Now you're moving the goalposts - first you claimed they were bad because they were meant for general audiences (which they aren't), now you're claiming they're bad because they're [some kind of vaguely] 'general'.
Since these games aren't intended for a general audience, and are intended to train a specialized audience (read TFA), your objections don't really apply. And no, simulators aren't just for 'improving performance on specific tasks', they're also for improving general skills within a specialized field. For example, when I got to my boat, I already knew what the FCS sounded like when it powered up - having powered one up in the simulator a hundred dozen times while performing other (specialized) task training. Ditto for increased situational awareness as to the normal and abnormal sounds of the FCS operating.
And we didn't do rifle drill in Missile Fire Control school.:)
gimmicks, it should be spending it on something that provides actual value to someone, somewhere, hopefully that the private economy isn't producing
You should be pleased then - because this software meets both criteria. For training and research, it provides actual value to me the taxpayer. And nobody in the private sector is producing these kinds of 'games'.
it would be like if the government decided to start manufacturing bottled water.
No it isn't. You, like so many others here, are getting hung up on the word 'games'. These aren't 'games' like you can get commercially, they're very specialized simulators. It's more like the government buying bottled water that was specially fortified for use by soldiers in the field.
Will educational games (more serious and presumably less fun than an ordinary first person shooting rampage through a novel virtual environment) improve your ability to make decisions or track objects
I don't see why not - simulators of varying sorts and fidelity have been doing just that for decades.
And fun is where you find it, I loved lab time when I was in school in the Navy - the simulators were a hell of a lot more fun that lectures. Later, when I was an instructor in the same school, if I had free time, I went in and set up scenarios and ran them just to amuse myself. Some of that was just plain old school hacking, some of it was the difference between the way a gamer approaches a game and a professional approaches his profession.
Despite snarky ignorance, even during a deficit, training for various Federal employees and various research efforts continue. The world doesn't stop just because we're in a deficit (as we have been for decades).
We can spend billions of dollars for useless weapons, but can't bother to spend the necessary money to keep our infrastructure from crumbling.
You're probably not old enough to remember - but the left has been playing this card since the 70's. Yet, the bridges stubbornly persist in not falling down. (And much of the infrastructure so often accused of being 'crumbling' isn't the responsibility of the Federal government anyhow.)
So, after observing politics for nigh upon forty years, I've come to the conclusion that 'crumbling infrastructure' is the left's version of 'welfare queens'. A useful strawman, but not an accurate reflection of reality. It also ignore the facts that our infrastructure *is* constantly being renewed, and it's impossible to not have at least some of it in bad shape at any given time.
And no, you can't really depend on the various reports about how our infrastructure is crumbling. They all rely on local self reporting, and those doing the reporting have no incentive to be honest and every incentive if not to lie outright to at least be deceptive. If they don't exaggerate, the funding doesn't come - and nothing horrifies a politician or a bureaucrat more than not being able to keep the pork coming. Here locally, when construction started on a replacement bridge (not one of the ones discussed below) the city engineer outright admitted to being deceptive about the bridge's condition "in order to get us higher on the priority list". The mayor, the city council, and the local media (mainstream and non) *praised* him for doing so.
Just this morning one of my left leaning friends posted to Facebook about how all our bridges are ancient and crumbling... The amount of handwaving of smokescreen generated when I pointed out that of the four major bridges in our area, one is twenty years old, two have been essentially replaced in the last five years, and construction on the replacement for the fourth starts next year was absolutely amazing. (Not to mention the construction of one totally new bridge to parallel one of the rebuilt older ones.) Confronted with reality that denies her dogma... she denied reality.
The USA just opened a new military base... in Australia. Nobody even knows how many foreign bases the USA has, but we have them in at least 130 foreign countries.
Well, there's a pretty thorough list on Wikipedia - found trivially by googling "number of US overseas bases". But really, the US only has bases worthy of the name (I.E. supports significant operational or support capability) in only a dozen or so countries. The vast majority of US military installations overseas are nothing more than offices for military attache's or liason officers. That those looking to find reasons to complain are unaware of the difference is unsurprising.
If you focus on just two things in the world, the distribution of wealth, and the distribution of military power, you may conclude like I that the US is a de facto empire
In other words, so long as you disregard the things that actually define an empire - the US is an empire.
Being amazed that the debt-bound USA is still developing weapons systems is like being amazed a thirsty pit bull still pisses on trees.
No, being amazed that this activity is still going one is like being amazed that debt bound private individual still eats and buys clothes. I.E. it's supremely ignorant. Just because somebody or someone is in debt doesn't meant that normal activities cease.
Well, he might be an expert in something regarding Mars, but he knows nothing about camera calibration targets.
