Given that the US Navy already uses Extremely Low Frequency radio to communicate with submarines, I wonder what the military communication applications would be of being able to turn the whole ionosphere, even briefly and at insanely low wattages, into an antenna.
I'm no radio engineer, but I'd assume that would mean you could generate some very penetrating radiation which could be picked up deep underwater or in bunkers - as long as you had very sensitive detectors.
Course you'd want to do the transmissions from an actual secure military facility, not a science base, but...
Excuse me, I have an abandoned mineshaft in Nevada I need to buy for... um, personal recreational purposes.
Yes, and if you stopped wasting so much time playing with silly little apps on your phone, you could have just used the time to call the friend you don't get to see much anymore... if you actually cared.
And if that list of friends-at-the-margins runs to several hundred? And for each of them you don't know if they're in a meeting, at home, travelling, or will be available, when and where they have things on....?
Seems to me you'd be spending forever just playing phone tag, and probably annoying all those friends with your constant phone spamming. And then someone like you would say 'why are you spending all your time on this artificial device called a phone, if you REALLY cared about your friends you'd all move into the same apartment.' Then it would be 'apartmentsare modern and evil! If you REALLY cared you'd all buy a cabin in the woods, burn all your books and live off the land.'
One of the advantages of social networking tools is that they are moderated many-to-many micro-broadcasts, while phone and email are one-to-one conversations, which means to talk to more than one friend you have to set up and arrange exponentially more conversations. Think about cinema and newspapers and radio: yes, you COULD get all your news by one-on-one gossip, but the apparatus to do so would be huge and inefficient.
Modern cities are complex machines and often hostile to having a healthy social life. But why drop out of modernity completely when a simple application could help you stay in touch as you navigate the maze?
2001 did the 'look' of space brilliantly, and has never yet really been equalled except by actual documentaries. It also captured a really impersonal, soulless 'feel' which was what many people in the 1960s-70s were afraid Apollo-era big technology would produce. The people in 2001 - and in many other SF movies of the era - were tiny insects dwarfed by the huge systems they had created. This was the era of the frightening, bland, technological-socialist future.
Star Wars carried through that realistic look. But it also reintroduced the idea of romance both to space and to cinema. It made it okay to dream, and to pretend that individuals could change the world. Above all, it was fun. It was a nostalgic rock-n-roll rebel take on the techno-future. It said, 'yes there will be robots, but people will still be people and emotions will still matter and there'll be space to follow your heart'.
Is this a silly, childish thing to believe? Perhaps. The future isn't likely to be like Star Wars; the physics doesn't work, for one thing, and neither does the politics. But on the other hand, the big centrally-planned grim tech-socialist future imagined by the downbeat SF of the 1970s - Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, Blakes 7, even Lucas' own THX-1138, hasn't happened either.
And so far in the 1990s-2000s, we haven't managed to come up with an equally optimistic dream of the future. (Except perhaps Pixar's animation.) We got lots of X-Files, Aliens, Terminator, Matrix, Blade Runner, Dark Knight, but they're all oppressive futures we really don't want to live in.
I agree that Star Wars is mined out and I'd like to see a new vision of the future which is both romantic and plausible, but I'm not sure what that will look like or who will do it.
Anyone who *never* watched Star Wars as a kid, and watches it for the first time as an adult (such as I), instantly reconigzes how incredibly cheeze of a film it is.
Nope.
I'd seen the merchandise around age 7, but never watched the movies.
I was 25 when I first actually watched Star Wars, and the binary sunset scene just blew me away. Somehow it seemed to capture a whole generational sense of aching desperation to get out of suburbia and do something interesting with my life.
Empire had the duel, and Jedi, not much except for the unmasking scene.
But the thing about Star Wars is that 1) since Lucas back then knew he couldn't write, he cribbed shamelessly from iconic cinema, so it's really a distillation of every Western, Samurai, WW2 and sci-fi story ever, and 2) he had really really good set designers / FX experts who borrowed techniques from 2001 and imagery from NASA.
Star Wars was only four years after the last Apollo - so 'real space' was hot in everyone's minds, and the 2001/NASA look was very different from the Buck Rogers cheesy spacecraft look. Whoever designed the look of Star Wars knew that, and made things which looked 'real': chunky, functional, metallic. Bright whites, crisp lines, a reused aesthetic.
