"Considering the one-dimensional case, higher orbits would appear slower, and elliptical orbits would appear faster around the perigee and slower around the apogee."
We're dealing with a three-dimensional model where the observations are being taken from a rotating sphere. The apparent motion of a satellite through the night sky is a combination of both it's own motion and the motion of the observer on the rotating planet. The result is that two (at least) different non-coplanar orbits can produce the same apparent path from the ground (or at least your small patch of it). An object's slower speed through your sky may be the result of a higher orbit, or it may be the result of a lower inclination.
"When you're not in the orbital plane, I expect the apparent curvature would further help to fix the altitude."
The low altitudes and the high inclinations of the orbits used by spy satellites mean that, for the time that you see it, you're always near (if not moving through) the orbital plane.
"For one, it's passive, so you can't detect it."
Other than the web traffic you'd generate frequently accessing NASA's Orbital Information Group for the list of objects you can eliminate from your observations (tables populated thanks to NORAD radar). Otherwise your workload would go up at least one order of magnitude.
"Also, I suspect it would be easier to design a satellite to not reflect certain bands of radar back towards Earth, than to not reflect sunlight."
You're trying to hide against what is essentially a black body.
"You can infer time by carefully recording the times the images were taken."
You would still end up with thousands of pictures to sort through every evening, as you'd need a second-by-second picture of the entire region throughout the available time.
"The exposures would ideally be short enough that a streak would span several images "
LEO satellites move across the sky quickly. You'd have three choices:
Shorter exposures, meaning more pictures, increasing the cost to process data
Wide-angled lenses on all cameras, thereby reducing each individual camera's ability to see fainter objects (such as satellites)
More cameras.
"You know the satellite's motion is inertial, so you should be able to figure the orbit."
But you don't know its altitude. Even with position and angular velocity measurements of adequate precision, you'd have no information on only one pass with which to devise its true linear velocity; multiple three-dimensional orbits could produce the measured two-dimensional results. You would not only need to catch multiple passes, but you would also need to know that you were catching multiple passes, that the moving light you see now is the same moving light you saw three weeks ago. Otherwise, you have to wait months and rely on eliminating potential orbits before you narrow it down to the right one.
"You'd also need to throw away data that isn't plausible for an orbit, which you'd get plenty of from airplanes."
Unless the airplane in question turns within the field of view of a camera, distinguishing between airplanes and satellites purely by the two-dimensional data you'd be collecting is not mathematically trivial.
"I only said cover the horizon because, looking at data from heavens-above, it seems like it's more likely for the satellites to be visible there, and near dawn and dusk."
No, satellites, like all astronomical phenomena, are less visible at the horizon. The best place to catch something as faint as a satellite is directly overhead.
I have to ask: Have you ever gone stargazing and seen satellites for yourself?
"You could cover a bigger area if you wanted."
By increasing the number of cameras (and the price tag) exponentially.
"Admittedly, you probably wouldn't get the best quality data. But it should be good enough for you to guess at the next visible pass,"
One pass will give you, say, five or six possible candidates for when the next potential pass will be. You'd have to observe for several more weeks to eliminate those potentials. But during the intervening time you'll find more new objects (at least you think they're new), and each one will, again, introduce another five or six potential orbits to worry about. If your goal is to avoid being seen by one, you will either have to let the project continue for more than a year, or you'd have to plan around all those potential satellites, the "false positives" if you will, as well as the real ones, potentially leaving you paralyzed.
"especially if you have multiple sites."
This would increase the number of potential satellites. "Is this parallax or did we catch two different satellites?"
"And the end goal isn't to rendezvous with it or shoot it down, it's to know when it's visible so you can hide your doomsday devices."
Doing this, you'd end up spending more time and resources trying to hide your doomsday device than actually building it.
In contrast, the French (and anybody else serious about catching spy satellites) are using radar, which:
Tells you an object's altitude as well as position, narrowing down its potential orbit to one on only one pass
Tells you an object's size, letting you distinguish between a functional satellite and some piece that fell off of a functional satellite
Tells you an object's shape, letting you distinguish between an asteroid caught in earth orbit and something with solar arrays sticking out
Can catch satellites 24 hours a day, regardless of weather, rather than 2 hours a day, weather permitting
There are only two types of people who park at parking meters: those who pay and those who don't. Those who don't pay, however, still need to compete with those who do, meaning someone seeking to park illegally will not always have the opportunity. This is not true if the curb is made a no-parking zone.
