Me again. A place I used to work had conference rooms named after birds of prey: eagle, hawk, kestrel. etc. The smokers' lounge was informally known as 'Puffin'.
I worked in an organisation where we named our servers after Marx brothers. When we ran out of Harpo, Zeppo, Chico and Groucho we added Karl, skid, birth, stretch and Deutsch. Then we changed to something more sensible.
This 'less is more' approach is enshrined in UK army doctrine where it is called 'mission command'. At all but the lowest tactical levels, a 'good' order should specify the overall context, the desired outcome, the resources available and any constraints (in particular the boundary of area within which the recipient has freedom to operate). The person receiving the order then uses his own skill and judgement to figure out the precise steps required. In some cases he will brief these back to the commander so that his actions can be checked against other people's plans (e.g. to make sure they are correctly 'deconflicted'). The whole point of this is that the commander focusses on the big picture, and delegates lower-level thinking to his subordinates.
These principles are in fact directly relevant in a commercial/industrial environment - they in effect describe the general principles of how to delegate a task to someone.
It's a perfect environment for terrorist mission rehearsal assuming your terrorist plot is something like the following: 1) teleport to the adjacent block and meet up 2) Fly to 50m altitude and then head toward the objective 3) crash at the sim border 4) relog 5) teleport to the adjacent block and meet up 6) Fly to 50m altitude and then head toward the objective 7) Abdul launches a swarm of flying penises as a distraction 8) land in the target compound 9) Try to rez bomb - oops - no build permission 10...
It just sounds like a company wants to release a product that only works on Windows, and I'm pretty sure that's been done before.
The difference is that UK citizens are required to pay a licence fee to receive BBC content. It is so difficult for ordinary citizens to get out of paying the licence fee that it is in effect a universal tax. If the BBC then decides to release an MS-only product I (as a UK citizen) am in effect being taxed by the Government to support MS. Regardless of my views on MS, the BBC, etc, this is pretty unacceptable. This is like the BBC releasing content that only works on Sony (for example) televisions.
Every game on the face of the earth advertises dynamic content in one form or another, and almost all of them fail miserably. Why?
// flame suit on I almost hate to say it here, but Second Life has quite good and open-ended content creation. It's original building tools and scripting language have recently been extended with a three-D sculpting capability that can import externally generated 3-shape files. For all its faults, SL is one of the very few programming environments where you can be interrupted mid-edit by a lesbian vampire dominatrix looking for help because their scripted whip has just stopped working.
// flame suit off
Okay, I will now animate my cute redhead avatar so it gnaws its own legs off as a punishment for me for posting this
The DoD aren't running a real time simulation of the world at the level of individual people. What they can in fact do is analyse broad political and social trends at a fairly coarse 'crowd' level to support the fine grained simulations used to model combat. The simulation might for example show changes in allegiance of Afghan villagers over time depending on how many times they are bombed / given food by NATO troops. The models could support pre-deployment training - e.g. a commnder submits his military plans before he deploys to theatre, the analysts run the sim and then say whether or not his proposed plan will make the locals more or less hostile to his forces, and perhaps suggest hotspot locations where direct conflict can be expected. No commander worth his salt would rely on any of this as an actual prediction of real events, and would be sacked were he to do so.
The behaviours of actual individuals are subsumed into the larger crowds, although 'warlord' style individuals may be represented from a political perspective. The emphasis is on trends, not predictions of actual individual actions.
A good analogy for this is Psychohistory in Asimov's early Foundation novels - and the current sims fall a long way short of the predictive power available to Hari Seldon.
Can you name any recent naval battles in the past 20 years or so that warranted having a stealthed ship that would not be picked up on radar?
~15 months ago the Brits conducted amphibious landings in the Al Fawr peninsula (Gulf War 2). They were shot at. I don't know if the Iraqis used radar-guided weapons, but others might do. If I was the landing force it would be nice to have a stealthy mothership for my landing craft, etc. Accrording to the article, this ship is designed for littoral (coastal) ops.
22 years ago the Brits were in a shooting war with the Argentinians, and lost non-stealthy ships (and crew!!) to radar-guided weapons. If the Brits had lost one of their carriers in the same way they might have lost the war itself.
The peacekeeeping ops in Somalia (U.S.) and Sierra Leone (U.K.) also involved amphib. landings
Malthus's hypothesis implied that actual population always has a tendency to push above the food supply. Because of this tendency, any attempt to ameliorate the condition of the lower classes by increasing their incomes or improving agricultural productivity would be fruitless, as the extra means of subsistence would be completely absorbed by an induced boost in population.
