Well, a desert at times. But it snows. And it has lakes, and bogs, and rivers, and oceans and bays.
That's the great thing about Canada - you get all that nature can throw at you somewhere except maybe +50C like Alice Springs (and not too many poisonous beasties thankfully).
A squad with Garands would output more volume of fire than a squad with Enfields. That matters depending on what you are using your fire for. The British had a mania for accuracy which led to some accurate (but less effective) tools like the Bren (30 round mag for a squad support weapon... really? and too accurate to get enough dispersion on area fire). The Brits even fought repeating rifles at first because they believed in marksmanship even in a world where repeaters were appearing and the MG was already demonstrating what faster rates of fire would permit tactically.
Both the M1 and Mk III were great battle rifles. The.30-06 is also a wee bit heftier than the.303 in terms of delivered kinetic energy.
It's the Canadian Rangers. They are not Mounties. They are a force comprised of aboriginal volunteers in the North that act as scouts, terrain experts, survival experts, and that help enforce Canadian sovereignty in concert with Regular and Reserve soldiers of the Canadian Forces.
But the point about them not playing counter strike is well taken.
Gaming in Linux still doesn't match up to what can be done on Windows.
And I have yet to find a spreadsheet of any sort that is as capable as Excel 2007. (2010 may be, but the online variant now isn't). I have tried most open source alternatives. I'd probably even try a pay-for alternative if I thought there was one for Linux that was as capable.
An as an aside: As far as Surface goes, where's my affordable coffee table sized version? I kept seeing the ones they used in demos and early experimental development and THAT is what I want from Surface - an affordable, robust, coffee table sized touchscreen that can be married to many very cool applications and data visualizations.
Microsoft, where is this? I don't give a crap about small tablets or notablebooks (or convertibles). I want the big mid-livingroom coffee table you developed and I want it to be affordable in the consumer space.
AC, seriously? That doesn't even address the point raised.
The original poster sounds like an Apple fanboi. The iPhone6 was perfectly timed only in the sense of 'gosh, Samsung and others have been making lots of money off bigger phones... we'd better try to get some of that FINALLY.'.
Trying to copy Surface is.... coming late to the party too.
Apple hasn't really innovated much since Steve left the scene. Now it is trying to make progress not by inventing innovative new products that control new product spaces or create them, but instead by joining the party after the fact in several already busy sub-market areas and trying to fight with the other dogs over the bones.
Honestly, I hate a lot of things they did on the iPhone that they could have done differently without losing many of its truly positive features. There's no good reason backup is the mess it is (if you don't want to use Apple's chosen method and even a bit if you do) as just one example. But I will give credit where credit is due - they created a device most people seem to find usable (I don't, but that's probably just because I've been trained in other directions) and that doesn't tend to just shut off on my randomly in mid-day to run an update I didn't ask for (I'm looking at you, Android/Google).
The one thing the iPhone 3s and 4s had right is that I want a phone that fits in my pants front pocket. I don't want to need a cargo pocket. I also want a phone I can operate one-handed. The larger iPhone 5, 6, and the Samsung monstrosities as well don't accomodate that. I'm getting concerned that when my Nexus 4 dies, I won't be able to easily replace a highly capable phone in that form factor (instead having to buy either a bloated oversize phablet or settle for an incapable smaller phone).
Voiceprints, retina prints, DNA scans, fingerprint scans, hand geometry scans, capillary scans, etc. all have one thing in common: They generate some sort of electronic record. That record can then be stolen and misused.
Unlike a password for my bank or a credit card number, it isn't easily possible to reissue these sorts of biometrics (although some sort of Monty Pythonesque 'Biometric Update Service' showing up at your door with bone saws and graft on parts a la Fankenstein is a darkly comedic thought).
THIS is why they're a horrible idea. They are not replaceable or updatable.
British banks are distributing retinal scanners. If my mastercard or bank debit card are hacked, I can get a new one. If someone steals my retinal data, I'm pooched in a permanent way. Ditto voiceprints.
Biometric data is never going to be fully secure and thus it borders on pointless as an access control. To use it when its theft would be devastating is a clear sign of insanity.
I'll drop my accounts with any agency or entity that wants to use biometric data as the access control. When we get hacks of biometric data they'll make the 'sploits of Home Depot, Steam, Snapchat, Dropbox and various government agencies look like a minor moment of humour comparatively.
We are sailing upon the Seas of Stupidity and have elected to make our course directly for the Maelstrom of Idiocy located in the Bermuda Triangle of Lost Common Sense.
Anarchists? (can't organize, often seem oriented around just opposing everything rather than building anything) Communists? (never met a real one, just a lot that wrapped other objectives in the flag of communism) Democrats? (there is a misnomer if ever there was one) Socialists? (they like big nanny state which is as bad as big surveillance state just different slightly) Republicans? (long since betrayed republics of all sorts) Conservatives? (apparently most lean towards the Brown Shirt style of conservatism) Liberals? (another big government group, their classic brethren rotating in their graves at high speed notwithstanding)
The system is such that the voice of the people can only make itself heard through bought men and women and through party apparatuses that insure not true change will disturb the social elites.
TANSTAAFL is a truism in the physical world (except for entropy - we get more of that no matter what we do). In the larger perspective, it is still true. There is a cost for everything in some respect.
