Given the extraordinary advances in unmanned aircraft we've seen in the past twenty years, it seems safe to say that the F-22 and F-35 will represent the last generation of manned fighter aircraft. The purpose of the pilot is to control the flight of the aircraft, navigate the aircraft, and target the enemy. Now that all of those things can be done remotely, or done by an onboard computer, there's less and less reason to even have a pilot onboard.
There are already UCAVs- unmanned combat air vehicles- being tested, including the Boeing X-45 and Grumman X-47. Neither is capable of matching the performance of an F-22; these are subsonic aircraft with lower ceilings. But there's no reason that you couldn't build a UCAV with the performance of the F-22; in fact it would have better performance- higher speed, longer range, lower observability- since you could build it without needing to worry about the weight added by the pilot and cockpit, and without worrying about the stealth characteristics of the cockpit.
At any rate, the F-22 program is no longer an issue- production stopped at 187. The idea was that the F-35 would take its place. The problem is that the development of the F-35 has been a nightmare of delays and cost overruns. It turns out that making one fighter to fill the conflicting demands of the Navy, Air Force, and Marines is a lot tougher than it sounds. Right now the program is estimated to run a total of 1 trillion dollars.
I'm all for maintaining air superiority, but I think that spending a trillion dollars on F-35s is insane when our enemies, for the foreseeable future, are goat herders with IEDs and AK-47s. It would make more sense to cut back the F-35 program drastically and continue to use F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s until we can build stealthy, supersonic drones to take their place.
Let me preface this by saying that I like Google. Google is my homepage, I use Google and Gmail on a daily basis, and I literally don't know how I could do my job without Google and Google Scholar. I liked the fact that they took a stand on the China issue, and I like the "do no evil" ethos.
But there have been a lot- and I mean a lot- of recent reports about Google failing to live up to the whole "do no evil" thing. To sum up some recent stories about Google: Google paid $500 million to the government for aiding illegal sales of online pharmaceuticals, Google has come under fire for capturing information from people's Wifi networks using Street View, Google has intentionally worked around Safari privacy settings, Google deliberately turned a blind eye to copyright violations on Youtube because they wanted to build the site's popularity...
I think Sergei Brin needs to stop bitching about how Apple and Facebook are threats to our online freedom, and take a long hard look at his own damn company. Lately, their philosophy seems a lot less like "Google should do no evil" than "Google can do no evil". One or two stories I would be willing to write off as honest mistakes, but there's a clear pattern here. The common theme to all of these stories about Google is an attitude of arrogance, a lack of accountability, and the idea that they can just ignore the rules everyone else has to play by. There's an element of trust involved in allowing a company to host your email and your documents, and to see what you're searching for online. If they go too far and people lose faith in the company, then they're going to suffer for it.
This place has always attracted the conspiracy-minded. I think that there are more high-IQ people here than average, and high-IQ people like to find patterns. There is also a high correlation between paranoid schizophrenia and IQ. Conspiracy theories are really just grand pattern-finding exercises.
So you're saying that this forum naturally attracts conspiracy theorists and gives them a place to vent their conspiracies. That would be awfully convenient if there was an organization working in the shadows that needed to monitor people's communications to make sure that none of the conspiracy theorists had accidentally stumbled onto the truth. All they'd have to do is monitor this forum and then disappear anybody who got too close. Awfully convenient indeed....
Perfectly hypothetical, of course. Anyway, I'd write more but I have to go, it's 2:00 AM and for some reason somebody is banging on my door and I better see who it is.
I was gonna make a smartass comment and say he'd probably like comics with talking animals, so try Art Spiegelmans' 'Maus' (mice and cats... the mice are Jews and the cat are Nazis in Third Reich Germany. It is a good read, but it's more for a high school aged kid). Then I remembered- there was whole series of Donald Duck comics written and drawn by Carl Barks that I really liked as a kid (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Huey, Dewey and Louie, and the Beagle Boys). They're well drawn, they're smartly written, the stories are good, and they're kid appropriate..
There are a number of glaring problems with the idea of using an airborne laser for defense against ballistic missiles. One of them is the whole "airborne" part. Providing continuous coverage against North Korea's missiles would require keeping a plane in the air continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year... that's not impossible but it would be logistically challenging and very expensive to fly multiple sorties per day. The other issue is the limited range of the system. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, thin-skinned liquid-fueled ICBMS might be vulnerable from 600 km away but you would need to be within 300 km to be assured of taking out a solid-fueled ICBM. That means you would probably need several aircraft in the air at the same time to cover North Korea completely, and you wouldn't be able to take out a solid-fueled ICBM fired from central Iran, unless you actually entered Iranian airspace. Overall the airborne laser seems thoroughly useless as a defence against ICBMS.
I suspect the main reason this design didn't catch on is that there's no clear military role for a ship like the Sea Shadow that another vessel couldn't already do better. The unconventional design of the hull limits the ship in a lot of ways, the most obvious is that you can't put guns on it. You can't put a radar on it either, or rather, you could, but it would undo all your efforts to make the ship invisible as soon as you turned it on. So the ship can't be used in a defensive role against ships and aircraft like a destroyer.
Basically the only places where a stealth ship makes sense are missions where the need for stealth outweighs other considerations. Stealth is useful in an attack role, or for electronic eavesdropping, or perhaps for infiltrating a small group of special operations forces close to shore. However, the ship still has long way to go in terms of stealth. The main issue is that you can see the thing- a 100 foot long ship is going to be visible to patrol aircraft and other ships from a long way off, and it will also be visible to satellites. At night it would probably be fairly easy to pick up using thermal imaging, unless you found a way to heat or cool the skin of the boat to the same temperature as the surrounding ocean.
But there's a simple way to make you invisible to radar and to avoid visual detection at the same time: put the boat underwater. And I suspect that is the real reason nothing like the Sea Shadow was ever built. We've been able to achieve total invisibility to radar and visual detection for close to a century using subs, it's hard to imagine what advantage the Sea Shadow would have over something like a Seawolf attack sub.
Look there- that one is petitioning his local school board to keep intelligent design out of the curriculum! Isn't that adorable? Let's simulate some lightning bolts and a flood and see what he does.
autism, hemophilia, etc... things like this used to be very rare because people with these genes tended to not pass them down (due to lower survival rate, or in autism's case due to social stigma attached to mating with one).
