and use their industry connections to get even more content taken away from Netflix to keep them under control
"Industry connections" aren't stupid - if Netflix offers a better deal, they're going with Netflix. If those "connections" do decide to be stupid, they do so knowing full well there's raftloads of independents snapping at their heels.
But let's be clear: This is the military performing as expected. This is a routine thing, and it's only making the news because it involves nuclear weapons. If it happened anywhere else, it'd be a non-event.
I suspect it's only making the news because it's slow news day... Otherwise, you're spot on. These kinds of failures, while not common, do happen. It happened to me back in the 1980's while serving onboard USS Henry L. Stimson (Blue). The WEPS dicked up some paperwork, resulting in a failure with immediate re-inspect (I.E. after we'd had a chance to fix the screw up). The worst part is that until he took it into his head to do something on his own hook rather than consulting with the Weapons Department Yeoman (me), it looked like we were going to nail a "comment only" inspection. (Which is realistically the best you can do nobody ever heard of someone getting a "perfect" inspection. Given that running a nuclear weapons system is partially a science, partially an art... there's a lot of differing opinions about the 'art' part.)
so how many more steps will have to be completed before we land a competent assessment that north korea can send a warhead to the US?
Since they haven't demonstrated the ability to send a warhead anywhere significant, I'd say you're playing Chicken Little.
re we seriously going to entertain the idea that a country capable of launching a satellite into space is just 'faking it' when it comes to missile technology?
Given that they haven't demonstrated the ability to send an operating satellite into space... I fail to see that your question has any relevance or validity in the real world. You seem unaware that their one "successful" satellite launch didn't end with an operational satellite in orbit. Their ongoing failures in the satellite business in fact suggest exactly the opposite of the conclusion you'd like to handwave into existence from whole cloth.
They do, however, have very sophisticated submarines.
Sophisticated, maybe, but there's no real evidence of that openly available. Not to mention, what those that aren't obsolete or (at best and being generous) obsolescent and aren't extremely short ranged miniature boats are short range coastal submarines. The numbers may be impressive to the non professional, but their capabilities shouldn't be.
All they need to do is load one of their nukes on a sub and sail it into a major harbor anywhere in the world and viola, world catastrophe.
None of their boats have the range to reach more than a bare handful of the major harbors of the world. Not to mention the risk of the crew deciding they don't want to die on a certain suicide mission today and giving themselves up. (Or a subset of the crew starting a mutiny and thus ending the mission.) There's a reason why the nutjobs of the world concentrate on missiles rather than other delivery systems... missiles can be designed to operated by a trained monkey smart enough to push the Big Red Button. Unlike submarines and aircraft, they don't require intelligent and trained operators in direct operational support. And those trained monkey operators can be overseen by trained monkey security forces and both guarded by trained monkey guards - providing multiple levels of loyal support. Nutjobs absolutely loathe armed forces without a deeply loyal counter to those forces close at hand - too many times in history those armed forces have decided they'd like to take a go at being the head high nutjob.
This is the threat we should be worried about. The whole missile thing is just sabre rattling, irrelevant of their real capabilities. They'd need thousands to overwhelm our defenses.
And you don't think there are any anti-submarine defenses keeping an eye on their larger boats? (The handful that pose a regional threat that is.)
So? In this era of "liking" and "sharing" and "+1ing"... 78k "likes" isn't all that impressive. (And the vast majority probably aren't qualified and won't pass screening in the first place - they're just applying because it's "cool".)
Adobe underestimates how much it benefits from piracy. If poor college students can't cut their teeth on the full Adobe suite, they're likely to learn how to use something else. When those students go out and get jobs, they're more likely to use what they're used to than drop a bundle on Adobe software they've never used before.
It's not those new hires (the former students) who decide what to drop a bundle on - it's management. Nice try though.
It's difficult at all. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
The hard part is dealing with unsophisticated and ignorant folk who mistakenly believe that because they read xkcd and watch Mythbusters they're sophisticated, informed, and educated.
Exactly my point... Mythbusters kinda sorta teaches people those things, except for all the parts like the scientific method, experimental design, logic, and analysis. Y'know, all the hard bits that actually matter. On those they say "just trust us, big boom after the break."
Back in the 50's and 60's it was much easier for a kid to pop the hood and learn to tear down and rebuild an engine. Now it requires specialized tools.