The TIE fighters look like satellites, not rockets. The scene where the escape pod is ejected looks exactly like a Saturn V first-stage ejection. The Jawa Sand Crawler's giant treads are identical to the Saturn crawler system. The Stormtrooper suits look like astronaut suits via Nazi Art Deco. Vader's suit controls borrow from John Glenn and the way astronauts with all those handheld life support packs looked like actual cyborgs -- just as much as from ancient Japan. Both of which seemed new and exotic to the West at the time.
The beeping droids came along just as microprocessors were talking off and kitset computers were in the news. They symbolised the new way of seeing computers, not as big central systems (though the Death Star computer walls still have that IBM System/360 look) but as personal companions. Compare with, say, HAL, or Hewey and Dewey from Silent Running, and it's such a different vibe: none of the oppressiveness of the Big System, but a belief in personal freedom via technology. And the droids also had that functional, don't-much-care-about-aesthetics look which real machines have.
Look at, say, 1979's The Space Movie and take a close look at all that old space footage. You'll see how Star Wars brought in visual inspiration which hadn't been seen in a comic-book cheesy space movie before.
The way everything mixed together into a space-age fairytale cinematic dreamspace just make it work, and most of those inspirations weren't from Lucas but his scriptwriting and visual design team.
The prequels utterly failed to do this process; I don't even know if they could have, now. We have too much ironic distance from Apollo and too much familiarity with space hardware now. Perhaps we can't see those images with new eyes. But the prequels didn't even try; they looked to the 1930s serials for inspiration, and to the first trilogy, and to 'coolness', not to NASA and the Altair 8800 and the Graflex Flash Gun and other real technology.
I know a number of people with corporate-issued Blackberrys. One of the featuures that made these attractive to corporate customers was that RIM set them up with their own server infrastructure. This placed encryption and data security in the hands of their IT departments.
Sure about that? With a standard BES install, data to and from the device gets routed via Blackberry's corporate servers, so if they could crack the encryption they'd have a copy of every corporate email ever. Supposedly it's AES encrypted at the endpoints, yes. But how is an admin going to verify how strong the crypto really is in a server binary that you don't have source code to? I know I'm not smart enough to do that. I would feel a little safer if the BES talked directly to the device through the layer-3 network of my choice rather than through one company's application-level gateways.
Maybe there are special exotic BES setups which don't route via Blackberry servers, but it's not how I understand the system works for most companies.
Since I don't particularly care about obeying software patents covering codecs and file formats,
Because I live in New Zealand, I'm legally allowed to do this - but if you live in the USA, isn't it a bit of a problem that your chosen media codec solution involves deliberate lawbreaking?
Mass civil disobedience might indeed be the appropriate response to broken software patent law, but if you're going to do that, shouldn't you also be willing to undergo mass arrests and trials?
Or you could just avoid using the broken patented technology. Seems easier to me.
No, really they don't have a right to know about the operational details of the war until it is over.
And a Global War on Terror will never be over, and can never be escaped from, and will require pervasive covert operations, and so all the executive actions of any government running such a war could legitimately be considered 'operational details' and kept secret forever.
It seems as if war is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, and we're fast approaching the time when we have to choose either one or the other.
You left the door open so wide there using that as a metric for success in your example that even I want to put on somebody's crazy hat and make crap up about how the goal of the war is to generate money. My God, they must have all short circuited their keyboards while salivating to have not responded yet =P
On the wide scale, making wars which do not in the end lead to an increase (or at least not a decrease) in the wealth of the country which prosecutes them, seem like a sure recipe for that country's collapse.
Everything is about wealth, eventually. Not all wealth can necessarily be measured in short-term financial profit/loss accounts, but if you're not thinking 'is this war worth it?' then you'll run around like Rambo making enemies and eventually running out of bullets.
Real war is like Doom on Nightmare mode. Enemies don't stay neatly dead, they respawn behind you, and you need more achievable objectives then 'die trying to clear every sector.'
Look at any internal bug-tracking database for any reasonably-sized project and you'll immediately conclude that the project is a horrible steaming pile of crap that everyone hates. That does not necessarily mean that the project actually is worthless.