Societies evolve (I can't think of one of any size that was ever 'set up' in some particular way) and they evolve in different directions and have many, many actors in that evolution. That means they cannot have a coherence of thought or purpose or even of mechanisms and social structures.
What you can say is that people will be generally be nice to others if it won't harm them (ignoring the a-holes who have a real sense of schadenfreude as they need some re-Ned-ucation...). What you can also say is that if people see a chance to line their own pockets and they don't think it'll hurt someone directly and that they won't get caught, a fair percentage of people will. People have no problem preventing a government or corporation from collecting money from them (in various ways) but they may well be not inclined to steal from a single mother (unless the are the a-holes mentioned previously).
This new commenting thing is a mess. My preview looks fine with paragraph spacing even after I preview it, but when I post it, it jams everything together.
What sort of a preview is it that doesn't display what will show up when the submission is done? That's ridiculous.
Is there a setting I need to fix? Or is this just slashdot's Beta sucking?
Let's start by saying you've got a good point when it comes to the mercenary nature of the corporations involved.
Acknowledging that, a lot of people on here seem to be criticizing coding as an activity for kids *because of their own notion of what that means - particularly reams of text, etc*.
Coding is simply a way of instructing a machine to do something (at its root). If you have the right graphical ways of doing this and the things the machine can do (for instance a Lego mindstorm robot or an RC car with computer control), then this doesn't have to be a boring exercise for kids. There are several enrichment programs for kids from 8-12 around here using lego mindstorm products.
What does coding involve? Sequencing actions/instructions (a skill kids need to learn and practice), understanding on some level trade offs between two options (another important skill for kids to develop), and an ability to create a solution to a problem using tools (a skill kids usually intuitively manifest). These ARE key developmental skills. They aren't the only skills of import (teaching the kids about life, about society, about how the world works socially, and about mathematics and critical thinking are all valid and useful, as are languages and philosophy). But the skills that coding can develop can be helpful too and can be fun if done right.
I don't want to plop my 7 year old in front of a mixed batch of C and assembler or even Ruby Off The Rails, but I wouldn't mind sitting down with her and having her learn to control a robot via an app on an iPad where she could program the robot to accomplish a variety of things and to solve puzzles or to have her use an app to direct a character to solve puzzles (an educational game could be made from a programming task). It has to be fun but it can also help her develop key skills.
There's no need for balance! There's only work. And then dying. Now shut up and like it, dispensable interchangeable resource creature!
Seriously, our biologically best childbearing years are likely in the 18-25 range. Maturity wise, we're probably better parents often in the 28-35 range. Later than that, you're going to have some issues. Keeping up with agile, active kids at 35+ is more draining than it was at 18, 25 or even 30. The odds of complications are also higher. So are the odds of small families (the wear and tear of a pregnancy at older ages is higher and people want to have a second or third child less often as a result). That means kids get denied some of the social context they might have if people were having slightly bigger families (and starting younger). As an older parent, you also tend to be involved in fewer physical activities with the child. (I'm not saying in any event that some parents aren't able to keep up or aren't fully involved in sports and other activities, but on average, fewer older parents will be).
The companies are mercenary. They'll coddle you as long as they think you are useful and replacing you would be more expensive. They'll try to convince you to work hard, long hours and remunerate you not with what any objective standard thinks you deserve, but the least they can get away with (why you generally get more from moving companies). And they'll dispense with you rapidly if you show any signs of cracks from illness, stress or if your skillset simply no longer fits their needs or if their business case changes. Loyalty is a conveniently fostered illusion (a convenient fiction for HR types).
Also, your odds of getting sick or dying are higher as you age. This means the chance the kids lose their parents at vulnerable times in their lives goes up. If you are younger, this is less likely and your kids stand a better chance of getting to maturity and hopefully independence and emotional readiness before having to deal with the loss of a parent.
Our society is kind of backwards. I hate to say it, but those in Utah had some parts of it right. I had a friend from Corel go down as part of the team picking up the Word Perfect code base. He noted that down there, their universities and colleges were filled with late twenties women. They had elected to have kids in the 18-25 zone and had them up to school age by their late twenties so they could pursue a higher education and a career once the kids were in school. This model has all sorts of benefits biologically and statistically. (Again, not saying individual cases, and even a fair number of them overall, of parents of older ages don't work out just fine... mine did, albeit with many health scares and a lot less involvement in physical activities or sports).
True enough but every critique I've seen that leans the other way seems at least as flawed and assumption loaded.
Speculation is always cherry picking. But the 'no stealth' crowd at least has a lot of data on modern sensing and near future developments on their side whereas the 'stealth' side seems to rely on forcing restrictions on the detection platforms that are unreasonable and unlikely as well as developing heat sinking technology that is 100% efficient and as yet not even in vague development.
When one side is based partly in today and partly in the near future and the other is based in things that might be possible someday, I know who I tend to side with.
Rocket exhaust is free expansion of a gas if I understand correctly. It does not qualify for the effect of cooling in an external environment like the atmosphere because there is no environment to work against in a vacuum and thus work cannot be done and thus the energy that is kinetic cannot be dissipated into the environment. Nor does it qualify for the Joule-Thomson effect because it is not passing through the equivalent of a porous insulated plug (read the wiki on Joule-Thomson).
