There have, to be picky, been instances of the U.S. targeting its own people. Kent State comes to mind, not a whole lot less.
Kent State was a riot-control situation gone awry. "Targeting its own people" implies premeditation, which was not the case.
It's tough to figure out what to call the Civil War.
Not really. I prefer "civil war."
SFC is supposedly moving away from "space-based" shows and heading more toward the "paranormal," in keeping with the latest fads/trends in the TV people are watching. Which makes you wonder why they even bother calling themselves "sci-fi," but there you go.
I thought the whole paranormal craze tanked with the last few seasons of X-Files? I've been in Europe for a while so I'm out of touch with what's going on back home though, so I could be wrong.
Amtrak sucks by design. The government apathy towards the commuter rail industry is too extreme to be accidental. I can't prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that huge payoffs are involved somewhere.
Yes, the auto industry.
The NWEuro people are tired of the alien desert religions. They respond to HP and LOTR because it resonates with them deep inside--despite a lifetime of slimey Xian propaganda and the modern materialism.
I don't know if they cover this pagan catechism class, but J.R.R. Tolkien was very, very Catholic and considered his work inspired by his religion. Best you chuck the Lord of the Rings in the trash with the rest of the "slimy Xian propaganda" eh?
(And "Xian"? WTF is that? Chinese?)
Interestingly, some countries are unwilling to extradite to the U.S., Russia, or other countries that practice capital punishment. This is a background issue re 9/11 prosecutions.
No, this only happens in cases where the person being extradited would actually face the death penalty.
this is not about left/right as you suggest, this is about humanity and the right to live a decent life
Actually what it's really about is the bad governance and dire civic cultures in the countries on the wrongside of the "divide" permanently keeping these countries in squalor. No amount of tech industry largesse or donate-your-old-computers movements are going to change that.
We've been down this road many, many times before. In past decades the "divide" concerned things like not having enough power plants, multi-lane highways, national airlines, etc. and the West did not fail to pony up huge sums of money for these sorts of projects. What have all these development projects brought their recipients? Most are poorer today than they were then, and this is primarily because they have governed themselves exceptionally poorly.
The sickness of the developing countries is the chronic inability to organize their societies in the necessary ways to make industrialization possible. Once this is cured, then symptoms like the "digital divide" will disappear as a matter of course.
But they do have land-based missiles and nuclear warheads to go on top of them; most importantly, they have the will to defend themselves, which most EU countries don't seem to have anymore.
You make the assumption that the Navy would want to use the laser to attack other ships, which is incorrect. It would primarily be for air defense/ missile defense purposes. Possibly they could use it to blind pilots like the Russians have in the past, as well.
Some games are getting close to this. Have you played Medieval: Total War? The game tracks each and every warrior in your army - thousands of them, and all of them in your opponents' armies too. I know that the game rates the performance of each individual warrior in a battle and then modifies his bravery/ cowardice and effectiveness based on that.
This is quite a feat, considering how huge the armies and battles can get in this game.
These weapons wont help the US. They'll equalize the playing field even more as dubious regimes obtain them by making the US air force so much flying target practice.
On the contrary - this is exactly the sort of weapon that helps us and is useless to them. First of all, these weapons won't be portable anytime soon, so terrorists/ guerillas/ etc. aren't going to be able to use them if they were to loot them from the battlefield. Secondly, it's a safe assumption that this weapon, like many cutting edge weapon systems, requires tremendous logistics to put into practical use. Very high power consumption requiring lots of fuel and powerful generators; heavy maintenance requirements with spares being effectively impossible to get; requirement for specially trained personnel to operate and most importantly maintain the weapon - all of these make the sort of laser weapon envisaged effectively impossible to be looted on the battlefield and turned against the former owners.
Above the small arms level, modern weapons are weapon systems that require mature, sophisticated and well-financed military/technical organizations to operate. Take a look at the typical Arab army with Western weapons to see what sort of effectiveness you get when you have modern systems deployed in militaries that don't have necessary technical moxie to service them.
The radar actually detects the projectiles in flight; it analyzes the location, trajectory, and speed of the projo, accounts for atmospheric factors and determines where the artillery must be in order to fire a projectile with that flight path. What is being detected and tracked is the projectile; all the bits about targetting the firing battery is derived from that. If a radar beam can track a small projectile that accurately, so can a laser. And with a laser weapon, acquisition/ tracking and firing are essentially the same act.
Thanks for the info!