Malthus published "An essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798 and his predictions just haven't panned out. As countries industrialise their population increases significantly but then levels out or even becomes negative - to the extent that some western countries (Japan and Italy are good examples) have aging and stagnating populations. Population growth is still massive in the third world in terms of sheer numbers, but even there the birth rates aren't increasing as fast as Malthus predicted. There simply isn't the need to have large families to make sure that at least some kids survive to carry on with the farm.
The actual picture is very complicated. One view is that, barring disasters, the world will end up with a large but 'stable' population, the vast majority of which lives in what we would now call the developing world. Most people wouldn't have a particularly brilliant quality of life, and the worlds ecosystems would be dominated by food production. But this assumes that the developing world can create the social and other systems required to ensure stabilty, and that global civilisation doesn't become 'brittle' with respect to resources, etc.
Arthur C Clarke once wrote a nice little piece called "Apes or Angels" (Ok, the title may be wrong). Basically his point is that the universe is 10 billion years old, we have been here for 5 million years. That is a tiny drop in the lifetime of the universe. So if we hit alien species the chances that life on the planet would be exactly in the same range as our evolutionary scale is pretty remote because 1 million years back or forth yould not be much in the tiemscale that the universe operates in. Although the general point is valid, it is only really true if the conditions that allow intelligent life have remained the same for the entire history of the Universe. E.g. older stars were formed when there were fewer of the heavy elements (carbon, silicon, take your pick) required to support life, so they probably aren't harbouring ancient transcendant civilisations.
To take another example from Science Fiction ('Space' by Stephen Baxter), what if something happens every few billion years that wipes out all life across an entire region of a galaxy - such as a very energetic Supernova or gamma ray burst. This might simultaneously destroy life in many nearby star-systems, starting them again from scratch. Although finding a local civ that is exactly the same age/level as your own would still be very unlikely, this sort of reboot would level the playing field a bit.
A Hungarian tourist (John Cleese) approaches the clerk (Terry Jones). The tourist is reading haltingly from a phrase book.
Hungarian: I will not buy this record, it is scratched. Clerk: Sorry? Hungarian I will not buy this record, it is scratched. Clerk: Uh, no, no, no. This is a tobacconist's. Hungarian: Ah! I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched. Clerk: No, no, no, no. Tobacco...um...cigarettes (holds up a pack). Hungarian: Ya! See-gar-ets! Ya! Uh...My hovercraft is full of eels. Clerk: Sorry? Hungarian: My hovercraft (pantomimes puffing a cigarette)...is full of eels (pretends to strike a match). Clerk: Ah! matches! Hungarian: Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant...do you waaaaaant...to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
I don't know how you would program a male robot, but for a female robot, it only has to randomly exhibit one of the following reactions to any given input X: 1) gossip about X 2) get emotional about X 3) be bored by X 4) buy an outfit for X 5) blame X on men
why can't the US Army put up a mock up of Babhdad and let the grunts try it out for REAL.
They could. But how long would it take for the whole army to rotate through it? Simulations allow a few guys to practice squad-level drills with simulated buddies, perhaps every afternoon in their own barracks. As it happens, there are some facilities where they do physical practice as you suggest - although they use lasers rather than paintball. Once the trainees have got their act together in the virtual worlds, then they can be let loose on the physical trainers without wasting everyone's time.
A good virtual world also supports mission rehearsal, if it can be configured to look like the street they will go down tomorrow. This simply can't be done with the physical Baghdad film set approach, where one size fits all cities.
You're joking, right? Civilian control of the military is one of the cornerstones of our armed forces. It's a tradition we inherited from the British.... Compare this with a country like Denmark (since you mentioned it), where you have an actual King ruling over the people and controlling the military.
Ermm - just like the British, where the armed forces (Royal Air Force, etc) swear alliegence to the Queen, not the elected Prime Minister. I don't suppose the Danish King runs his army any more than the Queen attends the UK war cabinet or the Permanent Joint HQ.
Re:Talking about insanely short-sighted...
on
Weapons in Space
·
· Score: 1
Germany was indeed well on its way, and we succeeded in being 'first' mainly due to a large number of clandestine operations by the Allies/SOE.