Contrariwise, if the purpose of the project is fundamentally flawed, then no matter how good the execution, it's never going to rise above that purpose.
The purpose of the Afghan war, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to force a compliant US-friendly puppet government onto a nation which has a centuries-long history of being violently hostile to foreign occupation - and who are, furthermore morally in the right to resist such an occupation.
Or did you so easily forget how loudly the US beat its breast in dismay in 1979 when the USSR did exactly what the USA did in 2001?
This seems like not only an unwinnable war, but an unjust war. Not a good mix.
"Supporting the troops" is simply a way to voice that you understand that they are in harm's way on your behalf, despite your opposition to the fact they've been put in harm's way for reasons you disagree with.
If the troops are in harm's way for reasons I totally disagree with, and I vehemently and publically opposed the decision to put them in harm's way, and I believe that their being in harm's way is utterly counterproductive to my and the nation's interests --
-- then by what definition could the troops possibly be said to be in harm's way 'on my behalf'?
I don't want them there, I want them NOT there, they're not doing me, themselves, or the world any good by being there. Whatever military command it is that they're 'defending', it is not my rights, it is not my freedom, it is not consistent with my ethics, and I want them to stop doing it.
I don't support the troops in their current mission and in the career decisions they have made which have led them to support that mission - including oaths of obedience to a system of command which has been revealed to be fatally, hugely, ethically in the wrong.
And nor should you.
I want them to stop killing people against my express wishes and telling people falsely that it is 'on my behalf'. I want them to stop blindly following the illegal orders given them which caused them to start an illegal war. I want them to stop using my money and reputation to do things that appall me.
Once they do that, THEN we can start discussing whether I 'support' their new career and mission, whatever that may turn out to be.
You can't argue that something like a Fire Dept is just plain bad. It's a fire department, you know, firemen, good guys, saving houses and lives.
That's why it is harder to be a conservative. We have to argue "Yes, there is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of our Fire Department, but they cost us too much money.
So your argument is that it's hard to be a conservative because the conservative position starts by ignoring the moral purpose of providing public services, and therefore needs much more careful thought to avoid making rash, ill-thought-out budget cuts which could create grave public harm?
And that therefore you deserve sympathy because you've got such a hard road in comparison to the people who do start by assuming that public services, by definition, serve the public?
I can see how your position would be difficult, yes, but I can't quite see how you've managed to convince me that it's correct.
The comment about the Church implies that the object was assumed to be extraterrestrial, which is perhaps the least plausible bit: why would a group of military experts assume such a thing?
Probably because that's exactly the conclusion that the first group of military experts assigned to investigate UFOs came to. The 'ET hypothesis' was not received well by the US military, and certainly did not become the official explanation. But it was out there, and people in a position to see the early evidence were thinking along those lines.
The really interesting question to my mind is not, is it plausible that Winston Churchill may have reached such a conclusion a few years earlier than the public record shows (though that is both interesting and plausible to me), but why did the actual, documented, paper trail of Project Sign in 1947 reach such an out-there conclusion - even at substantial risk to their careers?
No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
But wouldn't a universal algorithmic crack for reCAPTCHA imply an algorithm that could automatically tell the difference between a correct OCR transcription and nonsense? So just fold that algorithm into future open-source OCR libraries and watch the recognition rate soar. We're using black hat hackers to write AI code for us, and everyone wins! *
* Except John Connor, after Skynet starts reading the Hollywood rejected scripts vault.
Slashdot Mirror
That URL doesn't resolve. Replacing 'raytheonaircraft' with 'raytheon' doesn't work either.
While I'm sympathetic to conspiracy theories, posting valid URLs would help your case.
We can destabilize a hurricane with a strong laser, or we can make the thing worse with a different laser tuning.
We can? Cite please?
Increase nucleation to dump water in places where it's useless and dry the air, dump heat-of-condensation and/or reflect sunlght to steer winds, etc.
Your ideas intrigue me and I would like to subscribe to the Google Weather Control Beta.
Given that the US Navy already uses Extremely Low Frequency radio to communicate with submarines, I wonder what the military communication applications would be of being able to turn the whole ionosphere, even briefly and at insanely low wattages, into an antenna.
