Perhaps a suitcase that is generally spherical would maximize this effect. Nothing stacks on top well, gets packed closer to the door since it does not fit nicely with the rectangular bags.
It would certainly maximize irritation to the airline since it would leave the most wasted space in the cargo bay.
Might also end up just rolling in place at the bottom of some conveyor belt. The baggage handlers would probably gleefully pound it into a more rectangular shape, as a customer service. And remember, 'Fragile' is from the Italian for "throw with great force."
No matter who's doing it, if the fire is incoming it is not 'friendly.'
From the article, it sounds like this _could_ have been a purely mechanical malfunction. Perhaps in the process of clearing the jam, the gun became a 'run away' [firing until all ammo is expended, despite no finger on the trigger.] This is a not uncommon issue with automatic weapons. The normal response is for the gunner to keep the weapon pointed down-range and for the loader/AG to try to interrupt the ammo supply (e.g. break the belt.) Not sure about the possibility of a run away with this particular weapon, though.
Then the recoil alone caused it to slew through 360 degrees. This could happen if the gun was not locked down and the motors were not actively trying to keep the gun on a certain azimuth.
Before you scoff, ask your self what you did to further space exploration this summer.
This experiment is a step toward doing more long-term, closed-cycle experiments as you describe. A program of research usually starts with smaller experiments and uses the results to guide the more elaborate full-scale experiments later.
A full-scale test before going to Mars is certainly needed. However, they have not started constructing the Mars ship in the orbital dockyards yet, we have some time to work incrementally on this problem.
A two-year-long, closed-cycle experiment would:
-Cost much, much more.
-Require a 'crew' that is doing this for a living. If you look at the bios, these people all have other jobs and are taking their own time (without pay) to contribute.
-Be a waste of time and money if it failed in the first month because the work cycle was wrong or nobody knew how much water would be consumed or how many packages of Tang to pack. This is the sort of thing they are investigating.
Implementations of Multilevel Security exist, but they are not easy to use and are expensive to develop and operate. This is why systems processing different classification levels are on separate (air-gapped) networks. Off-the-shelf hardware and software can be used with physical security measures preventing information compromises. [Of course, an ID10T sneaker-netting data between the security domains is always a potential problem. The weak point is always people...]
Enforcing a Bell-LaPadula type multilevel security scheme is at odds with providing a flexible, user-friendly system. In order to ensure no violations of a security property, users will end up not being able to do some legitimate actions because the security monitor will see them as security violations. A MLS system that is more user friendly is going to have leaks. It is hard enough to get an OS that can enforce security at a single classification level, let alone one that can quickly and accurately handle a huge possible range of cross-security-domain user actions.
Can't address LandWarrior directly, have not used it.
Other similar C2 systems allow an administrator to remotely challenge a user to authenticate himself.
The admin can also configure the network to lock out and stop updating a suspect device. The location information is still inside, but it becomes stale fairly quickly and it is usually filtered to the user's area of interest (e.g. PFC Snuffy does not usually need to know, nor care, about the location of someone 10 KM away).
The intended result is to make the possible loss of information from a compromised device not much higher than we had with paper maps and lap boards.
1) Not really the case. The numbers are not really sequential, just used to tell various models apart, especially during development and testing. Can you show me an M-15? The replacement for the M-16 will be the M-8...
2) There is a comonality of parts, but these are two different weapons. No one converts from one to the other.
There are no 40 year old M-4's out there in service. This weapon came into the inventory about 12 years ago. You may be thinking of the M-4 predecessor CAR-15/XM-177's used in Vietnam. SOF may have had some of these around, but replaced them with M-4 when it arrived.
Same deal with M-16's. There may be some 40 year old A1's around, but the service M-16's out there are A2's, mostly fielded in the late 80's / early 90's. (I carried an old M16A1 into Iraq in 1991, would not be surprised if that one was 20+ years old at the time...)
The sounds and animations were never well accepted in military briefings. A briefer who had sounds would probably hear "turn that sh*t off!" from the boss by about slide #2.
