Actually it was a contrail that just looked strange. But to answer your questions. Why an SLBM? A Tomahawk wouldn't make that type of a contrail. The boost phase is short. An SM2 or SM3 would have flown a lot faster than shown in the video. So it would have had to be a large rocket. The only large rocket the Navy has that would have looked like that is an SLBM. The Navy doesn't have any surface ships that can launch and SLBM so it would be sub launched. Also any ordinary test would have taken place on a closed range.
What is scary here is that it took so long to get the answer and I am not sure we have an answer yet as much as a most likely answer.
One would think that the Military and the FAA could have just told us that it was FLT xxx from y flying to x and was at FLxx.
That is pretty much it in a nutshell. I am all for getting our laws back in order as far as privacy is concerned. I want to see the courts rule that they must have a court order to plant a GPS device. But at no time would I ever believe that someone in South America is plotting to kill me or that I could pay someone to prevent it. That is narcissistic paranoia.
Out to get his money yes. But a complex conspiracy involving people in another country that are trying to kill you? Or in this case. "The couple are said to have tricked the composer into believing that, while investigating the virus, they had found evidence that his life was in danger – concocting a story that the virus had been tracked to a hard drive in Honduras, and that evidence had been found that the composer's life was in danger.""
More and more I feel that people who are that paranoid and quick to believe conspiracies have an extrem form of narcism. They actually believe that the are important enough to worth that much effort. They think the world is out to get them in fact most the world doesn't even know they are here.
ICBM always implies ground launched or always has. The Trident in every reference I have ever seen was classified as an SLBM. Do you have a reference where it is defined as an ICBM? fas.org classifies it as an SLBM.
A new Ensign? This is far worse than running a ship aground. If this was a launch with out a NOTAM filed this could end up with jail time. One would think that not only would the check box be for filing it but that it was also issued before you press the big red button.
You left out the last option that gets the navy at least a little off the hook.
It was a contrail of an bizjet or airliner. In which case NORAD and the FAA are incompetent because that plane would have had to be in IFR air space and probably coming in from outside the US territorial limit. The FAA and NORAD should have the data to say that was FLT xxx and it was at FLx at that time heading to y from z. If they can not then the US really had no real air defense at all. From the really poor quality video I can tell you that it wasn't an SM-2 because it was way too slow. I live near the Cape in Florida so I have seen a lot of launches. That contrail was also not from a Delta 4 or Atlas. It does look a lot like a large solid fuel booster to me but web video really does suck.
"Are all SLBM's implicitly intercontinental? You make a good point, but clearly you know more about this than most of us. I have no idea if most sub-launched missiles have that kind of range or not." They do but they do not fly from continent to continent they fly from the sea. Yes it is a nit picky distinction but military terms like scientific and most other technical terms are extremely specific. Just as it would be wrong to call a spider an insect. I don't trust the knowledge of anyone that talks about a sub launching an ICBM.
Has anyone looked at the NOTAMS for that day? If it was a government launch then a NOTAM must have been filed to clear the air space. They would not risk an accident that would take out an airliner full of people.
I tried to look but found nothing listed. As to a demonstration that the US can launch ballistic missiles from a sub... Well yea that has been proven for about the last 50 years. And you can bet your bottom dollar that you do not just pop off long range missile with out telling Russia and China that you are going to do it! That could be bad... BTW Subs do not launch intercontinental ballistic missiles "ICBMs". They launch Sub launched ballistic missiles "SLBMs"
At this point the fact that nobody is saying anything and it is getting so little press really scares the daylights out of me.
Speed is really a minor issue. It only needs to be as fast as flipping a page for a reader. Color and IMHO resolution is a major issue. I subscribe to Motorcyclist, Cycle World, Rider, and Classic Motorcycle. They are about the only magazines I still read. Without high resolution color screens they are not going to be on an Ereader. Same for Car and Driver, Road and Track, Popular Science and so on.
