a pun).
But seriously - the A10 is one hell of a plane; I read somewhere, that if a pilot wanted to, he could probably take out any of the american aircraft carriers with the canon alone (provided he managed to get close enough to hit it obviously). Any truth to that?
What do you think about [your choice here]? Is [your choice here] the best way to do [your choice here], or would [your choice here] be a better way to accomplish [your choice here]? How does your wife feel about [your choice here]? Does she even care? While on the subject, what is your favorite [your choice here]? What [your choice here] is the worst? And what [your choice here] is [your choice here]?
Last but not least - is "little wife night" and "wife night" exist outside of Denmark, and if so - what nights do you practice this?
Actually it's not just a troll; it's an interesting, insightful, flambaiting troll (according to the moderation).
Actually it wasn't meant as a troll, but a twist on the parent posts argument, that Korea was the backwater swamp... aparently that particular twist is rather close to home judging by the moderations and replies:-)
You could say "Why doesn't do so much more!"
Which is excactly what I did, but some people (none mentioned, none forgotten) aparently get their panties in a twist when their own country is the target of the pointy end of the stick.
As for the backbone, have a look at shysters reply:-)
At the risk of sounding like an insensitive racist jerk, what, exactly, has the US contributed positively to the net? 85% of the spam _I_ get continues to be from the US and they have effectively made a shambles out of the internet (witness DMCA, SSSCA (or whatever it's called today etc). We're not talking about a Nigeria and it's 419 scams, we're talking about a country that has the resources and ability to be doing a lot more than it currently is.
Or is it something completly different, when it's the US that's the troublemaker?
"Hell, the 64-bit chips haven't even come out yet."
Now, you may be referring to 64-bit x86 chips, but that is not implied.
Just to correct your statemet, here's a small list of some 64-bit CPUs:
Digital/Compaq Alpha Intel Itanium (well, I'm not entirely sure if it's available) PA-RISC SUN Sparc SUN Blade AIX IBM Power 4 Power G4 IBM AS/400 (and many other in the AS-series)
I'm not entirely sure about all of these though, so if some of them aren't 64-bit, please correct me.
There's an urban legend or true story about the moon mission. They should bring the same message to mars.
---
About 1966 or so, a NASA team doing work for the Apollo moon mission took the astronauts near Tuba City. There the terrain of the Navajo Reservation looks very much like the lunar surface. Among all the trucks and large vehicles were two large figures that were dressed in full lunar spacesuits.
Nearby a Navajo sheep herder and his son were watching the strange creatures walk about, occasionally being tended by other NASA personnel. The two Navajo people were noticed and approached by the NASA personnel. Since the man did not know English, his son asked him who the strange creatures were. The NASA people told them that they were just men that were getting ready to go to the moon. The man became very excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts.
The NASA personnel thought this was a great idea so they rustled up a tape recorder. After the man gave them his message, they asked his son to translate. His son would not.
Later, they tried a few more people on the reservation to translate and every person they asked would chuckle and then refuse to translate. Finally, with cash in hand someone translated the message,
"Watch out for these guys, they come to take your land."
Well, the one projector I'm basing my assumptions on, is a small portable Sony SVGA projector weighing in at ~2 kg. I suppose, that if you get a stationary projector, you can probably get a bigger fan for it, since it doesn't really matter, if it weighs 2 or 15 kg.
Obviously one of the things you have to do before spending 2000+ dollars on a projector is test it in the store; basing your buy only on other peoples recomendations isn't really a good idea in my book - not when dealing with that much money.
Getting a projector with decent settings is also a must; being able to set simple stuff like trapezoid and orthogonality is necessary for me, since I'm not a handyman, so any shelf I make for a projector is bound to be off center by a couple of yards;-)
The main problem of watching movies with a projector (in my experience) is the LOUD NOISE MADE BY THE FAN!
The problem is that the lamp needs to be cooled by a lot of air, but the projectors enclosure only allows a very small fan, maybe 40 mm, to feed the air, so it has to run at unbelievable speeds.