It is instead a free expansion of gas and that leads to NO cooling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_expansion
There is the possibility that divergences from being an ideal gas allow some slight cooling to occur but it happens at nothing like the rate that cooling from expansion happens in atmosphere because positive work is being done there against the atmosphere and that takes kinetic energy out of the gas. In a vaccuum, there isn't that to work against.
So any cooling from a gas expansion behind a reaction drive will be far slower than rocket exhaust cooling in atmosphere.
Additionally, the scatter graph for particles in an in-atmosphere rocket is going to be constrained both by the effects of gravity (will tend to pull the particles downward which is often back along the rocket's trajectory) and by the effects of the surrounding atmosphere (which the gas collides with to cool but this also limits the spread of the molecules significantly).
This is not true of expansion in a vaccuum which is almost entirely unconstrained and thus will be wider and faster than the expansion behind a rocket in atmo. There will also be no significant gravity (for the most part) involved so the scatter will tend to be either spherical or conical and wider than the in atmo rocket generates.
Given the heats required to produce enough thrust to move significant ship masses, you can expect either a lot of ejected reaction mass (more collisions within the ejecta, more scatter as a result around the direction of the ejecta as particles move off energetically in orthogonal directions) or a lot of heat in a lower amount of reaction mass (more energetic ejecta, also likely to be driven out further and faster) as compared to terrestrial lift rockets which move limited masses.
This means the combination of slowly cooling ejecta in a vacuum and rapidly expanding ejecta clouds (as compared to the terrestrial equivalents) and the greater energy needed for larger space vessels to accelerate combines to mean that the shielding option will have a very short period of effect and it seems pretty much guaranteed that ejecta will still be hot when it passes beyond the shield (even if it is a few kms wide).
Effectively, within 10 km likely and definitely within 50 km of ejection point, the gas will have expanded beyond the shield and be hot enough to be at least quite a few degrees above cosmic background which is very near absolute zero. Hence, easily detectable. And the continued expansion of the cloud will make for an ever expanding and hence larger silhouette which any even moderate sized array will pick up.
Unless you somehow invent a drive using no propellant that can produce very high thrust efficiency that is scalable to large scale drives (not yet done by our science), you are stuck either with low power (and hence mass limited) vessels like small satellites or drones that don't need decent acceleration or with ejecting hot mass that will rapidly scatter.
Everyone seems to treat reaction mass ejection as if this somehow produces an infinitely tight laser beam out the back. That's not anything like how a rocket exhaust behaves in a vacuum. No drive we have envisioned has that kind of character that is also not a very low power drive.
Some of the drives we are trialing as satellite positioning tools may have low signature, but they are not capable of the kind of push a warship of any worthwhile size would require (even a small one).
But hey, if you want to cling to the notion of stealth in space, go ahead. Nobody can disabuse you of your notion if you aren't willing to take the time to understand little details like gas expansion or the other properties of gases in vacuum that are relevant to your arguments.
So your cunning rebuttal to the fact we have and do detect small asteroids is to say that because NASA has an understaffed and poorly organized and managed asteroid detection operation that this somehow has much to do with what the technology is capable of or what the science allows?
Really?
Don't bring business articles to a science discussion........and you were accusing some other guy of being a humanities student.... ironic.
Your laser photon drive has a very, very weak thrust. It might be suitable for accelerating small satellites or drones, but its thrust for a ship weighing *tens of thousands of tons* is negligible. That's a big ship being pushed by a snail.
So, you are going to either take forever to accelerate to a decent speed (months? years? and what about life support and consumables while you do this?) or you need another drive system.
If you try sinking that much heat into an internal heat sink (say for instance into a reservoir of fluid that is insulated), your efficiency won't be 100% and the fact it will take you a long time to get to a decent speed or else a long time to cross the significant tactical distance you might care about in a system means there will be a lot of heat that needs radiated.
This sink won't 'float in mid air' - The heat needs to be transferred from all of your systems throughout the ship with pretty much 100% efficiency for your plan to work. The heat sink will have physical connections to the ship and will (even if mostly surrounded by a near perfect vacuum or insulator) be not 100% efficient. Plus most machinery won't shed its heat 100% efficiently into the heat sink.
So all of that thermal inefficiency will go into the air inside the ship and to the hull (the hull does not just float there without any thermal connection to the inner cabin). Over the length of time a slow laser drive will take to either get you to a decent speed or that will take to move you at a lower speed through a system of interest, enough heat will be emitted via inefficiency to your hull to ensure that you show above cosmic background.
And the idea of a ship weighing tens of thousands of tons tons (if your heat sink is thousands of tons, not counting the equipment to move heat to it and the drives and all other parts of the ship including your own sensors assuming you don't plan to run entirely blind) being not noticed on visual occlusion checks is ridiculous.
The technology exists today to do full sky scans that can detect as little as a 0.6 Kelvin variation from cosmic background. The movement of the background and the system you are traversing makes it unlikely you will be able to align with a single background source for camouflage for your entire transit and any monitoring system will eventually figure out you are an anomaly worth looking at, even in your magical spaceship.
The last time I spoke with my friend who works on NEAR as an instrument scientist about detection and stealth in space, he was fairly confident full sky surveillance was within near term grasp and that as processing power, synthetic arrays and detector sensitivities kept improving and so did our stellar catalogues/models, stealth was going to be less and less likely to the point of not being at all practical over meaningful intra-system distances.
