Plus, we have to get up in the morning anyway. No point in protesting for a few hours when I have bills to pay and would just have to leave anyway.
A real protest would involve thousands of armed citizens chained together around the White House. And thousands more chained around Congress. And they'd stay there until justice was served.
But, we all have bills to pay and families to feed and jobs to keep. So why bother...
In another post, I talked about air superiority. Current doctrine demands that the first targets are enemy airfields. The Migs might get off the ground once, but after that, they will never land again. UCAVs will continue to loiter over the decimated airfields until the end of the war in order to kill any combat engineers.
As for the current situation with "taliban" or gorilla fighters, UCAVs are perfect. We know the routes we need to follow to get from point A to point B. Convoys get attacked by roadside bombs. Just patrol the highways with UCAVs and scan for anyone digging or any newly-parked cars/trucks/boxes. If the car/truck/box remains for more than 2 hours, blow it up.
Most can be seen with a simple pair of binoculars. Probably better off with those than with the $100 wal-mart telescope.
And back in the day, there used to be a daily email service with things to look at every night. Unfortunately, I can't find it now...
Re:Among insiders this is a well-known phenomenon.
on
The Unmanned Air Force
·
· Score: 1
I don't think we've lost any to jamming yet.
Jamming sites are also ridiculously easy to spot. A few manned aircraft could take it out while the UCAVs loiter. Hell, you could even use a tungsten rod dropped from orbit or a dumb bomb that was lofted from outside of jamming range.
Most systems use sealed lead-acid. Maintenance-free batteries. We do keep thermal probes on the bank and monitor their temps. If a battery gets hot, it's pulled from the bank and replaced; just like RAID. If you've seen a deep-cycle marine battery, then you've seen one cell of a 48VDC bank. We wire 4 batteries into a bank for 48VDC. And we use multiple banks to provide the amperage and amp-hours needed. Most small sites run for 8 to 10 hours. But I have seen massive banks that could be used to operate COs for days with proper power shedding.
I work in one of those facilities. It is a myth that the station runs off the batteries.
We get 400VAC from commercial. That goes into a 3-way switchbox. The second side of the switchbox is connected to a 400VAC generator. The third part of the box feeds a rectifier. If commercial power fails, the switch kicks over to the generator and the generator starts. A tech has to manually reset the switch to go back to commercial power.
The output of the rectifier feeds a *huge* copper bar. This bar has several taps that feed DC breaker boxes. The breaker boxes feed the fuse panels at the tops of most of our racks. Some racks are equipped with inverters to get 120VAC back out of the 48VDC.
At the end of that copper bar, there is a wire connected to a bank of batteries. There is also a ground bar between the rectifier and the battery bank.
When the station was activated, the rectifiers charged the batteries to 48VDC. After that was done, the breakers were enabled and the station racks are powered off the bus bars.
In normal operation, the rectifiers and the batteries both power the bus equally. If commercial power stops, the rectifier dies for maybe 30 seconds. At that point, the full load of the station is assumed by the battery bank.
One other cool note. The battery bank has a hard cutoff and a soft cutoff. The hard cut is an old Frankenstein-esque switch used for maintenance and testing. The soft cut-off hits at 38VDC and shuts down power to save the batteries. You can find "smart" cutoffs that you wire to the rack fuse panels with alarm wire. As the battery bank loses voltage, the cutoff will automatically kill racks with low-priority equipment. Very clever, but I don't trust them.
It's even better than that. The pilot is really only needed on take-off, landing, and to carry out the mission over the target.
20 pilots can take-off 200 UCAVs, direct them to loiter over the target, and then bring them down in groups of 20 over the target. Finally, they can land the remaining UCAVs at the base.
While those 200 are en-route, the 20 pilots can be launching or recovering 200 more planes.
Or, even better, you can set up an assembly line of pilotage. 20 dedicated launchers, 20 dedicated recoverers, 20 dedicated mission specialists. And maybe 5 guys to monitor in-flight information. You could rain constant fire on a target for 24/7*365 with 300 pilots or so.