Parking meters enforce themselves by providing fewer opportunities to break the law to begin with.
"Apple didn't want to get rid of the traffic meters so that customers wouldn't need to pay; they wanted to get rid of them because (they think) they look ugly."
I'm really disinclined to believe the "quotes" and "motives" from TFA when it looks more and more to me like an editorial rather than an actual news article (one that conveniently caters to Canada's old anglophone/francophone blood feud at that). The only other source of information I can easily find is this, which includes:
The city says it's open to making some accommodations, but will not get rid of the meters completely.
One would assume that, of all people, Apple's architectural design team could "think differently" and find some way to redecorate the meters in order to not ruin the ambiance or whatever, and the city seems amenable to that, but wanting the meters removed outright sounds less like "They're ugly" and more "They inconvenience our car-driving customers."
And such a heavy-handed measure would cause more problems than it would solve. It would needlessly cause greater aggravation for drivers looking for someplace to park, and no-parking zones don't enforce themselves.
I would rather see a government avoid using brute force measures where gentle persuasion would suffice. Especially when the latter earns money rather than spends it on more traffic cops.
Besides, if it were primarily about the income, the city government would have jumped at the cash offer.
There is no source for the quote in TFA, and TFA is the only article I can find on the subject with the quote. I believe this is what we call "hyperbole."
Now why wouldn't the city want to play ball? As TFA and the summary say, the entire point of the parking meters is to reduce downtown parking to begin with; it's not about the revenue, it's about the traffic (always a problem in major metropolitan centers built well before the invention of the automobile). If anything, we should be applauding the local government here for not taking the money and instead sticking by their original intent. All too many such governments would have taken the money and turned the other way.
If anybody is failing to "think different," it's Apple themselves, who are trying to take the tried-and-true easy way out of essentially bribing a government to get their way. Something different would be to find a way to encourage all those hipster Apple fans to come to their store by, say, public transportation (save gas, ease traffic congestion, etc.).
Would the story have the same "Boo government, yay capitalists!" slant if we were talking about a Sony store?
"the Zapper will work with EA's Medal of Honor Heroes, which will feature an 'arcade mode' to make the game accessible to all age groups and skill levels,"
Should "all age groups" be exposed to a game that's rated T by the ESRB?
Nintendo should phrase things more carefully in light of recent scandals and Congressional interest.
"The problem is that orbital mechanics means that your satellite would be moving fastest when closest to the Earth (the best point to do observations) and slowest when furthest away."
The main problem isn't Johannes Kepler so much as Adam Smith: you're adding a great deal of cost to boost the satellite into such an orbit, one that would make the satellite useful for less than half the time of a more conventional orbit. Apogee would need to be moved dozens and hundreds of kilometers for ever second you want to extend a satellite's hang time over a particular point on the planet, and the additional distance would require much more sophisticated (and much heavier) optics in order to perform its duties, again adding to the cost to launch it; continuing ad absurdum, you'd end up with the scenario I alluded to in another post: the Hubble Space Telescope pointed at the ground from geostationary (40,000 km versus 400).
The circular, polar orbits at altitudes favored by the spooks has the satellite passing over virtually every point on the globe once every day, with the optics to take advantage of all the opportunities provided by daylight. It's cheaper, more efficient, more cost effective, and it saves you from having to predict where interesting events will occur and boosting yet another satellite into a specialized orbit that makes it useless for observing other regions.
You'd still need far more cameras than you have alloted (because you'd need far more of the sky covered than just the horizon), with a high enough resolution and aperture for astronomical photography (in essence, each camera would need a telescope), at a suitably remote location, with suitable weather. Then you'd have to make sure that you're able to differentiate visible motion as "satellite" and not "meteor," "airplane" or "lightning bug" (realistically, you'd have to involve humans in this step). And then you'd have to go through to eliminate known satellites from your observations. Finally, you'd need to keep the whole operation running over at least a number of months (if not years) before you'd be able to say with reasonable certainty that the particular streak of light you saw three weeks ago will be visible again ten days from now.
"But you're not looking for a solitary nuke. You've looking for the huge effort that goes into manufacturing and testing the thing. Things like materiel going into suspected labs and factories, or the local army cordoning off the test site. That's a lot harder to hide."