I'm no radio engineer, but I'd assume that would mean you could generate some very penetrating radiation which could be picked up deep underwater or in bunkers - as long as you had very sensitive detectors.
Course you'd want to do the transmissions from an actual secure military facility, not a science base, but...
Excuse me, I have an abandoned mineshaft in Nevada I need to buy for... um, personal recreational purposes.
It's Qt based? How does that work on non-Qt desktop environments?
Yes, and if you stopped wasting so much time playing with silly little apps on your phone, you could have just used the time to call the friend you don't get to see much anymore ... if you actually cared.
And if that list of friends-at-the-margins runs to several hundred? And for each of them you don't know if they're in a meeting, at home, travelling, or will be available, when and where they have things on....?
Seems to me you'd be spending forever just playing phone tag, and probably annoying all those friends with your constant phone spamming. And then someone like you would say 'why are you spending all your time on this artificial device called a phone, if you REALLY cared about your friends you'd all move into the same apartment.' Then it would be 'apartmentsare modern and evil! If you REALLY cared you'd all buy a cabin in the woods, burn all your books and live off the land.'
One of the advantages of social networking tools is that they are moderated many-to-many micro-broadcasts, while phone and email are one-to-one conversations, which means to talk to more than one friend you have to set up and arrange exponentially more conversations. Think about cinema and newspapers and radio: yes, you COULD get all your news by one-on-one gossip, but the apparatus to do so would be huge and inefficient.
Modern cities are complex machines and often hostile to having a healthy social life. But why drop out of modernity completely when a simple application could help you stay in touch as you navigate the maze?
Kia ora! Give that man a jar of Marmite!
Four Square was my neighbourhood corner shop growng up.
Mr Four Square is now so iconic of NZ that Dick Frizzell parodies him.
Same here. This is some American-only thing, right?
I first encountered a writeup about it on the Onion. Thought it was a parody, but apparently no.
That big glowing ball in the sky is now called "the Oracle." Get with the times!
So that's why we suddenly get a proof that P != NP?
We can't? Since when?
A postscript:
2001 did the 'look' of space brilliantly, and has never yet really been equalled except by actual documentaries. It also captured a really impersonal, soulless 'feel' which was what many people in the 1960s-70s were afraid Apollo-era big technology would produce. The people in 2001 - and in many other SF movies of the era - were tiny insects dwarfed by the huge systems they had created. This was the era of the frightening, bland, technological-socialist future.
Star Wars carried through that realistic look. But it also reintroduced the idea of romance both to space and to cinema. It made it okay to dream, and to pretend that individuals could change the world. Above all, it was fun. It was a nostalgic rock-n-roll rebel take on the techno-future. It said, 'yes there will be robots, but people will still be people and emotions will still matter and there'll be space to follow your heart'.
Is this a silly, childish thing to believe? Perhaps. The future isn't likely to be like Star Wars; the physics doesn't work, for one thing, and neither does the politics. But on the other hand, the big centrally-planned grim tech-socialist future imagined by the downbeat SF of the 1970s - Logan's Run, Planet of the Apes, Blakes 7, even Lucas' own THX-1138, hasn't happened either.
And so far in the 1990s-2000s, we haven't managed to come up with an equally optimistic dream of the future. (Except perhaps Pixar's animation.) We got lots of X-Files, Aliens, Terminator, Matrix, Blade Runner, Dark Knight, but they're all oppressive futures we really don't want to live in.
I agree that Star Wars is mined out and I'd like to see a new vision of the future which is both romantic and plausible, but I'm not sure what that will look like or who will do it.
Anyone who *never* watched Star Wars as a kid, and watches it for the first time as an adult (such as I), instantly reconigzes how incredibly cheeze of a film it is.
Nope.
I'd seen the merchandise around age 7, but never watched the movies.
I was 25 when I first actually watched Star Wars, and the binary sunset scene just blew me away. Somehow it seemed to capture a whole generational sense of aching desperation to get out of suburbia and do something interesting with my life.
Empire had the duel, and Jedi, not much except for the unmasking scene.
But the thing about Star Wars is that 1) since Lucas back then knew he couldn't write, he cribbed shamelessly from iconic cinema, so it's really a distillation of every Western, Samurai, WW2 and sci-fi story ever, and 2) he had really really good set designers / FX experts who borrowed techniques from 2001 and imagery from NASA.