People cloned the PC because they could make money off them. The same reason they cloned the Apple II. The Atari ST was cloneable but it wasn't worth cloning. They where too inexpensive to be worth the effort. Maybe you don't remember but IBM sued many people for coping the BIOS and making compatables. It Compaq had to create a team to make a clean room copy of the BIOS. Phoenix later did the same and I think they both ended up in court over it. As I said the Myth of the Open PC. Their was no standard to follow and no easy way to make a clone. It was only the huge marketing power of IBM that made it worth doing and the pressure IBM was facing from the US government for antitrust that allowed it. IBM even tried to close the PC after the fact with the PS/2. Now their you could argue that it was Open vs closed.
I guess I do not see the logic in your statement. Isn't it logical to prevent repeat attacks using the same method. What you saying is that it is like closing the barn door aft the horses have bolted. Well if their are still horses in the barn isn't it dumb to keep leaving the door open? Plus how often do you take a toner cartage with you on a plane? It is easy to and popular to complain about the TSA regs and they are a huge pain but let's be honest. People did try to use printer cartages for a terrorist attack. Do you have a better solution to prevent a repeat attack?
But that is so not right. The PC really wasn't more open at all. People don't know what open really means. The PC was at best documented and people could copy it but it wasn't more open. The Amgia and the ST both where just as well documented. The ST was probably just as as easy to clone as the PC "It used GEM for goodness sakes". It had nothing to do with open vs closed at all. It all had to do with Marketing. That is all. Now the Mac at that time was about as closed you could get as far as hardware goes but that was post Woz Apple way. What it came down too was the illusion that the ST and the Amiga where "game machines" or "home computers". The PC had the advantage that a lot of big companies had a relationship with IBM. And that lock in back in the day was a humdinger. To give you an example. A hospital I worked with wanted to bring in desktop publishing. First I suggested that they get a Mac. Not a chance they where an IBM shop. Okay they picked out an IBM laser printer that they wanted to use along with the a Linotype typesetter. The IBM laser printer used and ISA interface card and not a standard connection. This was when the PS/2 line was just out. So they had to run Pagemaker on windows on a 8086 or a 286 and not a 386!. Why? Because that was the only way to use the IBM laser printer on an IBM PC at that time! The only 386 that was around Microchannel and IBM didn't have a laser printer that would work with it. Their layout artist used the Very expensive PC and very expensive typesetter to create fonts. She would then use wax just like the old days and pasted up the documents! It had nothing to do with open vs closed. That is just a modern myth. It was 100% marketing.
The Mac also had a full graphics API and I am pretty sure that the ST did as well. I never worked on the ST just the Amiga, PC, Mac, and C64. So all the more advanced machines had a full graphics API while the PC was stuck with MS-DOS and software trying to figure out what graphics card was installed and where the video ram was located and what you could and could not do with it. Heck the PC was so bad that you couldn't even use the OS to read and write to the serial port over 300 baud! The PC was only more open in that there was nothing to it and it was easy to copy. After Pheonix reverse engineered the bios you could get a PC compatible that may or may not run your software. It actually took a while before they got the compatibility down and programers learned what they could and could not do an have the software work on most machines. There was no real standard back then to be honest. Compatibility at that time was so hit and miss that all the magazines more or less came up with a test. If a machine would run Lotus 123 and Microsoft Flightsimulator it was PC compatible. Also you couldn't be 100% sure that a card would work in every machine. The ISA buss had a lot of wiggle room in the speck. It was supposed to run at clock speed but that caused no end to problems so later machines clocked it at 6, 8, or 12 MHZ.
