Ha, made you look.;) Seriously, since 64bitishness is mostly vapor anyway, I've been daydreaming for years now about what a 256-bitter would be capable of. That would be some serious throughput!
Assuming this event kick-starts a wave of VRML development now that hackers can play with source, what's there to do with it? Build it into some games? I'm not trying to poor-mouth Blaxxun; I just don't see why people will think this is will lead to delivery of cooler 3-D imagery over the Net. Correct my ignorance, please.
The article alludes to the US Navy's hope that the technology can be applied to detecting and classifying ships' and submarines' sonar signatures more quickly and reliably. In spite of the bitchin' signal processing the Navy already does, it's still as much of a black art as a science. (Like the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall, you have to practice, practice, practice!) I wonder what a massive infusion of neural-net processing will add to the AI end of it. Same thing goes for ELINT/ESM and radar-intercept work -- I wonder how much better we'll get and how quickly.
Of course, you'll need to have only 11 neurons to understand the conversation.
Why, this'll stand me in good stead, then! I've only got about eleven left after all the booze and drugs I did at all the rock concerts that caused the degenerative hearing loss.
If my employer sniffs this packet I'll probably be taking a piss test Monday morning...
My wife's constantly complaining that I don't listen whereas I think the problem's increasingly that I don't hear well; I'm over 35 and have been putting off going to audiological screening for awhile now. This article makes me wonder: Will we eventually see hearing aids that specialize in recognizing and resynthesizing speech? (In case you care, what triggered my pondering was the mention that this works well even in noisy environments, and in any kind of background noise at all, I'm having real trouble understanding speech lately.)
I get quite a kick from the language in this section; it sounds much like a passage from an enlightenment treatise on `primitive peoples.'
I get quite a different and unpleasant sort of kick on viewing the diagrams for the device itself. It looks like some sort of torture apparatus from the Inquisition. (To be fair, the Spaniards didn't go in for sexual torture as such.)
This looks like a device only a managed-care corporation could love -- Let's get that delivery over with, no matter what the consequences! I hate to think of the complications that could be induced or worsened by using this technique -- in particular, unduly profuse intrauterine or episiotimal bleeding due to the increased forces the mother experiences during the centrifugal acceleration. And that's not even considering the issue of fetal distress.
Thinking back to an article I saw concerning alternative birthing methods, I recall some positions other than the standard supine presentation we know in the West -- for example, squatting, on hands & knees, perching on a U-shaped birthing stool, and so forth. (One of the most creative was underwater -- apparently the supportive buoyancy was supposed to help the mother.) I believe the preferred method used in "primitive" cultures was squatting, often with a cloth or skin laid on the ground to receive the baby. What happens to truly 'primitive' mothers and neonates who go through labor-specific birth complications? Mom and/or kiddo doesn't necessarily survive to pass on a genetic legacy (Sorry, state of Kansas).
Those of us with "Mc" in our last names might appreciate a custom cover with an authentic tartan pattern. (And how about authentic African tribal patterns while we're at it?) The technology to generate and print or dye this will have to evolve quite a bit, however. But hey, if you can dream it, you can do it, as they say...
For the nonce, fluorescent (Day-Glo) colors would be nice -- maybe screamingly bright International Distress orange or hot pink, for example.
...I often wonder how much more time will pass before they're slapped with antitrust action. Maybe they've avoided it because Steve Case is somewhat less irritating than Bill Gates. He's not necessarily any less predatory. Oops, there goes my free three hours now that I've said something bad about Dear Leader...;)
I think it's a worthwhile expense, too. In a truly "Doh!" moment, I swapped around the keycaps on a spare keyboard, and now the keycap sculpting angles are randomized to the the point that attempting Dvorak is an uncomfortable typing experience. YMMV, I hope.
Y'know in the Road Runner/Wiley Coyote cartoons, when Wiley's always using some kind of gear or supplies from the Acme Co.? Now I know who Acme really is...
Let's face it, no-one trusts the CIA. And I mean no-one on the planet.
And that's terribly ironic, considering the stuff the DIA, NIS, NRO, FBI, and the NSA can get away with. (And we're a bunch of pantywaists compared to what the Israelis or the Russians might try. Remember when the KGB tried to nail Pope John Paul II?) I suggest that the only thing wrong with the movie Enemy of the State was that rather than a bunch of cinemagenic explosions and stunts happening to and around him, the protagonist would have a tragic accident or quietly disappear altogether.