I've been considdering getting a nice XGA projector myself, ever since I tried using one to project a 135" image onto my living room wall, but I keep seeing two problems:
1) The price; but that can be overcome by saving up for it. 2) The noise. I've been considdering building some kind of airduct for it, using a large low/no noise fan (120 mm) to feed the airflow from outside my apartment; I just need to figure out how much air the small fan is able to move, so that I can replicate that.
Re:Heres the post everyone should read first
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 1, Offtopic
Suggestion: Do a diff on the original post and mine... then look up humour in the dictionary.
Re:Heres the post everyone should read first
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 1
IE is faster, Mozilla can't beat IE. Besides IE has won, it's too late, so the Mozilla team should just give up. Not to mention that Opera has done it all first, Mozilla is just copying them. But that's probably because Opera is better than Mozilla and IE because its faster. Then there's the problem that Mozilla/Netscape can't render certain pages. Like I said earlier, Mozilla is bloated and slow.
And after having done that for a couple of weeks, you now have a workspace populated with only the resistant (and potentialy very lethal) microbes, and since they have no competition, as you gratiously killed them off, they are free to multiply and multiply until they are amassed in big enough numbers to scare off a 600' giant entirely made up of white blood cells.
Think twice before using stuff like that. You might just set yourself up for death by cleanliness.
I hate being skewered, so I'll attempt to show why it's a bad thing.
To you and me, 2,000 US$ may be a somewhat trivial amount of money, but not everybody is that lucky. I'm from a country, with free public health care (it's alot better than the US version, but then again, that's not a difficult accomplishment), so if my doctor wanted to test me for that gene, it wouldn't cost me a dime (other than the taxes I pay anyway).
Now, what about the person in some poverished nation, to whom 2,000 US$ is more than a years salary? Should we just ignore his/her troubles, because (s)he is born in another country and is less wealthy than you and I? Hell, what about people from low income families in the US, who can't afford such tests and whos HMO doesn't cover gene-testing?
Do we have a moral obligation to help the people less fortunate than ourselves, or are we only supposed to care for ourselves, our friends and family?
What price do you want to put on a human life? 500$? 2,000$? What is a reasonable price to demand for preventing a persons death, which is basically what it comes down to? Should Joe Suit at ACME INC decide if you live or die tomorrow on a cost/benefit decision?
These questions don't just apply to the patent on the breast cancer gene, but to virtually all patents on medicine and tests used for diagnosing and treating debillitating and/or life threatening diseases. The drugs against HIV and AIDS are very good examples of this; yes - it costs a bundle to develop these drugs, but why should the price for this development be paid for by the countries who can afford it, so the price of the medicines are kept at production cost only? Maybe even dispenced for free?
In 2000, the US poured a lot of money into the federal support for education, job training, crime prevention and environmental protection. Around 97 billion dollars. 97,000,000,000 dollars*. Of course it spent 292 billion dollars on the military that very same year. It will be spending almost 400 billion dollars on the military in 2003.
Now maybe, just maybe, some of that money could be used to help mankind, instead of oppressing it? Yes, I know, "we're not an oppressive regime", but if that was the case, then why on earth would someone want to smash a couple of airliners into some "symbolic" buildings in the US? It would appear to me, that not everyone has the same idea as to what makes an oppressive regime as you
Maybe if the US spent some money on doing good for all of mankind, those wingnuts, of whom the US have its own share, wouldn't be as interested in blowing your stuff up.
I have failed to show, "that the information would get into the public domain sooner by your alternative method of spurring research", but then again, as things are right now, the information for detecting the breast cancer gene isn't in public domain, 'cause last I checked, I had to pay royalties to the company - that's not public domain - that's called taxing and highway robbery.
No, I cannot show, that my ideas are better than the current ones, but that wasn't my point; my point was and still is to spurr a debate about the current patent situation, and at that I have failed (even though my original post was modded up to 5).