"That was almost a necessity, however, as you don't have all kinds of OS APIs to isolate hardware. If you wanted to draw a line on the screen you just edited the video RAM, or sent IO calls to the video chipset. That is, unless you wanted to write your whole app in BASIC or whatever the vendor supplied in ROM." Ummm No you didn't. The Amiga and ST actually had a fully documented API and it included all sorts of things like blitter objects, sprites, playfields and draw line at least on the Amiga side I didn't code on the ST. Only on that piece of festering dung called a PC did you have to write to the video RAM to do something as simple as draw a line. For the Apple, Commodore, and Atari bits you are correct. For the more advanced systems at least the Amiga actually had a real OS. But even then you really had only a single PC vendor. It was Microsoft and Intel. Plus what real benifit did you get with that openness at the time. The Amiga 1000 was about $1000 less than an AT. It was faster, had better graphics, sound, and a real OS for the price as well. It all came down to Lotus, WordPerfect, and Dbase as well as the Borland development tools. What it really came down to was the illusion that the PC was serious when Commodore and Atari where "home computers". I even remember a very smart friend of mine telling me that he thought that the plain green screen was more professorial looking than Amiga, ST, or Mac OS. I wonder what he would have thought of XP if he had lived. It is all about the marketing.
When Windows 1.0 came out you had a lot of options. The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner. It was much more advanced and had real multitasking, stereo sound, and advanced graphics. The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI. Better doesn't all ways win. People stuck with DOS because it ran Lotus 123 and DBase, and WordPerfect. People used PCs to develop vertical applications because you could use TurboPascal,TurboC , TurboBasic, and QuickBasic. You also had a lot of code like Borlands TurboEditor Toolbox, DatabaseToolbox, and Communications Toolbox. The other reason was marketing and Press coverage. The magazines of the day couldn't afford to offend the PC market. Would you rather get ad revenue from 30 PC makers or Commodore, Atari, and Apple? People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then. The Amiga and ST where cheaper and more powerful than the average PC. Commodore and Atari at the time published all the pin outs and software specks needed to do anything you wanted much like Apple did back in the Apple II days.
I do agree people seem to think that Navy.mil or Whitehouse.gov are high security sites. They are for the most part nothing but PR tools. Nothing wrong with PR tools but sites like those do not control the Trident launch codes or anything else major. The big worry is that some idiot used the same password for that site as for a secured system. I swear that letting people pick their own passwords is just a bad idea. One of the first sites I did for my company I had to write our own forum and security using.htaccess. This was a million years ago and frankly there was nothing worth hacking on the message base. I let the users pick their own passwords and user names but I warned them with this text. "Your username and password are case sensitive." Then one day someone wanted me to change their user name and password for them. They set them them to... Case and Sensitive! Grrr. I then wrote a program that generated AOL style passwords using a random list words. I then had to deal with people that took offense to the random passwords!
Actually part of the border looks like it is defined by a river. Some of the rest of it is going through lakes and rivers. Not the easiest border to deal with for sure.
Actually Comcast has lost a lot of viewers this quarter. Scary thing is that their profits have increased! So are extracting more money from fewer people.
Not really anymore. I am in a cable only location. Once I drop cable the networks will know that I am no longer watching by that method. They will see that I am watching by Hulu.
They have the right but that doesn't mean that we have to like it. The reality is that TV used to be free. You put up an antenna and got TV for free. The networks made money by showing commercials. What consumers want is a return to that type of system. We do not want to pay $100 plus dollars for two hundred channels of which we watch 5. This is going to be the new reality and the Networks need to get a grip on it. The Cable TV model is passing. My mother in law lives near Dallas and gets all her TV OVA again. She gets like 30 channels and all the networks for free. Where I live that isn't an option which is too bad so my wife and I are probably just going to drop Cable and watch Hulu. The one channel we really want is CBS for Big Bang Theory but we are willing to stop watching that to save a thousand plus dollars a year. If the other networks want to not have us watch that is their business or lack of.
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Actually it was a contrail that just looked strange.
But to answer your questions.
Why an SLBM?
A Tomahawk wouldn't make that type of a contrail. The boost phase is short.
An SM2 or SM3 would have flown a lot faster than shown in the video.
So it would have had to be a large rocket. The only large rocket the Navy has that would have looked like that is an SLBM.
The Navy doesn't have any surface ships that can launch and SLBM so it would be sub launched.