Because this (the array of lines) is what a camera calibration target looks like. The lines let you test for distortion, the spacing between the lines lets you test for resolution. Just like TV test patterns they're carefully designed to present exactly the features you want to test for. They aren't semi random fractal patterns, and they aren't allowed to degrade the way the ones in the Chines desert have.
The same goes for his "radar test target" - it looks precisely nothing like how aircraft normally appear on flight lines or adjacent to hangars.
Why is this myth that the physics of constructing a nuclear weapon is a well kept secret?
The existence of such a myth is a strawman of your own creation. And proof that being highly educated in one field does not equate to knowledge in all fields, or to an immunity to batshit crazy ideas.
What's difficult about constructing a nuclear weapon is engineering the weapon itself - if you are what you claim to be, you should well know there's a long and pothole filled path between the equations and a physical object in the real world. An additional difficulty is obtaining the nuclear material, which is again simple in theory but not so simple in the real world.
Experts note that the military disclosed delivery of the new bunker-busting bomb less than a week after a United Nations agency warned that Iran was secretly working to develop a nuclear weapon and is known to have hidden nuclear complexes that are fortified with steel and concrete, and buried under mountains. 'Heck of a coincidence, isn't it?' says John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org."
If it's a coincidence, it's a meaningless one. Anyone who's been paying attention to defense development over the past two decades knew this bomb (or something like it) was under development.
But humans are good at seeing patterns, even when there are none, and John Pike is ever ready to deliver a suitably pithy quote for the appropriate remuneration.
You're not suggesting a complex open-source application that will require intensive work and special skills to implement to solve a basic task? You must be new around here.
There is nothing constitutionally protected about impeding others use of public property or of creating a public health hazard or of infringing on others rights. If you're going to wrap yourself in the constitution, you'd be well advised to learn a little bit more about constitutional law than you did in 3rd grade.
40.108521,93.993434 Looks like a small farming village. Pretty consistent with plantings (they deploy grids of little tents over their rows of crops at times of the year) and normal farming life.
I was with you up to here... But this village is in the middle of the desert, miles from any other settlement. It may be something innocuous (a test farm far from anywhere to avoid cross pollination) or something sinister (a test farm far from anywhere to avoid the plants being tested escaping or infecting elsewhere) - but it's not 'normal'.
The previous poster liked to point out that it was public land required to be accessible 24/7 (ie, the law that the rest of us/society need to follow), but wants to conveniently ignore the OTHER laws that say you can't squat/camp there.
Ie. "I'm a special snowflake, you need to follow the rules but I don't because I'm doing it for a reason"
That's not just a problem with the particular special snowflake to whom I was replying - it's a widespread condition.
I am so tired of this argument, let me make it a little easier for your obviously-limited intellect...
What I'm getting tired is folks like you and your ilk who take a simple concept, trivially understandable by any adult of average mentality, and then twist it and misinterpret it as you were seven years old.
This 'private property' is required to be open to the PUBLIC, 24/7. An agreement between the developer and the City lays these terms out - the developer was permitted to exceed the maximum height of a structure as defined in CITY ORDINANCES by creating and maintaining A PUBLIC PARK.
I know this is a hard concept for you to grasp - but I'll put it simply: "required to be accessible" mean "required to be accessible". Which the park was, temporarily is not, and will be again shortly. It does not mean they are required to allow or endure camping or squatting in the park. In fact, I expect that if you research the NYC codes, you'll find the same provisions found in my podunk little town - camping and squatting in public parks is expressly forbidden.
Calibrating an orbital imaging system is quite possible; the material looks VERY reflective, which is exactly what you want to test your camera.
No it isn't. Camera test patterns generally look something like a collage of barcodes on steroids. The straight lines let you test for distortion, while which lines you can see (and which you can't) lets you test resolution, and the size (length) of the lines lets you verify magnification/zoom. They're actually pretty well thought out.
The other thing you want for calibration is what is known as 'ground truth' I.E. a well known real place on the ground that you can compare satellite images to.
Fractal antennas are implemented in cell phones because they can be used to receive multiple frequencies with one antenna, but no radio wavelength would require an antenna that big.
3khz radio waves have wavelengths as long as 100 kilometers. So yes, radio waves exist that would require an antenna that big. (Though anything over 1km is blocked by the atmosphere.)
It *seems* quite informative and on topic... But someone actually familiar with military hardware would have written SPY-1, not "Spy I". On top of which, the SPY-1 is a radar and only a part of the Aegis system - another mistake someone familiar with the military would not make.
Whoever was posting to reddit (linked elsethread) that this spammer copied from is just as bad. He *sounds* reasonable to the uninformed, but his posts are riddled with subtle errors And not the kind that indicate someone talking about classified stuff hiding his true knowledge. The kind that indicate someone who gets his knowledge of military matters from the Discovery Channel and conspiracy nutter message boards.
