And what about surface-to-surface torpedos launched by ships at each other? Or air-to-surface torpedos? Or subsurface-to-surface? Additionally, it seems like there ought to be a good chance that learning to track and detonate torpedos with acoustic technology would provide benefits that would lead to other anti-warhead enterprises, be they space-based or ship-based or whatever.
Finally, I think you miss an important point: Yes, submarines are likely of limited future utility. I'm not proposint we introduce acoustic defenses on submarines to save the ship -- it's the sailors that are worth saving. A life of a sailor is, in my mind, worth more than any hypothetical whale that may or may not be harmed by the use of this technology. As another poster suggested, it's likely that the acoustic countermeasure is a targeted phased array of loudspeakers, in which case the chance of "splash damage" (no pun intended) is minimal.
I actually AM what many would call a bible-toting religious nut, but I'm tired of seeing mindless pacifism advocated. Pacifism is utterly naive and foolish in every sense. What happens if way lay down our arms? We get steamrolled, that's what. I'm all for advocating defensive-only warfare -- if everyone fights only in defense, nobody fights. But, unlike pacifism, defensive-only warfare is legitimate even if only adopted by some people; they don't get instantly screwed, and they still reduce the net violence.
As for your little rant... very few wars are started because of religion. If you review history, you'll find that most wars are started for all the reasons people do anything -- land, money, power, emotions. Religion is just often a convenient excuse to get some loyal soldiers lined up without too many questions.
I really hate to be there bearer of bad news, but there hasn't been a techonological revolution that instantaneously made all U.S. submarines and ships invulnerable to torpedos.
Yes, we have the technology, in theory, to keep taps on a ship, and to blow it to kingdom come if it pisses us off. Just becuase we have sattelites doesn't mean we have hte coverage or the manpower, though, to scan the entire Atlantic for enemy surface vessels 24/7. If you're looking at a resolution high enough to be able to spot a ship, you've got an awful lot of imagery to sift through. Even if we were to automate some of that, we still can only see where we are looking, and we can only know where to look if we have hints ahead of time. And you sure as hell can't see a submarine from space.
The military isn't arming their submarines for the present political scenario in which we have no enemies potent enough to launch a large-scale attack. They're arming against a hypothetical worst-case in which, say, another superpower gets testy, or a non-superpower gets a hold of something naughty like, say, some fancy supercavitating Russian torpedoes.
You can plug your ears and go "la la la" about how we have sattelites and space-age technology protecting us from all foes. Yes, those give us an enormous upper hand over most foes, but they don't make us invincible to basic attack. Should we remove armor plating from Abrams tanks because, hey, sattelites ought to be able to spot the Iraqi National Guard's T-72s before they get in range? Should we stop issuing body armor because hey, if our soldiers are getting shot, they aren't doing their job?
A US vessel probably hasn't been torpedoed in quite some time, you're right. Not because of mystical government powers that protect the ships, but because politically nobody with a torpedo has been engaged with us at that scale since World War II.
Defending our soldiers is all about worst-case. Getting shot is not something we hope for or desire, it's something we seek to prevent. Nevertheless, our infantry get medics and body armor, because we have to plan for a contingency that is, ultimately, pretty likely in a full scale engagement.
When was the last time a US Aircraft carrier was sunk? Should we, then, remove all anti-missile countermeasures and guns from the Nimitz and trust in magic sattelite observance to stare the missiles down?
If we have teh ability to give our submarines phased loudspeaker arrays to destroy incoming torpedos, excellent. One less incoming threat to worry about.
You keep working on that. Next time I'm on a submarine under fire though, I won't be wishing a torpedo away based on some ideals of pacifism. I'll be zapping the hell out of it with a spiffy techno-gadget to save my skin.
Call me short-sighted, I just don't happen to believe that Jesus is going to save our submariners from torpedos.
You're right, I'd forgotten that the Sonic Cruiser was just barely subsonic. Still, the remark that the US doesn't have the ability to produce a supersonic transport is pretty absurd. Perhaps we don't have the motivation, because the manufacturers believe it in their best interests to pursue more practical technology, but the ability? Come on.
"We don't have anyone in the US capable of develping an SST."
Are you kidding? Boeing was well on its way to committing to one until they decided the 787 would be more economical and a better business plan in the long-term -- and they were right.
Everybody cries "bigger! faster!," but frankly I'd rather have fewer flight switches and long layovers in domestic flights than a slightly curtailed intercontintental flight.