Left to nature, contra-survival traits like these weed themselves out in any population, not just human. But nowadays they're being kept alive and allowed to breed wantonly, which might be admirable from a moral standpoint... but it's not doing the human gene pool any favors.
Yeah, and as you demonstrate so well, being a complete fucking douche with no redeeming qualities as a human being is not being bred out of the population either.
You could probably improve on the B-52 in a number of ways. Using a tailless design like the B-2 would give you better aerodynamics. Using composites would give you a lighter airframe. Both of those would allow you to increase your range, or to carry a larger payload for a given distance. A more efficient airframe would also allow you to cruise at higher speeds. A tailless design would also have lower observability.
The question is whether these improvements would really be worth designing and building a new aircraft that would probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars. If what you primarily need is an aircraft that can fire cruise missiles from 1500 miles away, or drop thousands of pounds of bombs once you've established air superiority, we have that already. We have a low-observability bomber in the B-2. Another issue is that for the foreseeable future, the kinds of engagements the U.S. is likely to find itself in are messy campaigns like Afganistan, Iraq, and Libya- small wars against adversaries that are technologically inferior. When you're fighting goatherds armed with AK-47s and IEDs, the value of an improved strategic bomber is kinda questionable.
To solve a problem, you need to do three things: (1) come up with a solution, and (2) implement it. But we sometimes forget that there's another step there. This could be step (0), identifying which problem to solve in the first place.
It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Getting the answer is actually fairly trivial, but figuring out the right question to be asking in the first place is really hard.
Jobs and Apple became very, very good at solving the problems of product design and interface, and actually building the things. But one of the things that really set Jobs apart as a CEO was his remarkable ability to understand which problems to solve. I remember watching the Apple keynote talk where he introduced the iPhone, and thinking, "yeah, whatever. A phone where I touch the screen instead of physical buttons? I like tactile feedback. This is just a gimmick" He'd managed to solve this problem and build the device, and it never occurred to me that it would be something that would appeal to anybody other than the fanatics who need the newest, shiniest, slimmest offering from Apple. Microsoft had been playing with touch technology for years but never thought to put it in a portable device. It took years for RIM to recognize that the iPhone posed a threat to Blackberry. It wasn't obvious to anybody that something like the iPhone was what people wanted- not to consumers, and not to the highly paid CEOs who are paid millions of dollars because, supposedly, they are able to understand this kind of thing. Even after he'd built it and told everyone it would change everything, it wasn't obvious. Jobs knew otherwise, and he understood it enough to make developing the iPhone and iOS Apple's top priority over Mac and OS X.
This is just a desperate, insecure attempt by Myrvold to convince us that he's some kind of technology innovator. But if he had the idea for an iPhone like product back in 1991, before Apple did, then why the hell didn't he build an iPhone once the technology to do so became available? Instead, what Myrvold did do once he got rich as CTO of Microsoft is to create Intellectual Ventures, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue by buying up patents and then shaking down other companies. In other words, he's a patent troll. He's trying to say, 'oh yeah, I could have done that. I'm innovative'. No you couldn't, and no you're not. All you are is just a patent troll, a parasite on the real innovators, and a total douche for trying to pretend otherwise.
The issue is that we have vast amounts of intelligence out there that can let us spot threats, but it doesn't end up where it needs to go. In the lead up to 9/11, intelligence analysts were writing reports with titles like "bin Laden Determined to Strike in US"; if they had also known that there were middle eastern men taking lessons in flying planes (but not interested in landing them) then perhaps 9/11 and two wars could have been averted. Attempted airplane bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was reported by his own family as being radicalized, they were worried about him and what he might do. His plot didn't work, but if those reports had made it to the right people, he never would have gotten on that plane in the first place. Likewise, Mohamed Merah, the French man who killed three French soldiers and three Jewish schoolchildren, was detained in Afghanistan by NATO forces. If that information had been in the right hands, perhaps they would have caught him sooner.
It's ultimately a social networking problem. People are connected to other people by links, often surprisingly few. There's the classic 'six degrees of separation', but these days, with social media, internet, and cell phones, the number of links has to be even fewer. But the information doesn't get where it needs to go. So how do we exploit a combination of internet and social networks to ensure that the right information gets passed to the right people, at the right time? The obvious application would be to intelligence organizations and government bureaucracies, allowing them to accurately assess threats and make the right decisions.
I'm against the war on drugs, but I don't think that we should underestimate the risks posed by recreational drug use. I think the issue is how much you use. I have a friend from high school who used to smoke up occasionally. These days she's a mother with two kids and teaches the gifted program at the local high school, and she seems like a productive, successful, happy member of society. Of course, kids aren't stupid and when they see that people like that exist, they realize that the anti-drug propaganda is wildly exaggerating the risks of drugs. But there are real risks.
Because I've also had friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who were long-term, heavy users of pot and the word that comes to mind is 'fried'. Emotionally, they come across as disengaged from others; they're not quite able to relate or sympathize to other people, they're sort of off in space. They're difficult to talk to- sure, you can converse with them, but it's hard to really connect with them as human beings. It just seems like they're not all there anymore. In terms of their thought processes, they can be highly creative and they often make lots of unusual associations. However, they seem unable to concentrate, to make plans, or follow through, so they're not very good at actually accomplishing anything. They're just sort of losers. I know one who is a prof at a big-name university, and he has lots of great ideas, but he ignores his students, he can't teach worth a damn, and he rarely publishes anything anymore. Again, I'm the last person to advocate for the "War on Drugs" but I think part of the idea that pot should be treated more like alcohol is recognizing that, like alcohol it has the real potential for abuse, and something that might be harmless or even good for you in moderation can be destructive when used to excess.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that drugs can cause long-term changes to your brain structure. This isn't anti-drug paranoia, this is mainstream psychiatric research. Psychiatrists have long noticed that certain drugs took weeks or even months to take effect. Antidepressants, for instance, typically take 4-8 weeks before they start having any effect, and may take months to reach full effectiveness. What they eventually figured out is that one of the factors involved in depression is the death of brain cells, and the therapeutic effect of the drugs comes in part by promoting the growth of new brain cells and the development of new connections between brain cells, which takes weeks to occur. The flip side of this is that some of these changes can be for the worse, at least in some people. There's a school of thought that argues that antidepressants can cause bipolar people to have more frequent and more severe mood swings, and that the changes can cause a long-term, maybe permanent, turn for the worse in the course of the disorder. As a result, psychiatrists are increasingly hesitant to prescribe them to bipolar people.