In the specific examples of the surprise tests of India and Pakistan in 1998, none of that was hidden. India set off its first nuclear device in the 1970's and Pakistan finished building the required infrastructure in the 1980's. India already had a testing range set aside for its first blast and Pakistan picked and cordoned off a testing site soon afterwards. The only thing left to both countries was actually building and testing the bombs. The United States used diplomatic pressure to dissuade both countries from doing just that, and satellites successfully caught a pending test in India in 1995, which the US successfully pressured them into stopping.
All the Indians did different in 1998 was use more camouflage, do most of their work at night, and make sure all the earth-moving equipment was back where it belonged come daylight.
If you're looking for "Country X has the infrastructure to build Teh Bomb!" as you'd want to find out with Iran and DPRK, then the satellites are impossible to hide from, but the only question the world was still asking in 1998 for both countries was "When are they going to test Teh Bomb?" and, due to careful planning, satellites weren't very helpful, and the surveilled party didn't need knowledge of satellites trajectories to do it.
"taking long-exposure images during dusk and dawn."
You need to know when the streak was made, preferably to the nearest second (at least). From the ground, LEO satellites move through the sky faster than a passenger jet at cruising altitudes (especially the "interesting" satellites in polar orbits). You'd also have to know in what direction it moved.
"Enough cameras to cover the horizon."
An object reflecting sunlight while overhead need not still be catching sunlight near the horizon. On top of that, at the horizon you have more light pollution obscuring the faint light and more atmosphere to absorb it and/or throw off your orbital calculations.
"and correlate them against your database of known targets."
Said databases need to be continually updated due to atmospheric drag on the satellites and the attitude adjustments needed to correct it. Which brings me to another point: you need to catch two or three passes to really get a fix on an object's orbit. These subsequent passes won't all happen at night (let alone near dusk or dawn), and not all nights are cloudless.
It doesn't matter how good your math skills are, you can't get a fix on them without decent data collection, and you can't get decent data without a second-by-second picture of most (if not all) of the visible sky.
"So I guess my point is that they did it invisibly despite being looked at the whole time."
And my point is that it wasn't "the whole time." An individual satellite only has scant seconds to photograph an area on a pass and won't be able to do it again for at least a day (probably longer). Multiple satellites give you a few more handfuls of seconds to observe during the course of any given day, but the odds are strongly in favor that no satellite will be making a pass at the random time you decide to move the bomb.
This isn't a Hollywood movie, satellites don't have hang time. Satellite reconnaissance is done by comparing two still photographs and looking for differences. Unless you actually have a satellite passing by as they move the bomb (you'd have a better chance of winning the lottery), all the NRO has to go on is "The A-Bombs R Us truck is parked in a different spot today than it was last Tuesday, it probably went somewhere. I wonder if they moved the bomb..." Park said truck in exactly the same place after you move the bomb, and there's no reason to suspect anything from the two photos.
"They didn't see it because the Pakistanis (or Indians) were keeping track of satellites and not moving anything when there were unknown ones overhead."
It's not about knowing where the satellites are so much as understanding that, altogether, all the spy satellites will only be able to photograph your little corner of the world for a total of maybe 1 minute out of 1440. Make sure that the trucks from Habib's Fissionable Material Shipping Service are always parked in the same place, in the same position after you're done with them and the odds are in your favor that Langley won't see any difference between two consecutive satellite passes. The rest is basic camouflage techniques that had been used to counter reconnaissance aircraft long before Sputnik.
Realistically, the odds are in your favor if you want to do something small that you don't want satellites to catch and you think a little about what you're doing. They satellites are mostly there to catch gross, macro changes in another country's borders ("Gee, they just moved this tank brigade to their border and a surface fleet has left port!"), but the hopes of catching a single, solitary nuclear device on the move is a crapshot at best. Of course, it may not be an acceptable risk when the stakes involved are you clandestinely testing your first nuclear device, and Langley surely hopes that the fear of "We might see you do it!" gives them second thoughts, but unless they have the Hubble parked at geostationary above your sorry ass, "we have teh sattelitez!" is a bogeyman at best
"Numerous communications satellites have been lost over the years."
They tend to fall out of orbit and burn up in re-entry and/or are placed in geosynchronous orbit, not the globe-spanning polar LEO's favored by the spook community.
Also, for the kind of money involved in launching, using and maintaining one, you do not lose one casually.
"Others may be a secret alien monitoring network..."