The CIA's on a comparatively short leash ever since the Church Commission shone a little too much light on them back in the seventies. They're largely relegated to compiling and producing opinions, or "assessments" as they call them, based on data supplied from outside the agency (see above for dramatis personae). Due to bureaucracy and frank office politics, sometimes conflicting assessments result in minority opinions getting lost before they percolate up to a level where the State Department, the Defense Department, or the White House notices -- anybody remember how we were taken by surprise by the Soviet Union imploding and the Berlin Wall coming down?
The CIA gathers its intelligence through mostly aboveboard means or through what the law-enforcement community would just call "snitches." As for the people who do the wet work, you'll necessarily never hear much about them. Mostly that's handled thru international proxies for reasons of deniability. The rest is so highly classified that God's probably hazy on the details. (Hint: some of the players went body-surfing in Coronado.) But the CIA's out of that end of the biz, by statute. On screw-up and there won't be a CIA when Congress gets through with it.
We're all thinking "tsunami" like it's some monster cresting wave dozens or hundreds of meters high. But to devastate a port area, the event doesn't have to be more than the kind of storm surge usually associated with a typhoon. Force a measly five meters of seawater into Long Beach or Charleston, and you have a multi-billion-dollar mess -- a "mission kill" instead of a "hard kill."
Obviously there's the water damage you'd get when everything gets flooded for a mile or two inland, but the worst aspect of storm surges is the way the water current pushes and pulls at things. Imagine a dockside crane getting pulled right off the pier.
In fact, a tornado-producing storm front rolling across a Kansas plain has megatons of energy to it, too -- again, distributed entirely differently over time and space. Relative to Momma Nature, a nuke ain't a fart in a whirlwind.
Try telling it to one hell of a lot of Gold Star mothers of Eighth Air Force crewmen, too.
The Luftwaffe -- or more properly the half of it we Yanks and Brits fought while the other Russians withstood the other half on the Eastern Front -- didn't find their air superiority numerically challenged over Europe until late '43. As surviving RAF Bomber Command and US Eighth Army Air Force vets will tell you, the Germans were a looooooong way from losing the air war and would remain that way through early 1945.
By 1942, the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm had pilots with combat stick time, but the Yanks didn't start arriving out of bomber and pursuit training for over half a year -- having been trained by personnel who themselves hadn't been in combat yet either and didn't know what would or wouldn't work. The US Army Air Force found itself up against German pilots who'd been flying combat missions for four years already. As I noted in an earlier post, when you learn in wartime, the tuition is expensive.
Despite getting bombed flat, Germany put up some beautifully engineered warplanes. They were at the forefront of radar-intercept night fighters throughout the European air war, and until the Little Friends (P-47s and P-51s) got drop tanks that permitted them to escort daylight strikes all the way to Germany, the B-17s and B-24s were sitting ducks. Things were so bad that at one point, the probability of a US bomber crewman completing the minimum required 25 missions and going home alive and unhurt was under 50 percent. According to an old, very wise and very honest man I knew who survived 32 missions as a ball-turret gunner, the part in the movie Memphis Belle where the guy gets drunk, puking and crying because he's so terrified of going up the next day, wasn't all that far-fetched.
(Did y'all know that US Senator George McGovern and former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry were 8th AF bomber pilots?)
Even in WWI, the U-boats had really bitchin' scopes courtesy of Zeiss. But without any effective passive sonar, ELINT, or spotter aircraft, the boats had a hard time attacking submerged from any respectable range. And so they didn't. They made most of their kills surfaced and at night. Submarines then were torpedo boats that had the added feature of submerging for a few hours; they weren't at all like submarines as we understand them now.
By the short 'n' curlies, definitely. How does > 2100 ft depth grab YOU? That's what a titanium-hulled Alfa could do (still can, if there are any left). If you're citing Popular Mechanics as a source on submarine performance data, you may awe some Penguinheads around here, but I remain unimpressed. Tell ya what: Why don't you try a Jane's All the World's Ships annual review and see what it says? (Although to be fair, I bet Jane's doesn't have cool articles on how to wire your house for a home network.)
BTW: Concrete submarines my @$$. That article got laughed to death on sci.military.naval. I know because I posted it there to watch the fun. Steel doesn't have a "crush depth" (more properly, a test depth); submarine hulls do. Submarines, like balloons, tend to compress at greater depths. A concrete hull is less compressible, but that's precisely because it's also less plastic. Would you like to be in one when rapidly changing depths or when getting hammered by a shock wave, even at relatively shallow depths? You bet you wouldn't.