And all the pilots would be able to go home at the end of the day.
Re:Among insiders this is a well-known phenomenon.
on
The Unmanned Air Force
·
· Score: 1
*Reaction time for the remote pilot must equal or exceed that of an in-the-air pilot.
Reaction time does not matter as much in bombing. The UCAV is, more or less, a reusable cruise missile.
*Data the remote pilot has access to must equal or exceed that of an in-the-air pilot.
Again, not really needed. One thing that keeps UCAV cost high is the "requirement" to provide feedback to the pilot. Sure, you need basic instruments. But most of the data in the cockpit is really not needed for the remote pilot. An onboard computer can track the data. If it falls outside of parameters, the plane can self-destruct and the pilot can be switched to another plane.
*Counter-counter measures must ensure that the remote pilot is always in control of the craft.
It's called an INS. Set up a crypto-enabled link to update the INS in-flight. The INS is a gyroscope attached to a computer and a bomb. If the gyro and the computer disagree, the bomb explodes.
For years, "fighters" really haven't been doing A2A combat. Most (all?) of these are employed as bombers. And fighter/bombers are limited by airframe, not the pilot.
And when it comes to bombing, unmanned aircraft are just better. One can orbit at high altitude and lase targets while others come in lower and drop GBUs all over the target. If a few get shot down, no big deal.
Set up an INS with a gyroscope and trigger that to the proposed flight path and set the bomb to detonate if the plane veers off course. If a few blow up in the air, no big deal. Better than having one go "unguided" and hit whatever.
Forget calling in air strikes for CAS roles. The soldiers on the front can launch their own RPVs for some stuff. And for other missions, it'll be cost effective to have a wing of escorts accompany the troops. If they are attacked, the UCAVs can come down in seconds and drop munitions.
Forget the traditional role of air dominance. We can just send hundreds of UCAVs for every piloted vehicle the enemy has. He can't possibly shoot them all down. And in the opening days of the war, we'll blanket all the enemy runways with thousands of UCAVs anyway. Bomb the shit out of the runways and then loiter to take out any combat engineers trying to fix it.
The greatest thing is the manpower use. One pilot can update the INS for hundreds of UCAVs. Then, they just fly themselves. Once over the target, one pilot can take a single UCAV out of loiter and hit targets all night. Or, 20 pilots can be re-directed to engage in "shock and awe" while their former flights loiter.
Pilots will be working 8-hour shifts with 15 minute breaks every hour. They will even be able to take lunch. They can do their job from Utah or Maryland or Colorado without every having to deploy to Iraq. They won't have to be in perfect physical shape to fly. Bum knee on a great pilot; no problem.
I got tired of carrying around 10+ individual carts. Last time I was in Tokyo, I stopped by Akihabara and grabbed a R4DS card and 8gb micro-SD card.
Now I can consolidate all my games and, just as importantly, try new games before I buy them. Works great. The only down side is that you have to download the firmware from the site and copy that to all the MicroSD cards. I wish they'd burned it onto the R4 itself.
Also, I sometimes have to try the card 3 or 4 times to get it to read properly. This is only an issue if I remove the card to play a normal cart and then swap back.
I think the US is the only place where you pay for *incoming* communications. I've been in several European and Asian countries; all of them had free SMS and free incoming calls.
I run Vista on an older laptop. I disabled all the visual styles and set the theme to "Windows 2000". I also disabled a bunch of stuff like UAC and some of the dumber services.
When you start turning things off in Vista, it seems to run okay on older hardware. The OS does a performance check, but fails to cut back on enough things to keep the OS usable by default.
The economy was already reeling from the dot-com crash. 9/11 was an excuse to spin-up the military machine. Without the war, the recession would have been much worse.
The military is,after all, the biggest welfare program in the USA.
Of course, those bills still need to be paid. Have lots of kids and hope they fall in a bad tax bracket.
