Guys... they were making itty bitty nukes well before this story. My father watched the test of an artillery-fired nuke in the early 50s. They also had a nuclear bazooka. All of this is documented online. Everything that flew could carry nuclear warheads - especially anti-aircraft missiles.
As far as survivability, the A-1 was a tough aircraft, as it showed in the Vietnam War. Keep it out of the fireball and it could probably survive.
Lots of aircraft used lobbing techniques for nuclear weapons delivery. For all I know, they still do.
BTW... for whoever mentioned that tactical nukes got all the way down to a few hundred kilotons. They get down to about 100 tons, not kilotons. A few hundred kilotons is strategic.
Malaria requires a mosquito vector to spread. SARS does not. A CDC official recently said that SARS wasn't [soon] contained, everybody on earth will get it. Nobody is likely to have natural immunity because is it is a recombinant or (less likely) mutation of a coronavirus - thus a new organism.
If it has an animal host, we are screwed. We either all get it, or we get immunization.
If not, it may be able to cause it to burn out through quarantine and other infection control measures.
One thing not shown in the statistics is the number of people with SARS who do not get sick enough to get treatment. That is a two-sided issue...
If there are none or only a few, then we may still be able to contain the disease, but the morbidity (for example, 40% of patients needing respirators) and mortality (around 4%) remain high.
If there are a lot, we will probably not be able to contain the disease, but the serious illness and fatality rates will (by definition) be significantly lower.
Sorry, but 20 years is way to short a time to draw any inferences from. Furthermore, there is no 20 year long spike in CO2 to which you can correlate the post 1980 era. Finally, you don't take into account several issues:
Solar irradiance variations
urban heat island effects and its impact on land thermometers.
Also, take a look at the various IPCC reports that have come out... the most important trend there is that of the forecast warming to decrease.
The most significant rise in temperature occurred before 1940. The bulk of the CO2 increase was after 1940.
So much for your simple correlation.
I won't bother to go into detail about little issues like the sparsity of temperature data nor its strong bias towards being measured in urban areas. Nor will I belabor the insanity of making projections about systems with millenial cycles from a few decades of data. Also, I won't make a big deal about how climatologists, with 80% of the data you just mentioned, concluded in the 1970s that an ice age was about to strike.
Good scientists do their work regardless of funding sources. The folks you want to scrutinize for funding are the intermediaries that publish summary results - such as the press (biased pro-warming), the UN, think tanks, political magazines, etc.
I don't know how much if any warming will be caused by CO2. I do know that nobody else does either, including the IPCC. I also don't know what it will cost to implement Kyoto and the much harsher protocols required to make any difference, but I do know that the odds are high that the economic impact will be highly negative, with concomitant loss of political will and loss of human life.
And finally, why aren't more folks looking at ameliorating potential warming, which might be far more effective than limiting CO2 emissions.
When the scientific community cannot even find where 30% of the carbon flux goes, why should we believe any assertions about carbon sinks. This is one of the many reasons that Kyoto is bad policy - it is based on an infant scientific field with lousy data. That doesn't mean that the science is bad - it means that it is insufficient, by a long ways.
As far as Kyoto went, what nobody seems to mention is that it was a fraud and a trap. If you believed the numbers that the Kyoto framers themselves used, Kyoto would have resulted in an unmeasurable change in global temperature over the 100 year timeframe of its scope. Or, put another way, it would have delayed whatever warming there was by just a few years.
Kyoto was meant to do two things:
1) Hurt the US economically compared to Europe, by hitting us harder
2) Provide a start to a process that would have required drastic cuts in CO2 emissions - cuts that would have been politically impossible if called for in the first treaty, but cuts that would be necessary to achieve Kyoto's goals.
Without breakthrough technology and massive investment, those cuts would have been impossible. But there is no way to cause breakthrough technology - it is like pushing a rope!
The ultimate conceit in Kyoto was its assumption that its CO2 emissions rules could be maintained, world wide, for 100 years. That requires an absurd faith in the stability of international life that is unprecedented in history. If Kyoto had been put in place 100 years ago, is there anyone alive who believes it would have made any difference? Do the Kyoto planners really believe that the world will be stable... that monstrous regimes will not arise (which will give a fig about the environment - witness the USSR)... that unforseen technological innovations will not occur? After all, 100 years ago there were no airplanes, electronics, computers, antibiotics, totalitarian regimes, Naziism, Marxist-Leninism, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, etc.