Other than that, PowerPoint has steadily increased in use. This matches the availability of PCs for more personnel, networks that can make 'send me your slides' easy and especially the proliferation of PROJECTORS and LSD [large scale displays in this case; ironic acronym, though.]
PowerPoint did not start this process:
Before PowerPoint there was Harvard Graphics with a LCD panel device on an overhead projector.
Before that there were dot matrix printouts copied to thermal transfer overheads.
Before that, laboriously hand drawn overhead slides...
Have some citation to support this wild assertion??
Eminent domain would not apply in such a case. Eminent domain is a function of the court system, not the armed forces, and applies (in practice) only to real property. The military is not out seizing generators, or anything else.
If generators were diverted for reconstruction it would be because the manufacturer agreed to sell them the organization doing the reconstruction. Why? Because they would likely make a significantly higher profit to do so, even considering late delivery penalties, cancellations or plain ill will from the original customers.
The advantage here is that one does not need an observer in line-of-sight, lasing the target, in order to put steel on it. Terrain, weather and hostile response can really make it difficult to get the laser energy in the right spot for a Copperhead shoot.
"Field Artillery: when it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight..."
Frequency Hopping is not a security measure in the same sense as encrytion.
FH is an Electronic Counter Countermeasures (ECCM) measure. It is intended to make the radios harder to jam (jammer needs to transmit on a wide band of frequencies in stead of a single frequency) and harder to locate through direction finding.
Communications security (COMSEC) is provided by a symmetric encryption module on the radios. FH/ECCM is emphatically NOT a substitute for encryption.
The article did not come right out and say that the encryption was broken. It is not unknown, especially in a time-critical situation such as a firefight, for users to switch the encryption off if they are having difficulty talking to another unit. The thought is that some communications, even non-secure, is better than nothing in the heat of the moment.
The more likely way an enemy gets into the radio net is to capture a keyed radio, even worse if they get a crypto fill device too. Reacting to such a compromise is a critical skill set for the signal personnel in a combat unit.
-"Pro Patria Vigilans"
Re:I'm reminded of what Colnel Kurtz said
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
COL Kurtz and CPT Willard are fictional characters. You are drawing lessons for military policy from that great war leader and military thinker: Francis Ford Coppola.
If you think staying there for the long haul is a good idea, go join the Iraqi Army.
Also, we DO have a professional army. Not everyone wants to make a life of it. The troop who serves four years and moves on deserves our appreciation. The NCOs and Officers (SF, Ranger or 'regulars') who make a life of it are every bit as professional in their fields as any doctor, lawyer or IT expert you may know. These folks do have your 3-5+ years of training, make those new troops into effective soldiers and make our Army the best in the world.
As mentioned before, Tripwire does this very well.
The Knoppix Security Tools Distribution provides a free alternative. It includes FTimes [File Topography and Integrity Monitoring on an Enterprise Scale] to record and monitor file signatures. This is a cheap and fairly painless way to keep an eye on those critical files.
SANS Reading Room has some good papers on system baselines. This one discusses using FTimes as part of a Windows box baseline.
Used to consider the Sony brand to be an indicator of superior quality and service. Then my DCR/HC-30 camcorder began to act strangely just at the end of the warranty period.
Turns out many people were having the same problem, with the suspected cause being a bad batch of components used in part of the production run.
http://www.camcorderinfo.com/bbs/t107753.html
Sony support wanted over $200 to repair it.
I politely discussed the problem and the suspected systemic flaw with multiple levels of the support staff, requesting a free or at least discounted repair.
They politely told me to go get bent.
So, none of my personal dollars, or the fairly large IT budgets I manage, will ever go to Sony again.
Good move Sony; implode at your earliest convenience.
Had an incident in the military where a user wanted to turn in a newly fielded notebook. The notebook had a large hole (apparently) melted in the LCD display.
