At our medical clinic, we have an Electronic Medical Records system, which the clinical staff access mainly through handheld computers. Every time there's a new story about tablets, we look into them, and every time we've reached the same conclusion: not yet.
For our usage, we really like wireless, pen-enabled notebook PCs. While our EMR system allows a tremendous amount of data to be entered easily with a point-and-click interface, nurses and docs still need to do some free-text entry. That pretty much ties us to a device with a keyboard. (I have heard that the handwriting recognition in XP is really good, but we're skeptical about it being good enough. I guess I should actually test it, huh?)
If the tablets come down well below touchscreen notebooks in price, maybe we'll try one and see if we can live without the keyboard.
For those that are interested, we've been using the Fujitsu Lifebook P-series (P1120) which is a great little machine. It's about 2.2 lb, and its Transmeta processor squeezes 4-5 hours out of the standard battery, while running Win2k or XP and a Windows terminal session over the built-in 802.11b. We went 18 months of daily use before we had a single significant hardware failure. (But then two of our first four went out nearly simultaneously... $225 to repair each. Considering they each see about 60 hours of use every week, I think that's not too shabby.)
We first bought them with the extended-life batteries and some spares with chargers, and those spares never left the shelf. The next ones we got with the standard battery and no spares, and we've never had a problem with battery life during our staff's 12-hour shifts. Our staff is pretty good about plugging them in when they can, though.
The big complaint with the P-series is that the screen is really dinky, which is hard on staff with older eyes.
So we tried an iBook. While it's possible to get a touchscreen retrofit for an iBook, we decided to try it without the touchscreen. It works okay, but the lack of touchscreen is a problem for staff. Some staff are willing to trade the touchscreen for the Mac's bigger and sharper monitor, though. On the down side, it's had two main logic boards go out and it's pretty heavy by comparison. There are a few staff who love it, but most prefer the Fujitsus.
About a week ago, we purchased a Fujitsu B-series Lifebook (B3020D) and (so far) it looks spectacular for our usage. It has a 10.4" touchscreen, Atheros A+B+G wireless built-in, it's only 3 pounds, and it claims a battery life of several hours with its Pentium-M processor. (I'm guessing three hours under our conditions, but I haven't really tested it for that.) Staff loves it so far, and I suspect we'll be getting more of 'em.
I think a fair contract would give the photographer any and all commercial rights to the images, and grant the wedding subjects the rights to make any number of non-commercial copies. It's going to be tricky, because the photographer would like to be treated like a service so he can generate revenue from reprints over the years. You, however, want to treat the photographer like a caterer, who shows up for one job and is basically done. You should probably be prepared to offer a higher up-front fee.
Shop photographers until you find one that will accept terms you think reasonable, or until you run out of local photographers to try.:)
Armadillo, well, they are tinkering with rockets, and writing a blog about it.
I think we can give Armadillo a bit more credit than that. Granted, they are not close to the X-prize. (Especially compared to Scaled.) But the work they've done really is very impressive. Just look at their "perfect boosted hop" video.
They have constructed, in their spare time, a VTOL rocket craft with very good autonomous control and capacity for a useful payload. That may or may not be a detour on the way to the X-prize, but it's a damned impressive feat in itself.
"[...] government is essentially a way to justify the initiation of force for the benefit of special interests. A way to legitimize robbing Peter for Paul's sake, and taking a cut for yourself."
For a really interesting perspective on this, see "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It's a fascinating book on another subject entirely, but it has a chapter on this. (I forget the chapter title, but it should be easliy recognizable in the ToC.) While he and I agree with you in principle, there is also some return on the investment in government.
It appears that I happen to think the return on that investment is greater than you think it is, but that opinion may well be the sum of our political differences.
That's interesting, but I would suggest it's a bit of an oxymoron.
Not as I see it.
Example: Stalin and Gandhi were both leftists, but they had rather different views on authoritarianism. Stalin was an authoritarian leftist, while Gandhi was a libertarian leftist.
I'm not a member of the Libertarian party, but I see myself as upholding libertarian social principles. Or maybe I'm just an anti-authoritarian.:-)
In any case, I'm not so far to the left that I think private property is a bad concept... I just don't want government power supplanted by corporate power. I'd rather the forces of law and order answer to the people than to shareholders.
See politicalcompass.org, and take their quiz. You'll find it worth your time, honest. On the two-axis scale proposed by those authors, I'm right next to Gandhi. Sounds like you might be right next to Milton Friedman. Both you and I prefer individual liberty to state power, I think, but we have different views on economics.