Finally, one almost never hears any support for the cheapest, most reliable anti-CO2 emissions technology around: nuclear. France would have an easy time with Kyoto, BECAUSE 70% OF ITS ELECTRICAL POWER IS NUCLEAR. But US enviros have completely killed nuclear power, in spite of its free world history of ZERO deaths - the safest power ever invented.
This in itself is enough to make me strongly doubt either the sanity, education or honesty of almost every pro-Kyoto proponent!
Good grief. All you need to do is extend the library. We use SAX and then build up a hash-table to let us find all notes and attributes from a string. We add accessors to the normal DOM routines like "find the first node with path/a/b/c" and return its value, otherwise return this default value.
Once you do a few of those, you can handle most of simple XML with most of the work focused on the data (i.e. the business use) rather than screwing around with the access methods, etc.
Oh, and to generate simple XML, just use your language's equivalent of printf.
For complex XML, we use the standard DOM with some methods added again to make it easier.
I'll bet thousands of folks do similar things.
XML is really handy. For the sort of work we do (transaction processing) it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
There is at least one case that I know of where an American nut-case did hijack an airplane and force it to crash.
Adding ethnicity to a profiling system isn't perfect. No profiling system can be. But ignoring ethnicity is ignoring information that is significant. After all, it required a political decision to force CAPPS-I to ignore ethnicity. Any time you use political decisions to alter pattern recognition criteria, you are *admitting* that it is likely that the naturally best criteria are likely to be politically incorrect.
When you see an argument full of name calling, one has to wonder about it's validity. You have called me a bigot and a moron and implicitly, a racist. You have also called me intolerant, which I confess to: I am intolerant of idiocy, especially in the area of political correctness, and ESPECIALLY, like in this case, where it affects national security.
Your inferences are crap. You assume I want to flag each arab immediately. Wrong. All I said was that ethnicity should be a factor. Factor - as in part of the equation that determines risk.
Furthermore, I would strongly contend that even if I proposed that all young male arabs should be given special attention, that would not be bigotry.
Bigotry: One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
Now, we are talking about race in this context (I would arge that intolerance of different politics, if used as a definition, would apply to LOTS of people, including, clearly yourself).
What I am talking about it security measures, not relative merits of one race or ethnic group or another. And that isn't bigotry unless it is driven by bigotted views. It is not bigoted to be more cautious of a young arab than a old black lady when we are talking about security.
Clearly you do not understand the difference between bigotry, which involves intolerance, and discrimination on the basis of risk, which need have no basis at all in intolerance.
Now I notice you have read my blog. I am sorry you were unable to understand it. You must see everything in terms like "bigotry." You strongly imply above that I am a racist, but you don't know me and you know nothing about my attitude about people of difference races. Nor do you know anything about my family (which includes members of a different race) or my friends (of all "races"). In other words, you are doing what the offended left always does - call someone a racist because you don't like their views, and stereotyping me based on my views.
Since you find my views so racist, I invite you to debate them on my blog which is a better forum than slashdot for such things. My blog is designed to, among other things, offend idiotarians. I can tell from your post that it succeeded.
Re:The subject of "mesh networks" was covered in..
on
Wireless Mesh Networks
·
· Score: 1
Also, one would expect tight power control and very wide band spread spectrum. The latter can drop signal strength by up to 40 dB.
I would be surprised if directional antennas would be very effective, though. Also, if the soldiers are moving around, they are going to have to be transmitting a fair amount of routing information as different individuals wander in and out of range.
Re:The subject of "mesh networks" was covered in..
on
Wireless Mesh Networks
·
· Score: 1
Oh goodie. So now our enemy can detect our soldiers with just a simple radio receiver. Marvelous!
But because of not taking ethnicity (and other factors that the new system will use), the system had too high a false positive rate. This causes people to lose confidence in it and ignore it, as was done in this case.