Some say, that you can't just bring out the bad examples and debate on those, but I think you can. Raise the lowest common denominator, and everybody gains from it. Debating the well being of a populations income by ignoring the people living below the "poverty border" (as the UN so aptly calls it) does noone any good (except the people who have no interest in helping anyone but themselves), and as such we need to have a debate on the merrits of not the patents themselves, but on which things should be patentable and which things should be funded by nations as a whole and owned by everyone.
*Damnit - I can't find the figures to support that claim.
Slashdot Mirror
"There are many legitimate uses for CD burners. However, experience has shown illegitimate uses as well."
... wow ... how much time did they spend comming up with that.
Let's replace the piracy issue with something else:
"There are many legitimate uses for cars. However, experience has shown illegitimate uses as well."
"There are many legitimate uses for back packs. However, experience has shown illegitimate uses as well."
"There are many legitimate uses for knives. However, experience has shown illegitimate uses as well."
"There are many legitimate uses for money. However, experience has shown illegitimate uses as well."
I'm rather impressed with their ability to find illegitimate uses for CD burners
"-- I feel better now. Thanks for asking."
You're quite welcome.
For the Spy in the Sky, New Eyes
By IAN AUSTEN
FLYING in his helicopter, Sgt. Frank Sheer of the Orange County Sheriff's Department in Southern California can be literally miles from the action. But that does not mean that he and his co-pilot do not know what's going on. In fact, Sergeant Sheer says they often have a clearer picture of a crime scene than the officers who are there.
Advertisement
"We'll be tracking a suspect on a hillside from the helicopter," said Sergeant
Sheer, the chief pilot in the Orange County force, "and the deputies climbing up it will be saying to us, `There's nobody here.' We've actually had them step on a guy who pulled up a bush for cover."
It's not just having a bird's-eye view that gives Sergeant Sheer and many other airborne police officers, rescue workers, military personnel, and television news and movie crews almost paranormal vision. Nor is it simply advances in optics and cameras. Ultimately they all rely on complex camera stabilization systems that mix mechanical and electronic technologies to produce steady images, even at high magnification, from inherently unsteady craft like helicopters and boats.
When officers pursued O. J. Simpson along the freeways of Los Angeles eight years ago, a covey of police and television news helicopters tracked him with stabilized cameras hanging at the sides in their distinctive ball-shaped pods. But most helicopter surveillance is not that dramatic. If the Orange County Sheriff's Department needs a car discreetly followed, Sergeant Sheer can keep tabs on it from 3,000 feet up and a considerable distance behind -- a position that would leave most motorists unaware there was a helicopter around, let alone watching them.
New systems built around all-electronic motion-sensing technologies are so stable that only the horizon and haze limit how far away observers can be.
The use of airborne stabilized cameras to create films or follow athletes in action attracts little controversy. Nor does anyone dispute that the systems allow police officers to capture criminals or rescue people. Some privacy advocates, however, are concerned that the recent proliferation of airborne cameras and the growing capabilities of new systems may mean that anyone who steps outside may unknowingly be a target of an aerial eye. Outdoors, there may no longer be any place to hide.
"Because technology affords police what amounts to superhuman vision, that doesn't mean we lose all expectations of privacy," said Barry Steinhardt, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's program on technology and liberty. "There are lots of innocent people who are going to have their privacy invaded -- observed naked in their backyard sunbathing from far away."
There is a long history of efforts to produce steady airborne pictures. But in the early years, the results were for the most part dismal.
Steven Poster, the president of the American Society of Cinematographers, recalls his first attempt at photography from a helicopter, in the late 1960's. "It was an Illinois State Fair, and the stabilization came from a rope tied around me to the helicopter," Mr. Poster recalled. "I quickly realized that this was not a very good system."
While more sophisticated systems existed back then, they did not differ much from Mr. Poster's rope. Known as side mounts, they generally relied on bungee cords and the user's body to isolate the camera.