"What, haven't the hairless apes wiped themselves out yet?" Alien monitoring requires that we actually be, y'know, interesting and worth monitoring. Feels too much like a descendant of the ol' Ptolemaic geocentricism.
"If the French can see them then so can anyone else with a telescope."
Those are very small satellites in a very, very big sky (it's not called "space" for no reason). If you're lucky, you might see it with the naked eye go by near sunrise or sunset, so that it catches sunlight against the dark sky, but otherwise you'd have to use magnification, which means limiting your field of view dramatically to look for an object that is in your stretch of sky for less than a minute while it passes through your field of view (which happens maybe once or twice a day as the earth rotates under the satellite's polar orbit, and not always at night).
Or you'd need a sophisticated radar system capable of bouncing signals off of objects in low orbit, the kind of system only a first-world national government could afford.
It's easier to find earth-threatening asteroids than it is to catch a satellite you don't already know about.
"fansite Project Manhunt has a warning: '...remember downloading this game is only going to slimming [sic] the already slim chance of Manhunt 3 ever happening,' "
All this because some random customer bought the Ao version and ripped it and... wait, what?
Oh, that's right, this game never got published! The only way this could make its way onto the internet is if one of the raters from the ESRB uploaded the copy they were given to rate, or (more likely) it was one of Rockstar's own employees that did this. Heck, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if this was done with a wink and a nudge from management.
So spare me the bleeding-heart rhetoric when it wasn't some selfish, unfeeling fan that did this. Rockstar knows exactly how many copies of this version were made and who had access to them. Besides, they'll only lose money if you download the Ao version in lieu of buying the M version on store shelves. Download it to see any potential differences from a game you already own, and nobody loses a dime.
"The jury is still out on how much of the wii's numbers overlap and exclude the PS3 potential customer base."
But that's not the issue. Parent poster pointed to declining sales of the PS2 and suggested the PS3 was the cause of it, while it seems safe to say that, if any console is helping to cause the decline in PS2 sales, it's the Wii.
Slashdot Mirror
"Can you really fight terrorists with giant bombs?"
Of course you can, very easily. But then you end up with another of those catch phrases: collateral damage.
Why do I have the sudden vision of zombies shuffling around in lab coats crying out for "branes?"
"Considering the one-dimensional case, higher orbits would appear slower, and elliptical orbits would appear faster around the perigee and slower around the apogee."
We're dealing with a three-dimensional model where the observations are being taken from a rotating sphere. The apparent motion of a satellite through the night sky is a combination of both it's own motion and the motion of the observer on the rotating planet. The result is that two (at least) different non-coplanar orbits can produce the same apparent path from the ground (or at least your small patch of it). An object's slower speed through your sky may be the result of a higher orbit, or it may be the result of a lower inclination.
"When you're not in the orbital plane, I expect the apparent curvature would further help to fix the altitude."
The low altitudes and the high inclinations of the orbits used by spy satellites mean that, for the time that you see it, you're always near (if not moving through) the orbital plane.
"For one, it's passive, so you can't detect it."
Other than the web traffic you'd generate frequently accessing NASA's Orbital Information Group for the list of objects you can eliminate from your observations (tables populated thanks to NORAD radar). Otherwise your workload would go up at least one order of magnitude.
"Also, I suspect it would be easier to design a satellite to not reflect certain bands of radar back towards Earth, than to not reflect sunlight."
You're trying to hide against what is essentially a black body.
No, this is DOS 5; it is IBM. The MS/IBM split didn't start until DOS 6.x.
You would still end up with thousands of pictures to sort through every evening, as you'd need a second-by-second picture of the entire region throughout the available time.
"The exposures would ideally be short enough that a streak would span several images "
LEO satellites move across the sky quickly. You'd have three choices:
- Shorter exposures, meaning more pictures, increasing the cost to process data
- Wide-angled lenses on all cameras, thereby reducing each individual camera's ability to see fainter objects (such as satellites)
- More cameras.
"You know the satellite's motion is inertial, so you should be able to figure the orbit."But you don't know its altitude. Even with position and angular velocity measurements of adequate precision, you'd have no information on only one pass with which to devise its true linear velocity; multiple three-dimensional orbits could produce the measured two-dimensional results. You would not only need to catch multiple passes, but you would also need to know that you were catching multiple passes, that the moving light you see now is the same moving light you saw three weeks ago. Otherwise, you have to wait months and rely on eliminating potential orbits before you narrow it down to the right one.