Interesting, but I can't help but think, that is exactly what government wants: more demand for their services. This is a classic example of government creating problems (unfair patent law), which they will "solve" with even MORE government.
Wow. Umm. Okay.
So, you clearly are of Reagan's anti-government camp, and that's fine. But I hope you'll allow me to respond with a quote from an earlier (indeed, the first) Republican president, and give it due consideration:
"[...] It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I assert that it is not government that is the problem. Government that is not accountable to the people is the problem.
This is our government. We the people constitute it, and we the people are responsible for it. Don't dismiss government, but take it back.
This idea once was written this way:
"[...] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it [...]"
Now, personally, I'm a fan of the "alter" approach, rather than the "abolish" approach. My faith in the goodness of mankind is not so great that I would like to see anarchy.
Instead, I call on everyone reading this to work to alter our government to once again place the people first. I'm a libertarian leftist, so I think this means that people come before profit, that immortal corporations are not due the same rights under the law that natural persons enjoy, that government shall pass no law reducing the freedom of the people where no harm is done, that the Bill of Rights is not to be trifled with.
Verbal Kint once said, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." I have a corallary: "The greatest trick the forces of oppression ever pulled was convincing Americans that their government doesn't matter."
And for coming up with the idea, you can go first.
Heh. I was wondering when someone would call me out.
That's one kinda major problem with this scheme. I haven't the expertise to get in the game and make myself a target. (I'm not sure I'm willing to, either, but that's not the most limiting factor just now.)
Unlike the civil rights movement, where there were millions of African Americans directly affected and European Americans found it pretty straightforward to get arrested in solidarity with them, in this fight the people affected would be a pretty small group... and it'd be hard to offer much help beyond contributions to a legal defense fund.
When it came to civil rights, people had to be willing to go to jail, willing to pack the prisons, to bring decency to the law.
Now, perhaps, it's time to be willing to go to civil court to bring sanity to the law. Maybe it's time to simply ignore patents on which there is known prior art. It's certainly not going to be an easy decision to make, to risk lengthy and expensive court proceedings. But maybe letting the owners of ridiculous patents stuff the courts with enforcement cases is an appropriate way to prod Congress to action.
I'd love it if my main-line application used end-to-end encryption. It doesn't, and there isn't a darn thing I can do about it. It's a closed system that my users are locked into, one they absolutely require, and one for which no viable alternative yet exists. I have a real-world problem, and I can't hold out for the ideal solution.
Due to the nature of my company's business, I personally may be criminally and civilly liable for disclosure of my network's data. My network's big vulnerability is the wireless network, which is crucial to our operations. The critical data is protected in wireless transit by another layer of encryption, but what if that has an unknown flaw?
I met a local wardriver one night. We had a nice chat, and I asked him where he'd looked... his list included my street. I am certain that they sniffed my wireless. I have to presume that they could have broken my pathetic WEP had they wanted to, and that they probably did. If so, they were kind enough not to mess with anything, because they were just hackers, not crackers. I have no evidence they even saw any of the encrypted wireless traffic, because no one was working at that time, but it's not a comfortable thing.
Hell yes I want a better hardware encryption layer on my wireless!
I seem to recall Schneier or Anderson saying something about making sure that one's security measures fail gracefully. Among other things, that pretty much requires a layered defense, no matter how inefficient. Just because hardware-layer encryption is inefficient doesn't mean it's not an effective and useful defensive layer. The inefficiency is not a liability, it's a bonus called redundancy.
Well, yes, obviously it's rough on the crews. While my hypothetical sub is not in a hopeless position, it certainly is in a dire spot. (An admiral's good trade means a real bad day for a lot of sailors.) Is it somehow better if I just gloss over this problem by not mentioning it?
I fully recognize that my statement is terribly cold-blooded, and that to expect men to attack in the face of probable death smacks of desperation or foolishness. But many people have done it before, and I do not doubt that they'll do it again. There are plenty of historical examples of commanders on the scene making similar decisions for themselves.
Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet pressed home the attack against the Japanese carriers in the battle of Midway despite having lost their escort, knowing they were doomed. There was but one survior among about thirty men, and they scored no hits. The USAAF lost something like 2,000 B-17s with a crew of 10 each, but they still kept bombing Germany. And let's not even talk about the slaughter of the Union army at Fredricksburg or of Pickett's men at Gettysburg.
People are known to do cold-bloodedly crazy shit in wars, and it's not just the other guys.
War is hell, and no one should forget it. I certainly don't, even though it seems that our President and Congress have.