By the 1980's Mr. Poster was a director of photography for feature films and television advertisements, and he had found an answer to his aerial photography problems with a system made by Wescam, a company now based in Burlington, Ontario.
"It's the best way to stabilize a camera," said Mr. Poster, who has used the system in films like "Stuart Little 2," which is to be released this summer.
The Wescam system used by Mr. Poster's film crews is remarkably similar to the original Wescam developed in the early 1960's by a Canadian subsidiary of Westinghouse as a battlefield surveillance tool for the Canadian military. (Wescam is short for Westinghouse camera.)
Eliminating the vibration from the helicopter was the first step and the easy part. The Wescam ball is attached to a helicopter or airplane through a shock absorber that uses springs and other damping materials. "It is tuned for the natural frequencies of helicopters," said Mark Chamberlain, a mechanical engineer who is president and chief executive of Wescam.
But eliminating the vibration does nothing to limit three other kinds of movement by the camera: pitch (plunging up and down), yaw (rotating around a vertical axis) and roll (the side-to-side rotation that creates a moving horizon).
To deal with these kinds of movements, inventors of the original Wescam turned to large gyroscopes, which create inertia. It is like strapping a large boulder to the camera to stabilize it, yet without all the weight that a boulder would add.
Inside the camera ball are three gyros oriented to offset each of the three types of unwanted motion. Motors attached to the camera mount allow an operator within the helicopter to view images from the camera on a video monitor and point the camera as needed.
The gyro stabilization system proved so steady that it has not significantly changed over the last three decades. But the system has one significant drawback: the gyros require frequent maintenance.
That is not a problem for the movie industry, which rents the camera systems for short periods. (Other companies, including Gyron Systems International, Tyler Camera Systems and Spacecam Systems, also offer stabilized motion picture cameras.) But the need for maintenance made the systems largely impractical for full-time use by police, the military and television stations.
After Mr. Chamberlain led a management buyout in 1987 of the engineering company that had come to control the Wescam technology, he turned its attention to introducing a technology that was more robust.
Instead of providing stability, its three gyros wobble slightly when the rig changes directions. Sensors measure the wobbling and feed the data to microprocessors that in turn use high-speed electric motors to move the camera and offset the unwanted motion.
he second-generation technology -- what Mr. Chamberlain calls a sense- and-react system -- has only about half the stability of the original Wescam, so it cannot be used with lenses with very high magnification. But for the Orange County Sheriff's Department, it is unquestionably an improvement over using hand-held binoculars from a helicopter.
"At 1,500 feet we're not reading license plates, but we can tell if it's a man or a woman on the ground," Sergeant Sheer said.
Advertisement
Like many systems used by police forces, one of the two Wescam systems
owned by Orange County has a night vision camera that creates images by capturing the infrared radiation emitted by warm objects, including people.
But a United States Supreme Court ruling last June has forced the Orange County Sheriff's Department and other police forces to change the way they use those thermal imaging cameras. The court said that the police could not train thermal imaging cameras on private homes without a warrant.
Mr. Steinhardt of the A.C.L.U. said he would like to see legislators, rather than the courts, come up with specific rules for police use of helicopter camera systems. The A.C.L.U. does not oppose the use of cameras "under the rare circumstance that the police might be legitimately in pursuit of a hot suspect," he said.
"But in the end, that's not how it's going to be used," he added. "It's going to be used in ordinary law enforcement, and that's very different."
It is also being used from ever greater distances. Four years ago Wescam introduced a third stabilization system that combines the reliability of cameras like those used by the Orange County Sheriff's Department while offering even greater stability than the original system. It replaces the spinning mechanical gyroscopes with fiber-optic gyros, which use bursts of laser light to calculate movements by the camera system in each direction.
Once measured, the movement is also offset with a new technology known as magnetic torque motors that can apply a force in a specific direction but allow free movement in all other directions.
