carpet bombing is generally used to refer to large formations of bombers dropping their entire bombload over a target.
"Carpet bombing" is generally used by pressmen who have no idea what they are talking about, to refer to anything other than precision bombing. I don't believe the term has ever been used by the US military.
The Subject line is absolutely correct. Hemos just bought the standard media distortion when he commented Heh -- it's the environmental bit shift of the neutron bomb -- "Kill the people, preserve the industry" becomes "Kill the people, preserve the land."
The neutron bomb never did any such thing. The effect of induced radiation from the neutron flux would leave valuable objects, such as vehicles and buildings in the target area, too "hot" for use for a long time. The major difference was that enhanced radiation meant the primary effect of the bomb fell off as the square of distance, as opposed to blast effects which diminish more nearly linearly with distance (for the distances of interest, in near proximity to the ground). In other words, its main attribute was that the prompt effects were more localized, which is important in weaponeering, when one wants to pick a detonation point to maximize damage to the enemy while minimizing damage to nearby friendlies (or civilians). Every high school class should go through a basic nuclear weaponeering exercise, determining optimal placement of a blast to achieve certain effects. That would convey both a respect for what the things can do and some grounding in reality, to distinguish the hysterical shrieking from realistic claims.
Also of note is that distant fallout effects would be less with the neutron weapon. At the margin, the weapons might have saved a few million civilian lives in a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact tactical nuclear battle (supposing that such a limited nuclear exchange were possible). It's anybody's guess whether they would have the effect of "lowering the nuclear threshold" in the mind of a decision-maker.
Geeks already realize that popular media coverage of computer-related issues is of poor quality. What they may not realize is that the press has vastly less comprehension of military issues than it does of computers. At best, one occasionally reads a mediocre treatment of the military in a major press publication. Excellent treatments by reporters come by once a decade, and then only in book form, being months or years late for the original press time. More commonly, the articles are agressively awful in their accuracy, erring in the most basic facts. By analogy, it would be like reading an article about the 2.4 kernel release, only to gradually realize that the reporter who wrote it thought Linux was something that one folded from sheets of paper.
It works like this:
o British company invents a product. They patent it and start selling it.
o American company steals idea, and patents it in the US...
o Infringment Court case opens in the US. Being a US Judge, with a US Company, and the congressman suitably "funded", the judge rules in the US Companies favour.
o Theft of the product is complete...
Please provide the best three recent examples of this occuring. Be specific, please, with company and product names and cites to the court cases.
One reason Pearl Harbor was attacked so successfully is that the U.S. Navy couldn't find a trace of the vast Japanese Naval Task Force that crept 4,000 miles across the ocean to carry out the attack. The fleet simply vanished into the Pacific for weeks, leaving military officials to guess at it's location. Today, satellites and electronic surveillance would have much any such stealth impossible.
The details have changed, but entire carrier battle groups still can and do "lose" themselves at sea. For all the wonderful air, satellite, and ground-based surveillance we have today, the challenge of tracking and identifying ships and aircraft at sea remains a daunting one. Oceans are big. It's hard to appreciate just how difficult a task it is until you've stood watch as Force Over the Horizon Targeting Coordinator (FOTC) for a battle group. The fog clears, and you realize that no matter how perfectly they may have been executing Soviet battle tactics and formation, the "Orange" (exercise enemy) task force that you just had half the air wing WASEX (blow away) was really an Icelandic fishing fleet. [True story, Northern Wedding '89]. But then you take comfort in realizing that the neither the Orange fleet nor the Red (real) Bear-D's have found you, either, as you approach the relative safety of the Vestfjord.
Nor is it all that hard to sneak aircraft past radar. For just one example, send 'em through in welded-wing formation, in the dark, on the expected track of a commercial flight, and there's a very good chance you'll get in and out before anyone wakes up.
Re:Cold Fusion Research
on
Excess Heat
·
· Score: 1
Twelve years later, results are found only "far to[o] close to the margin of error for comfort"????
There is another term for such results, that never do emerge from the statistical weeds: failure to reproduce. Therein lie an arbitrarily large number of purported phenomena, none more credible than the others.