That's what's at stake here. Drugs- legal, illegal, prescription- can cause long-term changes to your brain structure. Don't do drugs, M'kay? Well, not really. What I would argue is that you should do a little research and think carefully about the risks before you take any drug, whether you're getting it at the liquor store, from a dealer on the corner, or a psychiatrist.
The other issue is that you're not a whistleblower unless the information you reveal actually provides evidence of wrongdoing. Leaking the pictures of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, for instance, is clearly whistleblowing and should be protected. But when Manning released gun camera footage of an Apache helicopter gunship slaughtering Iraqi reporters, is that whistleblowing? If you watch that movie the whole way through, it's clear that the reporters were embedded with insurgents (an RPG is clearly visible on one of the men, which is not something a civilian would carry around) and it's a horrific case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time in an active battlefield. Maybe at some level releasing that stuff is good for the public, to give us an idea of the awful costs of war- the reporters and civilians killed, and the helicopter pilots who have to live for the rest of their lives knowing they did that- but it's not evidence of illegal or unethical activity. Much of the remaining stuff released by manning, for example the idea that some diplomats think that Medvedev is "Robin to Putin's Batman" is an interesting insight into the workings of our government, but not really necessary for us to evaluate our government. So how is that whistleblowing?
I'm all in favor of whistleblowing, the issue I have is that releasing people's private communications, regardless of whether they reveal unethical behaviour or not, isn't really whistleblowing.
Sabu's real name is Hector Xavier Monsegur. He's an unemployed father caring for two children, so you can see the position the FBI had him in. Work with us and help us take down Lulzsec, and we'll make this easy. You'll get away with a minimum of jail time, you'll get to go back to your kids, and maybe we can help find you a job working on the other side in computer security. Fight us, and we can send you away for a long time, you'll lose custody of your kids, and then what happens to them? It's not clear where the mother is in all of this; she's described as his girlfriend but they weren't living together. At the risk of speculating, I'd say it raises some huge red flags when a mother either doesn't want her kids to live with her, or it's somehow better to have an unemployed hacker raise the kids. Maybe having the mother raise the kids instead of him wasn't an option, then.
That was basically the situation they had him in. Betray your fellow hackers, or lose your kids. It's a cruel choice, but ultimately he's the one responsible for making the kids a pawn in this game. Nobody forced him to break the law in the first place. The FBI agents, on the other hand, have to enforce the law of the land. They don't have the option of saying, "yeah he broke the law and hacked some websites, but he's got kids so we'll let him off with a stern warning". Once they had evidence that he'd broken the law, they have to pursue a case even if the kids become casualties. Offering Monsegur this way out is just about the only act of mercy they are allowed. He made a poor choice as a parent when he chose to engage in illegal activities while acting as the caretaker for two children. That's not to say that he shouldn't have been an online activist, but he could have found a way to do so in a responsible fashion that didn't pose the risk of the kids losing their father.
Canticle is fucking amazing. It's been said that the Golden Age of science fiction is 14, and I found that to be true in a lot of ways. Some of the books I'd loved as a freshman in high school I find unreadable today; the writing seems poor, and the characterization weak. Canticle was the opposite- I never really appreciated it when I went through my high school phase, but after college I gave it a read and it seemed rich and nuanced. I know "nuanced" probably sounds odd in a book about post-apocalyptic wastelands, two-headed mutants, and spacefaring monks, but it is.
So what are the applications? Boston Dynamic's Big Dog robot is able to move over uneven terrain and carry a large load, but it's fairly slow, so it's limited to a sort of robotic pack mule role. The emphasis on speed here means this new robot is intended for some other kind of role. I can see three potential roles for this thing in combat.
The first is as a scout- basically, the robot can walk point, look for potential ambushes or IEDs, run behind and see if anyone is following, or run up to the top of a hill to look around. A human could do the exact same thing, of course, but these are dangerous roles, and the robot is expendable.
The second role is to act as a highly mobile fire team. Assuming you built a larger version of this thing, about the size of a person, you could arm it with a light machine gun. If a unit comes under attack, the robot could then rapidly move to take another position and shoot back at the enemy or provide covering fire. Again, this role could also be performed by a person, but it's less dangerous to have the robot open fire while you're pinned down than to stand up and risk getting shot.
The third role is the one that immediately leaps to mind when you see this thing run, and that's a hunter-killer. This is the first robot that can actually chase down a person. A robotic vehicle might be faster, but it can't move over uneven terrain. Big Dog can move over uneven terrain, but it's not fast enough. You can hide from a flying drone. This thing could chase down and kill people. Stick a gun on it, or perhaps a Hellfire missile, and you'd have the terrestrial equivalent of a Predator drone.
That's not an accurate summary of these reports. There's a not-so-subtle difference between "Iran has decided not to build a bomb" and "Iran has not decided to build a bomb". Just like there's a world of difference whether Obama says "The United States has decided not to bomb Iran" and "The United States has not decided to bomb Iran". One means "I won't" and the other means "I'm not ruling it out" and it's wishful thinking to pretend that one means the other.
The Iranians may not have made the decision to go nuclear, but they are clearly taking all of the necessary steps required to go nuclear if they so choose. They're enriching uranium in underground facilities that can be defended against air attacks, and the IAEA has reported that there is evidence they are working on the technology needed to make the core, explosives, and triggers for an implosion-style nuclear device and place it on a ballistic missile. They're developing the ballistic missile technology that is needed to deliver a nuclear bomb. Maybe they aren't 100% sure that they want a bomb, but at a bare minimum, they want the option to go nuclear to be readily available.
You could summarize the American position similarly. America may not have decided to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, but they're positioning themselves to do so if they so choose. What was that stealth surveillance drone doing in Iranian airspace? One possible explanation is that it was doing the reconnaissance that is necessary to plan for an attack on Iran. The U.S. is also working to upgrade it's 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs that can take out Iran's buried nuclear facilities. America may not have decided to bomb Iran, but they clearly want the option.
It raises the question, why go to all that trouble of building a secret uranium enrichment plant under a mountain, unless you're sure you want the bomb? The answer could be that the Iranians have been hedging their bets. Obama's foreign policy- which is more restrained in terms of military force and emphasizes multilateralism, compared to the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes and regime change- makes it unlikely that the U.S. will attempt to take out the Iranian regime anytime soon. But it's hard to see how things might play out. What if there was an uprising in Iran by the people- would the U.S. step in? What if 4 or 8 years from now, a conservative is elected who believes in the Bush Doctrine and decides that he wants to depose the government of Iran?