Some things further complicating returning fire against the laser:
* unless you have a laser of your own, you'd have to attack the aircraft with a missile, which is vulnerable to being shot down by the laser.
* the other point that comes to mind is that the sort of technology to acquire and target and engage at great range these flying lasers are going to be available to very few countries, possibly even only to the US for some time. Certainly against the sort of enemies the US is likely to be fighting in the near-ish future, there will probably not be a way to fight back.
Military lasers do not lase in the visible spectrum; you're not going to see the beam. And they would fire a pulse of energy lasting only a fraction of a second.
If the target had a laser sensor, it could figure out where the fire is coming from, but I suspect the target is going to be having other concerns once it receives the laser pulse.
The answer to your question is called AN/TPQ-36 and AN/TPQ-37 "Firefinder" target acquisition radars. We've had them for 20 years - the -36 is designed to track mortar shells and the -37 other types of artillery (though IIRC, the -37 has all the functionality of the -36).
They are very effective. They calculate the location of the firing tubes, and that information is passed to artillery units tasked to provide counterbattery fire (usually MLRS rocket artillery). This all happens very quickly - 30 seconds to a few minutes' time.
This is so common it makes me cry. In every office that significant fraction of humanity still operating at the instinctual level is well represented; pull them out of their suits and dresses and plop them into animal skins and you have cavepeople. Too many places I've worked did managers and their toadies grab the best machines out of a primal need for status and leave the people who actually need the good machines with the bottom of the heap.
I would think that the signature generated by the nanomachines would be detectable at a much shorter range than the infrared signature already generated by the vehicle.
All of those operations are performed by 'lowly' soldiers.
Actually, they aren't anymore. Army vehicles must be painted with CARC (Chemical Agent Resistant Coating) paint, which is very hazardous to apply and generally is only applied by contractors or at the depot (like the one where I work). Big, special sealed paint booths are required to CARC paint a vehicle. This is why painting stuff is so expensive.
Of course, this could mean labor problems at the depot and with contractors, but that only affects civilians.
Unless they work up a nanopaint formula that's meant to be applied to rocks in the company area, soldiers will have plenty of painting to do for the forseeable future.;)
All work is not the same. I much prefer the sort of work where I can sit at my computer, and from time to time visit Slashdot, than being out in the elements digging ditches.
Those labor saving devices do save labor, and I'm thankful for them. Just start washing your family's clothes by hand for a while and you'll see what they mean by labor saving.
If I had to do all the chores that need to be done the way they were done in 1900, I'd sure as hell have a lot less leisure time. It ain't perfect leisure, but it's more leisure, and that's pretty good considering the alternatives.
Yeah, what's got into them? After all, an expensive suit and tie are just the thing to wear when you have to crawl up into the ceiling above the drop panels to run a cat 5 cable, crawl under desks to get at computers, and cut holes in dry wall to put in a new network drop.
J'accuse!
In fact such a nation is the only one having done that, twice, targeting civilians, and not in self defence.
That's right, those bastard Americans, starting that war with Japanese so they could test their nuclear weapons on innocent people. I'm sure the attack on Pearl Harbor and everything that followed was a vain effort of self-defense to prevent the inevitable.
Keep that keen analysis comin'!
Sometimes I have the feeling that the modern American workplace has regressed into a sort of feudal structure, where management is the aristocracy. The MBA is like a patent of nobility, and once you've got it, you're of the blood, and must never again really worry about your existence. If you toady to higher ranking nobility, you'll get a fief (management job) of your own complete with productive serfs (programmers, etc). If your fief is big enough, you can parcel out sub fiefs (lower tier management) to lower nobles (your business school/ frat chums) and be a liege lord.
And just like back in the day during feuds and other conflicts nobles who lost were almost always treated well by the victors and often were offered chances to switch allegience, today you can easily climb into a good job even if your company tanks (lacking a distinct skill set, managers are fungible; just look at the utterly disparate types of businesses that many CEOs have managed in their careers) and if that fails, there's always the golden parachute.
Back in the day, there were rarely serious consequences to the behavior of nobility as long as it didn't involve treachery towards those above you, and today this seems to be so with our manager class, at least as far as business decisions go. Being noble was enough.
"14words" is a white supremacist rallying cry. It refers to the number of words in some mission statement that some neo-Nazi came up with. I vaguely remember adding 88 to it had some other significance, but have since forgotten. There was an article in a Der Spiegel issue sometime back about the women in the neo-Nazi movement and how they utilize the internet for their political ends.