I will agree you might be able to sneak a low power, round, blind, nearly inert satellite through a system. It would need to generate little internal heat (hence nearly inert), not have a big array of sensors of its own (which would be detectable) (hence blind), and low power in order to avoid heat, and small to avoid occlusion and to further limit heat issues (hence no crew). That you might be able to do but it would for the most part be a worthless effort.
If you started doing stuff with an array from such a satellite, you get detected. If you start running systems and thrusting, likely to be detected eventually. If you make it much bigger, your odds of detection go up and your time until being detected goes down.
My friends in the space sensing community could be wrong. Nobody knows 100% (except some trolls) how these theoretical exercises will unfold when they meet real engineering challenges. It's just interesting to me that most of the detection tech is available today (faster processing, bigger synthetic arrays and a bit more sensitive detectors will help, but aren't absolutely necessary) but mo
1) Exhaust particles will strike each other and radiate off in what I imagine will be a conical dispersion. They are very hot and will take a fair length of time to cool (not much cool mass to transfer their heat to and wave radiation will take time). I don't know for certain but I'll bet that even a kilometer wide bell will not stop particles rapidly going beyond your ship's silhouette.
2) If you ever have to change course, you'll have hot particles still that are no longer shielded, further intensifying the problem.
3) A kilometer wide shield may in fact visually occlude things that will allow optical spotting.
4) We already use synthetic arrays. Why does the article limit the array to 24m? I'd say 100m+ is feasible and that sizably increases detection distance. If we assume tech progresses, we can have dispersed arrays (and should have given the possibility of attacks) using various satellites deployed in varying orbits around the system (including perhaps ever 60 degrees from your satellite in question plus some further out in the system). In fact, a coordinating system may be able to process data from every friendly sensor in the system. So both the assumptions about detection threshold/range and the assumptions about how many different perspectives at different angles might be available vastly changes the chance of your ship from sneaking in with a hot exhaust.
5) Real engineering means perfectly spherical ships that are thermally identical in all facings are pretty much just not going to happen.
Where you have a distributed detection network, as you will around any system of note (and around any fleet of note because they will tend to distribute satellites to extend their synthetic array and increase its sensitivity), you will find it very hard to sneak up with the ship the article mentions.
That article makes less likely assumptions about heat, about detection capability, and about the nature of any array trying to detect the ship. You can fully expect distributed arrays (even with one moderately large ship and a number of satellites it launches, let alone a fleet or any ground installations or a larger system data synthesis system). You can definitely expect synthetic arrays bigger than 24m. I mean, why can you drag a km wide heat shield and the other side not drag a km wide lightweight array? Change the math on the array to 1 km instead of 24m and tell me what the detection distance is!
My best guide on this is an instrument scientist I know who worked for NASA and who worked on thermal detection. His opinion, with his knowledge of current state of the art and what's likely in the near future, is that thermal stealth is going to be nearly impossible in short order. His opinion was real time processing was within grasp for full-sky in close to real-time within the next decade or two if we wanted to invest in it.
By the time we're out colonizing space, it'll be commonplace. The stealth can't keep up.
Modern instrument science disagrees. Even now, we can detect fractions of a degree off the cosmic background and it is very hard to sink heat (and impossible to stop generating it with power systems, electronics, batteries, life support, etc. aboard) and impossible to hide particle ejecta that are heated if thrusting.
Even an inert ship will be detected as it heats up. I can think of ways to *temporarily sink heat* but not that last long enough for closure of even interplanetary distances.
Stuff will get seen. The fight will be about overwhelming the other side's defenses likely. And with lightspeed point defense, that'll be one heck of a challenge. Or else just exchange coherent light at high energy densitites.
If the missile is ballistic, you simply use point defenses to destroy the missile. There might be shrapnel or not depending on how you defend exactly.
One option would be interceptors that close with an enemy missile and then use a laser to shoot a hole in one side of its rocket exhaust. Guess what? Your missile can sail off into space.
One option would be to have your own large anti-ship missile masses on the stationary target. Once you've destroyed a missile, project one of these into the path of the debris. You ought to deflect most of the debris. Or have your anti-anti-ship missile defence launch missiles that have weighted nets or the like that they deploy when approaching your missile's debris field.
There are a number of ways to deal with the missiles that either redirect them away from you without shredding them, that intersect them with a massive enough object (obviously if your missile can be coming in with much delta-V, then if they can slug it with another missile of similar mass with as much delta-V, they can likely deflect or stop it dead before it becomes a debris could), or that can vaporize them (sufficiently energetic explosion such as a nuke with very proximate detonation).
I'm not saying defending the static target is simple. I think the deterrent will be less about tactical defense than strategic - those with such installations will not want to fight because both sides' installations can be blown to hell. The danger might be more from fringe players (non-governmental enemies with some sufficient backing).
But there will be some partially effective defensive measures. Even if it means flying defense drones into every incoming anti-ship missile, that's still an economically viable defense. They probably cost less than the anti-ship missile.
There is rarely any form of weapon that is, for any length of time, without counters. Sometimes, like modern nuclear weapons, the counters have to be more of same on the other side or a context of battle that precludes their use. But those are counters and they work.
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Well, a desert at times. But it snows. And it has lakes, and bogs, and rivers, and oceans and bays.
That's the great thing about Canada - you get all that nature can throw at you somewhere except maybe +50C like Alice Springs (and not too many poisonous beasties thankfully).
Better is a relative thing.