Of course, today people are much more aware. As a result, the new system, which should have a lower false alarm rate (once it gets tuned) should inspire more confidence and not have its results ignored.
Actually, with more data per person the noise goes down. It allows it to take more factors into account, reducing false positives and false negatives.
Furthermore, the more data it uses, the harder it is to "spoof" by terrorists, who otherwise will try to spot vulnerabilities in the system. This is especially true if the algorithms are kept secret.
Oh, so you are saying that I advocate stupid screening.
Who says that ethnicity is the *only* criteria? You do, not me.
And US citizens do NOT have a right to non-discrimination - they have a right to not have unreasonable discrimination. Otherwise, it would be unconstitutional for a police BOLO to include race and gender, but it is not! Equal treatment under the law doesn't mean that cops cannot discriminate - otherwise after a robbery they would have to stop every car or no car. After all, it doesn't say *anything* about race or gender in the constitution.
If the definition of bigotry is intolerance, then I must be a bigot because I am intolerant of neo-Nazi's and KKK members. By that definition, I'll bet that you are a bigot too!
Furthermore, I am NOT assuming that every Arab is a high risk for terrorism or that most Arabs are terrorist. Your understanding of statistics seems a bit off. But young male Arabs as a group represent a much larger risk for terrorism than young male Mexicans, for example. To ignore that is criminal negligence.
I did my research - you obviously didn't. The CAPP system was specifically forbidden to consider ethnicity. If it had, it might have caught them. Since it couldn't, it was left only with other criteria, such as luggage, etc.
I don't claim that CAPP *would* have caught them if it considered ethnicity, but it might very well have done so.
As far as bigotry... is it bigotry to note that young Arabs are the highest threat for terrorism?
Bigotry is when you stereotype an entire group - for example, call all Arabs terrorists. When you recognize that the statistical risk of one group is significantly greater than another, taking that into account isn't bigotry, it's prudence.
You're right... that would be stupid reasoning... just like it was stupid of you to take my reasoning and recast it in that form. If you don't understand the concept of relative risk, perhaps you should avoid posting about such subjects.
They passed CAPPS I because the Clinton Administration had *insisted* that ethnicity (racial profiling) not be included in CAPPS.
Thus we had a system designed to prevent airplane hijacking that was forced to ignore the single most effective predictor: if the person is an Arab.
Without that political correctness (and a number of other stupid things done to the anti-terror apparatus and intelligence apparatus by the Carter and Clinton administration), it is highly likely that the terrorism would have been prevented with the original apprehension of Moussari (or however it's spelled).
Tell that to the environmentalists. Many, many people have had their property suddenly rendered effectively useless (with huge drops in value) by post-facto environmental laws, which is the equivalent of taking it for public use. Very few have been paid for it, because the Supreme Court has held applied a very high threshold to "taking."
This is the equivalent of the government taking your software and paying you 20% of the value, just because they can get away with it.
Of course, we rarely hear the "civil libertarians" complain about environmental takings, because of the marxist belief that private property is bad.
I've put together an animated GIF from radar archives showing the initial appearance of the Columbia radar track and the subsequent growth and drift of it,
Go to my blog and scroll down to the "Shuttle Disaster on Radar" item and click the link at the end of the article (labeled "radar image loop").
I worked with him many years ago on the DEC-10 and haven't heard from him in 25 years. He taught me the fundamentals of data communications, among other things.
Steve was one of the original MIT hackers, who started with train hacking, moved on to phone hacking and on into computers.
Spacewar was a lot of fun, by the way. Lunar lander was played on the same box.
Although it has been a long time since I was in the Navy dropping torpedoes from a P-3 Orion, at that time the torpedoes were quite capable of passive accoustic guidance. This is still true, as a quick google search will show. Active sonar is used only when a target has been acquired.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares what "poor" is to a libertarian?
Libertarians are the lint in the bellybutton of the body politic.
Guys... they were making itty bitty nukes well before this story. My father watched the test of an artillery-fired nuke in the early 50s. They also had a nuclear bazooka. All of this is documented online. Everything that flew could carry nuclear warheads - especially anti-aircraft missiles.