I have huge respect for the clandestine operations by the Allies/SOE, but in truth the Germans were never close to a weaponised capability. At the end of the war they hadn't even achieved a controlled chain reaction at their (undamaged) facility at Haigerloch. In June 1942, Albert Speer (Minister of Armaments) questioned Heisenburg (the German chief scientist) on the feasibility of developing a weapon, and later stated that "His answer was by no means encouraging". The German scientists also knew that they lacked experience compared with the US (which had already soaked up several European scientists fleeing Nazi persecution), and told Speer that they would have to 'start small'. This at a time when the US programme was close to achieving controlled fission, and was starting up the massive Manhattan project, whose scale dwarfed anything Speer could have funded.
Source: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, 1986
Slashdot Mirror
If the posties do go out on strike, lets hope they don't elect to have a postal ballot before going back to work...
Me again. A place I used to work had conference rooms named after birds of prey: eagle, hawk, kestrel. etc. The smokers' lounge was informally known as 'Puffin'.
I worked in an organisation where we named our servers after Marx brothers. When we ran out of Harpo, Zeppo, Chico and Groucho we added Karl, skid, birth, stretch and Deutsch. Then we changed to something more sensible.
Also, comment heard in suicide bombers' training camp: "Listen carefully I'm only going to show this once..."
These principles are in fact directly relevant in a commercial/industrial environment - they in effect describe the general principles of how to delegate a task to someone.
It's a perfect environment for terrorist mission rehearsal assuming your terrorist plot is something like the following: ...
1) teleport to the adjacent block and meet up
2) Fly to 50m altitude and then head toward the objective
3) crash at the sim border
4) relog
5) teleport to the adjacent block and meet up
6) Fly to 50m altitude and then head toward the objective
7) Abdul launches a swarm of flying penises as a distraction
8) land in the target compound
9) Try to rez bomb - oops - no build permission
10
Comment heard from Soldier, to his CO, during a test of some software:
"The fucking thing is fucking fucked, sir!"
The difference is that UK citizens are required to pay a licence fee to receive BBC content. It is so difficult for ordinary citizens to get out of paying the licence fee that it is in effect a universal tax. If the BBC then decides to release an MS-only product I (as a UK citizen) am in effect being taxed by the Government to support MS. Regardless of my views on MS, the BBC, etc, this is pretty unacceptable. This is like the BBC releasing content that only works on Sony (for example) televisions.
I almost hate to say it here, but Second Life has quite good and open-ended content creation. It's original building tools and scripting language have recently been extended with a three-D sculpting capability that can import externally generated 3-shape files. For all its faults, SL is one of the very few programming environments where you can be interrupted mid-edit by a lesbian vampire dominatrix looking for help because their scripted whip has just stopped working.
Okay, I will now animate my cute redhead avatar so it gnaws its own legs off as a punishment for me for posting this
The behaviours of actual individuals are subsumed into the larger crowds, although 'warlord' style individuals may be represented from a political perspective. The emphasis is on trends, not predictions of actual individual actions. A good analogy for this is Psychohistory in Asimov's early Foundation novels - and the current sims fall a long way short of the predictive power available to Hari Seldon.
An illustration of the fact that 'because something is infinite' does not imply that 'every possibility will occur':
There are an infinite number of numbers between 3.0 and 4.0 (3.1, 3.11, 3.111 etc), but none of them is 5.
Can you name any recent naval battles in the past 20 years or so that warranted having a stealthed ship that would not be picked up on radar?
~15 months ago the Brits conducted amphibious landings in the Al Fawr peninsula (Gulf War 2). They were shot at. I don't know if the Iraqis used radar-guided weapons, but others might do. If I was the landing force it would be nice to have a stealthy mothership for my landing craft, etc. Accrording to the article, this ship is designed for littoral (coastal) ops.
22 years ago the Brits were in a shooting war with the Argentinians, and lost non-stealthy ships (and crew!!) to radar-guided weapons. If the Brits had lost one of their carriers in the same way they might have lost the war itself.
The peacekeeeping ops in Somalia (U.S.) and Sierra Leone (U.K.) also involved amphib. landings
Malthus's hypothesis implied that actual population always has a tendency to push above the food supply. Because of this tendency, any attempt to ameliorate the condition of the lower classes by increasing their incomes or improving agricultural productivity would be fruitless, as the extra means of subsistence would be completely absorbed by an induced boost in population.