I can't say I know what it would be like if the plane is way up at 40,000 feet or whatnot, but if it's even remotely close to the ground, expect pictures to fall off the walls.
Well-designed windows programs work around this very well. For example, Trillian can stick all your IM conversations in one container with tabs for each conversation. FrontPage (yes, it is evil) opens all documents into tabs. Firefox does tabbed browsing. Onenote has note tabs.
I think you are incorrectly assuming that your preference for the Linux/OSX experience extrapolates well to everyone. I'm not trying to be contentious here; it's just my experience that using Linux (I dualboot with Ubuntu at the moment, though I'll probably be trying again to get a dualboot with XP/OSX going again here soon) and OSX feels incredibly disorganized and haphazard after using XP regularly. I think it's shortsighted to call either inherently better. I prefer the Windows experience to OSX because it allows me to use all my screen real estate without having dumb little docks and floating toolbars keeping me from maximizing windows effectively. In Windows, I can have everything maximized, and using Alt-tab and the taskbar I can easily navigate amongst a very large number of windows, especially if hte programs are designed with Windows in mind.
No, it's not hte perfect solution. But when I use Linux, I find the window manager clunky and slow and ugly. It has some good conceptual ideas, yes, but I don't really need virtual desktops -- just developers who consider that they are sharing screen and taskbar real estate with other applications and so make an effort to keep it all self-contained.
Problems with the current technology make this very unlikely, at least in the short term. For example: Set up a flimsy but opaque wall around all four sides of the automated vehicle. Uh-oh too bad it's stuck. Send somebody in to take the supplies and commandeer the vehicle. Game over.
Do you consider the US government evil for killing thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians?
In any case where true noncombatants were killed by deliberate action or careless inaction, yes, I would not hesitate in calling that incident evil. And I'm pretty conservative. Although I would definately think twice before applying a blanket qualitative judgment to an entire nation because of the outcome of what was likely incidental to an assault with a much different purpose.
but they typically do not do it just out of being evil.
Point me to where I said the Chinese did anything out of a desire to be evil and I will have a point to concede. Otherwise, what is your point?
Also do you think that if Chinese government is deposed, the Chinese will benefit from the resulting anarchy?
Once again, did I say this? "Theory for restructoring China" and "value judgment on a single aspect of Chinese governance" are not equivalent. Further, you'd do well to note that my reaction was to the "moralistic terms are incredibly annoying" bit, rather than anything concerning China in particular.
Anyway, as soon as you have success building a completely amoral, relativistic society, let me know.
It's pretty funny, the first thign I did when I got my new HP printer/scanner was to throw some change and a few bills in the top and hit "color copy." I was very impressed with the result. Then I was told it was illegal, which strikes me as odd because a cashier would have to be pretty daft to be fooled by a one-sided dollar bill on thin recycled paper with ragged edges (cut out from my 8.5x11 sheet). Even more daft to take the printouts of quarters.
In all seriousness, come one. I could just as easily say "these relativistic terms are annoying. Most people would agree that the Chinese have a right to their own opinion, but why do you expect us to value that opinion more than our own?"
But I do appreciate the blanket forgive-all of amoralism, and I'll be sure to bring it up if I'm ever being tried for, say, robbing your house or murdering your family. I'm sure you'll stick to your guns then.
Here's an argument for being the most advanced: We are more capable of spreading our seed than any other race, especially any other large mammal (yes, you could say that cockroaches and bacteria are more advanced by taht definition, but cockroaches and bacteria aren't going to Mars unless we bring them, deliberately or otherwise.)
Of course, there's another pretty potent argument: If anyone else gets all fussy and wants to be the most advanced, we have the capacity to nuke them off of the face of the earth. Total obliteration of everything is not something that every creature is capable of. And that's pretty cool:D
Having run Aero Glass on a 128mb video card very, very smoothly, I can confidently say taht 256mb is a huge overestimation of the requirements. And you don't *have* to run in Glass.
Wait a second. What happens to the part where they're dead after being cut in half? That seems to me to be a severe impingement on the "working it out afterwards" phase.
Slashdot Mirror
And what about surface-to-surface torpedos launched by ships at each other? Or air-to-surface torpedos? Or subsurface-to-surface? Additionally, it seems like there ought to be a good chance that learning to track and detonate torpedos with acoustic technology would provide benefits that would lead to other anti-warhead enterprises, be they space-based or ship-based or whatever.