AdBlock+ with EasyList USA seems to work okay for me. A HOSTS file just seems too hard to maintain. Plus, on some sites (Slashdot. RCGroups, and HeliFreak) I actually *want* to allow ads.
After AdBlock, I think the next logical step would be Privoxy. It probably takes a bit of time to setup and configure, but it works across all browsers equally well.
There used to be a FireFox plugin that would do a random Google search in the background. It would search for things like "fluffy kitten" or "kiddie pr0n" or "bomb + whitehouse". Things like that.
The first plan was to completely screw up any analysis software. The second idea was to give plausible deniability if your computer was ever seized.
I have an Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo and a Radeon 4750. I run this on a 42" LCD at 1920*1080.
I tried FSX for a while and just didn't like it. I mostly fly helicopters and the ones in FSX were just, well, blah. I could run FSX at full resolution with middle-of-the-road settings. FS9 is, basically, maxed out along with a few extra graphics packs installed.
Hard-core simmers will always need the super-high-end machines. Flight Sim 10 *kills* virtually any system out there today; as does Black Shark. Older sims like LOMAC (5 years old) and Falcon (10 years old) are just now entering a zone where they can be played at full settings and full AA/AF.
Flight Sim 9 (5 years old) still crushes all but the high-end machines. Flight Sim 10 and Black Shark will kill systems for years to come.
I'd add to that for you to install a good SoHo router. Don't forget to open/forward the ports you need for TightVNC.
Also, create a non-admin user account for every-day users. If they come across something they *need* to install, you can VNC in and check it out/install it for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, focus more on RX gain rather than TX boost.
Plus, we have to get up in the morning anyway. No point in protesting for a few hours when I have bills to pay and would just have to leave anyway.
A real protest would involve thousands of armed citizens chained together around the White House. And thousands more chained around Congress. And they'd stay there until justice was served.
But, we all have bills to pay and families to feed and jobs to keep. So why bother...
In another post, I talked about air superiority. Current doctrine demands that the first targets are enemy airfields. The Migs might get off the ground once, but after that, they will never land again. UCAVs will continue to loiter over the decimated airfields until the end of the war in order to kill any combat engineers.
As for the current situation with "taliban" or gorilla fighters, UCAVs are perfect. We know the routes we need to follow to get from point A to point B. Convoys get attacked by roadside bombs. Just patrol the highways with UCAVs and scan for anyone digging or any newly-parked cars/trucks/boxes. If the car/truck/box remains for more than 2 hours, blow it up.
Here are some events to look at this year:
http://www.seasky.org/astronomy/astronomy_calendar_2009.html
Most can be seen with a simple pair of binoculars. Probably better off with those than with the $100 wal-mart telescope.
And back in the day, there used to be a daily email service with things to look at every night. Unfortunately, I can't find it now...
I don't think we've lost any to jamming yet.
Jamming sites are also ridiculously easy to spot. A few manned aircraft could take it out while the UCAVs loiter. Hell, you could even use a tungsten rod dropped from orbit or a dumb bomb that was lofted from outside of jamming range.
Most systems use sealed lead-acid. Maintenance-free batteries. We do keep thermal probes on the bank and monitor their temps. If a battery gets hot, it's pulled from the bank and replaced; just like RAID. If you've seen a deep-cycle marine battery, then you've seen one cell of a 48VDC bank. We wire 4 batteries into a bank for 48VDC. And we use multiple banks to provide the amperage and amp-hours needed. Most small sites run for 8 to 10 hours. But I have seen massive banks that could be used to operate COs for days with proper power shedding.
I work in one of those facilities. It is a myth that the station runs off the batteries.
We get 400VAC from commercial. That goes into a 3-way switchbox. The second side of the switchbox is connected to a 400VAC generator. The third part of the box feeds a rectifier. If commercial power fails, the switch kicks over to the generator and the generator starts. A tech has to manually reset the switch to go back to commercial power.