I think everyone agrees that the invasion of Iraq was a disaster. But the case in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq was very, very different. Back then, the U.N. weapons inspectors were not finding evidence for WMD programs and only the American intelligence agencies were saying (after strong pressure from the White House to find evidence justifying an attack) that there was evidence for WMD.
This time around, everyone seems to be in agreement that Iran is pursuing the capability to build a nuclear bomb. The Israelis have one of the best intelligence services in the world, and they seem to find the evidence of an Iranian nuclear program compelling enough that they've been assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. The Saudis are convinced that Iran is after the bomb; according to one of the cables released by Wikileaks, Saudi King Abdullah "frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme," and the Saudi ambassador said that the king wanted the Americans to "cut the head off the snake". A Jordanian politician said that the U.S. should "bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb".
We should not enter into the decision to take military action lightly. Military action against Iran creates all sorts of risks- it risks killing American military personnel and Iranian civilians. Iran would almost certainly try to strike back against the United States, perhaps using conventional military forces, perhaps not. Military action could also lead to a wider war, and the last thing we need after getting our military out of the Middle East is to send them right back in. It risks a shutdown of the Straits of Hormuz, which would choke the supply of oil and lead to a dramatic spike in oil prices and cripple the economy. Given all that, it seems like the easiest decision is to let the Iranians have the damn bomb.
But here's the deal. Once Iran goes nuclear, the Arab world is going to feel threatened by Iran. The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians... none of them are going to be happy just sitting there, knowing that at a moments notice Iran could launch a nuclear missile at them. They're going to want nuclear weapons too. Some of those countries are either going to build their own nuclear weapons, or allow nuclear weapons on their soil. And you'll have an arms race the likes of which we haven't seen since the start of the Cold War, in one of the most volatile regions in the world. That's what's at stake here. The threat is that letting the Iranians get the bomb will result in the entire Middle East going nuclear.
Iran's nuclear facilities are not earthquake-proof. They are bomb-proof. The Natanz uranium enrichment site was built 20 feet underground, and then the top was reinforced with concrete and sixty feet of earth. Iran also started a second, secret uranium enrichment site at Fordow. Fordow is under 200-300 feet of mountain, and is reported to include blast-proof doors, hardened ceilings, thick walls, and double ceilings with earth between the concrete. Fordow has been built so deep and is so reinforced that it may be invulnerable to anything short of a nuclear strike. The largest bunker-buster bomb in the U.S. arsenal, the MOB (Massive Ordinance Penetrator) is a 30,000 lb bomb that is designed to penetrate 200 feet. Fordow is near the limit of what the MOB can do.
Anyway, those are the facts. The U.S. didn't put NORAD under Cheyenne Mountain, inside 2,000 feet of granite, because they were worried about earthquakes. They did that because they were worried about getting hit by a nuclear bomb. Similarly the design of the Fordow site indicates that the Iranians are worried about airstrikes. In particular, the design of the Fordow site seems specifically aimed at hardening the target against a U.S. airstrike using advanced bunker-busters.
So the question is, why would Iran do this for a peaceful nuclear program? If Iran's real aim is nuclear power, it would be a lot easier to just do everything out in the open, and let the U.N. weapons inspectors have free reign and allay everybody's fears. On the other hand, if you want the capability to build a nuclear bomb, and don't want the Israelis or the U.S. to stop you, then you do precisely what the Iranians are currently doing: build multiple enrichment facilities (so they can't be taken out by a single airstrike), build them deep underground, and harden them with advanced concrete and blast doors. Watching Ahmadinejad you could be forgiven for thinking that the Iranian government is run by irrational idiots, but this is really a very clever, well-thought-out approach to developing a nuclear bomb.
And the thing is, developing a nuclear bomb is not an irrational move here. Saddam Hussein's mistake wasn't pursuing WMD, it was that he didn't go far enough. If he'd had the ability to inflict mass civilian casualties with WMD, nobody would have bothered him. North Korea has two deterrent weapons- a nuclear bomb, and heavy artillery and missiles that can hit Seoul, causing large scale civilian casualties. There's a reason that Bush never screwed with Kim Jong Il. This isn't lost on the mullahs who run Iran. They realize that without any allies, they are vulnerable to regime change. But with a nuclear bomb, they will have a deterrent weapon.
As far as the Iranians not threatening anybody... well, generally speaking, if you're building a peaceful nuclear facility to provide electricity to a civilian population, you don't build the thing deep underground. The only time you build underground is when you have something that's of vital strategic importance. For instance, during the cold war, North American air defense (NORAD) was worried that the Soviets might try to take them out with a nuclear first strike, so they build their headquarters 2,000 feet inside the granite heart of Cheyenne Mountain.
Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant was built 20 feet underground; they later reinforced it with concrete and put another 60 feet of dirt on top. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime secretly developed a second nuclear facility a second locality, the Fordow plant. Fordow is built under 200-300 feet of mountain, and according to the Washington Post, "Western analysts think Fordow has not only the protection afforded by natural rock but also additional hardening that draws on North Korean bunker-building expertise. A report last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said the facility was thought to include multiple 'blast-proof doors, extensive divider walls, hardened ceilings, 20-centimeter-thick concrete walls, and double concrete ceilings with earth filled between layers.'" That is not a civilian plant. That is the underground lair of a James Bond super villain.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency has found evidence that Iran is pursuing work on a bomb. That includes research into turning uranium into the core for a nuclear weapon, the explosives, detonators, and firing devices needed for an implosion weapon, and modifications to put the bombs on a ballistic missile.
So as far as Iran being a threat... well, no, Iran isn't a threat. Not unless you think the idea of a radical theocracy armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs is a potential threat. Apparently the Arabs do. If you'll recall the diplomatic memos released by Wikileaks, the Saudis were constantly trying to persuade the U.S. to bomb Iran.