.30-06 is also a wee bit heftier than the .303 in terms of delivered kinetic energy.
A squad with Garands would output more volume of fire than a squad with Enfields. That matters depending on what you are using your fire for. The British had a mania for accuracy which led to some accurate (but less effective) tools like the Bren (30 round mag for a squad support weapon... really? and too accurate to get enough dispersion on area fire). The Brits even fought repeating rifles at first because they believed in marksmanship even in a world where repeaters were appearing and the MG was already demonstrating what faster rates of fire would permit tactically.
Both the M1 and Mk III were great battle rifles. The
RTFM much?
It's the Canadian Rangers. They are not Mounties. They are a force comprised of aboriginal volunteers in the North that act as scouts, terrain experts, survival experts, and that help enforce Canadian sovereignty in concert with Regular and Reserve soldiers of the Canadian Forces.
But the point about them not playing counter strike is well taken.
Skype has actually gotten considerably worse since MS bought it.
Gaming in Linux still doesn't match up to what can be done on Windows.
And I have yet to find a spreadsheet of any sort that is as capable as Excel 2007. (2010 may be, but the online variant now isn't). I have tried most open source alternatives. I'd probably even try a pay-for alternative if I thought there was one for Linux that was as capable.
The free market sees why windows exists.
An as an aside: As far as Surface goes, where's my affordable coffee table sized version? I kept seeing the ones they used in demos and early experimental development and THAT is what I want from Surface - an affordable, robust, coffee table sized touchscreen that can be married to many very cool applications and data visualizations.
Microsoft, where is this? I don't give a crap about small tablets or notablebooks (or convertibles). I want the big mid-livingroom coffee table you developed and I want it to be affordable in the consumer space.
AC, seriously? That doesn't even address the point raised.
The original poster sounds like an Apple fanboi. The iPhone6 was perfectly timed only in the sense of 'gosh, Samsung and others have been making lots of money off bigger phones... we'd better try to get some of that FINALLY.'.
Trying to copy Surface is.... coming late to the party too.
Apple hasn't really innovated much since Steve left the scene. Now it is trying to make progress not by inventing innovative new products that control new product spaces or create them, but instead by joining the party after the fact in several already busy sub-market areas and trying to fight with the other dogs over the bones.
Honestly, I hate a lot of things they did on the iPhone that they could have done differently without losing many of its truly positive features. There's no good reason backup is the mess it is (if you don't want to use Apple's chosen method and even a bit if you do) as just one example. But I will give credit where credit is due - they created a device most people seem to find usable (I don't, but that's probably just because I've been trained in other directions) and that doesn't tend to just shut off on my randomly in mid-day to run an update I didn't ask for (I'm looking at you, Android/Google).
The one thing the iPhone 3s and 4s had right is that I want a phone that fits in my pants front pocket. I don't want to need a cargo pocket. I also want a phone I can operate one-handed. The larger iPhone 5, 6, and the Samsung monstrosities as well don't accomodate that. I'm getting concerned that when my Nexus 4 dies, I won't be able to easily replace a highly capable phone in that form factor (instead having to buy either a bloated oversize phablet or settle for an incapable smaller phone).
Why not an SSD?
A signature is pretty dumb too.
Voiceprints, retina prints, DNA scans, fingerprint scans, hand geometry scans, capillary scans, etc. all have one thing in common: They generate some sort of electronic record. That record can then be stolen and misused.
Unlike a password for my bank or a credit card number, it isn't easily possible to reissue these sorts of biometrics (although some sort of Monty Pythonesque 'Biometric Update Service' showing up at your door with bone saws and graft on parts a la Fankenstein is a darkly comedic thought).
THIS is why they're a horrible idea. They are not replaceable or updatable.
It's bad enough to have a \. account, let alone a FB account...
If you aren't paying for it, you are the product. Lately, if you are paying for it, you're still the product.
I totally wanted to say this. THIS THIS THIS!
British banks are distributing retinal scanners. If my mastercard or bank debit card are hacked, I can get a new one. If someone steals my retinal data, I'm pooched in a permanent way. Ditto voiceprints.
Biometric data is never going to be fully secure and thus it borders on pointless as an access control. To use it when its theft would be devastating is a clear sign of insanity.
I'll drop my accounts with any agency or entity that wants to use biometric data as the access control. When we get hacks of biometric data they'll make the 'sploits of Home Depot, Steam, Snapchat, Dropbox and various government agencies look like a minor moment of humour comparatively.
We are sailing upon the Seas of Stupidity and have elected to make our course directly for the Maelstrom of Idiocy located in the Bermuda Triangle of Lost Common Sense.
And you are counting on whom?
Anarchists? (can't organize, often seem oriented around just opposing everything rather than building anything)
Communists? (never met a real one, just a lot that wrapped other objectives in the flag of communism)
Democrats? (there is a misnomer if ever there was one)
Socialists? (they like big nanny state which is as bad as big surveillance state just different slightly)
Republicans? (long since betrayed republics of all sorts)
Conservatives? (apparently most lean towards the Brown Shirt style of conservatism)
Liberals? (another big government group, their classic brethren rotating in their graves at high speed notwithstanding)
The system is such that the voice of the people can only make itself heard through bought men and women and through party apparatuses that insure not true change will disturb the social elites.
As I recall, that was usually to blow up the ship.... ;)
TANSTAAFL is a truism in the physical world (except for entropy - we get more of that no matter what we do). In the larger perspective, it is still true. There is a cost for everything in some respect.