Not only is the new system much faster, said Steven Tritchew, Wescam's chief technology officer, but it will also provide a steady image with the magnification of "any lens being made." Practically speaking, atmospheric haze and, ultimately, the impossibility of seeing beyond the horizon are the only limits on how far it can see. "We call it the ground-based Hubbell -- we can see a long way," Mr. Chamberlain said.
Certainly Lt. Keith Howland, a mission commander and tactical coordinatorbased at the Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Me., noticed a big difference after an old system in his P-3 Orion surveillance airplane was replaced by a turret with Wescam's new technology about a year ago. "You wouldn't even place them in the same universe," he said.
While on patrol, Lieutenant Howland said, he can watch events on the ground "well outside of visible range."
Like many civilian cameras, the Wescam on the P-3 can be aimed by punching in Global Positioning System coordinates. Software allows it to track moving objects on the ground more or less automatically.
While his aircraft's camera system cannot match the broad sweep of surveillance satellites, Lieutenant Howland said that it had many other advantages. "Basically we can be in real time on a target, see things at the moment they happen, and report it," he said. "It's live video versus a picture."
The systems can be costly, with the most advanced models costing as much as $650,000. But Wescam plans gradually to introduce variations on the new technology into all its markets, potentially giving police departments the same farsightedness. (The Raytheon Company recently introduced a fiber-optic gyro-stabilization system of its own. FLIR Systems of Portland, Ore., is also among the companies that make stabilization systems for police and military use.)
Mr. Chamberlain suggested that the most advanced technology might next go to an even more demanding customer than a police department chasing criminals or a military unit tracking terrorists: the broadcast news industry.
"From a pure image point of view, the military want uninterrupted imagery," he said, "but if it bounces a little bit once in a while or there's a little bit of fuzz on it from interference for a second or two, that's O.K. In the broadcast industry, if it jiggles a little bit or has a bit of fuzz when someone's crossing the finish line, well, you might not get invited back."
"the U.S. was the first of all colonial states to fight and win independence from a european monarchy?"
... so the fact that Sweden was under Danish rule from 1397 to 1521, and then broke free doesn't count, because Sweden wasn't a colony? I see.
...
Ahh
What next? Claims that the US is the oldest democracy, when it's a republic? Or that it is the biggest "democracy", even though such countries as India and Malaysia are far bigger?
*sigh*
"it's early history is truely significant"
So? The same can be said of Denmark. Up until the late 1500s, early 1600s, Denmark was one the foremost countries in Europe with regards to naval power and supremacy. Now it's just a puny little country with some of the highest taxes in the world. In comparison, the US was once regarded as a guardian of democracy and freedom, but that was a loong time ago - and it's not getting better, I'm sad to say.
So to get back to the point - why choose July 4th as "independence day"? I have no idea - why not pick something more symbolic; what day was MSFT introduced on the stockmarket? What day was Microsoft founded? What day was Windows introduced? What day did Linus start working on Linux?
Tying it to a national independence day (no matter what nation) will only deter the participation of nationalists across the world "because my country is MUCH better than the other countries - I know because I was born in THIS country and that makes it better than the piece of land 10 yards away!!!".
Of course if what you want is to promote the use of Windows, be sure to place Windependence Day on such a day
Oh wait - too late.
And placing Tux in an Uncle Sam hat? Nich touch. Who arranged this? Microsofts PR-department?
Just out of curiosity, how do you debug an applet, that uses network-access?
.101, where you have your needed variables etc.
An applet can only access the server it was loaded from (ie. 192.168.1.101). If you run if from your workstation (ie 192.168.1.102) as I assume you would when debugging it, you can't get it working, as it won't allow you to access
"Using the right tool for the job you aren't"
Visual Studio != the_right_tool
It might be, if I was targeting a pure windows-environment and ms' jvm, but it's not in this case.
Also, when run-time-testing on say a FreeBSD workstation, just how the devil do you intend to pop into VS?