The output of the rectifier feeds a *huge* copper bar. This bar has several taps that feed DC breaker boxes. The breaker boxes feed the fuse panels at the tops of most of our racks. Some racks are equipped with inverters to get 120VAC back out of the 48VDC.
At the end of that copper bar, there is a wire connected to a bank of batteries. There is also a ground bar between the rectifier and the battery bank.
When the station was activated, the rectifiers charged the batteries to 48VDC. After that was done, the breakers were enabled and the station racks are powered off the bus bars.
In normal operation, the rectifiers and the batteries both power the bus equally. If commercial power stops, the rectifier dies for maybe 30 seconds. At that point, the full load of the station is assumed by the battery bank.
One other cool note. The battery bank has a hard cutoff and a soft cutoff. The hard cut is an old Frankenstein-esque switch used for maintenance and testing. The soft cut-off hits at 38VDC and shuts down power to save the batteries. You can find "smart" cutoffs that you wire to the rack fuse panels with alarm wire. As the battery bank loses voltage, the cutoff will automatically kill racks with low-priority equipment. Very clever, but I don't trust them.
It's even better than that. The pilot is really only needed on take-off, landing, and to carry out the mission over the target.
20 pilots can take-off 200 UCAVs, direct them to loiter over the target, and then bring them down in groups of 20 over the target. Finally, they can land the remaining UCAVs at the base.
While those 200 are en-route, the 20 pilots can be launching or recovering 200 more planes.
Or, even better, you can set up an assembly line of pilotage. 20 dedicated launchers, 20 dedicated recoverers, 20 dedicated mission specialists. And maybe 5 guys to monitor in-flight information. You could rain constant fire on a target for 24/7*365 with 300 pilots or so.
And all the pilots would be able to go home at the end of the day.
*Reaction time for the remote pilot must equal or exceed that of an in-the-air pilot.
Reaction time does not matter as much in bombing. The UCAV is, more or less, a reusable cruise missile.
*Data the remote pilot has access to must equal or exceed that of an in-the-air pilot.
Again, not really needed. One thing that keeps UCAV cost high is the "requirement" to provide feedback to the pilot. Sure, you need basic instruments. But most of the data in the cockpit is really not needed for the remote pilot. An onboard computer can track the data. If it falls outside of parameters, the plane can self-destruct and the pilot can be switched to another plane.
*Counter-counter measures must ensure that the remote pilot is always in control of the craft.
It's called an INS. Set up a crypto-enabled link to update the INS in-flight. The INS is a gyroscope attached to a computer and a bomb. If the gyro and the computer disagree, the bomb explodes.
For years, "fighters" really haven't been doing A2A combat. Most (all?) of these are employed as bombers. And fighter/bombers are limited by airframe, not the pilot.
And when it comes to bombing, unmanned aircraft are just better. One can orbit at high altitude and lase targets while others come in lower and drop GBUs all over the target. If a few get shot down, no big deal.
Set up an INS with a gyroscope and trigger that to the proposed flight path and set the bomb to detonate if the plane veers off course. If a few blow up in the air, no big deal. Better than having one go "unguided" and hit whatever.
Forget calling in air strikes for CAS roles. The soldiers on the front can launch their own RPVs for some stuff. And for other missions, it'll be cost effective to have a wing of escorts accompany the troops. If they are attacked, the UCAVs can come down in seconds and drop munitions.
Forget the traditional role of air dominance. We can just send hundreds of UCAVs for every piloted vehicle the enemy has. He can't possibly shoot them all down. And in the opening days of the war, we'll blanket all the enemy runways with thousands of UCAVs anyway. Bomb the shit out of the runways and then loiter to take out any combat engineers trying to fix it.
The greatest thing is the manpower use. One pilot can update the INS for hundreds of UCAVs. Then, they just fly themselves. Once over the target, one pilot can take a single UCAV out of loiter and hit targets all night. Or, 20 pilots can be re-directed to engage in "shock and awe" while their former flights loiter.