Societies evolve (I can't think of one of any size that was ever 'set up' in some particular way) and they evolve in different directions and have many, many actors in that evolution. That means they cannot have a coherence of thought or purpose or even of mechanisms and social structures.
What you can say is that people will be generally be nice to others if it won't harm them (ignoring the a-holes who have a real sense of schadenfreude as they need some re-Ned-ucation...). What you can also say is that if people see a chance to line their own pockets and they don't think it'll hurt someone directly and that they won't get caught, a fair percentage of people will. People have no problem preventing a government or corporation from collecting money from them (in various ways) but they may well be not inclined to steal from a single mother (unless the are the a-holes mentioned previously).
This new commenting thing is a mess. My preview looks fine with paragraph spacing even after I preview it, but when I post it, it jams everything together.
What sort of a preview is it that doesn't display what will show up when the submission is done? That's ridiculous.
Is there a setting I need to fix? Or is this just slashdot's Beta sucking?
Let's start by saying you've got a good point when it comes to the mercenary nature of the corporations involved.
Acknowledging that, a lot of people on here seem to be criticizing coding as an activity for kids *because of their own notion of what that means - particularly reams of text, etc*.
Coding is simply a way of instructing a machine to do something (at its root). If you have the right graphical ways of doing this and the things the machine can do (for instance a Lego mindstorm robot or an RC car with computer control), then this doesn't have to be a boring exercise for kids. There are several enrichment programs for kids from 8-12 around here using lego mindstorm products.
What does coding involve? Sequencing actions/instructions (a skill kids need to learn and practice), understanding on some level trade offs between two options (another important skill for kids to develop), and an ability to create a solution to a problem using tools (a skill kids usually intuitively manifest). These ARE key developmental skills. They aren't the only skills of import (teaching the kids about life, about society, about how the world works socially, and about mathematics and critical thinking are all valid and useful, as are languages and philosophy). But the skills that coding can develop can be helpful too and can be fun if done right.
I don't want to plop my 7 year old in front of a mixed batch of C and assembler or even Ruby Off The Rails, but I wouldn't mind sitting down with her and having her learn to control a robot via an app on an iPad where she could program the robot to accomplish a variety of things and to solve puzzles or to have her use an app to direct a character to solve puzzles (an educational game could be made from a programming task). It has to be fun but it can also help her develop key skills.
There's no need for balance! There's only work. And then dying. Now shut up and like it, dispensable interchangeable resource creature!
Seriously, our biologically best childbearing years are likely in the 18-25 range. Maturity wise, we're probably better parents often in the 28-35 range. Later than that, you're going to have some issues. Keeping up with agile, active kids at 35+ is more draining than it was at 18, 25 or even 30. The odds of complications are also higher. So are the odds of small families (the wear and tear of a pregnancy at older ages is higher and people want to have a second or third child less often as a result). That means kids get denied some of the social context they might have if people were having slightly bigger families (and starting younger). As an older parent, you also tend to be involved in fewer physical activities with the child. (I'm not saying in any event that some parents aren't able to keep up or aren't fully involved in sports and other activities, but on average, fewer older parents will be).
The companies are mercenary. They'll coddle you as long as they think you are useful and replacing you would be more expensive. They'll try to convince you to work hard, long hours and remunerate you not with what any objective standard thinks you deserve, but the least they can get away with (why you generally get more from moving companies). And they'll dispense with you rapidly if you show any signs of cracks from illness, stress or if your skillset simply no longer fits their needs or if their business case changes. Loyalty is a conveniently fostered illusion (a convenient fiction for HR types).
Also, your odds of getting sick or dying are higher as you age. This means the chance the kids lose their parents at vulnerable times in their lives goes up. If you are younger, this is less likely and your kids stand a better chance of getting to maturity and hopefully independence and emotional readiness before having to deal with the loss of a parent.
Our society is kind of backwards. I hate to say it, but those in Utah had some parts of it right. I had a friend from Corel go down as part of the team picking up the Word Perfect code base. He noted that down there, their universities and colleges were filled with late twenties women. They had elected to have kids in the 18-25 zone and had them up to school age by their late twenties so they could pursue a higher education and a career once the kids were in school. This model has all sorts of benefits biologically and statistically. (Again, not saying individual cases, and even a fair number of them overall, of parents of older ages don't work out just fine... mine did, albeit with many health scares and a lot less involvement in physical activities or sports).
True enough but every critique I've seen that leans the other way seems at least as flawed and assumption loaded.
Speculation is always cherry picking. But the 'no stealth' crowd at least has a lot of data on modern sensing and near future developments on their side whereas the 'stealth' side seems to rely on forcing restrictions on the detection platforms that are unreasonable and unlikely as well as developing heat sinking technology that is 100% efficient and as yet not even in vague development.
When one side is based partly in today and partly in the near future and the other is based in things that might be possible someday, I know who I tend to side with.
Rocket exhaust is free expansion of a gas if I understand correctly. It does not qualify for the effect of cooling in an external environment like the atmosphere because there is no environment to work against in a vacuum and thus work cannot be done and thus the energy that is kinetic cannot be dissipated into the environment. Nor does it qualify for the Joule-Thomson effect because it is not passing through the equivalent of a porous insulated plug (read the wiki on Joule-Thomson).