When asked how it got that way the user replied that he had used the notebook in the field on a recent exercise and that it was exposed to rain. (Already stupid.) Water had accumulated in the screen, which still worked and probably would have dried with a few days of care. The user unfortunately decided to dry it out quickly with a 'hairdryer' he had found on the field site.
The 'hairdryer' turned out to be a heat gun from an electronics maintenance kit, used for shrink tubing, etc. Took only seconds to burn a hole in the LCD...
Those IT specialists/mechanics/etc you are talking about are _already_ being converted to Department of the Army civil service jobs. There is no tricky 'civilian draft' pending. Civilians are filling non-combat, non-deployable jobs to free up more soldiers to serve where needed. Looking for a job? Visit Army Civilian Personnel Online http://cpol.army.mil/employment
Much of the military is still structured for fighting a war with the Soviet Union. In many cases this is because of Congressional porkbarrel-preservation and the inertia inherent in any large organization. However, changes are in motion to make better use of the available personnel.
Wrong.
There are currently offsets for disability payments, but military retirement pay is independent of Social Security payments.
How would you like if Uncle Sugar helped himself to a portion of YOUR employer pension or 401k when (if) you start getting SSA payments?
My prediction is that SS will be means-tested before I can ever collect; people with pensions and retirement savings will get only token payments. Check back here in 2029 to see if I was right...
My employer is sending me back for a fully funded PhD program in the Fall. Full tuition, stipend for books plus my ~$100K salary. This is good work if you can get it! There is the six years of indentured servitude after graduation, but that is OK.
If you can show that you are paying your own way rather than taking assistantship funds from the university you will be much more appealing. You become, in effect, a 'free' graduate student. This is great leverage for getting admitted.
I went back for a MS in CS nine years after getting my BS. Had forgotten all the advanced math, but did not really need it. I needed to brush up on coding, since I was not doing it as part of my work. Brush up on your writing (prose, not code) if you do not do that routinely at work. Learn some presentation skills and how to use PowerPoint, too. I earned points with my thesis advisor by showing him how to fix some MS Office problems he had.
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It would certainly maximize irritation to the airline since it would leave the most wasted space in the cargo bay.
Might also end up just rolling in place at the bottom of some conveyor belt. The baggage handlers would probably gleefully pound it into a more rectangular shape, as a customer service. And remember, 'Fragile' is from the Italian for "throw with great force."
From the article, it sounds like this _could_ have been a purely mechanical malfunction. Perhaps in the process of clearing the jam, the gun became a 'run away' [firing until all ammo is expended, despite no finger on the trigger.] This is a not uncommon issue with automatic weapons. The normal response is for the gunner to keep the weapon pointed down-range and for the loader/AG to try to interrupt the ammo supply (e.g. break the belt.) Not sure about the possibility of a run away with this particular weapon, though.
Then the recoil alone caused it to slew through 360 degrees. This could happen if the gun was not locked down and the motors were not actively trying to keep the gun on a certain azimuth.
"Their [sic] waisting [sic] there [sic] time!"
"Amusing, but you'll never be able to get across the Atlantic using wings. Airships are the future!"
"We should be putting this effort into improving the proven technology of steam locomotives."
"Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!"
"I for one welcome welcome our new internal combustion powered, heavier than air overlords!"
This experiment is a step toward doing more long-term, closed-cycle experiments as you describe. A program of research usually starts with smaller experiments and uses the results to guide the more elaborate full-scale experiments later.
A full-scale test before going to Mars is certainly needed. However, they have not started constructing the Mars ship in the orbital dockyards yet, we have some time to work incrementally on this problem.
A two-year-long, closed-cycle experiment would:
-Cost much, much more.
-Require a 'crew' that is doing this for a living. If you look at the bios, these people all have other jobs and are taking their own time (without pay) to contribute.
-Be a waste of time and money if it failed in the first month because the work cycle was wrong or nobody knew how much water would be consumed or how many packages of Tang to pack. This is the sort of thing they are investigating.