I'd like to see some documentation to the effect that anybody was worried beforehand about the ethical considerations of A-bombing Japan at the time. By Hiroshima, we'd been at war with Japan for three and a half years. The Pearl Harbor revenge factor was still a prime motivator, as was, to a provable degree, basic ethnic hatred. (Ever see some of those wartime propaganda cartoons shown to motivate US troops? In case not, the Japanese are portrayed as grinning, sadistic little bucktoothed, bandy-legged yellow devils in thick glasses.) Nobody had yet seen what a nuke would do to Japanese cities and Japanese flesh, so no haunting involved. We hadn't shown the least compunction about firebombing Osaka, certainly.
Also, by late 1941 the IJN was waaaaay ahead of the USN PacFlt in quality and quality, particularly in naval air warfare. We were just plumb lucky the carriers were out to sea. We were even luckier at Midway.
Ummm, I guess if you're in the Navy at all, you're a skimmer, not a bubblehead. The real deal is that the US Navy will not publish nor admit to submarine speeds in excess of 30 knots or depths in excess of 200 feet. IOW, say what you wish; the US Navy is free to disavow anything you say, and they've got the last word on the subject. Now, unofficially, how does 45+ knots (just sprints, not sustained) and twelve hundred feet grab you?
A conventional depth chage just vaporizes water, too. But both a nuke and a conventional charge generate pressure waves -- and they're far more efficent at it than explosions in air. Pressure waves against surface and submerged hulls are a Bad Thing(tm).
As an example, a Mk 48 torpedo doesn't kill surface ships by actually hitting them like in WW II submarine movies. Instead, it detonates directly beneath them at a shallow depth. The resulting pressure bubble hoists the ship and breaks its keel.
Picture ships rolling through the water like logs.
Supposedly the USS Constellation, an Essex-class CV (carrier) about eight hundred feet long, can be seen blown skyward in one piece in one bit of footage of the Bikini test.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha, made you look. ;) Seriously, since 64bitishness is mostly vapor anyway, I've been daydreaming for years now about what a 256-bitter would be capable of. That would be some serious throughput!
Assuming this event kick-starts a wave of VRML development now that hackers can play with source, what's there to do with it? Build it into some games? I'm not trying to poor-mouth Blaxxun; I just don't see why people will think this is will lead to delivery of cooler 3-D imagery over the Net. Correct my ignorance, please.
The article alludes to the US Navy's hope that the technology can be applied to detecting and classifying ships' and submarines' sonar signatures more quickly and reliably. In spite of the bitchin' signal processing the Navy already does, it's still as much of a black art as a science. (Like the old joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall, you have to practice, practice, practice!) I wonder what a massive infusion of neural-net processing will add to the AI end of it. Same thing goes for ELINT/ESM and radar-intercept work -- I wonder how much better we'll get and how quickly.
Of course, you'll need to have only 11 neurons to understand the conversation.
Why, this'll stand me in good stead, then! I've only got about eleven left after all the booze and drugs I did at all the rock concerts that caused the degenerative hearing loss.
If my employer sniffs this packet I'll probably be taking a piss test Monday morning...
My wife's constantly complaining that I don't listen whereas I think the problem's increasingly that I don't hear well; I'm over 35 and have been putting off going to audiological screening for awhile now. This article makes me wonder: Will we eventually see hearing aids that specialize in recognizing and resynthesizing speech? (In case you care, what triggered my pondering was the mention that this works well even in noisy environments, and in any kind of background noise at all, I'm having real trouble understanding speech lately.)
I get quite a kick from the language in this section; it sounds much like a passage from an enlightenment treatise on `primitive peoples.'
I get quite a different and unpleasant sort of kick on viewing the diagrams for the device itself. It looks like some sort of torture apparatus from the Inquisition. (To be fair, the Spaniards didn't go in for sexual torture as such.)
This looks like a device only a managed-care corporation could love -- Let's get that delivery over with, no matter what the consequences! I hate to think of the complications that could be induced or worsened by using this technique -- in particular, unduly profuse intrauterine or episiotimal bleeding due to the increased forces the mother experiences during the centrifugal acceleration. And that's not even considering the issue of fetal distress.