Star Wars was only four years after the last Apollo - so 'real space' was hot in everyone's minds, and the 2001/NASA look was very different from the Buck Rogers cheesy spacecraft look. Whoever designed the look of Star Wars knew that, and made things which looked 'real': chunky, functional, metallic. Bright whites, crisp lines, a reused aesthetic.
The TIE fighters look like satellites, not rockets. The scene where the escape pod is ejected looks exactly like a Saturn V first-stage ejection. The Jawa Sand Crawler's giant treads are identical to the Saturn crawler system. The Stormtrooper suits look like astronaut suits via Nazi Art Deco. Vader's suit controls borrow from John Glenn and the way astronauts with all those handheld life support packs looked like actual cyborgs -- just as much as from ancient Japan. Both of which seemed new and exotic to the West at the time.
The beeping droids came along just as microprocessors were talking off and kitset computers were in the news. They symbolised the new way of seeing computers, not as big central systems (though the Death Star computer walls still have that IBM System/360 look) but as personal companions. Compare with, say, HAL, or Hewey and Dewey from Silent Running, and it's such a different vibe: none of the oppressiveness of the Big System, but a belief in personal freedom via technology. And the droids also had that functional, don't-much-care-about-aesthetics look which real machines have.
Look at, say, 1979's The Space Movie and take a close look at all that old space footage. You'll see how Star Wars brought in visual inspiration which hadn't been seen in a comic-book cheesy space movie before.
The way everything mixed together into a space-age fairytale cinematic dreamspace just make it work, and most of those inspirations weren't from Lucas but his scriptwriting and visual design team.
The prequels utterly failed to do this process; I don't even know if they could have, now. We have too much ironic distance from Apollo and too much familiarity with space hardware now. Perhaps we can't see those images with new eyes. But the prequels didn't even try; they looked to the 1930s serials for inspiration, and to the first trilogy, and to 'coolness', not to NASA and the Altair 8800 and the Graflex Flash Gun and other real technology.
I know a number of people with corporate-issued Blackberrys. One of the featuures that made these attractive to corporate customers was that RIM set them up with their own server infrastructure. This placed encryption and data security in the hands of their IT departments.
Sure about that? With a standard BES install, data to and from the device gets routed via Blackberry's corporate servers, so if they could crack the encryption they'd have a copy of every corporate email ever. Supposedly it's AES encrypted at the endpoints, yes. But how is an admin going to verify how strong the crypto really is in a server binary that you don't have source code to? I know I'm not smart enough to do that. I would feel a little safer if the BES talked directly to the device through the layer-3 network of my choice rather than through one company's application-level gateways.
Maybe there are special exotic BES setups which don't route via Blackberry servers, but it's not how I understand the system works for most companies.
Since I don't particularly care about obeying software patents covering codecs and file formats,
Because I live in New Zealand, I'm legally allowed to do this - but if you live in the USA, isn't it a bit of a problem that your chosen media codec solution involves deliberate lawbreaking?
Mass civil disobedience might indeed be the appropriate response to broken software patent law, but if you're going to do that, shouldn't you also be willing to undergo mass arrests and trials?
Or you could just avoid using the broken patented technology. Seems easier to me.
No, really they don't have a right to know about the operational details of the war until it is over.
And a Global War on Terror will never be over, and can never be escaped from, and will require pervasive covert operations, and so all the executive actions of any government running such a war could legitimately be considered 'operational details' and kept secret forever.
It seems as if war is fundamentally incompatible with democracy, and we're fast approaching the time when we have to choose either one or the other.
We aren't responsible enough as a society at viewing all that information fairly to be trusted with it indiscriminately.
And secret military cabals are?
A feral pack--on leashes.
I am not sure "feral" means what you think it does.
You left the door open so wide there using that as a metric for success in your example that even I want to put on somebody's crazy hat and make crap up about how the goal of the war is to generate money. My God, they must have all short circuited their keyboards while salivating to have not responded yet =P
On the wide scale, making wars which do not in the end lead to an increase (or at least not a decrease) in the wealth of the country which prosecutes them, seem like a sure recipe for that country's collapse.