"You'd also need to throw away data that isn't plausible for an orbit, which you'd get plenty of from airplanes."
Unless the airplane in question turns within the field of view of a camera, distinguishing between airplanes and satellites purely by the two-dimensional data you'd be collecting is not mathematically trivial.
"I only said cover the horizon because, looking at data from heavens-above, it seems like it's more likely for the satellites to be visible there, and near dawn and dusk."
No, satellites, like all astronomical phenomena, are less visible at the horizon. The best place to catch something as faint as a satellite is directly overhead.
I have to ask: Have you ever gone stargazing and seen satellites for yourself?
"You could cover a bigger area if you wanted."
By increasing the number of cameras (and the price tag) exponentially.
"Admittedly, you probably wouldn't get the best quality data. But it should be good enough for you to guess at the next visible pass,"
One pass will give you, say, five or six possible candidates for when the next potential pass will be. You'd have to observe for several more weeks to eliminate those potentials. But during the intervening time you'll find more new objects (at least you think they're new), and each one will, again, introduce another five or six potential orbits to worry about. If your goal is to avoid being seen by one, you will either have to let the project continue for more than a year, or you'd have to plan around all those potential satellites, the "false positives" if you will, as well as the real ones, potentially leaving you paralyzed.
"especially if you have multiple sites."
This would increase the number of potential satellites. "Is this parallax or did we catch two different satellites?"
"And the end goal isn't to rendezvous with it or shoot it down, it's to know when it's visible so you can hide your doomsday devices."
Doing this, you'd end up spending more time and resources trying to hide your doomsday device than actually building it.
In contrast, the French (and anybody else serious about catching spy satellites) are using radar, which:
"If they don't want the parking, get rid of the spots."
Yeah, they could launch a government War on Cars.
Funny how many Slashdotters here are encouraging government punishment rather than persuasion.
"unlike parking meters?"
There are only two types of people who park at parking meters: those who pay and those who don't. Those who don't pay, however, still need to compete with those who do, meaning someone seeking to park illegally will not always have the opportunity. This is not true if the curb is made a no-parking zone.
Parking meters enforce themselves by providing fewer opportunities to break the law to begin with.
I'm really disinclined to believe the "quotes" and "motives" from TFA when it looks more and more to me like an editorial rather than an actual news article (one that conveniently caters to Canada's old anglophone/francophone blood feud at that). The only other source of information I can easily find is this, which includes:One would assume that, of all people, Apple's architectural design team could "think differently" and find some way to redecorate the meters in order to not ruin the ambiance or whatever, and the city seems amenable to that, but wanting the meters removed outright sounds less like "They're ugly" and more "They inconvenience our car-driving customers."
And such a heavy-handed measure would cause more problems than it would solve. It would needlessly cause greater aggravation for drivers looking for someplace to park, and no-parking zones don't enforce themselves.
I would rather see a government avoid using brute force measures where gentle persuasion would suffice. Especially when the latter earns money rather than spends it on more traffic cops.
Besides, if it were primarily about the income, the city government would have jumped at the cash offer.
"We've never done it before, so we can't."
There is no source for the quote in TFA, and TFA is the only article I can find on the subject with the quote. I believe this is what we call "hyperbole."
Now why wouldn't the city want to play ball? As TFA and the summary say, the entire point of the parking meters is to reduce downtown parking to begin with; it's not about the revenue, it's about the traffic (always a problem in major metropolitan centers built well before the invention of the automobile). If anything, we should be applauding the local government here for not taking the money and instead sticking by their original intent. All too many such governments would have taken the money and turned the other way.
If anybody is failing to "think different," it's Apple themselves, who are trying to take the tried-and-true easy way out of essentially bribing a government to get their way. Something different would be to find a way to encourage all those hipster Apple fans to come to their store by, say, public transportation (save gas, ease traffic congestion, etc.).
Would the story have the same "Boo government, yay capitalists!" slant if we were talking about a Sony store?
We don't only test games, but we dance just as good as we walk!
Con: They're an obvious attempt to get money from that demographic distinguished by having considerably more disposable income than most.
Pro: Open your own such school to cash in on the phenomenon.
"the Zapper will work with EA's Medal of Honor Heroes, which will feature an 'arcade mode' to make the game accessible to all age groups and skill levels,"
Should "all age groups" be exposed to a game that's rated T by the ESRB?