Seven years ago, I was sitting on a train, on vacation, watching the rolling plains of eastern Germany go by the window, when I thought of something like this.
What I envisioned then is a little beetle-like walking robot. It would move very slowly, but very persistently. It would have something very like mandibles with something very like a sense of taste, and would keep track where it is by means of a combination of GPS and a mesh network between dozens of them. There were other little details, like a milch-bug with a substantial power plant that the others could "nurse" power from, supplemental solar arrays on their backs, that sort of thing.
But they weren't for cutting grass... they're for cutting weeds.
Currently, people plow fields, plant a monoculture, and then use herbicides to selectively kill the non-crop plants. They do this not because it's the best way to grow things, necessarily, but because that's what our technology has supported and made efficient since the invention of the plow.
But what if a swarm of little robots could sow and tend a field without plowing? They could walk among the crop, taste every plant that they come across, and chop off the ones that don't taste like the crop. Even chew them up into mulch. Gently, persistently, precisely. No soil compaction from heavy tractors. No herbicides, no resistant strains of weeds.
I thought it was a great little vision. I never have had the gumption to try carrying it off, though, so here it is for anyone who wants it. Just don't patent it, or I'll fish out this comment as prior art.:-)
Hmm. Remember the skip-bombing trick the RAF developed for dam-busting? The USAAF used it to great effect in anti-ship engagements in WW2.
I wonder if you could do the same thing with a railgun projectile, and keep the round under effective radar coverage until it was within 10- miles of the target?
The overall range would go way down, of course, but it'd be a hell of a good trick.
Well, I'm sure the Navy will try to spread the ASW umbrella that wide; they know their business. But it's a huge footprint, and I just wonder if it is even possible, let alone practical and cost-effective. If the ASW umbrella takes three times the current number of escorts, what does that mean for the future of carriers?
It's safe to assume that this hypothetical sub can get targetting data. Anybody bothering to deploy such a railgun is going to have figured out how to spot its targets. Aquiring a target is easier now than it was Way Back When: A carrier will show up nicely on a satellite image, for instance, and the technology to send a stealthy drone high enough and close enough to spot it is pretty widespread. I'm sure there's a way.
Even with a six-minute flight time, and assuming the shells are spotted by the carrier's defensive systems in the first 30 seconds, there are only so many places a carrier could maneuver to. A carrier is not especially good at evasive action, especially if you catch it during launch or recovery operations. It's not a circular target range, it's trumpet-bell-shaped based on the carrier's speed, turn rate, and reaction time.
The attacker just needs a big enough salvo to cover most of those places, at a density sufficient to develop a good hit probablility on a carrier-sized target. It may be that it can't be done by one sub with one railgun... so they mount more guns or send two subs, or make the subs stealthy enough to get in closer and cut the flight time.
(Besides, navies have been dealing with the time-to-target problem for a hundred years, so there's no reason to think they wouldn't figure it out this time.)
And to complicate matters for the carrier, why not throw in a few Harpoons during the same assault? You probably have room on the attack subs for a couple. That'll keep the escorts busy shooting them down, force the carrier to maneuver to avoid them (which makes it more predictable), and they might even score a hit on the battle group.
Fortunately, there's only a few countries that could conceievably field a system like this in 15 years. Unfortunately, two of them are Russia and China.
Whoops, you're right. I wasn't specific enough. I meant just in terms of ship-to-ship engagements. Fleet actions, if you will. But that's not what I said. Bad me.
Obviously, shore bombardment is another matter entirely. As I understand it, that's one of the capabilities that the Navy (or Marines, I suppose) would like to get back with the DDX.
The era of the big gun pretty much ended with the battle of Midway. After that, it became obvious that aircraft carriers could both defend themselves and attack enemy shipping without need for battleships and their guns. (Or, more to the point, without big guns and the battleships needed to haul 'em around.)
But I wonder what this development means? The railgun projectile is better in several respects than a missle: cheaper, higher rate of fire, harder to spoof or shoot down, apparently more hitting power. It seems to me that this railgun is closer to carrier based aircraft in relative performance than any guns have been since before WW2.
It's almost enough to make one think that the big gun could be effective again. Envision the "bad guys" having a submarine with railguns sneaking up to within 200 miles of a carrier battle group. It could surface to rapidly launch a few dozen hypersonic projectiles at the carrier. If it could launch a big salvo rapidly enough, the carrier would be in a world of hurt. The sub probably wouldn't survive the counterattack, but to disable a carrier that's probably a good trade.