Finally, I think you miss an important point: Yes, submarines are likely of limited future utility. I'm not proposint we introduce acoustic defenses on submarines to save the ship -- it's the sailors that are worth saving. A life of a sailor is, in my mind, worth more than any hypothetical whale that may or may not be harmed by the use of this technology. As another poster suggested, it's likely that the acoustic countermeasure is a targeted phased array of loudspeakers, in which case the chance of "splash damage" (no pun intended) is minimal.
Adblock is a much more effective means to the same end.
I actually AM what many would call a bible-toting religious nut, but I'm tired of seeing mindless pacifism advocated. Pacifism is utterly naive and foolish in every sense. What happens if way lay down our arms? We get steamrolled, that's what. I'm all for advocating defensive-only warfare -- if everyone fights only in defense, nobody fights. But, unlike pacifism, defensive-only warfare is legitimate even if only adopted by some people; they don't get instantly screwed, and they still reduce the net violence.
As for your little rant... very few wars are started because of religion. If you review history, you'll find that most wars are started for all the reasons people do anything -- land, money, power, emotions. Religion is just often a convenient excuse to get some loyal soldiers lined up without too many questions.
I really hate to be there bearer of bad news, but there hasn't been a techonological revolution that instantaneously made all U.S. submarines and ships invulnerable to torpedos.
Yes, we have the technology, in theory, to keep taps on a ship, and to blow it to kingdom come if it pisses us off. Just becuase we have sattelites doesn't mean we have hte coverage or the manpower, though, to scan the entire Atlantic for enemy surface vessels 24/7. If you're looking at a resolution high enough to be able to spot a ship, you've got an awful lot of imagery to sift through. Even if we were to automate some of that, we still can only see where we are looking, and we can only know where to look if we have hints ahead of time. And you sure as hell can't see a submarine from space.
The military isn't arming their submarines for the present political scenario in which we have no enemies potent enough to launch a large-scale attack. They're arming against a hypothetical worst-case in which, say, another superpower gets testy, or a non-superpower gets a hold of something naughty like, say, some fancy supercavitating Russian torpedoes.
You can plug your ears and go "la la la" about how we have sattelites and space-age technology protecting us from all foes. Yes, those give us an enormous upper hand over most foes, but they don't make us invincible to basic attack. Should we remove armor plating from Abrams tanks because, hey, sattelites ought to be able to spot the Iraqi National Guard's T-72s before they get in range? Should we stop issuing body armor because hey, if our soldiers are getting shot, they aren't doing their job?
A US vessel probably hasn't been torpedoed in quite some time, you're right. Not because of mystical government powers that protect the ships, but because politically nobody with a torpedo has been engaged with us at that scale since World War II.
Defending our soldiers is all about worst-case. Getting shot is not something we hope for or desire, it's something we seek to prevent. Nevertheless, our infantry get medics and body armor, because we have to plan for a contingency that is, ultimately, pretty likely in a full scale engagement.
When was the last time a US Aircraft carrier was sunk? Should we, then, remove all anti-missile countermeasures and guns from the Nimitz and trust in magic sattelite observance to stare the missiles down?
If we have teh ability to give our submarines phased loudspeaker arrays to destroy incoming torpedos, excellent. One less incoming threat to worry about.
Congratulations, you win the Kyle Award for Funniest Thing I've Read All Day.
You keep working on that. Next time I'm on a submarine under fire though, I won't be wishing a torpedo away based on some ideals of pacifism. I'll be zapping the hell out of it with a spiffy techno-gadget to save my skin.
Call me short-sighted, I just don't happen to believe that Jesus is going to save our submariners from torpedos.
You're right, I'd forgotten that the Sonic Cruiser was just barely subsonic. Still, the remark that the US doesn't have the ability to produce a supersonic transport is pretty absurd. Perhaps we don't have the motivation, because the manufacturers believe it in their best interests to pursue more practical technology, but the ability? Come on.
"We don't have anyone in the US capable of develping an SST."
Are you kidding? Boeing was well on its way to committing to one until they decided the 787 would be more economical and a better business plan in the long-term -- and they were right.
Everybody cries "bigger! faster!," but frankly I'd rather have fewer flight switches and long layovers in domestic flights than a slightly curtailed intercontintental flight.
But by all means. Bigger, faster.
Someone has never experienced a sonic boom.
I can't say I know what it would be like if the plane is way up at 40,000 feet or whatnot, but if it's even remotely close to the ground, expect pictures to fall off the walls.