You must not be young enough to remember those days, or you are old enough but don't really have any experience. Or you have a *seriously* thick pair of rose colored reality distortion glasses and false memories of a lost Golden Age.
Back then, you frequently *had* to learn how to maintain and overhaul your car - because the damn things broke down so often, and after 50k miles or so they were frequently shot to hell or pretty close to it. Otherwise, you paid a mechanic (which could get expensive) and put up with not having a car for a day or two. (Or more if he had to get parts in... Overnight delivery was practically non-existent back then, and expensive as hell when it *was* available.) People held *parties* if a car reached 100k miles with the original engine and transmission because that was a significant and rare milestone. This was why the flood of cheap imports in the early/mid 70's nearly toppled the American auto industry - not only were they not gas guzzlers, they were reliable and they *lasted*. (Good thing too, parts for imports that weren't Volkswagen could be hard to come by sometimes.)
Today? Today is a very different story - cars are warrantied for 75 or 100k miles. If you don't abuse them and regularly get your oil changes, it's fairly trivial to reach that milestone. I've owned two in the last twenty years that exceed 100k miles before I sold them. One of them was when I owned a used and rare bookstore, and I routinely bought and loaded enough books to nearly bottom the shocks. (And after I sold it to a friend, he put another 25k miles on it as a short range commuter car - if he actually maintained it, it probably would still be around today.)
Not to mention, serious engine maintenance has always required special tools.
With expressways and everything else becoming so prevalent, the 25 minute trip that my wife used to take to get to work is now 15-18 minutes but 10 minutes of that is now at 75+ so she's getting there faster and over a shorter distance but where there should be some gas savings there are none at all.
Why "should" there be gas savings? You're accelerating longer (to reach 75 rather than 60 or 65) and working harder to overcome air resistance - nobody with any sense or science would expect gas mileage to go up because travel time went down for the same distance.
The Highway speed limit here is 65mph but normal highway speed is actually 75-80mph. At 80 mph in a 2010 Honda Civic I get WORSE gas mileage than in a 2003 Mustang thats had mods done to it that reduces its gas mileage. Its entirely due to the fact that the last gear on the automatic trans in the civic is designed for optimal gas mileage for the EPA rating @ 60MPH and there is no shorter gear.
As above, your problem isn't with the faulty MPG measurements, it's that you're an idiot for driving in excess of the speed limit and then getting upset because your MPG is lower.
You mean that there are people that don't consider most of xkcd a piece of art?
Yeah, pretty much anyone* over thirty or who have otherwise outgrown the sophomoric phase of their life.
Anyway, of all the amazing, insightful, and informative things things that are in xkcd, probably the one that impressed me more recently was one in What-if, explaining whats the worst that could happen missusing pressure cookers, few days before Boston bombing. That it remains there is a big message.
I've all but given up reading "What If", as it bears the same relationship to science as the Mythbusters do... That is, it's kinda science like/lite, but he doesn't let the science get in the way of the amusing and/or funny bits.
*I know I'm going to get replies saying "I'm 30+n years old and I think it's a work of art"... so, to those pseudo-pedants without reading comprehension. "pretty much anybody" != "everybody". The phrase was deliberately chosen because unlike the OP, I know there are exceptions, and you're one of them.
Let's just add in another handful of vectors for phishing attacks. With people with less familiarity to your personal information and less incentive to exercise diligence.
Again, that comes down to your choice of friends - something there's really no technical solution for.
This trusted contact scheme would work well for me, because I'll just mark as trusted the people who either a) already have keys to my house, or b) know the location my spare key is hidden.* Every one of them are type that, when they get the email from Facebook are going to call me and ask what's up before authorizing the release of the code.
* Given sufficient time, another geocacher might find it. Anyone else? Extraordinarily unlikely.
Disclaimer, I was a submarine crewman and though I was a qualified sonar watchstander I was not a sonar tech. I have also studied fairly widely in the unclassified literature.
So now the highly directional microphone has to be pointed toward the undetected drone in order to detect it? That makes perfect sense.
If you're sophisticated and have multiple microphones in a well planned array, then you can aim your microphone in software and sweep the sky looking for the signature. Look up acoustic beam-forming. If the array is large enough you can estimate distance as well as angle. The bonus is that you get actual tracking instead of just detection.
It's certainly simple - in theory. In reality, picking out such a faint noise from the background is Very Difficult Indeed.