Also any ordinary test would have taken place on a closed range.
What is scary here is that it took so long to get the answer and I am not sure we have an answer yet as much as a most likely answer.
One would think that the Military and the FAA could have just told us that it was FLT xxx from y flying to x and was at FLxx.
Does the US have any air defense at all?
You forgot that they use a VM image hidden with TrueCrypt and stored on a USB suppository.
That is pretty much it in a nutshell.
I am all for getting our laws back in order as far as privacy is concerned. I want to see the courts rule that they must have a court order to plant a GPS device.
But at no time would I ever believe that someone in South America is plotting to kill me or that I could pay someone to prevent it.
That is narcissistic paranoia.
Out to get his money yes.
But a complex conspiracy involving people in another country that are trying to kill you?
Or in this case.
"The couple are said to have tricked the composer into believing that, while investigating the virus, they had found evidence that his life was in danger – concocting a story that the virus had been tracked to a hard drive in Honduras, and that evidence had been found that the composer's life was in danger.""
More and more I feel that people who are that paranoid and quick to believe conspiracies have an extrem form of narcism. They actually believe that the are important enough to worth that much effort. They think the world is out to get them in fact most the world doesn't even know they are here.
You maybe right but that is the missing killer app for these things IMHO.
ICBM always implies ground launched or always has. The Trident in every reference I have ever seen was classified as an SLBM.
Do you have a reference where it is defined as an ICBM?
fas.org classifies it as an SLBM.
A new Ensign? This is far worse than running a ship aground. If this was a launch with out a NOTAM filed this could end up with jail time. One would think that not only would the check box be for filing it but that it was also issued before you press the big red button.
You left out the last option that gets the navy at least a little off the hook.
It was a contrail of an bizjet or airliner. In which case NORAD and the FAA are incompetent because that plane would have had to be in IFR air space and probably coming in from outside the US territorial limit. The FAA and NORAD should have the data to say that was FLT xxx and it was at FLx at that time heading to y from z.
If they can not then the US really had no real air defense at all.
From the really poor quality video I can tell you that it wasn't an SM-2 because it was way too slow. I live near the Cape in Florida so I have seen a lot of launches. That contrail was also not from a Delta 4 or Atlas. It does look a lot like a large solid fuel booster to me but web video really does suck.
"Are all SLBM's implicitly intercontinental? You make a good point, but clearly you know more about this than most of us. I have no idea if most sub-launched missiles have that kind of range or not."
They do but they do not fly from continent to continent they fly from the sea. Yes it is a nit picky distinction but military terms like scientific and most other technical terms are extremely specific. Just as it would be wrong to call a spider an insect. I don't trust the knowledge of anyone that talks about a sub launching an ICBM.
Has anyone looked at the NOTAMS for that day?
If it was a government launch then a NOTAM must have been filed to clear the air space.
They would not risk an accident that would take out an airliner full of people.
I tried to look but found nothing listed.
As to a demonstration that the US can launch ballistic missiles from a sub... Well yea that has been proven for about the last 50 years. And you can bet your bottom dollar that you do not just pop off long range missile with out telling Russia and China that you are going to do it!
That could be bad...
BTW Subs do not launch intercontinental ballistic missiles "ICBMs". They launch Sub launched ballistic missiles "SLBMs"
At this point the fact that nobody is saying anything and it is getting so little press really scares the daylights out of me.
Slim Pickens rode a bomb not a missile.
This message brought to you by the literal net.
Speed is really a minor issue. It only needs to be as fast as flipping a page for a reader. Color and IMHO resolution is a major issue.
I subscribe to Motorcyclist, Cycle World, Rider, and Classic Motorcycle. They are about the only magazines I still read.
Without high resolution color screens they are not going to be on an Ereader. Same for Car and Driver, Road and Track, Popular Science and so on.
People cloned the PC because they could make money off them. The same reason they cloned the Apple II. The Atari ST was cloneable but it wasn't worth cloning. They where too inexpensive to be worth the effort.