Built from the perspective of some unknown ground-use, not only would they tend to work with natural contours rather than stubbornly going in straight lines over hills and chasms, they quite likely wouldn't even look straight.
That's an assumption, even though you're [mistakenly] treating it as a fact. Whether they follow the natural contours would depend on what that use is - and that they didn't is prima facie evidence that the intended use requires straight lines. (Basic rule of photo intelligence, work forward from what you can see. Not backwards from what you assume.)
One thing I've always wondered is why no distributed crawlers or search engines have ever come about.
Because being 'distributed' is not a magic wand. (Nor is 'crowdsourcing', nor 'open source', or half a dozen other terms often used as buzzwords in defiance of the actual (technical) meanings.) You still need substantial bandwidth and processing power to handle the index, being distributed just makes the problems worse as now you need bandwidth and processing power to coordinate the nodes.
Slashdot Mirror
Is ignorance that great painful? Or do the drugs you're on keep it under control?
Now you're moving the goalposts - first you claimed they were bad because they were meant for general audiences (which they aren't), now you're claiming they're bad because they're [some kind of vaguely] 'general'.
Since these games aren't intended for a general audience, and are intended to train a specialized audience (read TFA), your objections don't really apply. And no, simulators aren't just for 'improving performance on specific tasks', they're also for improving general skills within a specialized field. For example, when I got to my boat, I already knew what the FCS sounded like when it powered up - having powered one up in the simulator a hundred dozen times while performing other (specialized) task training. Ditto for increased situational awareness as to the normal and abnormal sounds of the FCS operating.
And we didn't do rifle drill in Missile Fire Control school. :)
You should be pleased then - because this software meets both criteria. For training and research, it provides actual value to me the taxpayer. And nobody in the private sector is producing these kinds of 'games'.
No it isn't. You, like so many others here, are getting hung up on the word 'games'. These aren't 'games' like you can get commercially, they're very specialized simulators. It's more like the government buying bottled water that was specially fortified for use by soldiers in the field.
I don't see why not - simulators of varying sorts and fidelity have been doing just that for decades.
And fun is where you find it, I loved lab time when I was in school in the Navy - the simulators were a hell of a lot more fun that lectures. Later, when I was an instructor in the same school, if I had free time, I went in and set up scenarios and ran them just to amuse myself. Some of that was just plain old school hacking, some of it was the difference between the way a gamer approaches a game and a professional approaches his profession.
Despite snarky ignorance, even during a deficit, training for various Federal employees and various research efforts continue. The world doesn't stop just because we're in a deficit (as we have been for decades).
Both sides have been tossing strategic missiles around for years - no war has resulted yet. That's why there are notification protocols.
Pay 'em welfare or pay 'em to do useful weapons development work - your call. I prefer the latter.
You're probably not old enough to remember - but the left has been playing this card since the 70's. Yet, the bridges stubbornly persist in not falling down. (And much of the infrastructure so often accused of being 'crumbling' isn't the responsibility of the Federal government anyhow.)
So, after observing politics for nigh upon forty years, I've come to the conclusion that 'crumbling infrastructure' is the left's version of 'welfare queens'. A useful strawman, but not an accurate reflection of reality. It also ignore the facts that our infrastructure *is* constantly being renewed, and it's impossible to not have at least some of it in bad shape at any given time.
And no, you can't really depend on the various reports about how our infrastructure is crumbling. They all rely on local self reporting, and those doing the reporting have no incentive to be honest and every incentive if not to lie outright to at least be deceptive. If they don't exaggerate, the funding doesn't come - and nothing horrifies a politician or a bureaucrat more than not being able to keep the pork coming. Here locally, when construction started on a replacement bridge (not one of the ones discussed below) the city engineer outright admitted to being deceptive about the bridge's condition "in order to get us higher on the priority list". The mayor, the city council, and the local media (mainstream and non) *praised* him for doing so.
Just this morning one of my left leaning friends posted to Facebook about how all our bridges are ancient and crumbling... The amount of handwaving of smokescreen generated when I pointed out that of the four major bridges in our area, one is twenty years old, two have been essentially replaced in the last five years, and construction on the replacement for the fourth starts next year was absolutely amazing. (Not to mention the construction of one totally new bridge to parallel one of the rebuilt older ones.) Confronted with reality that denies her dogma... she denied reality.
Well, there's a pretty thorough list on Wikipedia - found trivially by googling "number of US overseas bases". But really, the US only has bases worthy of the name (I.E. supports significant operational or support capability) in only a dozen or so countries. The vast majority of US military installations overseas are nothing more than offices for military attache's or liason officers. That those looking to find reasons to complain are unaware of the difference is unsurprising.