It is instead a free expansion of gas and that leads to NO cooling.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_expansion
There is the possibility that divergences from being an ideal gas allow some slight cooling to occur but it happens at nothing like the rate that cooling from expansion happens in atmosphere because positive work is being done there against the atmosphere and that takes kinetic energy out of the gas. In a vaccuum, there isn't that to work against.
So any cooling from a gas expansion behind a reaction drive will be far slower than rocket exhaust cooling in atmosphere.
Additionally, the scatter graph for particles in an in-atmosphere rocket is going to be constrained both by the effects of gravity (will tend to pull the particles downward which is often back along the rocket's trajectory) and by the effects of the surrounding atmosphere (which the gas collides with to cool but this also limits the spread of the molecules significantly).
This is not true of expansion in a vaccuum which is almost entirely unconstrained and thus will be wider and faster than the expansion behind a rocket in atmo. There will also be no significant gravity (for the most part) involved so the scatter will tend to be either spherical or conical and wider than the in atmo rocket generates.
Given the heats required to produce enough thrust to move significant ship masses, you can expect either a lot of ejected reaction mass (more collisions within the ejecta, more scatter as a result around the direction of the ejecta as particles move off energetically in orthogonal directions) or a lot of heat in a lower amount of reaction mass (more energetic ejecta, also likely to be driven out further and faster) as compared to terrestrial lift rockets which move limited masses.
This means the combination of slowly cooling ejecta in a vacuum and rapidly expanding ejecta clouds (as compared to the terrestrial equivalents) and the greater energy needed for larger space vessels to accelerate combines to mean that the shielding option will have a very short period of effect and it seems pretty much guaranteed that ejecta will still be hot when it passes beyond the shield (even if it is a few kms wide).
Effectively, within 10 km likely and definitely within 50 km of ejection point, the gas will have expanded beyond the shield and be hot enough to be at least quite a few degrees above cosmic background which is very near absolute zero. Hence, easily detectable. And the continued expansion of the cloud will make for an ever expanding and hence larger silhouette which any even moderate sized array will pick up.
Unless you somehow invent a drive using no propellant that can produce very high thrust efficiency that is scalable to large scale drives (not yet done by our science), you are stuck either with low power (and hence mass limited) vessels like small satellites or drones that don't need decent acceleration or with ejecting hot mass that will rapidly scatter.
Everyone seems to treat reaction mass ejection as if this somehow produces an infinitely tight laser beam out the back. That's not anything like how a rocket exhaust behaves in a vacuum. No drive we have envisioned has that kind of character that is also not a very low power drive.
Some of the drives we are trialing as satellite positioning tools may have low signature, but they are not capable of the kind of push a warship of any worthwhile size would require (even a small one).
But hey, if you want to cling to the notion of stealth in space, go ahead. Nobody can disabuse you of your notion if you aren't willing to take the time to understand little details like gas expansion or the other properties of gases in vacuum that are relevant to your arguments.
So your cunning rebuttal to the fact we have and do detect small asteroids is to say that because NASA has an understaffed and poorly organized and managed asteroid detection operation that this somehow has much to do with what the technology is capable of or what the science allows?
....and you were accusing some other guy of being a humanities student.... ironic.
Really?
Don't bring business articles to a science discussion....
Sometime, do all the math for this.
Your laser photon drive has a very, very weak thrust. It might be suitable for accelerating small satellites or drones, but its thrust for a ship weighing *tens of thousands of tons* is negligible. That's a big ship being pushed by a snail.
So, you are going to either take forever to accelerate to a decent speed (months? years? and what about life support and consumables while you do this?) or you need another drive system.
If you try sinking that much heat into an internal heat sink (say for instance into a reservoir of fluid that is insulated), your efficiency won't be 100% and the fact it will take you a long time to get to a decent speed or else a long time to cross the significant tactical distance you might care about in a system means there will be a lot of heat that needs radiated.
This sink won't 'float in mid air' - The heat needs to be transferred from all of your systems throughout the ship with pretty much 100% efficiency for your plan to work. The heat sink will have physical connections to the ship and will (even if mostly surrounded by a near perfect vacuum or insulator) be not 100% efficient. Plus most machinery won't shed its heat 100% efficiently into the heat sink.
So all of that thermal inefficiency will go into the air inside the ship and to the hull (the hull does not just float there without any thermal connection to the inner cabin). Over the length of time a slow laser drive will take to either get you to a decent speed or that will take to move you at a lower speed through a system of interest, enough heat will be emitted via inefficiency to your hull to ensure that you show above cosmic background.
And the idea of a ship weighing tens of thousands of tons tons (if your heat sink is thousands of tons, not counting the equipment to move heat to it and the drives and all other parts of the ship including your own sensors assuming you don't plan to run entirely blind) being not noticed on visual occlusion checks is ridiculous.
The technology exists today to do full sky scans that can detect as little as a 0.6 Kelvin variation from cosmic background. The movement of the background and the system you are traversing makes it unlikely you will be able to align with a single background source for camouflage for your entire transit and any monitoring system will eventually figure out you are an anomaly worth looking at, even in your magical spaceship.
The last time I spoke with my friend who works on NEAR as an instrument scientist about detection and stealth in space, he was fairly confident full sky surveillance was within near term grasp and that as processing power, synthetic arrays and detector sensitivities kept improving and so did our stellar catalogues/models, stealth was going to be less and less likely to the point of not being at all practical over meaningful intra-system distances.