I took my checkride for my private from a guy with 150 hours logged in the SR-71.
In-tim-i-dat-ing.
Well-designed windows programs work around this very well. For example, Trillian can stick all your IM conversations in one container with tabs for each conversation. FrontPage (yes, it is evil) opens all documents into tabs. Firefox does tabbed browsing. Onenote has note tabs.
I think you are incorrectly assuming that your preference for the Linux/OSX experience extrapolates well to everyone. I'm not trying to be contentious here; it's just my experience that using Linux (I dualboot with Ubuntu at the moment, though I'll probably be trying again to get a dualboot with XP/OSX going again here soon) and OSX feels incredibly disorganized and haphazard after using XP regularly. I think it's shortsighted to call either inherently better. I prefer the Windows experience to OSX because it allows me to use all my screen real estate without having dumb little docks and floating toolbars keeping me from maximizing windows effectively. In Windows, I can have everything maximized, and using Alt-tab and the taskbar I can easily navigate amongst a very large number of windows, especially if hte programs are designed with Windows in mind.
No, it's not hte perfect solution. But when I use Linux, I find the window manager clunky and slow and ugly. It has some good conceptual ideas, yes, but I don't really need virtual desktops -- just developers who consider that they are sharing screen and taskbar real estate with other applications and so make an effort to keep it all self-contained.
Problems with the current technology make this very unlikely, at least in the short term. For example: Set up a flimsy but opaque wall around all four sides of the automated vehicle. Uh-oh too bad it's stuck. Send somebody in to take the supplies and commandeer the vehicle. Game over.
That doesn't seem to prevent piracy.
Do you consider the US government evil for killing thousands of Iraqi and Afghani civilians?
In any case where true noncombatants were killed by deliberate action or careless inaction, yes, I would not hesitate in calling that incident evil. And I'm pretty conservative. Although I would definately think twice before applying a blanket qualitative judgment to an entire nation because of the outcome of what was likely incidental to an assault with a much different purpose.
but they typically do not do it just out of being evil.
Point me to where I said the Chinese did anything out of a desire to be evil and I will have a point to concede. Otherwise, what is your point?
Also do you think that if Chinese government is deposed, the Chinese will benefit from the resulting anarchy?
Once again, did I say this? "Theory for restructoring China" and "value judgment on a single aspect of Chinese governance" are not equivalent. Further, you'd do well to note that my reaction was to the "moralistic terms are incredibly annoying" bit, rather than anything concerning China in particular.
Anyway, as soon as you have success building a completely amoral, relativistic society, let me know.
It's pretty funny, the first thign I did when I got my new HP printer/scanner was to throw some change and a few bills in the top and hit "color copy." I was very impressed with the result. Then I was told it was illegal, which strikes me as odd because a cashier would have to be pretty daft to be fooled by a one-sided dollar bill on thin recycled paper with ragged edges (cut out from my 8.5x11 sheet). Even more daft to take the printouts of quarters.
Because if they don't, they're evil. Duh.
In all seriousness, come one. I could just as easily say "these relativistic terms are annoying. Most people would agree that the Chinese have a right to their own opinion, but why do you expect us to value that opinion more than our own?"
But I do appreciate the blanket forgive-all of amoralism, and I'll be sure to bring it up if I'm ever being tried for, say, robbing your house or murdering your family. I'm sure you'll stick to your guns then.
Okay... but why not Firefox?
Never heard of these guys? Aren't these the guys that did Flagpole Sitta' way back when?
You know...
I'm not sick but I'm not well...
Here's an argument for being the most advanced: We are more capable of spreading our seed than any other race, especially any other large mammal (yes, you could say that cockroaches and bacteria are more advanced by taht definition, but cockroaches and bacteria aren't going to Mars unless we bring them, deliberately or otherwise.)
:D
Of course, there's another pretty potent argument: If anyone else gets all fussy and wants to be the most advanced, we have the capacity to nuke them off of the face of the earth. Total obliteration of everything is not something that every creature is capable of. And that's pretty cool
That would be twenty-one years, actually.
Redundant? What, they already have electrodes?
Having run Aero Glass on a 128mb video card very, very smoothly, I can confidently say taht 256mb is a huge overestimation of the requirements. And you don't *have* to run in Glass.
That makes some more sense.
Haha, that's what I did too.
Wait a second. What happens to the part where they're dead after being cut in half? That seems to me to be a severe impingement on the "working it out afterwards" phase.
0.o