Can an effective ASW umbrella be extended to beyond the range of these guns?
I imagine (and I'm just guessing here, I don't speak for anyone else) that Armadillo goes on the "RTFM" theory of publicity. They have an excellent website that posts detailed test reports just about weekly. Pretty much everything you'd want to know about the project is there.
Their project is much more open than Scaled's; Mr. Rutan played his cards pretty close to the vest all through the testing phase up to now. Carmack's team has been very open about both successes and failures.
I suppose it might be nice for them to have some sort of overall status summary on the website for people who don't have time to read the test reports, but it's probably better that they devote that time to things like getting rockets to fly.:-)
Speaking of... how cool! The latest boosted hop video is flippin' freaky. You just don't see many things in the real world doing what their rocket does. Straight up, straight down, and very much in defiance of gravity the whole way. Congratulations to the whole Armadillo team!
You know, lots of people around here say something like "The government leaders here make it so difficult to have a business here."
I have yet to hear anyone actually explain why this is so, in any convincing way. (The argument usually amounts to "so-and-so had trouble getting a permit to build whatchyamacallit.")
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Promise... or at least not of the particular RAID card I inherited at work. (The FastTrak-66)
Before the business had an IT staff, they bought a system from a local computer shop for use as a windows terminal server. It needed to be pretty highly available, so they put an IDE mirror set in it using the FastTrak... which worked fine for a couple years.
But when a drive finally died, the system stopped serving terminals. It kept the data, which was handy but not at all critical. The reason the system was RAID to begin with was so that it would continue to do its job in the event of a fault. It might be described as just a performance hit, but it was about a 98% hit. The local session was incredibly slow, and it took me about 30 minutes just to to complete the login and shut down process.
It sure didn't fill the need to remain operational. On the bright side, it did keep the data... so if that's all you're after, it should work fine.
(In fairness to Promise, I suppose this may be a problem common inherent to IDE-RAID or particular to that older controller. I replaced the server with SCSI-RAID, so I'll probably never know.)
But don't expect good service or clean silverware.
Bah. Those are highly overrated. We're talkin' atmosphere.:)
There's nothing wrong with the Deschutes.
Whoops, my mistake. I forgot about deschutes-the-chip.
Avoid downtown Portland (and downtown Eugene) whenever [...] it is reasonable to forecast traffic-slowing protests.
There's a reason PDX is known as Little Beirut, and it ain't Al-Amir. The protests here are almost always peaceful, though it is prudent to stay away from the black-bloc anarchist types. Even they are pretty tame most of the time, and they are only about 2% of any major protest march. Still, why take chances when you've got the kids along?
Downtown in general seems much safer than other cities; I'm more comfortable downtown Portland at midnight than in downtown Seattle at noon.
Get a Shedrain umbrella.
Umbrella? Why? It's just water.
Also, one other thing. It's wacky in every sense of the word, but the Oregon Country Fair is a cultural experience that you'll not soon forget. (No matter how hard you try.) Think of it like Burning Man in the mud. It's the weekend of July 9 this year.
Yes he was. There is a Fred Meyer's near a KFC on Burnside, just as the lyrics say. Freddy's is a local chain. (Or at least it was, before Kroger's bought 'em.)
He's a Finn, for heaven's sake. I think he'll manage somehow.
Anyway, I wish him a warm welcome to my home state. Some odd bits of advice on settling in:
* For tires and suspension work, go to Les Schwab. * Try Black Tiger from Coffee People... in a milkshake. * Cinema 21. * The Rimsky-Korsakoffee House, on SE 12th just North of Belmont in Portland, for a quiet dessert with atmosphere. (And the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport for a holiday; same owner, different quirks.) * Visit a McMennamin's hotel for lunch or dinner... walk around the place and check out the artwork. The beer's pretty good, too, but there's plenty that's better 'round here. * Fareless Square. * Don't swim in any river that Intel has named a chip for. Seriously. It's not their fault, but I mean it. * Three Square Grill * Local strawberries are in season right now.
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If you wouldn't mind:
Which tablets have you tried? Which ones does your staff (especaially nursing) like? How much did they cost?
At our medical clinic, we have an Electronic Medical Records system, which the clinical staff access mainly through handheld computers. Every time there's a new story about tablets, we look into them, and every time we've reached the same conclusion: not yet.
For our usage, we really like wireless, pen-enabled notebook PCs. While our EMR system allows a tremendous amount of data to be entered easily with a point-and-click interface, nurses and docs still need to do some free-text entry. That pretty much ties us to a device with a keyboard. (I have heard that the handwriting recognition in XP is really good, but we're skeptical about it being good enough. I guess I should actually test it, huh?)