Good idea. Perhaps Checkers can be revitalized by randomizing which piece goes on which starting space too...
Much of the cost is not just making the system secure, but in formally proving that it is so. This is the level of requirement for EAL 1 / TCSEC A1.
The personnel costs are a killer in getting/keeping all the data labeled accurately and having skilled security administrators to manage exceptions.
Declassification is difficult, too:
-If you say document X is classified and it really should be unclassified, you create an administrative problem.
-If you say document X is unclassified and it really should be classified, you can go to jail (or people die or a war is lost, etc.)
Which side do you think people are going to err on?
Implementations of Multilevel Security exist, but they are not easy to use and are expensive to develop and operate. This is why systems processing different classification levels are on separate (air-gapped) networks. Off-the-shelf hardware and software can be used with physical security measures preventing information compromises. [Of course, an ID10T sneaker-netting data between the security domains is always a potential problem. The weak point is always people...]
Enforcing a Bell-LaPadula type multilevel security scheme is at odds with providing a flexible, user-friendly system. In order to ensure no violations of a security property, users will end up not being able to do some legitimate actions because the security monitor will see them as security violations. A MLS system that is more user friendly is going to have leaks. It is hard enough to get an OS that can enforce security at a single classification level, let alone one that can quickly and accurately handle a huge possible range of cross-security-domain user actions.
Other similar C2 systems allow an administrator to remotely challenge a user to authenticate himself.
The admin can also configure the network to lock out and stop updating a suspect device. The location information is still inside, but it becomes stale fairly quickly and it is usually filtered to the user's area of interest (e.g. PFC Snuffy does not usually need to know, nor care, about the location of someone 10 KM away).
The intended result is to make the possible loss of information from a compromised device not much higher than we had with paper maps and lap boards.
2) There is a comonality of parts, but these are two different weapons. No one converts from one to the other. There are no 40 year old M-4's out there in service. This weapon came into the inventory about 12 years ago. You may be thinking of the M-4 predecessor CAR-15/XM-177's used in Vietnam. SOF may have had some of these around, but replaced them with M-4 when it arrived. Same deal with M-16's. There may be some 40 year old A1's around, but the service M-16's out there are A2's, mostly fielded in the late 80's / early 90's. (I carried an old M16A1 into Iraq in 1991, would not be surprised if that one was 20+ years old at the time...)
3) Good points.
Other than that, PowerPoint has steadily increased in use. This matches the availability of PCs for more personnel, networks that can make 'send me your slides' easy and especially the proliferation of PROJECTORS and LSD [large scale displays in this case; ironic acronym, though.]
PowerPoint did not start this process: Before PowerPoint there was Harvard Graphics with a LCD panel device on an overhead projector. Before that there were dot matrix printouts copied to thermal transfer overheads. Before that, laboriously hand drawn overhead slides...
Eminent domain would not apply in such a case. Eminent domain is a function of the court system, not the armed forces, and applies (in practice) only to real property. The military is not out seizing generators, or anything else.
If generators were diverted for reconstruction it would be because the manufacturer agreed to sell them the organization doing the reconstruction. Why? Because they would likely make a significantly higher profit to do so, even considering late delivery penalties, cancellations or plain ill will from the original customers.
The new hotness is Excalibur http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/mun itions/m982-155.htm
GPS guided 155mm round, the tube artillery equivalent of JDAM.
The advantage here is that one does not need an observer in line-of-sight, lasing the target, in order to put steel on it. Terrain, weather and hostile response can really make it difficult to get the laser energy in the right spot for a Copperhead shoot.
"Field Artillery: when it absolutely, positively has to be destroyed overnight..."
Still no clear path to '3. Profit', though...
FH is an Electronic Counter Countermeasures (ECCM) measure. It is intended to make the radios harder to jam (jammer needs to transmit on a wide band of frequencies in stead of a single frequency) and harder to locate through direction finding.
Communications security (COMSEC) is provided by a symmetric encryption module on the radios. FH/ECCM is emphatically NOT a substitute for encryption.