Granted, I haven't put much effort into VS for java, for two reasons:
1) I was far more comfortable with another IDE
2) It seemed to be working against me, in that some times it wouldn't allow me to do things my way. I can't remember the details, but I remember one specific instance, where it would claim to compile the file, but the class-file not reflecting the changes I had made. Deleting the class-file and trying again did not cure the problem. I think this was the specific reason I dropped it.
As mentioned in a post above this one, it works because programmers target the MS JVM.
I'm personally working on an applet that CANNOT target that JVM for several reasons:
1) MS' JVM has no support for PNG. The applet is using a multitude of images, and they're too large to be in GIF; it runs off a webserver with a total of 256 KB storage, and the images take up 258 KB as max compressed GIF.
2) Making network-connections is a pain in the ass with MS' JVM, and due to time constraints, this was the main reason we dumped the MS JVM.
3) Things that work in Suns JVM doesn't always work in MS' JVM - even when targeting the same version. Using selective applet loading, you can work around this, but not when you only have 256 KB to play around with.
4) Tracking bugs in MS' JVM is also a pain, since it doesn't give you the line-number in stackTrace(). This is not a problem, when you're only working with small methods, but when you are working with complicated methods, it gets old really fast, to the point of litterally hurling a mouse through the office, and nearly incapacitating a PHB.
5) It is possible to crash IE when using MS' JVM. I'm not entirely sure how or why, since the applet worked flawlessly when using Suns JVM and this was around the time we dumped MS' JVM. It wasn't a local problem - it happened on every single machine we tried it on.
Yes, this is an applet that is to be sold to companies, and yes - we WILL be shipping it with the current JVMs for all platforms we can think of.
Look on the bright side: ...
... can't think of a bright side. Btw - what the hell is a "pink pine apple"?
-
damn
Oh - and if you're looking for a one night stand, I'm not your guy.
"A self-contained package, Phalanx automatically carries out functions usually performed by multiple systems -- including search, detection, threat evaluation, tracking, engagement, and kill assessment."
;-)
:-)
Well, if a rogue pilot decides to go banzai agains an acc, the Phalanx doesn't know it's a hostile target, since it would be a US plane (and if they get shot down just for getting close, it'd kinda defeat the purpose of an acc)
"The avenger could probbably put a few holes in the hull of a carrier, but it has no chance of sinking it"
Why not? Let's just assume for a second, that the acc won't defend itself, wouldn't a couple of 2 second burst right below the waterline wreak havoc with the balance of the ship?
If not (and again assuming a no defence policy), then what kind of ship would it be able to sink? Anything smaller than a row boat obviously, but I'm thinking warships here
Why yes, I do own an A10 and all of us are quite insane; why do you ask?
"A mil or two for a turbofan, or serious $$$ for a whole plane, plus getting the pilot's ass back..."
... one way or the other (yes, that was a pun).
Well, getting the pilots ass back might be an issue even if the A10 manages to limp back to base, as the unfortunate A10 pilot, who had his plane blown all over the desert but still managed to land in less than one piece during the Gulf War. Now, I'm not entirely sure he litterally lost his ass over the desert, but I have a feeling he lost part of his lunch
But seriously - the A10 is one hell of a plane; I read somewhere, that if a pilot wanted to, he could probably take out any of the american aircraft carriers with the canon alone (provided he managed to get close enough to hit it obviously). Any truth to that?
*dread*
What do you think about [your choice here]? Is [your choice here] the best way to do [your choice here], or would [your choice here] be a better way to accomplish [your choice here]? How does your wife feel about [your choice here]? Does she even care? While on the subject, what is your favorite [your choice here]? What [your choice here] is the worst? And what [your choice here] is [your choice here]?
Last but not least - is "little wife night" and "wife night" exist outside of Denmark, and if so - what nights do you practice this?
Actually it's not just a troll; it's an interesting, insightful, flambaiting troll (according to the moderation).