As far as survivability, the A-1 was a tough aircraft, as it showed in the Vietnam War. Keep it out of the fireball and it could probably survive.
Lots of aircraft used lobbing techniques for nuclear weapons delivery. For all I know, they still do.
BTW... for whoever mentioned that tactical nukes got all the way down to a few hundred kilotons. They get down to about 100 tons, not kilotons. A few hundred kilotons is strategic.
Malaria requires a mosquito vector to spread. SARS does not. A CDC official recently said that SARS wasn't [soon] contained, everybody on earth will get it. Nobody is likely to have natural immunity because is it is a recombinant or (less likely) mutation of a coronavirus - thus a new organism.
If it has an animal host, we are screwed. We either all get it, or we get immunization.
If not, it may be able to cause it to burn out through quarantine and other infection control measures.
One thing not shown in the statistics is the number of people with SARS who do not get sick enough to get treatment. That is a two-sided issue...
If there are none or only a few, then we may still be able to contain the disease, but the morbidity (for example, 40% of patients needing respirators) and mortality (around 4%) remain high.
If there are a lot, we will probably not be able to contain the disease, but the serious illness and fatality rates will (by definition) be significantly lower.
Sorry, but 20 years is way to short a time to draw any inferences from. Furthermore, there is no 20 year long spike in CO2 to which you can correlate the post 1980 era. Finally, you don't take into account several issues:
Solar irradiance variations
urban heat island effects and its impact on land thermometers.
Also, take a look at the various IPCC reports that have come out... the most important trend there is that of the forecast warming to decrease.
You missed the word "free" as in "free world history."
Not to mention that even Chernobyl killed many fewer people than coal.
Not to mention that nobody in a democracy would ever build a dynamically unstable, FLAMMABLE reactor like the Soviets did at Chernobyl.
The most significant rise in temperature occurred before 1940. The bulk of the CO2 increase was after 1940.
So much for your simple correlation.
I won't bother to go into detail about little issues like the sparsity of temperature data nor its strong bias towards being measured in urban areas. Nor will I belabor the insanity of making projections about systems with millenial cycles from a few decades of data. Also, I won't make a big deal about how climatologists, with 80% of the data you just mentioned, concluded in the 1970s that an ice age was about to strike.
Good scientists do their work regardless of funding sources. The folks you want to scrutinize for funding are the intermediaries that publish summary results - such as the press (biased pro-warming), the UN, think tanks, political magazines, etc.
I don't know how much if any warming will be caused by CO2. I do know that nobody else does either, including the IPCC. I also don't know what it will cost to implement Kyoto and the much harsher protocols required to make any difference, but I do know that the odds are high that the economic impact will be highly negative, with concomitant loss of political will and loss of human life.
And finally, why aren't more folks looking at ameliorating potential warming, which might be far more effective than limiting CO2 emissions.
When the scientific community cannot even find where 30% of the carbon flux goes, why should we believe any assertions about carbon sinks. This is one of the many reasons that Kyoto is bad policy - it is based on an infant scientific field with lousy data. That doesn't mean that the science is bad - it means that it is insufficient, by a long ways.
As far as Kyoto went, what nobody seems to mention is that it was a fraud and a trap. If you believed the numbers that the Kyoto framers themselves used, Kyoto would have resulted in an unmeasurable change in global temperature over the 100 year timeframe of its scope. Or, put another way, it would have delayed whatever warming there was by just a few years.
Kyoto was meant to do two things:
1) Hurt the US economically compared to Europe, by hitting us harder
2) Provide a start to a process that would have required drastic cuts in CO2 emissions - cuts that would have been politically impossible if called for in the first treaty, but cuts that would be necessary to achieve Kyoto's goals.
Without breakthrough technology and massive investment, those cuts would have been impossible. But there is no way to cause breakthrough technology - it is like pushing a rope!
The ultimate conceit in Kyoto was its assumption that its CO2 emissions rules could be maintained, world wide, for 100 years. That requires an absurd faith in the stability of international life that is unprecedented in history. If Kyoto had been put in place 100 years ago, is there anyone alive who believes it would have made any difference? Do the Kyoto planners really believe that the world will be stable... that monstrous regimes will not arise (which will give a fig about the environment - witness the USSR)... that unforseen technological innovations will not occur? After all, 100 years ago there were no airplanes, electronics, computers, antibiotics, totalitarian regimes, Naziism, Marxist-Leninism, nuclear energy, nuclear weapons, etc.