Slashdot Mirror
There have, to be picky, been instances of the U.S. targeting its own people. Kent State comes to mind, not a whole lot less.
Kent State was a riot-control situation gone awry. "Targeting its own people" implies premeditation, which was not the case.
It's tough to figure out what to call the Civil War.
Not really. I prefer "civil war."
SFC is supposedly moving away from "space-based" shows and heading more toward the "paranormal," in keeping with the latest fads/trends in the TV people are watching. Which makes you wonder why they even bother calling themselves "sci-fi," but there you go.
I thought the whole paranormal craze tanked with the last few seasons of X-Files? I've been in Europe for a while so I'm out of touch with what's going on back home though, so I could be wrong.
Amtrak sucks by design. The government apathy towards the commuter rail industry is too extreme to be accidental. I can't prove it, but I'd be willing to bet that huge payoffs are involved somewhere.
Yes, the auto industry.
The NWEuro people are tired of the alien desert religions. They respond to HP and LOTR because it resonates with them deep inside--despite a lifetime of slimey Xian propaganda and the modern materialism.
I don't know if they cover this pagan catechism class, but J.R.R. Tolkien was very, very Catholic and considered his work inspired by his religion. Best you chuck the Lord of the Rings in the trash with the rest of the "slimy Xian propaganda" eh?
(And "Xian"? WTF is that? Chinese?)
Interestingly, some countries are unwilling to extradite to the U.S., Russia, or other countries that practice capital punishment. This is a background issue re 9/11 prosecutions.
No, this only happens in cases where the person being extradited would actually face the death penalty.
No, it's only forbidden for (most) European countries to extradite when the accused faces the death penalty.
this is not about left/right as you suggest, this is about humanity and the right to live a decent life
Actually what it's really about is the bad governance and dire civic cultures in the countries on the wrongside of the "divide" permanently keeping these countries in squalor. No amount of tech industry largesse or donate-your-old-computers movements are going to change that.
We've been down this road many, many times before. In past decades the "divide" concerned things like not having enough power plants, multi-lane highways, national airlines, etc. and the West did not fail to pony up huge sums of money for these sorts of projects. What have all these development projects brought their recipients? Most are poorer today than they were then, and this is primarily because they have governed themselves exceptionally poorly.
The sickness of the developing countries is the chronic inability to organize their societies in the necessary ways to make industrialization possible. Once this is cured, then symptoms like the "digital divide" will disappear as a matter of course.
But they do have land-based missiles and nuclear warheads to go on top of them; most importantly, they have the will to defend themselves, which most EU countries don't seem to have anymore.
You make the assumption that the Navy would want to use the laser to attack other ships, which is incorrect. It would primarily be for air defense/ missile defense purposes. Possibly they could use it to blind pilots like the Russians have in the past, as well.
Some games are getting close to this. Have you played Medieval: Total War? The game tracks each and every warrior in your army - thousands of them, and all of them in your opponents' armies too. I know that the game rates the performance of each individual warrior in a battle and then modifies his bravery/ cowardice and effectiveness based on that.
This is quite a feat, considering how huge the armies and battles can get in this game.
These weapons wont help the US. They'll equalize the playing field even more as dubious regimes obtain them by making the US air force so much flying target practice.
On the contrary - this is exactly the sort of weapon that helps us and is useless to them. First of all, these weapons won't be portable anytime soon, so terrorists/ guerillas/ etc. aren't going to be able to use them if they were to loot them from the battlefield. Secondly, it's a safe assumption that this weapon, like many cutting edge weapon systems, requires tremendous logistics to put into practical use. Very high power consumption requiring lots of fuel and powerful generators; heavy maintenance requirements with spares being effectively impossible to get; requirement for specially trained personnel to operate and most importantly maintain the weapon - all of these make the sort of laser weapon envisaged effectively impossible to be looted on the battlefield and turned against the former owners.
Above the small arms level, modern weapons are weapon systems that require mature, sophisticated and well-financed military/technical organizations to operate. Take a look at the typical Arab army with Western weapons to see what sort of effectiveness you get when you have modern systems deployed in militaries that don't have necessary technical moxie to service them.
The radar actually detects the projectiles in flight; it analyzes the location, trajectory, and speed of the projo, accounts for atmospheric factors and determines where the artillery must be in order to fire a projectile with that flight path. What is being detected and tracked is the projectile; all the bits about targetting the firing battery is derived from that. If a radar beam can track a small projectile that accurately, so can a laser. And with a laser weapon, acquisition/ tracking and firing are essentially the same act.