Pilots will be working 8-hour shifts with 15 minute breaks every hour. They will even be able to take lunch. They can do their job from Utah or Maryland or Colorado without every having to deploy to Iraq. They won't have to be in perfect physical shape to fly. Bum knee on a great pilot; no problem.
I got tired of carrying around 10+ individual carts. Last time I was in Tokyo, I stopped by Akihabara and grabbed a R4DS card and 8gb micro-SD card.
Now I can consolidate all my games and, just as importantly, try new games before I buy them. Works great. The only down side is that you have to download the firmware from the site and copy that to all the MicroSD cards. I wish they'd burned it onto the R4 itself.
Also, I sometimes have to try the card 3 or 4 times to get it to read properly. This is only an issue if I remove the card to play a normal cart and then swap back.
I think the US is the only place where you pay for *incoming* communications. I've been in several European and Asian countries; all of them had free SMS and free incoming calls.
I run Vista on an older laptop. I disabled all the visual styles and set the theme to "Windows 2000". I also disabled a bunch of stuff like UAC and some of the dumber services.
When you start turning things off in Vista, it seems to run okay on older hardware. The OS does a performance check, but fails to cut back on enough things to keep the OS usable by default.
I thought the niftiest part was using the second audio channel to pipe modem tones to the broadcasting booth. I always love an interesting hack...
In the South-East, we grow mostly pine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulpwood
From what I remember, it grows in maybe 20~25 years.
The economy was already reeling from the dot-com crash. 9/11 was an excuse to spin-up the military machine. Without the war, the recession would have been much worse.
The military is,after all, the biggest welfare program in the USA.
Of course, those bills still need to be paid. Have lots of kids and hope they fall in a bad tax bracket.
Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.
AdBlock+ with EasyList USA seems to work okay for me. A HOSTS file just seems too hard to maintain. Plus, on some sites (Slashdot. RCGroups, and HeliFreak) I actually *want* to allow ads.
After AdBlock, I think the next logical step would be Privoxy. It probably takes a bit of time to setup and configure, but it works across all browsers equally well.
Glad to see the First Amendment going strong in VT. /sarcasm
I like the number-pad thingy, but I don't like having to press the same key 6 times.
1-2 should give a capital "A" while 3-2 should give a capital "C" and 6-2 should give a lower-case "c"; 7-2 would just give a "2".
Also, the iPhone's prediction algorithm is f'ed.
The International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service has announced that a leap second will be added on December 31, 2008 [CC] at 23h 59m 60s
My understanding is that the last 60 seconds of the year will be 1/60th of a second longer. Or will my GPS actually read "23h 59m 59s" twice?
There used to be a FireFox plugin that would do a random Google search in the background. It would search for things like "fluffy kitten" or "kiddie pr0n" or "bomb + whitehouse". Things like that.
The first plan was to completely screw up any analysis software. The second idea was to give plausible deniability if your computer was ever seized.
I have an Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo and a Radeon 4750. I run this on a 42" LCD at 1920*1080.
I tried FSX for a while and just didn't like it. I mostly fly helicopters and the ones in FSX were just, well, blah. I could run FSX at full resolution with middle-of-the-road settings. FS9 is, basically, maxed out along with a few extra graphics packs installed.
Hard-core simmers will always need the super-high-end machines. Flight Sim 10 *kills* virtually any system out there today; as does Black Shark. Older sims like LOMAC (5 years old) and Falcon (10 years old) are just now entering a zone where they can be played at full settings and full AA/AF.
Flight Sim 9 (5 years old) still crushes all but the high-end machines. Flight Sim 10 and Black Shark will kill systems for years to come.
I'd add to that for you to install a good SoHo router. Don't forget to open/forward the ports you need for TightVNC.
Also, create a non-admin user account for every-day users. If they come across something they *need* to install, you can VNC in and check it out/install it for them.