In other words, so long as you disregard the things that actually define an empire - the US is an empire.
No, being amazed that this activity is still going one is like being amazed that debt bound private individual still eats and buys clothes. I.E. it's supremely ignorant. Just because somebody or someone is in debt doesn't meant that normal activities cease.
Well, he might be an expert in something regarding Mars, but he knows nothing about camera calibration targets.
Because this (the array of lines) is what a camera calibration target looks like. The lines let you test for distortion, the spacing between the lines lets you test for resolution. Just like TV test patterns they're carefully designed to present exactly the features you want to test for. They aren't semi random fractal patterns, and they aren't allowed to degrade the way the ones in the Chines desert have.
The same goes for his "radar test target" - it looks precisely nothing like how aircraft normally appear on flight lines or adjacent to hangars.
The existence of such a myth is a strawman of your own creation. And proof that being highly educated in one field does not equate to knowledge in all fields, or to an immunity to batshit crazy ideas.
What's difficult about constructing a nuclear weapon is engineering the weapon itself - if you are what you claim to be, you should well know there's a long and pothole filled path between the equations and a physical object in the real world. An additional difficulty is obtaining the nuclear material, which is again simple in theory but not so simple in the real world.
From the summary:
If it's a coincidence, it's a meaningless one. Anyone who's been paying attention to defense development over the past two decades knew this bomb (or something like it) was under development.
But humans are good at seeing patterns, even when there are none, and John Pike is ever ready to deliver a suitably pithy quote for the appropriate remuneration.
You're not suggesting a complex open-source application that will require intensive work and special skills to implement to solve a basic task? You must be new around here.
There is nothing constitutionally protected about impeding others use of public property or of creating a public health hazard or of infringing on others rights. If you're going to wrap yourself in the constitution, you'd be well advised to learn a little bit more about constitutional law than you did in 3rd grade.
I was with you up to here... But this village is in the middle of the desert, miles from any other settlement. It may be something innocuous (a test farm far from anywhere to avoid cross pollination) or something sinister (a test farm far from anywhere to avoid the plants being tested escaping or infecting elsewhere) - but it's not 'normal'.
Since I'm referring to extremely low frequencies, guess what that means for the wavelength and the size of the required antenna?
That's not just a problem with the particular special snowflake to whom I was replying - it's a widespread condition.
What I'm getting tired is folks like you and your ilk who take a simple concept, trivially understandable by any adult of average mentality, and then twist it and misinterpret it as you were seven years old.
I know this is a hard concept for you to grasp - but I'll put it simply: "required to be accessible" mean "required to be accessible". Which the park was, temporarily is not, and will be again shortly. It does not mean they are required to allow or endure camping or squatting in the park. In fact, I expect that if you research the NYC codes, you'll find the same provisions found in my podunk little town - camping and squatting in public parks is expressly forbidden.
No it isn't. Camera test patterns generally look something like a collage of barcodes on steroids. The straight lines let you test for distortion, while which lines you can see (and which you can't) lets you test resolution, and the size (length) of the lines lets you verify magnification/zoom. They're actually pretty well thought out.
Here's a very basic one out in the wilds of Edwards AFB: http://g.co/maps/4qf5d.
The other thing you want for calibration is what is known as 'ground truth' I.E. a well known real place on the ground that you can compare satellite images to.
3khz radio waves have wavelengths as long as 100 kilometers. So yes, radio waves exist that would require an antenna that big. (Though anything over 1km is blocked by the atmosphere.)
It *seems* quite informative and on topic... But someone actually familiar with military hardware would have written SPY-1, not "Spy I". On top of which, the SPY-1 is a radar and only a part of the Aegis system - another mistake someone familiar with the military would not make.
Whoever was posting to reddit (linked elsethread) that this spammer copied from is just as bad. He *sounds* reasonable to the uninformed, but his posts are riddled with subtle errors And not the kind that indicate someone talking about classified stuff hiding his true knowledge. The kind that indicate someone who gets his knowledge of military matters from the Discovery Channel and conspiracy nutter message boards.
That's an assumption, even though you're [mistakenly] treating it as a fact. Whether they follow the natural contours would depend on what that use is - and that they didn't is prima facie evidence that the intended use requires straight lines. (Basic rule of photo intelligence, work forward from what you can see. Not backwards from what you assume.)
Because being 'distributed' is not a magic wand. (Nor is 'crowdsourcing', nor 'open source', or half a dozen other terms often used as buzzwords in defiance of the actual (technical) meanings.) You still need substantial bandwidth and processing power to handle the index, being distributed just makes the problems worse as now you need bandwidth and processing power to coordinate the nodes.
You think only groundpounders are going to be effected by the coming cuts?
And yeah, submariners were deployed to the Middle East. I know a yeoman and storekeeper who spent time there.