Bullshit. You people really need to read up on world events. Iran has recently been providing arms to Assad so that he can slaughter his own people, and their intelligence service has been providing support for the Assad regime in their campaign against the uprising. And remember when the insurgency in Iraq started playing with EFPs- Explosively Formed Penetrators? These are devices that use a shaped explosive charge to fire a slug of metal through the armor of a vehicle and rip apart the people inside. They were killing U.S. soldiers, and they were coming from Iran. The Iranians also helped trained Hezbollah and have also provided them with tens of millions of dollars in funding per year. If you'll recall, it was Hezbollah attacks on Israeli military forces that directly led to the 2006 war in Lebanon. Iran may not have launched any invasions, but the Iranian government has been behind plenty of violence in the Middle East, mostly by providing support for the people doing the killing. Letting them get ahold of a nuclear bomb is asking for more of the same. I'm not saying that it's a good idea to get in another war, and I don't have anything against the Iranian people, but the idea that Iran's regime is harmless and peaceful is just ridiculously naive.
According to the CV on the Princeton website, Andrew Wiles published 24 papers from 1977 to 2008, which averages out to less than a paper a year. So it clearly is possible to be a highly respected, important, and influential academic while publishing relatively few papers, and obviously quantity of papers isn't the best way to measure things.
That being said, there seems to be this attitude that it's somehow inappropriate to even try to quantify academic output. But if you're a mathematician, why on earth would you be against quantifying things? Mathematicians even came up with a metric, the Erdos number, which quantifies how many publications it takes to tie you to legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, as a way of sticking a number on where you fit in the network of mathematicians. And if you're a scientist, you quantify your results and run statistical tests. Why is it expected to use numbers to describe fruit flies, dinosaur bones, or the red shift of distant galaxies... but god forbid, the university actually tries to stick a number on what you do?
The number of articles probably isn't the best metric. One article in a journal like Nature, Science, PLOS Biology, or the New England Journal of Medicine is usually worth a half dozen articles in a specialist journal. A metric like impact factor (average number of citations per article in that journal) helps take that into account. Eigenfactor takes it a step further by weighting the citations- citations coming from Nature or Science count more than citations from the Journal of Fish Biology or whatever. H-factor offers a way of ranking individual scientists- if you have one paper cited once you have an H-factor of one, two papers cited at least twice gives you an H-factor of 2, three papers cited three times gives you an H-factor of 3, etc. Admittedly it's field-specific. The sheer volume of papers in certain fields inevitably means those papers are cited more.
I think the University of Sydney is taking a simplistic approach to the problem, but I sympathize with their aims. You see really creative, productive researchers who are having trouble landing tenure-track jobs in this job market, while some tenured faculty sit back and coast. We need a way to get rid of people who aren't performing and replace them with people who will perform. And it's incredibly hypocritical of academics to say that you can't measure their success: academia measures applicants for college, grad school, med school and law school using test scores and grades. Why is it OK to examine student performance with grades and scores, but inappropriate to grade the teachers themselves? Why not figure out a way to keep the excellent academics and get rid of the bad ones, just like we weed out students? Yes, academic excellence is inherently hard to quantify, but academics are generally pretty creative when it comes to quantifying things that are hard to quantify... the idea that suddenly "oh, it's just too hard to measure!" strikes me as remarkably self-serving.
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There are already UCAVs- unmanned combat air vehicles- being tested, including the Boeing X-45 and Grumman X-47. Neither is capable of matching the performance of an F-22; these are subsonic aircraft with lower ceilings. But there's no reason that you couldn't build a UCAV with the performance of the F-22; in fact it would have better performance- higher speed, longer range, lower observability- since you could build it without needing to worry about the weight added by the pilot and cockpit, and without worrying about the stealth characteristics of the cockpit.
At any rate, the F-22 program is no longer an issue- production stopped at 187. The idea was that the F-35 would take its place. The problem is that the development of the F-35 has been a nightmare of delays and cost overruns. It turns out that making one fighter to fill the conflicting demands of the Navy, Air Force, and Marines is a lot tougher than it sounds. Right now the program is estimated to run a total of 1 trillion dollars.
I'm all for maintaining air superiority, but I think that spending a trillion dollars on F-35s is insane when our enemies, for the foreseeable future, are goat herders with IEDs and AK-47s. It would make more sense to cut back the F-35 program drastically and continue to use F-15s, F-16s, and F-18s until we can build stealthy, supersonic drones to take their place.
But there have been a lot- and I mean a lot- of recent reports about Google failing to live up to the whole "do no evil" thing. To sum up some recent stories about Google: Google paid $500 million to the government for aiding illegal sales of online pharmaceuticals, Google has come under fire for capturing information from people's Wifi networks using Street View, Google has intentionally worked around Safari privacy settings, Google deliberately turned a blind eye to copyright violations on Youtube because they wanted to build the site's popularity...
I think Sergei Brin needs to stop bitching about how Apple and Facebook are threats to our online freedom, and take a long hard look at his own damn company. Lately, their philosophy seems a lot less like "Google should do no evil" than "Google can do no evil". One or two stories I would be willing to write off as honest mistakes, but there's a clear pattern here. The common theme to all of these stories about Google is an attitude of arrogance, a lack of accountability, and the idea that they can just ignore the rules everyone else has to play by. There's an element of trust involved in allowing a company to host your email and your documents, and to see what you're searching for online. If they go too far and people lose faith in the company, then they're going to suffer for it.
This place has always attracted the conspiracy-minded. I think that there are more high-IQ people here than average, and high-IQ people like to find patterns. There is also a high correlation between paranoid schizophrenia and IQ. Conspiracy theories are really just grand pattern-finding exercises.
So you're saying that this forum naturally attracts conspiracy theorists and gives them a place to vent their conspiracies. That would be awfully convenient if there was an organization working in the shadows that needed to monitor people's communications to make sure that none of the conspiracy theorists had accidentally stumbled onto the truth. All they'd have to do is monitor this forum and then disappear anybody who got too close. Awfully convenient indeed....
Perfectly hypothetical, of course. Anyway, I'd write more but I have to go, it's 2:00 AM and for some reason somebody is banging on my door and I better see who it is.
I was gonna make a smartass comment and say he'd probably like comics with talking animals, so try Art Spiegelmans' 'Maus' (mice and cats... the mice are Jews and the cat are Nazis in Third Reich Germany. It is a good read, but it's more for a high school aged kid). Then I remembered- there was whole series of Donald Duck comics written and drawn by Carl Barks that I really liked as a kid (Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, Huey, Dewey and Louie, and the Beagle Boys). They're well drawn, they're smartly written, the stories are good, and they're kid appropriate..