The problem would be processing power though. Simple implementations could range from 4 microphones that you sum/subtract to look at quandrants, up the way to something approaching what the US Navy does with its towed arrays. I doubt the PI could handle the processing of the signals in both the time domain to get tracking, and the frequency domain to do target qualification.
Processing power, both for signal analysis (finding the faint signal) and for beamforming is on the beginning of your problems. Let's just hit the high spots:
The accuracy of your track is only as good as the accuracy of your microphone positioning. (You won't need surveyor grade accuracy, but you will probably need better than the three meter accuracy that WAAS/GPS provides.) You can't beamform if you don't know the relative locations of your microphones. Oh, and did I mention that sound is refracted as the temperature of the air changes? You'll have to account for that too - assuming you can get accurate enough data on current conditions.
You'll need some fairly clever filtering and processing to avoid the microphones being swamped by unrelated and louder background noise.
You also need high quality low noise amplifiers to bring the sound of Predator up to useable levels. (The highest quality commercial audiophile amplifier isn't even close. You need a supercomputer and audiophile gear by comparison isn't even as good as the throwaway calculators you get with your breakfast cereal.)
Speaking of the sound... different frequencies get attenuated and refracted differently. You'll have to account for that too.
Etc... etc... The very definition of a non trivial project. You're essentially trying to replicate what the USN does with it's passive sonar systems, with dull and chipped stone knives. (You don't even have a bearskin. You don't even get a bearskin, just the aforementioned knives.)
Except, close approach actually means within 700' of the defunct satellite, which really isn't all the close at all.
Except, you don't know the margin of error in either our knowledge of Fermi's orbit or that of Cosmos 1805's orbit. But I'd be willing to bet that the margins are large enough that a predicted 700' approach would place the two spheres of position sufficiently in overlap that there was a non-zero chance of collision.
Once we know where one is and how fast it's going, it doesn't deviate much from that.
On the contrary, stuff in LEO wanders all over the place (relatively speaking) - not only is the Earth's gravitational field "lumpy", there's atmospheric drag a surprising distance out (and it varies over time), there's light pressure and the solar wind too... That's why it's such a big damn job to keep track of the stuff, and why they sometimes have to move the station's orbit unexpectedly.
The modern geek way is to clean up the act, keep it really funny, and promote it on Youtube. It worked for Jeff Dunham. Who hasn't heard of the dead terroist routine?
Jeff Dunham started hitting it big well before the public web (with an appearance on the Tonight Show in 1990), and had his first Comedy Central special in 2003. Youtube was founded in 2005.
We (the US Navy) has been networking it's ships since it was born... first with flags and lights forming a sneakernet, then with telegraphy and voice radio in the same role, and finally with direct data and control links since the 1950's. Internal networks have followed the same arc. (The original practice of both stretches back into antiquity.)
Seriously, don't try and extrapolate technology lessons from TV or other fiction. It just makes you look like a fool.
They aren't legitimizing Bitcoins, the government is just reminding people that certain transactions create a tax liability - they don't care if the transactions are in dollars, Bitcoins, or jars of pickled hamster poop. The same rules apply to all three.
You need only browse Photography is Not a Crime for 2 minutes before you realize that this war is already happening. There's a metric shit-ton of this stuff going on, with video evidence to back it up.
Yes, please do take two minutes to browse the site - because you'll find the OP is painting a very biased and heavily spun version of what the site shows.
It also completely ignores recent court decisions which have ruled public photography to be a FIRST AMENDMENT right.
The rulings that public photography is a First Amendment right goes back a long, long ways. The recent ones just re-affirm that. The author of TFA is woefully ignorant of the state-of-the-law when it comes to photography.
While the author has some good points, she also has his tinfoil adjusted just a bit to tightly... because while he rails against the [big, bad, ebil] gub'ment, and the [equally big, bad, and ebil] survelliance-industrial "complex" (he really hits all the buzzwords and hot buttons nicely I must admit)... Pretty much nowhere does he actually address or provide much (if anything) of support to the nominal thesis of the piece.
So this pretty much seems to be a chance for him to get hits and 'net cred by namechecking the Boston bombings, and since it's a slow news day and nothing else has come along... for Slashdot to get it's daily Two Minute Hate.
Slashdot Mirror
"Industry connections" aren't stupid - if Netflix offers a better deal, they're going with Netflix. If those "connections" do decide to be stupid, they do so knowing full well there's raftloads of independents snapping at their heels.