Thinking back to an article I saw concerning alternative birthing methods, I recall some positions other than the standard supine presentation we know in the West -- for example, squatting, on hands & knees, perching on a U-shaped birthing stool, and so forth. (One of the most creative was underwater -- apparently the supportive buoyancy was supposed to help the mother.) I believe the preferred method used in "primitive" cultures was squatting, often with a cloth or skin laid on the ground to receive the baby. What happens to truly 'primitive' mothers and neonates who go through labor-specific birth complications? Mom and/or kiddo doesn't necessarily survive to pass on a genetic legacy (Sorry, state of Kansas).
Those of us with "Mc" in our last names might appreciate a custom cover with an authentic tartan pattern. (And how about authentic African tribal patterns while we're at it?) The technology to generate and print or dye this will have to evolve quite a bit, however. But hey, if you can dream it, you can do it, as they say...
For the nonce, fluorescent (Day-Glo) colors would be nice -- maybe screamingly bright International Distress orange or hot pink, for example.
...I often wonder how much more time will pass before they're slapped with antitrust action. Maybe they've avoided it because Steve Case is somewhat less irritating than Bill Gates. He's not necessarily any less predatory. Oops, there goes my free three hours now that I've said something bad about Dear Leader... ;)
I think it's a worthwhile expense, too. In a truly "Doh!" moment, I swapped around the keycaps on a spare keyboard, and now the keycap sculpting angles are randomized to the the point that attempting Dvorak is an uncomfortable typing experience. YMMV, I hope.
Y'know in the Road Runner/Wiley Coyote cartoons, when Wiley's always using some kind of gear or supplies from the Acme Co.? Now I know who Acme really is...
Christ, you got Seymour Cray waxed? Remind me never to piss you off!
Let's face it, no-one trusts the CIA. And I mean no-one on the planet.
And that's terribly ironic, considering the stuff the DIA, NIS, NRO, FBI, and the NSA can get away with. (And we're a bunch of pantywaists compared to what the Israelis or the Russians might try. Remember when the KGB tried to nail Pope John Paul II?) I suggest that the only thing wrong with the movie Enemy of the State was that rather than a bunch of cinemagenic explosions and stunts happening to and around him, the protagonist would have a tragic accident or quietly disappear altogether.
The CIA's on a comparatively short leash ever since the Church Commission shone a little too much light on them back in the seventies. They're largely relegated to compiling and producing opinions, or "assessments" as they call them, based on data supplied from outside the agency (see above for dramatis personae). Due to bureaucracy and frank office politics, sometimes conflicting assessments result in minority opinions getting lost before they percolate up to a level where the State Department, the Defense Department, or the White House notices -- anybody remember how we were taken by surprise by the Soviet Union imploding and the Berlin Wall coming down?
The CIA gathers its intelligence through mostly aboveboard means or through what the law-enforcement community would just call "snitches." As for the people who do the wet work, you'll necessarily never hear much about them. Mostly that's handled thru international proxies for reasons of deniability. The rest is so highly classified that God's probably hazy on the details. (Hint: some of the players went body-surfing in Coronado.) But the CIA's out of that end of the biz, by statute. On screw-up and there won't be a CIA when Congress gets through with it.
Hey, kitten's great marinated. Otherwise it's kind of stringy.
We're all thinking "tsunami" like it's some monster cresting wave dozens or hundreds of meters high. But to devastate a port area, the event doesn't have to be more than the kind of storm surge usually associated with a typhoon. Force a measly five meters of seawater into Long Beach or Charleston, and you have a multi-billion-dollar mess -- a "mission kill" instead of a "hard kill."
Obviously there's the water damage you'd get when everything gets flooded for a mile or two inland, but the worst aspect of storm surges is the way the water current pushes and pulls at things. Imagine a dockside crane getting pulled right off the pier.
In fact, a tornado-producing storm front rolling across a Kansas plain has megatons of energy to it, too -- again, distributed entirely differently over time and space. Relative to Momma Nature, a nuke ain't a fart in a whirlwind.
Try telling it to one hell of a lot of Gold Star mothers of Eighth Air Force crewmen, too.
The Luftwaffe -- or more properly the half of it we Yanks and Brits fought while the other Russians withstood the other half on the Eastern Front -- didn't find their air superiority numerically challenged over Europe until late '43. As surviving RAF Bomber Command and US Eighth Army Air Force vets will tell you, the Germans were a looooooong way from losing the air war and would remain that way through early 1945.