There are a number of glaring problems with the idea of using an airborne laser for defense against ballistic missiles. One of them is the whole "airborne" part. Providing continuous coverage against North Korea's missiles would require keeping a plane in the air continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year... that's not impossible but it would be logistically challenging and very expensive to fly multiple sorties per day. The other issue is the limited range of the system. According to the Wikipedia article on the subject, thin-skinned liquid-fueled ICBMS might be vulnerable from 600 km away but you would need to be within 300 km to be assured of taking out a solid-fueled ICBM. That means you would probably need several aircraft in the air at the same time to cover North Korea completely, and you wouldn't be able to take out a solid-fueled ICBM fired from central Iran, unless you actually entered Iranian airspace. Overall the airborne laser seems thoroughly useless as a defence against ICBMS.
Basically the only places where a stealth ship makes sense are missions where the need for stealth outweighs other considerations. Stealth is useful in an attack role, or for electronic eavesdropping, or perhaps for infiltrating a small group of special operations forces close to shore. However, the ship still has long way to go in terms of stealth. The main issue is that you can see the thing- a 100 foot long ship is going to be visible to patrol aircraft and other ships from a long way off, and it will also be visible to satellites. At night it would probably be fairly easy to pick up using thermal imaging, unless you found a way to heat or cool the skin of the boat to the same temperature as the surrounding ocean.
But there's a simple way to make you invisible to radar and to avoid visual detection at the same time: put the boat underwater. And I suspect that is the real reason nothing like the Sea Shadow was ever built. We've been able to achieve total invisibility to radar and visual detection for close to a century using subs, it's hard to imagine what advantage the Sea Shadow would have over something like a Seawolf attack sub.
Look there- that one is petitioning his local school board to keep intelligent design out of the curriculum! Isn't that adorable? Let's simulate some lightning bolts and a flood and see what he does.
According to the Hollywood rumor sites, XKCD is held up because Michael Bay can't decide who looks better in a hat, Brad Pitt or Ashton Kutcher.
autism, hemophilia, etc... things like this used to be very rare because people with these genes tended to not pass them down (due to lower survival rate, or in autism's case due to social stigma attached to mating with one).
Left to nature, contra-survival traits like these weed themselves out in any population, not just human. But nowadays they're being kept alive and allowed to breed wantonly, which might be admirable from a moral standpoint... but it's not doing the human gene pool any favors.
Yeah, and as you demonstrate so well, being a complete fucking douche with no redeeming qualities as a human being is not being bred out of the population either.
The question is whether these improvements would really be worth designing and building a new aircraft that would probably cost hundreds of millions of dollars. If what you primarily need is an aircraft that can fire cruise missiles from 1500 miles away, or drop thousands of pounds of bombs once you've established air superiority, we have that already. We have a low-observability bomber in the B-2. Another issue is that for the foreseeable future, the kinds of engagements the U.S. is likely to find itself in are messy campaigns like Afganistan, Iraq, and Libya- small wars against adversaries that are technologically inferior. When you're fighting goatherds armed with AK-47s and IEDs, the value of an improved strategic bomber is kinda questionable.
It's like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Getting the answer is actually fairly trivial, but figuring out the right question to be asking in the first place is really hard.
Jobs and Apple became very, very good at solving the problems of product design and interface, and actually building the things. But one of the things that really set Jobs apart as a CEO was his remarkable ability to understand which problems to solve. I remember watching the Apple keynote talk where he introduced the iPhone, and thinking, "yeah, whatever. A phone where I touch the screen instead of physical buttons? I like tactile feedback. This is just a gimmick" He'd managed to solve this problem and build the device, and it never occurred to me that it would be something that would appeal to anybody other than the fanatics who need the newest, shiniest, slimmest offering from Apple. Microsoft had been playing with touch technology for years but never thought to put it in a portable device. It took years for RIM to recognize that the iPhone posed a threat to Blackberry. It wasn't obvious to anybody that something like the iPhone was what people wanted- not to consumers, and not to the highly paid CEOs who are paid millions of dollars because, supposedly, they are able to understand this kind of thing. Even after he'd built it and told everyone it would change everything, it wasn't obvious. Jobs knew otherwise, and he understood it enough to make developing the iPhone and iOS Apple's top priority over Mac and OS X.
This is just a desperate, insecure attempt by Myrvold to convince us that he's some kind of technology innovator. But if he had the idea for an iPhone like product back in 1991, before Apple did, then why the hell didn't he build an iPhone once the technology to do so became available? Instead, what Myrvold did do once he got rich as CTO of Microsoft is to create Intellectual Ventures, a company that generates billions of dollars of revenue by buying up patents and then shaking down other companies. In other words, he's a patent troll. He's trying to say, 'oh yeah, I could have done that. I'm innovative'. No you couldn't, and no you're not. All you are is just a patent troll, a parasite on the real innovators, and a total douche for trying to pretend otherwise.
It's ultimately a social networking problem. People are connected to other people by links, often surprisingly few. There's the classic 'six degrees of separation', but these days, with social media, internet, and cell phones, the number of links has to be even fewer. But the information doesn't get where it needs to go. So how do we exploit a combination of internet and social networks to ensure that the right information gets passed to the right people, at the right time? The obvious application would be to intelligence organizations and government bureaucracies, allowing them to accurately assess threats and make the right decisions.
Because I've also had friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who were long-term, heavy users of pot and the word that comes to mind is 'fried'. Emotionally, they come across as disengaged from others; they're not quite able to relate or sympathize to other people, they're sort of off in space. They're difficult to talk to- sure, you can converse with them, but it's hard to really connect with them as human beings. It just seems like they're not all there anymore. In terms of their thought processes, they can be highly creative and they often make lots of unusual associations. However, they seem unable to concentrate, to make plans, or follow through, so they're not very good at actually accomplishing anything. They're just sort of losers. I know one who is a prof at a big-name university, and he has lots of great ideas, but he ignores his students, he can't teach worth a damn, and he rarely publishes anything anymore. Again, I'm the last person to advocate for the "War on Drugs" but I think part of the idea that pot should be treated more like alcohol is recognizing that, like alcohol it has the real potential for abuse, and something that might be harmless or even good for you in moderation can be destructive when used to excess.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that drugs can cause long-term changes to your brain structure. This isn't anti-drug paranoia, this is mainstream psychiatric research. Psychiatrists have long noticed that certain drugs took weeks or even months to take effect. Antidepressants, for instance, typically take 4-8 weeks before they start having any effect, and may take months to reach full effectiveness. What they eventually figured out is that one of the factors involved in depression is the death of brain cells, and the therapeutic effect of the drugs comes in part by promoting the growth of new brain cells and the development of new connections between brain cells, which takes weeks to occur. The flip side of this is that some of these changes can be for the worse, at least in some people. There's a school of thought that argues that antidepressants can cause bipolar people to have more frequent and more severe mood swings, and that the changes can cause a long-term, maybe permanent, turn for the worse in the course of the disorder. As a result, psychiatrists are increasingly hesitant to prescribe them to bipolar people.
