The engineers who designed the Predator were not idiots, adopting Security through Obscurity. The feeds were not encrypted for at least two reasons: The Predator is supposed to be able to go at a moment's notice, and having to wait around to be keyed for the mission at hand as required by NSA, defeats the purpose. I've heard the expression "80% of my intelligence needs that I can have NOW, can share it with coalitions, and don't need a security officer and a safe to transport it around the battlefield is a dream come true..." In any case, the imagery doesn't tell anyone anything they don't already know, and has a quick "half-life" meaning it rapidly becomes irrelevant. It's just not worth encrypting.
Not saying that we don't do stupid things, just that not encrypting the feed was not one of them.
No offense, but that is totally wrong. The tomcat was designed for one thing and one thing only: to protect the carrier group from nuclear capable soviet bombers. The tomcat was so physically large because it was basically a weapon platform... the awg-75 (?) radar system and up to six aim-54 missles that were used to flight out very fast (what dogfighter needs mach 2.4+ speed?) and rain Phoenixes on the bombers before a single one could take out the entire carrier group with a nuke. The Navy did studies and determined that that was preceisely what the Soviets would do. As a dogfighter, the Tomcat was for most of its career crippled by the anemic Pratt & Whitney TF-30 engines also used in the F-111. Aside from tending to flame out (the justification for Goose's death in Top Gun) at high alpha and spraying compressor blades everywhere, they did not have the umph to counter the induced drag when the Tomcat was turning. Hence, it bled energy and couldn't sustain corner velocity. Think about it... it's got a huge planform and can't turn... not a recipe for a great dogfighter. It wasn't until the DFE engines and later the GEs that allowed the Tomcat to take advantage of it extremely low loading, but that was years into its service life. The majority of the fleet was always the poor A version.
Incidentally, remember the Aldrich Aames spy case? Well, the Tomcat was one of the casualties of that affair. He passed inflated radar estimates to the U.S. government which caused the Navy to calculate that the Tomcat would not be non-survivable in light of the threat of Soviet radar advances. So the Tomcat was cancelled depsite the fact that it had been re-engined (with the same GEs used in the F-15, making it the dogfighter it should have been originally) and received firmware upgrades making it an extremely capable attack platform called the Bombcat. In a move that sparked a scandal, Congress ordered Grumman to not only stop production, but to also destroy all the tooling, ensuring the the project could not be easily restarted. And today, we have the F-18E/F, which in many ways fails to meet the performance of the old C/D version. Each time it failed a test, they simply relaxed the criteria, and (I don't know if it was ever corrected) I remember that it was discovered that the Super Hornet behaved extremely badly at high alpha, where a fighter pilot who wants to live another day usually flies.
There's a great book called "The Tomcat Story" which is worth reading. it's written by one of the program managers.
I think the above poster was confusing the F-14 with the F-15, which was created when the CIA was scared out of its wits by its own estimates of the Soviet Foxbat. So they told MacD to pull out all the stops and basically build a superplane with fewer tradeoffs.
The survival of the genre should not be at all surprising. If one's main attraction to the game is hack & slash, then silicon-based games might be superior. But for sophisticated adult players who know how the world works and that have a sophisticated DM who knows how, say, popular culture, economics, religion, politics, and war all affect one's experience, the result is essentially a simulation that is more engaging, more interesting than the best movies, let alone the best video games. There simply is no substitute for a small group of good players with a good DM. I think the pen & paper players that eschew the Everquests and WoWs of the world simply know what a good game is capable of, and know that a computer simply cannot do any of that. I can't help but think that those who don't like pen & paper games have just never had a good DM with a little world experience. How anyone can play these computer games and not become bored after a few weeks tells me that they are getting something else that they value from the game besides the entertainment & story telling that we are assuming. That's OK, but let's say that up front.
I don't know where the CDR got his numbers, but as of 5/1/06, the dollar is at about 2:1 face value, but R$10 is especially much when there are people in Brazil who make R$200 a month.
I'm not really worried... if I should start to get smam on Vonage, I'll switch to someone's Open Source implementation and implement a white list. This will just bring the Open Source version to the forefront.