If the tablets come down well below touchscreen notebooks in price, maybe we'll try one and see if we can live without the keyboard.
For those that are interested, we've been using the Fujitsu Lifebook P-series (P1120) which is a great little machine. It's about 2.2 lb, and its Transmeta processor squeezes 4-5 hours out of the standard battery, while running Win2k or XP and a Windows terminal session over the built-in 802.11b. We went 18 months of daily use before we had a single significant hardware failure. (But then two of our first four went out nearly simultaneously... $225 to repair each. Considering they each see about 60 hours of use every week, I think that's not too shabby.)
We first bought them with the extended-life batteries and some spares with chargers, and those spares never left the shelf. The next ones we got with the standard battery and no spares, and we've never had a problem with battery life during our staff's 12-hour shifts. Our staff is pretty good about plugging them in when they can, though.
The big complaint with the P-series is that the screen is really dinky, which is hard on staff with older eyes.
So we tried an iBook. While it's possible to get a touchscreen retrofit for an iBook, we decided to try it without the touchscreen. It works okay, but the lack of touchscreen is a problem for staff. Some staff are willing to trade the touchscreen for the Mac's bigger and sharper monitor, though. On the down side, it's had two main logic boards go out and it's pretty heavy by comparison. There are a few staff who love it, but most prefer the Fujitsus.
About a week ago, we purchased a Fujitsu B-series Lifebook (B3020D) and (so far) it looks spectacular for our usage. It has a 10.4" touchscreen, Atheros A+B+G wireless built-in, it's only 3 pounds, and it claims a battery life of several hours with its Pentium-M processor. (I'm guessing three hours under our conditions, but I haven't really tested it for that.) Staff loves it so far, and I suspect we'll be getting more of 'em.
I think a fair contract would give the photographer any and all commercial rights to the images, and grant the wedding subjects the rights to make any number of non-commercial copies. It's going to be tricky, because the photographer would like to be treated like a service so he can generate revenue from reprints over the years. You, however, want to treat the photographer like a caterer, who shows up for one job and is basically done. You should probably be prepared to offer a higher up-front fee.
:)
Shop photographers until you find one that will accept terms you think reasonable, or until you run out of local photographers to try.
Armadillo, well, they are tinkering with rockets, and writing a blog about it.
I think we can give Armadillo a bit more credit than that. Granted, they are not close to the X-prize. (Especially compared to Scaled.) But the work they've done really is very impressive. Just look at their "perfect boosted hop" video.
They have constructed, in their spare time, a VTOL rocket craft with very good autonomous control and capacity for a useful payload. That may or may not be a detour on the way to the X-prize, but it's a damned impressive feat in itself.
Ooops, I forgot:
"[...] government is essentially a way to justify the initiation of force for the benefit of special interests. A way to legitimize robbing Peter for Paul's sake, and taking a cut for yourself."
For a really interesting perspective on this, see "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond. It's a fascinating book on another subject entirely, but it has a chapter on this. (I forget the chapter title, but it should be easliy recognizable in the ToC.) While he and I agree with you in principle, there is also some return on the investment in government.
It appears that I happen to think the return on that investment is greater than you think it is, but that opinion may well be the sum of our political differences.
That's interesting, but I would suggest it's a bit of an oxymoron.
:-)
Not as I see it.
Example: Stalin and Gandhi were both leftists, but they had rather different views on authoritarianism. Stalin was an authoritarian leftist, while Gandhi was a libertarian leftist.
I'm not a member of the Libertarian party, but I see myself as upholding libertarian social principles. Or maybe I'm just an anti-authoritarian.
In any case, I'm not so far to the left that I think private property is a bad concept... I just don't want government power supplanted by corporate power. I'd rather the forces of law and order answer to the people than to shareholders.
See politicalcompass.org, and take their quiz. You'll find it worth your time, honest. On the two-axis scale proposed by those authors, I'm right next to Gandhi. Sounds like you might be right next to Milton Friedman. Both you and I prefer individual liberty to state power, I think, but we have different views on economics.
Interesting, but I can't help but think, that is exactly what government wants: more demand for their services. This is a classic example of government creating problems (unfair patent law), which they will "solve" with even MORE government.
Wow. Umm. Okay.
So, you clearly are of Reagan's anti-government camp, and that's fine. But I hope you'll allow me to respond with a quote from an earlier (indeed, the first) Republican president, and give it due consideration:
"[...] It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
(I trust you will recognize this as Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.)