... aparently that particular twist is rather close to home judging by the moderations and replies :-)
:-)
Actually it wasn't meant as a troll, but a twist on the parent posts argument, that Korea was the backwater swamp
You could say "Why doesn't do so much more!"
Which is excactly what I did, but some people (none mentioned, none forgotten) aparently get their panties in a twist when their own country is the target of the pointy end of the stick.
As for the backbone, have a look at shysters reply
At the risk of sounding like an insensitive racist jerk, what, exactly, has the US contributed positively to the net? 85% of the spam _I_ get continues to be from the US and they have effectively made a shambles out of the internet (witness DMCA, SSSCA (or whatever it's called today etc). We're not talking about a Nigeria and it's 419 scams, we're talking about a country that has the resources and ability to be doing a lot more than it currently is.
Or is it something completly different, when it's the US that's the troublemaker?
"Hell, the 64-bit chips haven't even come out yet."
Now, you may be referring to 64-bit x86 chips, but that is not implied.
Just to correct your statemet, here's a small list of some 64-bit CPUs:
Digital/Compaq Alpha
Intel Itanium (well, I'm not entirely sure if it's available)
PA-RISC
SUN Sparc
SUN Blade
AIX
IBM Power 4
Power G4
IBM AS/400 (and many other in the AS-series)
I'm not entirely sure about all of these though, so if some of them aren't 64-bit, please correct me.
There's an urban legend or true story about the moon mission. They should bring the same message to mars.
---
About 1966 or so, a NASA team doing work for the Apollo moon mission took the astronauts near Tuba City. There the terrain of the Navajo Reservation looks very much like the lunar surface. Among all the trucks and large vehicles were two large figures that were dressed in full lunar spacesuits.
Nearby a Navajo sheep herder and his son were watching the strange creatures walk about, occasionally being tended by other NASA personnel. The two Navajo people were noticed and approached by the NASA personnel. Since the man did not know English, his son asked him who the strange creatures were. The NASA people told them that they were just men that were getting ready to go to the moon. The man became very excited and asked if he could send a message to the moon with the astronauts.
The NASA personnel thought this was a great idea so they rustled up a tape recorder. After the man gave them his message, they asked his son to translate. His son would not.
Later, they tried a few more people on the reservation to translate and every person they asked would chuckle and then refuse to translate. Finally, with cash in hand someone translated the message,
"Watch out for these guys, they come to take your land."
Well, the one projector I'm basing my assumptions on, is a small portable Sony SVGA projector weighing in at ~2 kg. I suppose, that if you get a stationary projector, you can probably get a bigger fan for it, since it doesn't really matter, if it weighs 2 or 15 kg.
;-)
Obviously one of the things you have to do before spending 2000+ dollars on a projector is test it in the store; basing your buy only on other peoples recomendations isn't really a good idea in my book - not when dealing with that much money.
Getting a projector with decent settings is also a must; being able to set simple stuff like trapezoid and orthogonality is necessary for me, since I'm not a handyman, so any shelf I make for a projector is bound to be off center by a couple of yards
The main problem of watching movies with a projector (in my experience) is the LOUD NOISE MADE BY THE FAN!
The problem is that the lamp needs to be cooled by a lot of air, but the projectors enclosure only allows a very small fan, maybe 40 mm, to feed the air, so it has to run at unbelievable speeds.
I've been considdering getting a nice XGA projector myself, ever since I tried using one to project a 135" image onto my living room wall, but I keep seeing two problems:
1) The price; but that can be overcome by saving up for it.
2) The noise. I've been considdering building some kind of airduct for it, using a large low/no noise fan (120 mm) to feed the airflow from outside my apartment; I just need to figure out how much air the small fan is able to move, so that I can replicate that.
Suggestion: ... then look up humour in the dictionary.