Nintendo should phrase things more carefully in light of recent scandals and Congressional interest.
"The problem is that orbital mechanics means that your satellite would be moving fastest when closest to the Earth (the best point to do observations) and slowest when furthest away."
The main problem isn't Johannes Kepler so much as Adam Smith: you're adding a great deal of cost to boost the satellite into such an orbit, one that would make the satellite useful for less than half the time of a more conventional orbit. Apogee would need to be moved dozens and hundreds of kilometers for ever second you want to extend a satellite's hang time over a particular point on the planet, and the additional distance would require much more sophisticated (and much heavier) optics in order to perform its duties, again adding to the cost to launch it; continuing ad absurdum, you'd end up with the scenario I alluded to in another post: the Hubble Space Telescope pointed at the ground from geostationary (40,000 km versus 400).
The circular, polar orbits at altitudes favored by the spooks has the satellite passing over virtually every point on the globe once every day, with the optics to take advantage of all the opportunities provided by daylight. It's cheaper, more efficient, more cost effective, and it saves you from having to predict where interesting events will occur and boosting yet another satellite into a specialized orbit that makes it useless for observing other regions.
"If you use Linux you are buying into an ideology of how to ensure users are free to modify the software they are using. Don't like it? Don't use it,"
And this is why you're not going to be on the desktop.
You'd still need far more cameras than you have alloted (because you'd need far more of the sky covered than just the horizon), with a high enough resolution and aperture for astronomical photography (in essence, each camera would need a telescope), at a suitably remote location, with suitable weather. Then you'd have to make sure that you're able to differentiate visible motion as "satellite" and not "meteor," "airplane" or "lightning bug" (realistically, you'd have to involve humans in this step). And then you'd have to go through to eliminate known satellites from your observations. Finally, you'd need to keep the whole operation running over at least a number of months (if not years) before you'd be able to say with reasonable certainty that the particular streak of light you saw three weeks ago will be visible again ten days from now.
This is, literally, rocket science.
"But you're not looking for a solitary nuke. You've looking for the huge effort that goes into manufacturing and testing the thing. Things like materiel going into suspected labs and factories, or the local army cordoning off the test site. That's a lot harder to hide."
In the specific examples of the surprise tests of India and Pakistan in 1998, none of that was hidden. India set off its first nuclear device in the 1970's and Pakistan finished building the required infrastructure in the 1980's. India already had a testing range set aside for its first blast and Pakistan picked and cordoned off a testing site soon afterwards. The only thing left to both countries was actually building and testing the bombs. The United States used diplomatic pressure to dissuade both countries from doing just that, and satellites successfully caught a pending test in India in 1995, which the US successfully pressured them into stopping.
All the Indians did different in 1998 was use more camouflage, do most of their work at night, and make sure all the earth-moving equipment was back where it belonged come daylight.
If you're looking for "Country X has the infrastructure to build Teh Bomb!" as you'd want to find out with Iran and DPRK, then the satellites are impossible to hide from, but the only question the world was still asking in 1998 for both countries was "When are they going to test Teh Bomb?" and, due to careful planning, satellites weren't very helpful, and the surveilled party didn't need knowledge of satellites trajectories to do it.
"taking long-exposure images during dusk and dawn."
You need to know when the streak was made, preferably to the nearest second (at least). From the ground, LEO satellites move through the sky faster than a passenger jet at cruising altitudes (especially the "interesting" satellites in polar orbits). You'd also have to know in what direction it moved.
"Enough cameras to cover the horizon."
An object reflecting sunlight while overhead need not still be catching sunlight near the horizon. On top of that, at the horizon you have more light pollution obscuring the faint light and more atmosphere to absorb it and/or throw off your orbital calculations.
"and correlate them against your database of known targets."
Said databases need to be continually updated due to atmospheric drag on the satellites and the attitude adjustments needed to correct it. Which brings me to another point: you need to catch two or three passes to really get a fix on an object's orbit. These subsequent passes won't all happen at night (let alone near dusk or dawn), and not all nights are cloudless.
It doesn't matter how good your math skills are, you can't get a fix on them without decent data collection, and you can't get decent data without a second-by-second picture of most (if not all) of the visible sky.
"So I guess my point is that they did it invisibly despite being looked at the whole time."