I assert that it is not government that is the problem. Government that is not accountable to the people is the problem.
This is our government. We the people constitute it, and we the people are responsible for it. Don't dismiss government, but take it back.
This idea once was written this way:
"[...] We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. --That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it [...]"
Now, personally, I'm a fan of the "alter" approach, rather than the "abolish" approach. My faith in the goodness of mankind is not so great that I would like to see anarchy.
Instead, I call on everyone reading this to work to alter our government to once again place the people first. I'm a libertarian leftist, so I think this means that people come before profit, that immortal corporations are not due the same rights under the law that natural persons enjoy, that government shall pass no law reducing the freedom of the people where no harm is done, that the Bill of Rights is not to be trifled with.
Verbal Kint once said, "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." I have a corallary: "The greatest trick the forces of oppression ever pulled was convincing Americans that their government doesn't matter."
This land is your land.
Don't forget.
And for coming up with the idea, you can go first.
Heh. I was wondering when someone would call me out.
That's one kinda major problem with this scheme. I haven't the expertise to get in the game and make myself a target. (I'm not sure I'm willing to, either, but that's not the most limiting factor just now.)
Unlike the civil rights movement, where there were millions of African Americans directly affected and European Americans found it pretty straightforward to get arrested in solidarity with them, in this fight the people affected would be a pretty small group... and it'd be hard to offer much help beyond contributions to a legal defense fund.
I suppose it's time for some civil disobedience.
When it came to civil rights, people had to be willing to go to jail, willing to pack the prisons, to bring decency to the law.
Now, perhaps, it's time to be willing to go to civil court to bring sanity to the law. Maybe it's time to simply ignore patents on which there is known prior art. It's certainly not going to be an easy decision to make, to risk lengthy and expensive court proceedings. But maybe letting the owners of ridiculous patents stuff the courts with enforcement cases is an appropriate way to prod Congress to action.
You'd think Michael Dell could afford to just buy a new one.
I'd love it if my main-line application used end-to-end encryption. It doesn't, and there isn't a darn thing I can do about it. It's a closed system that my users are locked into, one they absolutely require, and one for which no viable alternative yet exists. I have a real-world problem, and I can't hold out for the ideal solution.
Due to the nature of my company's business, I personally may be criminally and civilly liable for disclosure of my network's data. My network's big vulnerability is the wireless network, which is crucial to our operations. The critical data is protected in wireless transit by another layer of encryption, but what if that has an unknown flaw?
I met a local wardriver one night. We had a nice chat, and I asked him where he'd looked... his list included my street. I am certain that they sniffed my wireless. I have to presume that they could have broken my pathetic WEP had they wanted to, and that they probably did. If so, they were kind enough not to mess with anything, because they were just hackers, not crackers. I have no evidence they even saw any of the encrypted wireless traffic, because no one was working at that time, but it's not a comfortable thing.
Hell yes I want a better hardware encryption layer on my wireless!
I seem to recall Schneier or Anderson saying something about making sure that one's security measures fail gracefully. Among other things, that pretty much requires a layered defense, no matter how inefficient. Just because hardware-layer encryption is inefficient doesn't mean it's not an effective and useful defensive layer. The inefficiency is not a liability, it's a bonus called redundancy.
Well, yes, obviously it's rough on the crews. While my hypothetical sub is not in a hopeless position, it certainly is in a dire spot. (An admiral's good trade means a real bad day for a lot of sailors.) Is it somehow better if I just gloss over this problem by not mentioning it?
I fully recognize that my statement is terribly cold-blooded, and that to expect men to attack in the face of probable death smacks of desperation or foolishness. But many people have done it before, and I do not doubt that they'll do it again. There are plenty of historical examples of commanders on the scene making similar decisions for themselves.
Torpedo Squadron 8 from the Hornet pressed home the attack against the Japanese carriers in the battle of Midway despite having lost their escort, knowing they were doomed. There was but one survior among about thirty men, and they scored no hits. The USAAF lost something like 2,000 B-17s with a crew of 10 each, but they still kept bombing Germany. And let's not even talk about the slaughter of the Union army at Fredricksburg or of Pickett's men at Gettysburg.
People are known to do cold-bloodedly crazy shit in wars, and it's not just the other guys.
War is hell, and no one should forget it. I certainly don't, even though it seems that our President and Congress have.
Seven years ago, I was sitting on a train, on vacation, watching the rolling plains of eastern Germany go by the window, when I thought of something like this.