Everything is about wealth, eventually. Not all wealth can necessarily be measured in short-term financial profit/loss accounts, but if you're not thinking 'is this war worth it?' then you'll run around like Rambo making enemies and eventually running out of bullets.
Real war is like Doom on Nightmare mode. Enemies don't stay neatly dead, they respawn behind you, and you need more achievable objectives then 'die trying to clear every sector.'
Look at any internal bug-tracking database for any reasonably-sized project and you'll immediately conclude that the project is a horrible steaming pile of crap that everyone hates. That does not necessarily mean that the project actually is worthless.
Contrariwise, if the purpose of the project is fundamentally flawed, then no matter how good the execution, it's never going to rise above that purpose.
The purpose of the Afghan war, as far as I can tell, is to attempt to force a compliant US-friendly puppet government onto a nation which has a centuries-long history of being violently hostile to foreign occupation - and who are, furthermore morally in the right to resist such an occupation.
Or did you so easily forget how loudly the US beat its breast in dismay in 1979 when the USSR did exactly what the USA did in 2001?
This seems like not only an unwinnable war, but an unjust war. Not a good mix.
"Supporting the troops" is simply a way to voice that you understand that they are in harm's way on your behalf, despite your opposition to the fact they've been put in harm's way for reasons you disagree with.
If the troops are in harm's way for reasons I totally disagree with, and I vehemently and publically opposed the decision to put them in harm's way, and I believe that their being in harm's way is utterly counterproductive to my and the nation's interests --
-- then by what definition could the troops possibly be said to be in harm's way 'on my behalf'?
I don't want them there, I want them NOT there, they're not doing me, themselves, or the world any good by being there. Whatever military command it is that they're 'defending', it is not my rights, it is not my freedom, it is not consistent with my ethics, and I want them to stop doing it.
I don't support the troops in their current mission and in the career decisions they have made which have led them to support that mission - including oaths of obedience to a system of command which has been revealed to be fatally, hugely, ethically in the wrong.
And nor should you.
I want them to stop killing people against my express wishes and telling people falsely that it is 'on my behalf'.
I want them to stop blindly following the illegal orders given them which caused them to start an illegal war.
I want them to stop using my money and reputation to do things that appall me.
Once they do that, THEN we can start discussing whether I 'support' their new career and mission, whatever that may turn out to be.
You can't argue that something like a Fire Dept is just plain bad. It's a fire department, you know, firemen, good guys, saving houses and lives.
That's why it is harder to be a conservative. We have to argue "Yes, there is nothing inherently wrong with the concept of our Fire Department, but they cost us too much money.
So your argument is that it's hard to be a conservative because the conservative position starts by ignoring the moral purpose of providing public services, and therefore needs much more careful thought to avoid making rash, ill-thought-out budget cuts which could create grave public harm?
And that therefore you deserve sympathy because you've got such a hard road in comparison to the people who do start by assuming that public services, by definition, serve the public?
I can see how your position would be difficult, yes, but I can't quite see how you've managed to convince me that it's correct.
... if they use this system for airport screening of terrorists, it will get a guaranteed 0% false negative rate.
Plus it will speed up the boarding queues!
The comment about the Church implies that the object was assumed to be extraterrestrial, which is perhaps the least plausible bit: why would a group of military experts assume such a thing?
Probably because that's exactly the conclusion that the first group of military experts assigned to investigate UFOs came to. The 'ET hypothesis' was not received well by the US military, and certainly did not become the official explanation. But it was out there, and people in a position to see the early evidence were thinking along those lines.
The really interesting question to my mind is not, is it plausible that Winston Churchill may have reached such a conclusion a few years earlier than the public record shows (though that is both interesting and plausible to me), but why did the actual, documented, paper trail of Project Sign in 1947 reach such an out-there conclusion - even at substantial risk to their careers?
No one benefits from reCAPTCHA being broken. No one.
But wouldn't a universal algorithmic crack for reCAPTCHA imply an algorithm that could automatically tell the difference between a correct OCR transcription and nonsense? So just fold that algorithm into future open-source OCR libraries and watch the recognition rate soar. We're using black hat hackers to write AI code for us, and everyone wins! *
* Except John Connor, after Skynet starts reading the Hollywood rejected scripts vault.
Live fast, die young and leave a good looking sarcophagus?