Finally, one almost never hears any support for the cheapest, most reliable anti-CO2 emissions technology around: nuclear. France would have an easy time with Kyoto, BECAUSE 70% OF ITS ELECTRICAL POWER IS NUCLEAR. But US enviros have completely killed nuclear power, in spite of its free world history of ZERO deaths - the safest power ever invented.
This in itself is enough to make me strongly doubt either the sanity, education or honesty of almost every pro-Kyoto proponent!
Good grief. All you need to do is extend the library. We use SAX and then build up a hash-table to let us find all notes and attributes from a string. We add accessors to the normal DOM routines like "find the first node with path /a/b/c" and return its value, otherwise return this default value.
Once you do a few of those, you can handle most of simple XML with most of the work focused on the data (i.e. the business use) rather than screwing around with the access methods, etc.
Oh, and to generate simple XML, just use your language's equivalent of printf.
For complex XML, we use the standard DOM with some methods added again to make it easier.
I'll bet thousands of folks do similar things.
XML is really handy. For the sort of work we do (transaction processing) it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
There is at least one case that I know of where an American nut-case did hijack an airplane and force it to crash.
Adding ethnicity to a profiling system isn't perfect. No profiling system can be. But ignoring ethnicity is ignoring information that is significant. After all, it required a political decision to force CAPPS-I to ignore ethnicity. Any time you use political decisions to alter pattern recognition criteria, you are *admitting* that it is likely that the naturally best criteria are likely to be politically incorrect.
When you see an argument full of name calling, one has to wonder about it's validity. You have called me a bigot and a moron and implicitly, a racist. You have also called me intolerant, which I confess to: I am intolerant of idiocy, especially in the area of political correctness, and ESPECIALLY, like in this case, where it affects national security.
Your inferences are crap. You assume I want to flag each arab immediately. Wrong. All I said was that ethnicity should be a factor. Factor - as in part of the equation that determines risk.
Furthermore, I would strongly contend that even if I proposed that all young male arabs should be given special attention, that would not be bigotry.
Bigotry: One who is strongly partial to one's own group, religion, race, or politics and is intolerant of those who differ.
Now, we are talking about race in this context (I would arge that intolerance of different politics, if used as a definition, would apply to LOTS of people, including, clearly yourself).
What I am talking about it security measures, not relative merits of one race or ethnic group or another. And that isn't bigotry unless it is driven by bigotted views. It is not bigoted to be more cautious of a young arab than a old black lady when we are talking about security.
Clearly you do not understand the difference between bigotry, which involves intolerance, and discrimination on the basis of risk, which need have no basis at all in intolerance.
Now I notice you have read my blog. I am sorry you were unable to understand it. You must see everything in terms like "bigotry." You strongly imply above that I am a racist, but you don't know me and you know nothing about my attitude about people of difference races. Nor do you know anything about my family (which includes members of a different race) or my friends (of all "races"). In other words, you are doing what the offended left always does - call someone a racist because you don't like their views, and stereotyping me based on my views.
Since you find my views so racist, I invite you to debate them on my blog which is a better forum than slashdot for such things. My blog is designed to, among other things, offend idiotarians. I can tell from your post that it succeeded.
Also, one would expect tight power control and very wide band spread spectrum. The latter can drop signal strength by up to 40 dB.
I would be surprised if directional antennas would be very effective, though. Also, if the soldiers are moving around, they are going to have to be transmitting a fair amount of routing information as different individuals wander in and out of range.
Oh goodie. So now our enemy can detect our soldiers with just a simple radio receiver. Marvelous!
But because of not taking ethnicity (and other factors that the new system will use), the system had too high a false positive rate. This causes people to lose confidence in it and ignore it, as was done in this case.
Of course, today people are much more aware. As a result, the new system, which should have a lower false alarm rate (once it gets tuned) should inspire more confidence and not have its results ignored.