I suspect it's only making the news because it's slow news day... Otherwise, you're spot on. These kinds of failures, while not common, do happen. It happened to me back in the 1980's while serving onboard USS Henry L. Stimson (Blue). The WEPS dicked up some paperwork, resulting in a failure with immediate re-inspect (I.E. after we'd had a chance to fix the screw up). The worst part is that until he took it into his head to do something on his own hook rather than consulting with the Weapons Department Yeoman (me), it looked like we were going to nail a "comment only" inspection. (Which is realistically the best you can do nobody ever heard of someone getting a "perfect" inspection. Given that running a nuclear weapons system is partially a science, partially an art... there's a lot of differing opinions about the 'art' part.)
Since they haven't demonstrated the ability to send a warhead anywhere significant, I'd say you're playing Chicken Little.
Given that they haven't demonstrated the ability to send an operating satellite into space... I fail to see that your question has any relevance or validity in the real world. You seem unaware that their one "successful" satellite launch didn't end with an operational satellite in orbit. Their ongoing failures in the satellite business in fact suggest exactly the opposite of the conclusion you'd like to handwave into existence from whole cloth.
Sophisticated, maybe, but there's no real evidence of that openly available. Not to mention, what those that aren't obsolete or (at best and being generous) obsolescent and aren't extremely short ranged miniature boats are short range coastal submarines. The numbers may be impressive to the non professional, but their capabilities shouldn't be.
None of their boats have the range to reach more than a bare handful of the major harbors of the world. Not to mention the risk of the crew deciding they don't want to die on a certain suicide mission today and giving themselves up. (Or a subset of the crew starting a mutiny and thus ending the mission.) There's a reason why the nutjobs of the world concentrate on missiles rather than other delivery systems... missiles can be designed to operated by a trained monkey smart enough to push the Big Red Button. Unlike submarines and aircraft, they don't require intelligent and trained operators in direct operational support. And those trained monkey operators can be overseen by trained monkey security forces and both guarded by trained monkey guards - providing multiple levels of loyal support. Nutjobs absolutely loathe armed forces without a deeply loyal counter to those forces close at hand - too many times in history those armed forces have decided they'd like to take a go at being the head high nutjob.
And you don't think there are any anti-submarine defenses keeping an eye on their larger boats? (The handful that pose a regional threat that is.)
So? In this era of "liking" and "sharing" and "+1ing"... 78k "likes" isn't all that impressive. (And the vast majority probably aren't qualified and won't pass screening in the first place - they're just applying because it's "cool".)
It's not those new hires (the former students) who decide what to drop a bundle on - it's management. Nice try though.
It's difficult at all. Different strokes for different folks and all that.
The hard part is dealing with unsophisticated and ignorant folk who mistakenly believe that because they read xkcd and watch Mythbusters they're sophisticated, informed, and educated.
Exactly my point... Mythbusters kinda sorta teaches people those things, except for all the parts like the scientific method, experimental design, logic, and analysis. Y'know, all the hard bits that actually matter. On those they say "just trust us, big boom after the break."
You must not be young enough to remember those days, or you are old enough but don't really have any experience. Or you have a *seriously* thick pair of rose colored reality distortion glasses and false memories of a lost Golden Age.
Back then, you frequently *had* to learn how to maintain and overhaul your car - because the damn things broke down so often, and after 50k miles or so they were frequently shot to hell or pretty close to it. Otherwise, you paid a mechanic (which could get expensive) and put up with not having a car for a day or two. (Or more if he had to get parts in... Overnight delivery was practically non-existent back then, and expensive as hell when it *was* available.) People held *parties* if a car reached 100k miles with the original engine and transmission because that was a significant and rare milestone. This was why the flood of cheap imports in the early/mid 70's nearly toppled the American auto industry - not only were they not gas guzzlers, they were reliable and they *lasted*. (Good thing too, parts for imports that weren't Volkswagen could be hard to come by sometimes.)
Today? Today is a very different story - cars are warrantied for 75 or 100k miles. If you don't abuse them and regularly get your oil changes, it's fairly trivial to reach that milestone. I've owned two in the last twenty years that exceed 100k miles before I sold them. One of them was when I owned a used and rare bookstore, and I routinely bought and loaded enough books to nearly bottom the shocks. (And after I sold it to a friend, he put another 25k miles on it as a short range commuter car - if he actually maintained it, it probably would still be around today.)
Not to mention, serious engine maintenance has always required special tools.