By 1942, the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm had pilots with combat stick time, but the Yanks didn't start arriving out of bomber and pursuit training for over half a year -- having been trained by personnel who themselves hadn't been in combat yet either and didn't know what would or wouldn't work. The US Army Air Force found itself up against German pilots who'd been flying combat missions for four years already. As I noted in an earlier post, when you learn in wartime, the tuition is expensive.
Despite getting bombed flat, Germany put up some beautifully engineered warplanes. They were at the forefront of radar-intercept night fighters throughout the European air war, and until the Little Friends (P-47s and P-51s) got drop tanks that permitted them to escort daylight strikes all the way to Germany, the B-17s and B-24s were sitting ducks. Things were so bad that at one point, the probability of a US bomber crewman completing the minimum required 25 missions and going home alive and unhurt was under 50 percent. According to an old, very wise and very honest man I knew who survived 32 missions as a ball-turret gunner, the part in the movie Memphis Belle where the guy gets drunk, puking and crying because he's so terrified of going up the next day, wasn't all that far-fetched.
(Did y'all know that US Senator George McGovern and former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry were 8th AF bomber pilots?)
Even in WWI, the U-boats had really bitchin' scopes courtesy of Zeiss. But without any effective passive sonar, ELINT, or spotter aircraft, the boats had a hard time attacking submerged from any respectable range. And so they didn't. They made most of their kills surfaced and at night. Submarines then were torpedo boats that had the added feature of submerging for a few hours; they weren't at all like submarines as we understand them now.
By the short 'n' curlies, definitely. How does > 2100 ft depth grab YOU? That's what a titanium-hulled Alfa could do (still can, if there are any left). If you're citing Popular Mechanics as a source on submarine performance data, you may awe some Penguinheads around here, but I remain unimpressed. Tell ya what: Why don't you try a Jane's All the World's Ships annual review and see what it says? (Although to be fair, I bet Jane's doesn't have cool articles on how to wire your house for a home network.)
BTW: Concrete submarines my @$$. That article got laughed to death on sci.military.naval. I know because I posted it there to watch the fun. Steel doesn't have a "crush depth" (more properly, a test depth); submarine hulls do. Submarines, like balloons, tend to compress at greater depths. A concrete hull is less compressible, but that's precisely because it's also less plastic. Would you like to be in one when rapidly changing depths or when getting hammered by a shock wave, even at relatively shallow depths? You bet you wouldn't.
I'd like to see some documentation to the effect that anybody was worried beforehand about the ethical considerations of A-bombing Japan at the time. By Hiroshima, we'd been at war with Japan for three and a half years. The Pearl Harbor revenge factor was still a prime motivator, as was, to a provable degree, basic ethnic hatred. (Ever see some of those wartime propaganda cartoons shown to motivate US troops? In case not, the Japanese are portrayed as grinning, sadistic little bucktoothed, bandy-legged yellow devils in thick glasses.) Nobody had yet seen what a nuke would do to Japanese cities and Japanese flesh, so no haunting involved. We hadn't shown the least compunction about firebombing Osaka, certainly.
Also, by late 1941 the IJN was waaaaay ahead of the USN PacFlt in quality and quality, particularly in naval air warfare. We were just plumb lucky the carriers were out to sea. We were even luckier at Midway.
Yeah. A CEP (circular error probable) of what, several *kilometers* across?
Ummm, I guess if you're in the Navy at all, you're a skimmer, not a bubblehead. The real deal is that the US Navy will not publish nor admit to submarine speeds in excess of 30 knots or depths in excess of 200 feet. IOW, say what you wish; the US Navy is free to disavow anything you say, and they've got the last word on the subject. Now, unofficially, how does 45+ knots (just sprints, not sustained) and twelve hundred feet grab you?
At the risk of pissing off any WW II Pacific vets on Slashdot, the Japanese really pulled off a beautiful number on Pearl Harbor. Worse luck for them.
A conventional depth chage just vaporizes water, too. But both a nuke and a conventional charge generate pressure waves -- and they're far more efficent at it than explosions in air. Pressure waves against surface and submerged hulls are a Bad Thing(tm).
As an example, a Mk 48 torpedo doesn't kill surface ships by actually hitting them like in WW II submarine movies. Instead, it detonates directly beneath them at a shallow depth. The resulting pressure bubble hoists the ship and breaks its keel.
Picture ships rolling through the water like logs.
Supposedly the USS Constellation, an Essex-class CV (carrier) about eight hundred feet long, can be seen blown skyward in one piece in one bit of footage of the Bikini test.