I will agree you might be able to sneak a low power, round, blind, nearly inert satellite through a system. It would need to generate little internal heat (hence nearly inert), not have a big array of sensors of its own (which would be detectable) (hence blind), and low power in order to avoid heat, and small to avoid occlusion and to further limit heat issues (hence no crew). That you might be able to do but it would for the most part be a worthless effort.
If you started doing stuff with an array from such a satellite, you get detected. If you start running systems and thrusting, likely to be detected eventually. If you make it much bigger, your odds of detection go up and your time until being detected goes down.
My friends in the space sensing community could be wrong. Nobody knows 100% (except some trolls) how these theoretical exercises will unfold when they meet real engineering challenges. It's just interesting to me that most of the detection tech is available today (faster processing, bigger synthetic arrays and a bit more sensitive detectors will help, but aren't absolutely necessary) but mo
1) Exhaust particles will strike each other and radiate off in what I imagine will be a conical dispersion. They are very hot and will take a fair length of time to cool (not much cool mass to transfer their heat to and wave radiation will take time). I don't know for certain but I'll bet that even a kilometer wide bell will not stop particles rapidly going beyond your ship's silhouette.
2) If you ever have to change course, you'll have hot particles still that are no longer shielded, further intensifying the problem.
3) A kilometer wide shield may in fact visually occlude things that will allow optical spotting.
4) We already use synthetic arrays. Why does the article limit the array to 24m? I'd say 100m+ is feasible and that sizably increases detection distance. If we assume tech progresses, we can have dispersed arrays (and should have given the possibility of attacks) using various satellites deployed in varying orbits around the system (including perhaps ever 60 degrees from your satellite in question plus some further out in the system). In fact, a coordinating system may be able to process data from every friendly sensor in the system. So both the assumptions about detection threshold/range and the assumptions about how many different perspectives at different angles might be available vastly changes the chance of your ship from sneaking in with a hot exhaust.
5) Real engineering means perfectly spherical ships that are thermally identical in all facings are pretty much just not going to happen.
Where you have a distributed detection network, as you will around any system of note (and around any fleet of note because they will tend to distribute satellites to extend their synthetic array and increase its sensitivity), you will find it very hard to sneak up with the ship the article mentions.
That article makes less likely assumptions about heat, about detection capability, and about the nature of any array trying to detect the ship. You can fully expect distributed arrays (even with one moderately large ship and a number of satellites it launches, let alone a fleet or any ground installations or a larger system data synthesis system). You can definitely expect synthetic arrays bigger than 24m. I mean, why can you drag a km wide heat shield and the other side not drag a km wide lightweight array? Change the math on the array to 1 km instead of 24m and tell me what the detection distance is!
My best guide on this is an instrument scientist I know who worked for NASA and who worked on thermal detection. His opinion, with his knowledge of current state of the art and what's likely in the near future, is that thermal stealth is going to be nearly impossible in short order. His opinion was real time processing was within grasp for full-sky in close to real-time within the next decade or two if we wanted to invest in it.
By the time we're out colonizing space, it'll be commonplace. The stealth can't keep up.
Modern instrument science disagrees. Even now, we can detect fractions of a degree off the cosmic background and it is very hard to sink heat (and impossible to stop generating it with power systems, electronics, batteries, life support, etc. aboard) and impossible to hide particle ejecta that are heated if thrusting.
Even an inert ship will be detected as it heats up. I can think of ways to *temporarily sink heat* but not that last long enough for closure of even interplanetary distances.
Stuff will get seen. The fight will be about overwhelming the other side's defenses likely. And with lightspeed point defense, that'll be one heck of a challenge. Or else just exchange coherent light at high energy densitites.
Of course, you might make a smarter system....
If the missile is ballistic, you simply use point defenses to destroy the missile. There might be shrapnel or not depending on how you defend exactly.
One option would be interceptors that close with an enemy missile and then use a laser to shoot a hole in one side of its rocket exhaust. Guess what? Your missile can sail off into space.
One option would be to have your own large anti-ship missile masses on the stationary target. Once you've destroyed a missile, project one of these into the path of the debris. You ought to deflect most of the debris. Or have your anti-anti-ship missile defence launch missiles that have weighted nets or the like that they deploy when approaching your missile's debris field.
There are a number of ways to deal with the missiles that either redirect them away from you without shredding them, that intersect them with a massive enough object (obviously if your missile can be coming in with much delta-V, then if they can slug it with another missile of similar mass with as much delta-V, they can likely deflect or stop it dead before it becomes a debris could), or that can vaporize them (sufficiently energetic explosion such as a nuke with very proximate detonation).
I'm not saying defending the static target is simple. I think the deterrent will be less about tactical defense than strategic - those with such installations will not want to fight because both sides' installations can be blown to hell. The danger might be more from fringe players (non-governmental enemies with some sufficient backing).
But there will be some partially effective defensive measures. Even if it means flying defense drones into every incoming anti-ship missile, that's still an economically viable defense. They probably cost less than the anti-ship missile.
There is rarely any form of weapon that is, for any length of time, without counters. Sometimes, like modern nuclear weapons, the counters have to be more of same on the other side or a context of battle that precludes their use. But those are counters and they work.
The exhaust plume is a dead giveaway for thermal detection though.