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The engineers who designed the Predator were not idiots, adopting Security through Obscurity. The feeds were not encrypted for at least two reasons: The Predator is supposed to be able to go at a moment's notice, and having to wait around to be keyed for the mission at hand as required by NSA, defeats the purpose. I've heard the expression "80% of my intelligence needs that I can have NOW, can share it with coalitions, and don't need a security officer and a safe to transport it around the battlefield is a dream come true..." In any case, the imagery doesn't tell anyone anything they don't already know, and has a quick "half-life" meaning it rapidly becomes irrelevant. It's just not worth encrypting. Not saying that we don't do stupid things, just that not encrypting the feed was not one of them.
Why not develop something HTTP based, so you would be able to access it from any paltform with a browser?
Just like when China tried to buy the energy they need, the Gov't would probably block the deal, this time on EAR or ITAR grounds.
No offense, but that is totally wrong. The tomcat was designed for one thing and one thing only: to protect the carrier group from nuclear capable soviet bombers. The tomcat was so physically large because it was basically a weapon platform... the awg-75 (?) radar system and up to six aim-54 missles that were used to flight out very fast (what dogfighter needs mach 2.4+ speed?) and rain Phoenixes on the bombers before a single one could take out the entire carrier group with a nuke. The Navy did studies and determined that that was preceisely what the Soviets would do. As a dogfighter, the Tomcat was for most of its career crippled by the anemic Pratt & Whitney TF-30 engines also used in the F-111. Aside from tending to flame out (the justification for Goose's death in Top Gun) at high alpha and spraying compressor blades everywhere, they did not have the umph to counter the induced drag when the Tomcat was turning. Hence, it bled energy and couldn't sustain corner velocity. Think about it... it's got a huge planform and can't turn... not a recipe for a great dogfighter. It wasn't until the DFE engines and later the GEs that allowed the Tomcat to take advantage of it extremely low loading, but that was years into its service life. The majority of the fleet was always the poor A version. Incidentally, remember the Aldrich Aames spy case? Well, the Tomcat was one of the casualties of that affair. He passed inflated radar estimates to the U.S. government which caused the Navy to calculate that the Tomcat would not be non-survivable in light of the threat of Soviet radar advances. So the Tomcat was cancelled depsite the fact that it had been re-engined (with the same GEs used in the F-15, making it the dogfighter it should have been originally) and received firmware upgrades making it an extremely capable attack platform called the Bombcat. In a move that sparked a scandal, Congress ordered Grumman to not only stop production, but to also destroy all the tooling, ensuring the the project could not be easily restarted. And today, we have the F-18E/F, which in many ways fails to meet the performance of the old C/D version. Each time it failed a test, they simply relaxed the criteria, and (I don't know if it was ever corrected) I remember that it was discovered that the Super Hornet behaved extremely badly at high alpha, where a fighter pilot who wants to live another day usually flies. There's a great book called "The Tomcat Story" which is worth reading. it's written by one of the program managers. I think the above poster was confusing the F-14 with the F-15, which was created when the CIA was scared out of its wits by its own estimates of the Soviet Foxbat. So they told MacD to pull out all the stops and basically build a superplane with fewer tradeoffs.
The survival of the genre should not be at all surprising. If one's main attraction to the game is hack & slash, then silicon-based games might be superior. But for sophisticated adult players who know how the world works and that have a sophisticated DM who knows how, say, popular culture, economics, religion, politics, and war all affect one's experience, the result is essentially a simulation that is more engaging, more interesting than the best movies, let alone the best video games. There simply is no substitute for a small group of good players with a good DM. I think the pen & paper players that eschew the Everquests and WoWs of the world simply know what a good game is capable of, and know that a computer simply cannot do any of that. I can't help but think that those who don't like pen & paper games have just never had a good DM with a little world experience. How anyone can play these computer games and not become bored after a few weeks tells me that they are getting something else that they value from the game besides the entertainment & story telling that we are assuming. That's OK, but let's say that up front.
I don't know where the CDR got his numbers, but as of 5/1/06, the dollar is at about 2:1 face value, but R$10 is especially much when there are people in Brazil who make R$200 a month.
I'm not really worried... if I should start to get smam on Vonage, I'll switch to someone's Open Source implementation and implement a white list. This will just bring the Open Source version to the forefront.