Do a diff on the original post and mine
IE is faster, Mozilla can't beat IE. Besides IE has won, it's too late, so the Mozilla team should just give up. Not to mention that Opera has done it all first, Mozilla is just copying them. But that's probably because Opera is better than Mozilla and IE because its faster. Then there's the problem that Mozilla/Netscape can't render certain pages. Like I said earlier, Mozilla is bloated and slow.
Neitzsche? Nope - he doesn't exist in any of my history books.
Aww man - I think I just woke my upstairs neighbour (it's 2:50 AM here) laughing out loud!
Yeah, it's off topic, but at least I'm willing to transfer some of my karma to the parent!
And after having done that for a couple of weeks, you now have a workspace populated with only the resistant (and potentialy very lethal) microbes, and since they have no competition, as you gratiously killed them off, they are free to multiply and multiply until they are amassed in big enough numbers to scare off a 600' giant entirely made up of white blood cells.
Think twice before using stuff like that. You might just set yourself up for death by cleanliness.
Maybe I should have read a bit more on that site.
I hate being skewered, so I'll attempt to show why it's a bad thing.
To you and me, 2,000 US$ may be a somewhat trivial amount of money, but not everybody is that lucky. I'm from a country, with free public health care (it's alot better than the US version, but then again, that's not a difficult accomplishment), so if my doctor wanted to test me for that gene, it wouldn't cost me a dime (other than the taxes I pay anyway).
Now, what about the person in some poverished nation, to whom 2,000 US$ is more than a years salary? Should we just ignore his/her troubles, because (s)he is born in another country and is less wealthy than you and I? Hell, what about people from low income families in the US, who can't afford such tests and whos HMO doesn't cover gene-testing?
Do we have a moral obligation to help the people less fortunate than ourselves, or are we only supposed to care for ourselves, our friends and family?
What price do you want to put on a human life? 500$? 2,000$? What is a reasonable price to demand for preventing a persons death, which is basically what it comes down to? Should Joe Suit at ACME INC decide if you live or die tomorrow on a cost/benefit decision?
These questions don't just apply to the patent on the breast cancer gene, but to virtually all patents on medicine and tests used for diagnosing and treating debillitating and/or life threatening diseases. The drugs against HIV and AIDS are very good examples of this; yes - it costs a bundle to develop these drugs, but why should the price for this development be paid for by the countries who can afford it, so the price of the medicines are kept at production cost only? Maybe even dispenced for free?
In 2000, the US poured a lot of money into the federal support for education, job training, crime prevention and environmental protection. Around 97 billion dollars. 97,000,000,000 dollars*. Of course it spent 292 billion dollars on the military that very same year. It will be spending almost 400 billion dollars on the military in 2003.
Now maybe, just maybe, some of that money could be used to help mankind, instead of oppressing it? Yes, I know, "we're not an oppressive regime", but if that was the case, then why on earth would someone want to smash a couple of airliners into some "symbolic" buildings in the US? It would appear to me, that not everyone has the same idea as to what makes an oppressive regime as you
Maybe if the US spent some money on doing good for all of mankind, those wingnuts, of whom the US have its own share, wouldn't be as interested in blowing your stuff up.
I have failed to show, "that the information would get into the public domain sooner by your alternative method of spurring research", but then again, as things are right now, the information for detecting the breast cancer gene isn't in public domain, 'cause last I checked, I had to pay royalties to the company - that's not public domain - that's called taxing and highway robbery.
No, I cannot show, that my ideas are better than the current ones, but that wasn't my point; my point was and still is to spurr a debate about the current patent situation, and at that I have failed (even though my original post was modded up to 5).
Some say, that you can't just bring out the bad examples and debate on those, but I think you can. Raise the lowest common denominator, and everybody gains from it. Debating the well being of a populations income by ignoring the people living below the "poverty border" (as the UN so aptly calls it) does noone any good (except the people who have no interest in helping anyone but themselves), and as such we need to have a debate on the merrits of not the patents themselves, but on which things should be patentable and which things should be funded by nations as a whole and owned by everyone.
*Damnit - I can't find the figures to support that claim.