Maybe you don't remember but IBM sued many people for coping the BIOS and making compatables. It Compaq had to create a team to make a clean room copy of the BIOS. Phoenix later did the same and I think they both ended up in court over it.
As I said the Myth of the Open PC. Their was no standard to follow and no easy way to make a clone. It was only the huge marketing power of IBM that made it worth doing and the pressure IBM was facing from the US government for antitrust that allowed it. IBM even tried to close the PC after the fact with the PS/2. Now their you could argue that it was Open vs closed.
I guess I do not see the logic in your statement.
Isn't it logical to prevent repeat attacks using the same method.
What you saying is that it is like closing the barn door aft the horses have bolted. Well if their are still horses in the barn isn't it dumb to keep leaving the door open?
Plus how often do you take a toner cartage with you on a plane?
It is easy to and popular to complain about the TSA regs and they are a huge pain but let's be honest. People did try to use printer cartages for a terrorist attack.
Do you have a better solution to prevent a repeat attack?
"and the powerhouse that IBM was in helping businesses select computers."
And that is pure marketing.
The applications where a driver.
But that is so not right. The PC really wasn't more open at all. People don't know what open really means. The PC was at best documented and people could copy it but it wasn't more open.
The Amgia and the ST both where just as well documented. The ST was probably just as as easy to clone as the PC "It used GEM for goodness sakes".
It had nothing to do with open vs closed at all.
It all had to do with Marketing.
That is all.
Now the Mac at that time was about as closed you could get as far as hardware goes but that was post Woz Apple way.
What it came down too was the illusion that the ST and the Amiga where "game machines" or "home computers". The PC had the advantage that a lot of big companies had a relationship with IBM.
And that lock in back in the day was a humdinger.
To give you an example. A hospital I worked with wanted to bring in desktop publishing. First I suggested that they get a Mac. Not a chance they where an IBM shop.
Okay they picked out an IBM laser printer that they wanted to use along with the a Linotype typesetter.
The IBM laser printer used and ISA interface card and not a standard connection.
This was when the PS/2 line was just out. So they had to run Pagemaker on windows on a 8086 or a 286 and not a 386!.
Why? Because that was the only way to use the IBM laser printer on an IBM PC at that time!
The only 386 that was around Microchannel and IBM didn't have a laser printer that would work with it.
Their layout artist used the Very expensive PC and very expensive typesetter to create fonts. She would then use wax just like the old days and pasted up the documents!
It had nothing to do with open vs closed. That is just a modern myth. It was 100% marketing.
The Mac also had a full graphics API and I am pretty sure that the ST did as well. I never worked on the ST just the Amiga, PC, Mac, and C64.
So all the more advanced machines had a full graphics API while the PC was stuck with MS-DOS and software trying to figure out what graphics card was installed and where the video ram was located and what you could and could not do with it.
Heck the PC was so bad that you couldn't even use the OS to read and write to the serial port over 300 baud!
The PC was only more open in that there was nothing to it and it was easy to copy. After Pheonix reverse engineered the bios you could get a PC compatible that may or may not run your software. It actually took a while before they got the compatibility down and programers learned what they could and could not do an have the software work on most machines. There was no real standard back then to be honest. Compatibility at that time was so hit and miss that all the magazines more or less came up with a test. If a machine would run Lotus 123 and Microsoft Flightsimulator it was PC compatible. Also you couldn't be 100% sure that a card would work in every machine. The ISA buss had a lot of wiggle room in the speck. It was supposed to run at clock speed but that caused no end to problems so later machines clocked it at 6, 8, or 12 MHZ.
"That was almost a necessity, however, as you don't have all kinds of OS APIs to isolate hardware. If you wanted to draw a line on the screen you just edited the video RAM, or sent IO calls to the video chipset. That is, unless you wanted to write your whole app in BASIC or whatever the vendor supplied in ROM."