That's what's at stake here. Drugs- legal, illegal, prescription- can cause long-term changes to your brain structure. Don't do drugs, M'kay? Well, not really. What I would argue is that you should do a little research and think carefully about the risks before you take any drug, whether you're getting it at the liquor store, from a dealer on the corner, or a psychiatrist.
I'm all in favor of whistleblowing, the issue I have is that releasing people's private communications, regardless of whether they reveal unethical behaviour or not, isn't really whistleblowing.
That was basically the situation they had him in. Betray your fellow hackers, or lose your kids. It's a cruel choice, but ultimately he's the one responsible for making the kids a pawn in this game. Nobody forced him to break the law in the first place. The FBI agents, on the other hand, have to enforce the law of the land. They don't have the option of saying, "yeah he broke the law and hacked some websites, but he's got kids so we'll let him off with a stern warning". Once they had evidence that he'd broken the law, they have to pursue a case even if the kids become casualties. Offering Monsegur this way out is just about the only act of mercy they are allowed. He made a poor choice as a parent when he chose to engage in illegal activities while acting as the caretaker for two children. That's not to say that he shouldn't have been an online activist, but he could have found a way to do so in a responsible fashion that didn't pose the risk of the kids losing their father.
Canticle is fucking amazing. It's been said that the Golden Age of science fiction is 14, and I found that to be true in a lot of ways. Some of the books I'd loved as a freshman in high school I find unreadable today; the writing seems poor, and the characterization weak. Canticle was the opposite- I never really appreciated it when I went through my high school phase, but after college I gave it a read and it seemed rich and nuanced. I know "nuanced" probably sounds odd in a book about post-apocalyptic wastelands, two-headed mutants, and spacefaring monks, but it is.
The first is as a scout- basically, the robot can walk point, look for potential ambushes or IEDs, run behind and see if anyone is following, or run up to the top of a hill to look around. A human could do the exact same thing, of course, but these are dangerous roles, and the robot is expendable.
The second role is to act as a highly mobile fire team. Assuming you built a larger version of this thing, about the size of a person, you could arm it with a light machine gun. If a unit comes under attack, the robot could then rapidly move to take another position and shoot back at the enemy or provide covering fire. Again, this role could also be performed by a person, but it's less dangerous to have the robot open fire while you're pinned down than to stand up and risk getting shot.
The third role is the one that immediately leaps to mind when you see this thing run, and that's a hunter-killer. This is the first robot that can actually chase down a person. A robotic vehicle might be faster, but it can't move over uneven terrain. Big Dog can move over uneven terrain, but it's not fast enough. You can hide from a flying drone. This thing could chase down and kill people. Stick a gun on it, or perhaps a Hellfire missile, and you'd have the terrestrial equivalent of a Predator drone.
The Iranians may not have made the decision to go nuclear, but they are clearly taking all of the necessary steps required to go nuclear if they so choose. They're enriching uranium in underground facilities that can be defended against air attacks, and the IAEA has reported that there is evidence they are working on the technology needed to make the core, explosives, and triggers for an implosion-style nuclear device and place it on a ballistic missile. They're developing the ballistic missile technology that is needed to deliver a nuclear bomb. Maybe they aren't 100% sure that they want a bomb, but at a bare minimum, they want the option to go nuclear to be readily available.
You could summarize the American position similarly. America may not have decided to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, but they're positioning themselves to do so if they so choose. What was that stealth surveillance drone doing in Iranian airspace? One possible explanation is that it was doing the reconnaissance that is necessary to plan for an attack on Iran. The U.S. is also working to upgrade it's 30,000-pound bunker-buster bombs that can take out Iran's buried nuclear facilities. America may not have decided to bomb Iran, but they clearly want the option.
It raises the question, why go to all that trouble of building a secret uranium enrichment plant under a mountain, unless you're sure you want the bomb? The answer could be that the Iranians have been hedging their bets. Obama's foreign policy- which is more restrained in terms of military force and emphasizes multilateralism, compared to the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes and regime change- makes it unlikely that the U.S. will attempt to take out the Iranian regime anytime soon. But it's hard to see how things might play out. What if there was an uprising in Iran by the people- would the U.S. step in? What if 4 or 8 years from now, a conservative is elected who believes in the Bush Doctrine and decides that he wants to depose the government of Iran?
This time around, everyone seems to be in agreement that Iran is pursuing the capability to build a nuclear bomb. The Israelis have one of the best intelligence services in the world, and they seem to find the evidence of an Iranian nuclear program compelling enough that they've been assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists. The Saudis are convinced that Iran is after the bomb; according to one of the cables released by Wikileaks, Saudi King Abdullah "frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme," and the Saudi ambassador said that the king wanted the Americans to "cut the head off the snake". A Jordanian politician said that the U.S. should "bomb Iran, or live with an Iranian bomb".
We should not enter into the decision to take military action lightly. Military action against Iran creates all sorts of risks- it risks killing American military personnel and Iranian civilians. Iran would almost certainly try to strike back against the United States, perhaps using conventional military forces, perhaps not. Military action could also lead to a wider war, and the last thing we need after getting our military out of the Middle East is to send them right back in. It risks a shutdown of the Straits of Hormuz, which would choke the supply of oil and lead to a dramatic spike in oil prices and cripple the economy. Given all that, it seems like the easiest decision is to let the Iranians have the damn bomb.