Thanks for the info!
Some things further complicating returning fire against the laser:
* unless you have a laser of your own, you'd have to attack the aircraft with a missile, which is vulnerable to being shot down by the laser.
* the other point that comes to mind is that the sort of technology to acquire and target and engage at great range these flying lasers are going to be available to very few countries, possibly even only to the US for some time. Certainly against the sort of enemies the US is likely to be fighting in the near-ish future, there will probably not be a way to fight back.
Read the article. These are not going to be weapons carried by soldiers on foot like rifles, but mounted on aircraft and large vehicles.
Military lasers do not lase in the visible spectrum; you're not going to see the beam. And they would fire a pulse of energy lasting only a fraction of a second.
If the target had a laser sensor, it could figure out where the fire is coming from, but I suspect the target is going to be having other concerns once it receives the laser pulse.
The answer to your question is called AN/TPQ-36 and AN/TPQ-37 "Firefinder" target acquisition radars. We've had them for 20 years - the -36 is designed to track mortar shells and the -37 other types of artillery (though IIRC, the -37 has all the functionality of the -36).
They are very effective. They calculate the location of the firing tubes, and that information is passed to artillery units tasked to provide counterbattery fire (usually MLRS rocket artillery). This all happens very quickly - 30 seconds to a few minutes' time.
This is so common it makes me cry. In every office that significant fraction of humanity still operating at the instinctual level is well represented; pull them out of their suits and dresses and plop them into animal skins and you have cavepeople. Too many places I've worked did managers and their toadies grab the best machines out of a primal need for status and leave the people who actually need the good machines with the bottom of the heap.
I would think that the signature generated by the nanomachines would be detectable at a much shorter range than the infrared signature already generated by the vehicle.
All of those operations are performed by 'lowly' soldiers. ;)
Actually, they aren't anymore. Army vehicles must be painted with CARC (Chemical Agent Resistant Coating) paint, which is very hazardous to apply and generally is only applied by contractors or at the depot (like the one where I work). Big, special sealed paint booths are required to CARC paint a vehicle. This is why painting stuff is so expensive.
Of course, this could mean labor problems at the depot and with contractors, but that only affects civilians.
Unless they work up a nanopaint formula that's meant to be applied to rocks in the company area, soldiers will have plenty of painting to do for the forseeable future.
All work is not the same. I much prefer the sort of work where I can sit at my computer, and from time to time visit Slashdot, than being out in the elements digging ditches.
Those labor saving devices do save labor, and I'm thankful for them. Just start washing your family's clothes by hand for a while and you'll see what they mean by labor saving.
If I had to do all the chores that need to be done the way they were done in 1900, I'd sure as hell have a lot less leisure time. It ain't perfect leisure, but it's more leisure, and that's pretty good considering the alternatives.
Yeah, what's got into them? After all, an expensive suit and tie are just the thing to wear when you have to crawl up into the ceiling above the drop panels to run a cat 5 cable, crawl under desks to get at computers, and cut holes in dry wall to put in a new network drop.
J'accuse!
What is the sound of one worm propagating?
Keep that keen analysis comin'!
Sometimes I have the feeling that the modern American workplace has regressed into a sort of feudal structure, where management is the aristocracy. The MBA is like a patent of nobility, and once you've got it, you're of the blood, and must never again really worry about your existence. If you toady to higher ranking nobility, you'll get a fief (management job) of your own complete with productive serfs (programmers, etc). If your fief is big enough, you can parcel out sub fiefs (lower tier management) to lower nobles (your business school/ frat chums) and be a liege lord.
And just like back in the day during feuds and other conflicts nobles who lost were almost always treated well by the victors and often were offered chances to switch allegience, today you can easily climb into a good job even if your company tanks (lacking a distinct skill set, managers are fungible; just look at the utterly disparate types of businesses that many CEOs have managed in their careers) and if that fails, there's always the golden parachute.
Back in the day, there were rarely serious consequences to the behavior of nobility as long as it didn't involve treachery towards those above you, and today this seems to be so with our manager class, at least as far as business decisions go. Being noble was enough.
"14words" is a white supremacist rallying cry. It refers to the number of words in some mission statement that some neo-Nazi came up with. I vaguely remember adding 88 to it had some other significance, but have since forgotten. There was an article in a Der Spiegel issue sometime back about the women in the neo-Nazi movement and how they utilize the internet for their political ends.