:-)
What I envisioned then is a little beetle-like walking robot. It would move very slowly, but very persistently. It would have something very like mandibles with something very like a sense of taste, and would keep track where it is by means of a combination of GPS and a mesh network between dozens of them. There were other little details, like a milch-bug with a substantial power plant that the others could "nurse" power from, supplemental solar arrays on their backs, that sort of thing.
But they weren't for cutting grass... they're for cutting weeds.
Currently, people plow fields, plant a monoculture, and then use herbicides to selectively kill the non-crop plants. They do this not because it's the best way to grow things, necessarily, but because that's what our technology has supported and made efficient since the invention of the plow.
But what if a swarm of little robots could sow and tend a field without plowing? They could walk among the crop, taste every plant that they come across, and chop off the ones that don't taste like the crop. Even chew them up into mulch. Gently, persistently, precisely. No soil compaction from heavy tractors. No herbicides, no resistant strains of weeds.
I thought it was a great little vision. I never have had the gumption to try carrying it off, though, so here it is for anyone who wants it. Just don't patent it, or I'll fish out this comment as prior art.
Hmm. Remember the skip-bombing trick the RAF developed for dam-busting? The USAAF used it to great effect in anti-ship engagements in WW2.
I wonder if you could do the same thing with a railgun projectile, and keep the round under effective radar coverage until it was within 10- miles of the target?
The overall range would go way down, of course, but it'd be a hell of a good trick.
Well, I'm sure the Navy will try to spread the ASW umbrella that wide; they know their business. But it's a huge footprint, and I just wonder if it is even possible, let alone practical and cost-effective. If the ASW umbrella takes three times the current number of escorts, what does that mean for the future of carriers?
It's safe to assume that this hypothetical sub can get targetting data. Anybody bothering to deploy such a railgun is going to have figured out how to spot its targets. Aquiring a target is easier now than it was Way Back When: A carrier will show up nicely on a satellite image, for instance, and the technology to send a stealthy drone high enough and close enough to spot it is pretty widespread. I'm sure there's a way.
Even with a six-minute flight time, and assuming the shells are spotted by the carrier's defensive systems in the first 30 seconds, there are only so many places a carrier could maneuver to. A carrier is not especially good at evasive action, especially if you catch it during launch or recovery operations. It's not a circular target range, it's trumpet-bell-shaped based on the carrier's speed, turn rate, and reaction time.
The attacker just needs a big enough salvo to cover most of those places, at a density sufficient to develop a good hit probablility on a carrier-sized target. It may be that it can't be done by one sub with one railgun... so they mount more guns or send two subs, or make the subs stealthy enough to get in closer and cut the flight time.
(Besides, navies have been dealing with the time-to-target problem for a hundred years, so there's no reason to think they wouldn't figure it out this time.)
And to complicate matters for the carrier, why not throw in a few Harpoons during the same assault? You probably have room on the attack subs for a couple. That'll keep the escorts busy shooting them down, force the carrier to maneuver to avoid them (which makes it more predictable), and they might even score a hit on the battle group.
Fortunately, there's only a few countries that could conceievably field a system like this in 15 years. Unfortunately, two of them are Russia and China.
Whoops, you're right. I wasn't specific enough. I meant just in terms of ship-to-ship engagements. Fleet actions, if you will. But that's not what I said. Bad me.
Obviously, shore bombardment is another matter entirely. As I understand it, that's one of the capabilities that the Navy (or Marines, I suppose) would like to get back with the DDX.
Range of 250 miles? That's impressive.
The era of the big gun pretty much ended with the battle of Midway. After that, it became obvious that aircraft carriers could both defend themselves and attack enemy shipping without need for battleships and their guns. (Or, more to the point, without big guns and the battleships needed to haul 'em around.)
But I wonder what this development means? The railgun projectile is better in several respects than a missle: cheaper, higher rate of fire, harder to spoof or shoot down, apparently more hitting power. It seems to me that this railgun is closer to carrier based aircraft in relative performance than any guns have been since before WW2.
It's almost enough to make one think that the big gun could be effective again. Envision the "bad guys" having a submarine with railguns sneaking up to within 200 miles of a carrier battle group. It could surface to rapidly launch a few dozen hypersonic projectiles at the carrier. If it could launch a big salvo rapidly enough, the carrier would be in a world of hurt. The sub probably wouldn't survive the counterattack, but to disable a carrier that's probably a good trade.
Can an effective ASW umbrella be extended to beyond the range of these guns?