And my point is that it wasn't "the whole time." An individual satellite only has scant seconds to photograph an area on a pass and won't be able to do it again for at least a day (probably longer). Multiple satellites give you a few more handfuls of seconds to observe during the course of any given day, but the odds are strongly in favor that no satellite will be making a pass at the random time you decide to move the bomb.
This isn't a Hollywood movie, satellites don't have hang time. Satellite reconnaissance is done by comparing two still photographs and looking for differences. Unless you actually have a satellite passing by as they move the bomb (you'd have a better chance of winning the lottery), all the NRO has to go on is "The A-Bombs R Us truck is parked in a different spot today than it was last Tuesday, it probably went somewhere. I wonder if they moved the bomb..." Park said truck in exactly the same place after you move the bomb, and there's no reason to suspect anything from the two photos.
"They didn't see it because the Pakistanis (or Indians) were keeping track of satellites and not moving anything when there were unknown ones overhead."
It's not about knowing where the satellites are so much as understanding that, altogether, all the spy satellites will only be able to photograph your little corner of the world for a total of maybe 1 minute out of 1440. Make sure that the trucks from Habib's Fissionable Material Shipping Service are always parked in the same place, in the same position after you're done with them and the odds are in your favor that Langley won't see any difference between two consecutive satellite passes. The rest is basic camouflage techniques that had been used to counter reconnaissance aircraft long before Sputnik.
Realistically, the odds are in your favor if you want to do something small that you don't want satellites to catch and you think a little about what you're doing. They satellites are mostly there to catch gross, macro changes in another country's borders ("Gee, they just moved this tank brigade to their border and a surface fleet has left port!"), but the hopes of catching a single, solitary nuclear device on the move is a crapshot at best. Of course, it may not be an acceptable risk when the stakes involved are you clandestinely testing your first nuclear device, and Langley surely hopes that the fear of "We might see you do it!" gives them second thoughts, but unless they have the Hubble parked at geostationary above your sorry ass, "we have teh sattelitez!" is a bogeyman at best
"Numerous communications satellites have been lost over the years."
They tend to fall out of orbit and burn up in re-entry and/or are placed in geosynchronous orbit, not the globe-spanning polar LEO's favored by the spook community.
Also, for the kind of money involved in launching, using and maintaining one, you do not lose one casually.
"Others may be a secret alien monitoring network..."
"What, haven't the hairless apes wiped themselves out yet?" Alien monitoring requires that we actually be, y'know, interesting and worth monitoring. Feels too much like a descendant of the ol' Ptolemaic geocentricism.
"If the French can see them then so can anyone else with a telescope."
Those are very small satellites in a very, very big sky (it's not called "space" for no reason). If you're lucky, you might see it with the naked eye go by near sunrise or sunset, so that it catches sunlight against the dark sky, but otherwise you'd have to use magnification, which means limiting your field of view dramatically to look for an object that is in your stretch of sky for less than a minute while it passes through your field of view (which happens maybe once or twice a day as the earth rotates under the satellite's polar orbit, and not always at night).
Or you'd need a sophisticated radar system capable of bouncing signals off of objects in low orbit, the kind of system only a first-world national government could afford.
It's easier to find earth-threatening asteroids than it is to catch a satellite you don't already know about.
"fansite Project Manhunt has a warning: '...remember downloading this game is only going to slimming [sic] the already slim chance of Manhunt 3 ever happening,' "
All this because some random customer bought the Ao version and ripped it and... wait, what?
Oh, that's right, this game never got published! The only way this could make its way onto the internet is if one of the raters from the ESRB uploaded the copy they were given to rate, or (more likely) it was one of Rockstar's own employees that did this. Heck, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if this was done with a wink and a nudge from management.
So spare me the bleeding-heart rhetoric when it wasn't some selfish, unfeeling fan that did this. Rockstar knows exactly how many copies of this version were made and who had access to them. Besides, they'll only lose money if you download the Ao version in lieu of buying the M version on store shelves. Download it to see any potential differences from a game you already own, and nobody loses a dime.
Dude, this is the Church of England we're talking about here.
Cake or death?!
"The jury is still out on how much of the wii's numbers overlap and exclude the PS3 potential customer base."
But that's not the issue. Parent poster pointed to declining sales of the PS2 and suggested the PS3 was the cause of it, while it seems safe to say that, if any console is helping to cause the decline in PS2 sales, it's the Wii.