Actually, with more data per person the noise goes down. It allows it to take more factors into account, reducing false positives and false negatives.
Furthermore, the more data it uses, the harder it is to "spoof" by terrorists, who otherwise will try to spot vulnerabilities in the system. This is especially true if the algorithms are kept secret.
Oh, so you are saying that I advocate stupid screening.
Who says that ethnicity is the *only* criteria? You do, not me.
And US citizens do NOT have a right to non-discrimination - they have a right to not have unreasonable discrimination. Otherwise, it would be unconstitutional for a police BOLO to include race and gender, but it is not! Equal treatment under the law doesn't mean that cops cannot discriminate - otherwise after a robbery they would have to stop every car or no car. After all, it doesn't say *anything* about race or gender in the constitution.
If the definition of bigotry is intolerance, then I must be a bigot because I am intolerant of neo-Nazi's and KKK members. By that definition, I'll bet that you are a bigot too!
Furthermore, I am NOT assuming that every Arab is a high risk for terrorism or that most Arabs are terrorist. Your understanding of statistics seems a bit off. But young male Arabs as a group represent a much larger risk for terrorism than young male Mexicans, for example. To ignore that is criminal negligence.
I did my research - you obviously didn't. The CAPP system was specifically forbidden to consider ethnicity. If it had, it might have caught them. Since it couldn't, it was left only with other criteria, such as luggage, etc.
I don't claim that CAPP *would* have caught them if it considered ethnicity, but it might very well have done so.
As far as bigotry... is it bigotry to note that young Arabs are the highest threat for terrorism?
Bigotry is when you stereotype an entire group - for example, call all Arabs terrorists. When you recognize that the statistical risk of one group is significantly greater than another, taking that into account isn't bigotry, it's prudence.
You're right... that would be stupid reasoning... just like it was stupid of you to take my reasoning and recast it in that form. If you don't understand the concept of relative risk, perhaps you should avoid posting about such subjects.
They passed CAPPS I because the Clinton Administration had *insisted* that ethnicity (racial profiling) not be included in CAPPS.
Thus we had a system designed to prevent airplane hijacking that was forced to ignore the single most effective predictor: if the person is an Arab.
Without that political correctness (and a number of other stupid things done to the anti-terror apparatus and intelligence apparatus by the Carter and Clinton administration), it is highly likely that the terrorism would have been prevented with the original apprehension of Moussari (or however it's spelled).
Tell that to the environmentalists. Many, many people have had their property suddenly rendered effectively useless (with huge drops in value) by post-facto environmental laws, which is the equivalent of taking it for public use. Very few have been paid for it, because the Supreme Court has held applied a very high threshold to "taking."
This is the equivalent of the government taking your software and paying you 20% of the value, just because they can get away with it.
Of course, we rarely hear the "civil libertarians" complain about environmental takings, because of the marxist belief that private property is bad.
And a bunch of people who file income tax returns do so to get the earned income tax credit - which is a welfare payment, not a tax.
When 50% of the population pays no income tax, income tax cuts of course benefit the "rich" more.
Personally, I would prefer that those who pay no income taxes have no vote. Then this sort of class warfare envy-driven drivel would be meaningless.
And the Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft line is all about maintaining big business' (particularly oil) stranglehold on power.
Why does the above trite and incorrect statement get modded up every time it appears on slashdot?
I've put together an animated GIF from radar archives showing the initial appearance of the Columbia radar track and the subsequent growth and drift of it,
Go to my blog and scroll down to the "Shuttle Disaster on Radar" item and click the link at the end of the article (labeled "radar image loop").
Does anyone know what happened to Steve?
I worked with him many years ago on the DEC-10 and haven't heard from him in 25 years. He taught me the fundamentals of data communications, among other things.
Steve was one of the original MIT hackers, who started with train hacking, moved on to phone hacking and on into computers.
Spacewar was a lot of fun, by the way. Lunar lander was played on the same box.
torpedoes do not home on noise
Although it has been a long time since I was in the Navy dropping torpedoes from a P-3 Orion, at that time the torpedoes were quite capable of passive accoustic guidance. This is still true, as a quick google search will show. Active sonar is used only when a target has been acquired.