Hmmm.
I imagine (and I'm just guessing here, I don't speak for anyone else) that Armadillo goes on the "RTFM" theory of publicity. They have an excellent website that posts detailed test reports just about weekly. Pretty much everything you'd want to know about the project is there.
:-)
Their project is much more open than Scaled's; Mr. Rutan played his cards pretty close to the vest all through the testing phase up to now. Carmack's team has been very open about both successes and failures.
I suppose it might be nice for them to have some sort of overall status summary on the website for people who don't have time to read the test reports, but it's probably better that they devote that time to things like getting rockets to fly.
Speaking of... how cool! The latest boosted hop video is flippin' freaky. You just don't see many things in the real world doing what their rocket does. Straight up, straight down, and very much in defiance of gravity the whole way. Congratulations to the whole Armadillo team!
You know, lots of people around here say something like "The government leaders here make it so difficult to have a business here."
I have yet to hear anyone actually explain why this is so, in any convincing way. (The argument usually amounts to "so-and-so had trouble getting a permit to build whatchyamacallit.")
Care to give it a shot? I'm really curious.
Yeah, I'm not a fan of Promise... or at least not of the particular RAID card I inherited at work. (The FastTrak-66)
Before the business had an IT staff, they bought a system from a local computer shop for use as a windows terminal server. It needed to be pretty highly available, so they put an IDE mirror set in it using the FastTrak... which worked fine for a couple years.
But when a drive finally died, the system stopped serving terminals. It kept the data, which was handy but not at all critical. The reason the system was RAID to begin with was so that it would continue to do its job in the event of a fault. It might be described as just a performance hit, but it was about a 98% hit. The local session was incredibly slow, and it took me about 30 minutes just to to complete the login and shut down process.
It sure didn't fill the need to remain operational. On the bright side, it did keep the data... so if that's all you're after, it should work fine.
(In fairness to Promise, I suppose this may be a problem common inherent to IDE-RAID or particular to that older controller. I replaced the server with SCSI-RAID, so I'll probably never know.)
Is it just me, or does "so far" sound like foreshadowing?
But don't expect good service or clean silverware.
:)
Bah. Those are highly overrated. We're talkin' atmosphere.
There's nothing wrong with the Deschutes.
Whoops, my mistake. I forgot about deschutes-the-chip.
Avoid downtown Portland (and downtown Eugene) whenever [...] it is reasonable to forecast traffic-slowing protests.
There's a reason PDX is known as Little Beirut, and it ain't Al-Amir. The protests here are almost always peaceful, though it is prudent to stay away from the black-bloc anarchist types. Even they are pretty tame most of the time, and they are only about 2% of any major protest march. Still, why take chances when you've got the kids along?
Downtown in general seems much safer than other cities; I'm more comfortable downtown Portland at midnight than in downtown Seattle at noon.
Get a Shedrain umbrella.
Umbrella? Why? It's just water.
Also, one other thing. It's wacky in every sense of the word, but the Oregon Country Fair is a cultural experience that you'll not soon forget. (No matter how hard you try.) Think of it like Burning Man in the mud. It's the weekend of July 9 this year.
The cop who took me down there [...] swore that he'd never seen more white trash than in Portland.
Hey, careful. You insult our hometown like that, and we'll send local celeb Tonya Harding around to break your kneecaps.
Oh, wait. Gee, I guess you're right after all.
Obviously Jello wasn't talking aout Portland Oregon.
Yes he was. There is a Fred Meyer's near a KFC on Burnside, just as the lyrics say. Freddy's is a local chain. (Or at least it was, before Kroger's bought 'em.)
My hometown is a bit conflicted, alas.
The weather is just toooooo dreary...
:)
He's a Finn, for heaven's sake. I think he'll manage somehow.
Anyway, I wish him a warm welcome to my home state. Some odd bits of advice on settling in:
* For tires and suspension work, go to Les Schwab.
* Try Black Tiger from Coffee People... in a milkshake.
* Cinema 21.
* The Rimsky-Korsakoffee House, on SE 12th just North of Belmont in Portland, for a quiet dessert with atmosphere. (And the Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport for a holiday; same owner, different quirks.)
* Visit a McMennamin's hotel for lunch or dinner... walk around the place and check out the artwork. The beer's pretty good, too, but there's plenty that's better 'round here.
* Fareless Square.
* Don't swim in any river that Intel has named a chip for. Seriously. It's not their fault, but I mean it.
* Three Square Grill
* Local strawberries are in season right now.
Just holler if you need anything.