Why "should" there be gas savings? You're accelerating longer (to reach 75 rather than 60 or 65) and working harder to overcome air resistance - nobody with any sense or science would expect gas mileage to go up because travel time went down for the same distance.
As above, your problem isn't with the faulty MPG measurements, it's that you're an idiot for driving in excess of the speed limit and then getting upset because your MPG is lower.
Yeah, pretty much anyone* over thirty or who have otherwise outgrown the sophomoric phase of their life.
I've all but given up reading "What If", as it bears the same relationship to science as the Mythbusters do... That is, it's kinda science like/lite, but he doesn't let the science get in the way of the amusing and/or funny bits.
*I know I'm going to get replies saying "I'm 30+n years old and I think it's a work of art"... so, to those pseudo-pedants without reading comprehension. "pretty much anybody" != "everybody". The phrase was deliberately chosen because unlike the OP, I know there are exceptions, and you're one of them.
Again, that comes down to your choice of friends - something there's really no technical solution for.
This trusted contact scheme would work well for me, because I'll just mark as trusted the people who either a) already have keys to my house, or b) know the location my spare key is hidden.* Every one of them are type that, when they get the email from Facebook are going to call me and ask what's up before authorizing the release of the code.
* Given sufficient time, another geocacher might find it. Anyone else? Extraordinarily unlikely.
Disclaimer, I was a submarine crewman and though I was a qualified sonar watchstander I was not a sonar tech. I have also studied fairly widely in the unclassified literature.
It's certainly simple - in theory. In reality, picking out such a faint noise from the background is Very Difficult Indeed.
Processing power, both for signal analysis (finding the faint signal) and for beamforming is on the beginning of your problems. Let's just hit the high spots:
Etc... etc... The very definition of a non trivial project. You're essentially trying to replicate what the USN does with it's passive sonar systems, with dull and chipped stone knives. (You don't even have a bearskin. You don't even get a bearskin, just the aforementioned knives.)
Ignorant beer snobs are so amusing.
Except, you don't know the margin of error in either our knowledge of Fermi's orbit or that of Cosmos 1805's orbit. But I'd be willing to bet that the margins are large enough that a predicted 700' approach would place the two spheres of position sufficiently in overlap that there was a non-zero chance of collision.
On the contrary, stuff in LEO wanders all over the place (relatively speaking) - not only is the Earth's gravitational field "lumpy", there's atmospheric drag a surprising distance out (and it varies over time), there's light pressure and the solar wind too... That's why it's such a big damn job to keep track of the stuff, and why they sometimes have to move the station's orbit unexpectedly.
Jeff Dunham started hitting it big well before the public web (with an appearance on the Tonight Show in 1990), and had his first Comedy Central special in 2003. Youtube was founded in 2005.
You do the math.
Had I made such a claim, you'd have a point.
We (the US Navy) has been networking it's ships since it was born... first with flags and lights forming a sneakernet, then with telegraphy and voice radio in the same role, and finally with direct data and control links since the 1950's. Internal networks have followed the same arc. (The original practice of both stretches back into antiquity.)
Seriously, don't try and extrapolate technology lessons from TV or other fiction. It just makes you look like a fool.
They aren't legitimizing Bitcoins, the government is just reminding people that certain transactions create a tax liability - they don't care if the transactions are in dollars, Bitcoins, or jars of pickled hamster poop. The same rules apply to all three.
And they aren't bothered by that - their policies are designed for the vast majority, not the one-in-a-million asshat.
Yes, please do take two minutes to browse the site - because you'll find the OP is painting a very biased and heavily spun version of what the site shows.
The rulings that public photography is a First Amendment right goes back a long, long ways. The recent ones just re-affirm that. The author of TFA is woefully ignorant of the state-of-the-law when it comes to photography.
While the author has some good points, she also has his tinfoil adjusted just a bit to tightly... because while he rails against the [big, bad, ebil] gub'ment, and the [equally big, bad, and ebil] survelliance-industrial "complex" (he really hits all the buzzwords and hot buttons nicely I must admit)... Pretty much nowhere does he actually address or provide much (if anything) of support to the nominal thesis of the piece.
So this pretty much seems to be a chance for him to get hits and 'net cred by namechecking the Boston bombings, and since it's a slow news day and nothing else has come along... for Slashdot to get it's daily Two Minute Hate.
This isn't exactly new technology... it's been around for over a decade now.