Ummm No you didn't. The Amiga and ST actually had a fully documented API and it included all sorts of things like blitter objects, sprites, playfields and draw line at least on the Amiga side I didn't code on the ST.
Only on that piece of festering dung called a PC did you have to write to the video RAM to do something as simple as draw a line.
For the Apple, Commodore, and Atari bits you are correct. For the more advanced systems at least the Amiga actually had a real OS.
But even then you really had only a single PC vendor. It was Microsoft and Intel.
Plus what real benifit did you get with that openness at the time.
The Amiga 1000 was about $1000 less than an AT. It was faster, had better graphics, sound, and a real OS for the price as well.
It all came down to Lotus, WordPerfect, and Dbase as well as the Borland development tools. What it really came down to was the illusion that the PC was serious when Commodore and Atari where "home computers".
I even remember a very smart friend of mine telling me that he thought that the plain green screen was more professorial looking than Amiga, ST, or Mac OS.
I wonder what he would have thought of XP if he had lived.
It is all about the marketing.
When Windows 1.0 came out you had a lot of options. ,TurboC , TurboBasic, and QuickBasic. You also had a lot of code like Borlands TurboEditor Toolbox, DatabaseToolbox, and Communications Toolbox.
The Commodore Amiga was right around the corner. It was much more advanced and had real multitasking, stereo sound, and advanced graphics.
The Atari ST was also just coming out. It was inexpensive and also had a good UI.
Better doesn't all ways win.
People stuck with DOS because it ran Lotus 123 and DBase, and WordPerfect.
People used PCs to develop vertical applications because you could use TurboPascal
The other reason was marketing and Press coverage. The magazines of the day couldn't afford to offend the PC market. Would you rather get ad revenue from 30 PC makers or Commodore, Atari, and Apple?
People will talk all about the benefits of the PCs openness but that was pretty much bull back then. The Amiga and ST where cheaper and more powerful than the average PC. Commodore and Atari at the time published all the pin outs and software specks needed to do anything you wanted much like Apple did back in the Apple II days.
I do agree people seem to think that Navy.mil or Whitehouse.gov are high security sites. They are for the most part nothing but PR tools. Nothing wrong with PR tools but sites like those do not control the Trident launch codes or anything else major. .htaccess. This was a million years ago and frankly there was nothing worth hacking on the message base.
The big worry is that some idiot used the same password for that site as for a secured system.
I swear that letting people pick their own passwords is just a bad idea.
One of the first sites I did for my company I had to write our own forum and security using
I let the users pick their own passwords and user names but I warned them with this text. "Your username and password are case sensitive."
Then one day someone wanted me to change their user name and password for them. They set them them to... Case and Sensitive!
Grrr.
I then wrote a program that generated AOL style passwords using a random list words. I then had to deal with people that took offense to the random passwords!
Actually part of the border looks like it is defined by a river. Some of the rest of it is going through lakes and rivers. Not the easiest border to deal with for sure.
Actually Comcast has lost a lot of viewers this quarter. Scary thing is that their profits have increased!
So are extracting more money from fewer people.
To get OTA where I live and get four major networks would take a 30 foot tower.
It is possible but not a small undertaking.
Not really anymore. I am in a cable only location. Once I drop cable the networks will know that I am no longer watching by that method. They will see that I am watching by Hulu.
They have the right but that doesn't mean that we have to like it.
The reality is that TV used to be free. You put up an antenna and got TV for free. The networks made money by showing commercials. What consumers want is a return to that type of system. We do not want to pay $100 plus dollars for two hundred channels of which we watch 5. This is going to be the new reality and the Networks need to get a grip on it. The Cable TV model is passing. My mother in law lives near Dallas and gets all her TV OVA again. She gets like 30 channels and all the networks for free.
Where I live that isn't an option which is too bad so my wife and I are probably just going to drop Cable and watch Hulu. The one channel we really want is CBS for Big Bang Theory but we are willing to stop watching that to save a thousand plus dollars a year.
If the other networks want to not have us watch that is their business or lack of.