The article did not come right out and say that the encryption was broken. It is not unknown, especially in a time-critical situation such as a firefight, for users to switch the encryption off if they are having difficulty talking to another unit. The thought is that some communications, even non-secure, is better than nothing in the heat of the moment.
The more likely way an enemy gets into the radio net is to capture a keyed radio, even worse if they get a crypto fill device too. Reacting to such a compromise is a critical skill set for the signal personnel in a combat unit.
-"Pro Patria Vigilans"
If you think staying there for the long haul is a good idea, go join the Iraqi Army.
Also, we DO have a professional army. Not everyone wants to make a life of it. The troop who serves four years and moves on deserves our appreciation. The NCOs and Officers (SF, Ranger or 'regulars') who make a life of it are every bit as professional in their fields as any doctor, lawyer or IT expert you may know. These folks do have your 3-5+ years of training, make those new troops into effective soldiers and make our Army the best in the world.
As mentioned before, Tripwire does this very well.
The Knoppix Security Tools Distribution provides a free alternative. It includes FTimes [File Topography and Integrity Monitoring on an Enterprise Scale] to record and monitor file signatures. This is a cheap and fairly painless way to keep an eye on those critical files.
SANS Reading Room has some good papers on system baselines. This one discusses using FTimes as part of a Windows box baseline.
Appropriate, since that's what many people yell when the graphics lock up in the middle of a good game...
Used to consider the Sony brand to be an indicator of superior quality and service. Then my DCR/HC-30 camcorder began to act strangely just at the end of the warranty period.
Turns out many people were having the same problem, with the suspected cause being a bad batch of components used in part of the production run. http://www.camcorderinfo.com/bbs/t107753.html
Sony support wanted over $200 to repair it.
I politely discussed the problem and the suspected systemic flaw with multiple levels of the support staff, requesting a free or at least discounted repair.
They politely told me to go get bent.
So, none of my personal dollars, or the fairly large IT budgets I manage, will ever go to Sony again.
Good move Sony; implode at your earliest convenience.
I'd bet there are lots of Dell refurb notebooks out there with traces of Middle Eastern sand and dust still in them...
When asked how it got that way the user replied that he had used the notebook in the field on a recent exercise and that it was exposed to rain. (Already stupid.) Water had accumulated in the screen, which still worked and probably would have dried with a few days of care. The user unfortunately decided to dry it out quickly with a 'hairdryer' he had found on the field site.
The 'hairdryer' turned out to be a heat gun from an electronics maintenance kit, used for shrink tubing, etc. Took only seconds to burn a hole in the LCD...
Watched this a couple of weeks ago. My eyes stopped bleeding yesterday.
Not an old, putrid carcas like "Plan 9" or some others cited; more like fresh roadkill, still steaming on the road side...
Much of the military is still structured for fighting a war with the Soviet Union. In many cases this is because of Congressional porkbarrel-preservation and the inertia inherent in any large organization. However, changes are in motion to make better use of the available personnel.
Penn State? Parking was bad there in the 80's. I imagine it is much worse now...
Wrong. There are currently offsets for disability payments, but military retirement pay is independent of Social Security payments. How would you like if Uncle Sugar helped himself to a portion of YOUR employer pension or 401k when (if) you start getting SSA payments? My prediction is that SS will be means-tested before I can ever collect; people with pensions and retirement savings will get only token payments. Check back here in 2029 to see if I was right...
If you can show that you are paying your own way rather than taking assistantship funds from the university you will be much more appealing. You become, in effect, a 'free' graduate student. This is great leverage for getting admitted.
I went back for a MS in CS nine years after getting my BS. Had forgotten all the advanced math, but did not really need it. I needed to brush up on coding, since I was not doing it as part of my work. Brush up on your writing (prose, not code) if you do not do that routinely at work. Learn some presentation skills and how to use PowerPoint, too. I earned points with my thesis advisor by showing him how to fix some MS Office problems he had.