Malthus published "An essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798 and his predictions just haven't panned out. As countries industrialise their population increases significantly but then levels out or even becomes negative - to the extent that some western countries (Japan and Italy are good examples) have aging and stagnating populations. Population growth is still massive in the third world in terms of sheer numbers, but even there the birth rates aren't increasing as fast as Malthus predicted. There simply isn't the need to have large families to make sure that at least some kids survive to carry on with the farm.
The actual picture is very complicated. One view is that, barring disasters, the world will end up with a large but 'stable' population, the vast majority of which lives in what we would now call the developing world. Most people wouldn't have a particularly brilliant quality of life, and the worlds ecosystems would be dominated by food production. But this assumes that the developing world can create the social and other systems required to ensure stabilty, and that global civilisation doesn't become 'brittle' with respect to resources, etc.
Arthur C Clarke once wrote a nice little piece called "Apes or Angels" (Ok, the title may be wrong). Basically his point is that the universe is 10 billion years old, we have been here for 5 million years. That is a tiny drop in the lifetime of the universe. So if we hit alien species the chances that life on the planet would be exactly in the same range as our evolutionary scale is pretty remote because 1 million years back or forth yould not be much in the tiemscale that the universe operates in.
Although the general point is valid, it is only really true if the conditions that allow intelligent life have remained the same for the entire history of the Universe. E.g. older stars were formed when there were fewer of the heavy elements (carbon, silicon, take your pick) required to support life, so they probably aren't harbouring ancient transcendant civilisations.
To take another example from Science Fiction ('Space' by Stephen Baxter), what if something happens every few billion years that wipes out all life across an entire region of a galaxy - such as a very energetic Supernova or gamma ray burst. This might simultaneously destroy life in many nearby star-systems, starting them again from scratch. Although finding a local civ that is exactly the same age/level as your own would still be very unlikely, this sort of reboot would level the playing field a bit.
A Hungarian tourist (John Cleese) approaches the clerk (Terry Jones). The tourist is reading haltingly from a phrase book.
Hungarian: I will not buy this record, it is scratched.
Clerk: Sorry?
Hungarian I will not buy this record, it is scratched.
Clerk: Uh, no, no, no. This is a tobacconist's.
Hungarian: Ah! I will not buy this *tobacconist's*, it is scratched.
Clerk: No, no, no, no. Tobacco...um...cigarettes (holds up a pack).
Hungarian: Ya! See-gar-ets! Ya! Uh...My hovercraft is full of eels.
Clerk: Sorry?
Hungarian: My hovercraft (pantomimes puffing a cigarette)...is full of eels (pretends to strike a match).
Clerk: Ah! matches!
Hungarian: Ya! Ya! Ya! Ya! Do you waaaaant...do you waaaaaant...to come back to my place, bouncy bouncy?
I don't know how you would program a male robot, but for a female robot, it only has to randomly exhibit one of the following reactions to any given input X:
1) gossip about X
2) get emotional about X
3) be bored by X
4) buy an outfit for X
5) blame X on men
Project Manager: "Ok team, start coding the system now, I'll go and find out what the customer wants..."
They could. But how long would it take for the whole army to rotate through it? Simulations allow a few guys to practice squad-level drills with simulated buddies, perhaps every afternoon in their own barracks. As it happens, there are some facilities where they do physical practice as you suggest - although they use lasers rather than paintball. Once the trainees have got their act together in the virtual worlds, then they can be let loose on the physical trainers without wasting everyone's time.
A good virtual world also supports mission rehearsal, if it can be configured to look like the street they will go down tomorrow. This simply can't be done with the physical Baghdad film set approach, where one size fits all cities.
Ermm - just like the British, where the armed forces (Royal Air Force, etc) swear alliegence to the Queen, not the elected Prime Minister. I don't suppose the Danish King runs his army any more than the Queen attends the UK war cabinet or the Permanent Joint HQ.
I have huge respect for the clandestine operations by the Allies/SOE, but in truth the Germans were never close to a weaponised capability. At the end of the war they hadn't even achieved a controlled chain reaction at their (undamaged) facility at Haigerloch. In June 1942, Albert Speer (Minister of Armaments) questioned Heisenburg (the German chief scientist) on the feasibility of developing a weapon, and later stated that "His answer was by no means encouraging". The German scientists also knew that they lacked experience compared with the US (which had already soaked up several European scientists fleeing Nazi persecution), and told Speer that they would have to 'start small'. This at a time when the US programme was close to achieving controlled fission, and was starting up the massive Manhattan project, whose scale dwarfed anything Speer could have funded.
Source: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Richard Rhodes, 1986