But here's the deal. Once Iran goes nuclear, the Arab world is going to feel threatened by Iran. The Saudis, the Egyptians, the Jordanians... none of them are going to be happy just sitting there, knowing that at a moments notice Iran could launch a nuclear missile at them. They're going to want nuclear weapons too. Some of those countries are either going to build their own nuclear weapons, or allow nuclear weapons on their soil. And you'll have an arms race the likes of which we haven't seen since the start of the Cold War, in one of the most volatile regions in the world. That's what's at stake here. The threat is that letting the Iranians get the bomb will result in the entire Middle East going nuclear.
Anyway, those are the facts. The U.S. didn't put NORAD under Cheyenne Mountain, inside 2,000 feet of granite, because they were worried about earthquakes. They did that because they were worried about getting hit by a nuclear bomb. Similarly the design of the Fordow site indicates that the Iranians are worried about airstrikes. In particular, the design of the Fordow site seems specifically aimed at hardening the target against a U.S. airstrike using advanced bunker-busters.
So the question is, why would Iran do this for a peaceful nuclear program? If Iran's real aim is nuclear power, it would be a lot easier to just do everything out in the open, and let the U.N. weapons inspectors have free reign and allay everybody's fears. On the other hand, if you want the capability to build a nuclear bomb, and don't want the Israelis or the U.S. to stop you, then you do precisely what the Iranians are currently doing: build multiple enrichment facilities (so they can't be taken out by a single airstrike), build them deep underground, and harden them with advanced concrete and blast doors. Watching Ahmadinejad you could be forgiven for thinking that the Iranian government is run by irrational idiots, but this is really a very clever, well-thought-out approach to developing a nuclear bomb.
And the thing is, developing a nuclear bomb is not an irrational move here. Saddam Hussein's mistake wasn't pursuing WMD, it was that he didn't go far enough. If he'd had the ability to inflict mass civilian casualties with WMD, nobody would have bothered him. North Korea has two deterrent weapons- a nuclear bomb, and heavy artillery and missiles that can hit Seoul, causing large scale civilian casualties. There's a reason that Bush never screwed with Kim Jong Il. This isn't lost on the mullahs who run Iran. They realize that without any allies, they are vulnerable to regime change. But with a nuclear bomb, they will have a deterrent weapon.
Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant was built 20 feet underground; they later reinforced it with concrete and put another 60 feet of dirt on top. Meanwhile, the Iranian regime secretly developed a second nuclear facility a second locality, the Fordow plant. Fordow is built under 200-300 feet of mountain, and according to the Washington Post, "Western analysts think Fordow has not only the protection afforded by natural rock but also additional hardening that draws on North Korean bunker-building expertise. A report last week by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said the facility was thought to include multiple 'blast-proof doors, extensive divider walls, hardened ceilings, 20-centimeter-thick concrete walls, and double concrete ceilings with earth filled between layers.'" That is not a civilian plant. That is the underground lair of a James Bond super villain.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency has found evidence that Iran is pursuing work on a bomb. That includes research into turning uranium into the core for a nuclear weapon, the explosives, detonators, and firing devices needed for an implosion weapon, and modifications to put the bombs on a ballistic missile.
So as far as Iran being a threat... well, no, Iran isn't a threat. Not unless you think the idea of a radical theocracy armed with nuclear-tipped ICBMs is a potential threat. Apparently the Arabs do. If you'll recall the diplomatic memos released by Wikileaks, the Saudis were constantly trying to persuade the U.S. to bomb Iran.
Bullshit. You people really need to read up on world events. Iran has recently been providing arms to Assad so that he can slaughter his own people, and their intelligence service has been providing support for the Assad regime in their campaign against the uprising. And remember when the insurgency in Iraq started playing with EFPs- Explosively Formed Penetrators? These are devices that use a shaped explosive charge to fire a slug of metal through the armor of a vehicle and rip apart the people inside. They were killing U.S. soldiers, and they were coming from Iran. The Iranians also helped trained Hezbollah and have also provided them with tens of millions of dollars in funding per year. If you'll recall, it was Hezbollah attacks on Israeli military forces that directly led to the 2006 war in Lebanon. Iran may not have launched any invasions, but the Iranian government has been behind plenty of violence in the Middle East, mostly by providing support for the people doing the killing. Letting them get ahold of a nuclear bomb is asking for more of the same. I'm not saying that it's a good idea to get in another war, and I don't have anything against the Iranian people, but the idea that Iran's regime is harmless and peaceful is just ridiculously naive.
That being said, there seems to be this attitude that it's somehow inappropriate to even try to quantify academic output. But if you're a mathematician, why on earth would you be against quantifying things? Mathematicians even came up with a metric, the Erdos number, which quantifies how many publications it takes to tie you to legendary mathematician Paul Erdos, as a way of sticking a number on where you fit in the network of mathematicians. And if you're a scientist, you quantify your results and run statistical tests. Why is it expected to use numbers to describe fruit flies, dinosaur bones, or the red shift of distant galaxies... but god forbid, the university actually tries to stick a number on what you do?
The number of articles probably isn't the best metric. One article in a journal like Nature, Science, PLOS Biology, or the New England Journal of Medicine is usually worth a half dozen articles in a specialist journal. A metric like impact factor (average number of citations per article in that journal) helps take that into account. Eigenfactor takes it a step further by weighting the citations- citations coming from Nature or Science count more than citations from the Journal of Fish Biology or whatever. H-factor offers a way of ranking individual scientists- if you have one paper cited once you have an H-factor of one, two papers cited at least twice gives you an H-factor of 2, three papers cited three times gives you an H-factor of 3, etc. Admittedly it's field-specific. The sheer volume of papers in certain fields inevitably means those papers are cited more.
I think the University of Sydney is taking a simplistic approach to the problem, but I sympathize with their aims. You see really creative, productive researchers who are having trouble landing tenure-track jobs in this job market, while some tenured faculty sit back and coast. We need a way to get rid of people who aren't performing and replace them with people who will perform. And it's incredibly hypocritical of academics to say that you can't measure their success: academia measures applicants for college, grad school, med school and law school using test scores and grades. Why is it OK to examine student performance with grades and scores, but inappropriate to grade the teachers themselves? Why not figure out a way to keep the excellent academics and get rid of the bad ones, just like we weed out students? Yes, academic excellence is inherently hard to quantify, but academics are generally pretty creative when it comes to quantifying things that are hard to quantify... the idea that suddenly "oh, it's just too hard to measure!" strikes me as remarkably self-serving.
Man that's one pretty smart parrot. I mean, simple arithmetic is one thing, but writing scientific papers is really hard!