That doesn't mean that these phenomena don't exist. It does means that the most parsimonious, objective explanation is that they don't exist. It means that they are not science. And there we have the boundary between science and other forms of belief. That boundary may at times be fuzzy, but cold fusion is well clear of that fuzziness.
Ah, no. Hanson *is* either guilty or innocent, regardless of what may ever be proven.
The correct answer is that, in legal proceedings, there is a guiding principle that the accused is entitled to a *presumption* of innocence until proven guilty. Perhaps this is not being done; however, Slashdot wouldn't be the place to check.
Since the planes can be networked and thus know each other's relative positions, preventing friendly fire is a much simpler problem than the visual recognition required to determine what to shoot at, unless you don't mind hitting non-military targets.
Sorry, but that isn't even wrong. Combat ID is much, much more difficult than that. We're just about at the technology point where we can do effective networking of a few dozen devices, within feet of each other, in a benign electronic environment.
Now try it with thousands of air and surface platforms, over hundreds of miles, while minimizing electronic signature, in the face of active electronic opposition.
JTIDS (Link 14) is the least bad form of air-to-air networking we have, and it's nowhere near being sufficient to prevent manned aircraft from hosing friendlies.
Another serious limitation of unmanned aircraft is vision. In air-to-air and air-to-ground combat, we remain a long way from replacing the acquisition and identification capabilities of the human eye, optic nerve, and brain. Electro-optics have their place, but also their limits.
Past the Tragic Kingdom, outside Dismal World, away from the architectural atrocities of the Swan and Dolphin hotels, beyond the dozens of parasitics and tourist traps, outside the Zone of Total Destruction in far southwest, past I-Drive, lies a very nice city and the most beautiful state in the Union, not quite all of which has yet been paved. It's too bad that so many visitors to Orlando never see it. Disney only ruined a small part.
>Does any SlashDot regular consider VB a real programming language?
Meaningless question. Turing-machine code is "a real programming language."
>Would you just love the opportunity to program in VB 8+ hours a day?
I do. It's a fine language (though I do prefer Perl). The reusable code-base, in the form of VBX/OCXs, is enormous. And it's awfully easy to write your own extensions, either in VB or using a lower-level tool such as PowerBasic.
The sheer prevalence of Basic in overall business programming effort (by any reasonable measure) has been an open secret since at least the late 1980s, when an MS survey surprised even them with the numbers for usage of what was then QuickBasic.
Slashdot Mirror
carpet bombing is generally used to refer to large formations of bombers dropping their entire bombload over a target.
"Carpet bombing" is generally used by pressmen who have no idea what they are talking about, to refer to anything other than precision bombing. I don't believe the term has ever been used by the US military.
The Subject line is absolutely correct. Hemos just bought the standard media distortion when he commented Heh -- it's the environmental bit shift of the neutron bomb -- "Kill the people, preserve the industry" becomes "Kill the people, preserve the land."
The neutron bomb never did any such thing. The effect of induced radiation from the neutron flux would leave valuable objects, such as vehicles and buildings in the target area, too "hot" for use for a long time. The major difference was that enhanced radiation meant the primary effect of the bomb fell off as the square of distance, as opposed to blast effects which diminish more nearly linearly with distance (for the distances of interest, in near proximity to the ground). In other words, its main attribute was that the prompt effects were more localized, which is important in weaponeering, when one wants to pick a detonation point to maximize damage to the enemy while minimizing damage to nearby friendlies (or civilians). Every high school class should go through a basic nuclear weaponeering exercise, determining optimal placement of a blast to achieve certain effects. That would convey both a respect for what the things can do and some grounding in reality, to distinguish the hysterical shrieking from realistic claims.
Also of note is that distant fallout effects would be less with the neutron weapon. At the margin, the weapons might have saved a few million civilian lives in a NATO vs. Warsaw Pact tactical nuclear battle (supposing that such a limited nuclear exchange were possible). It's anybody's guess whether they would have the effect of "lowering the nuclear threshold" in the mind of a decision-maker.
Geeks already realize that popular media coverage of computer-related issues is of poor quality. What they may not realize is that the press has vastly less comprehension of military issues than it does of computers. At best, one occasionally reads a mediocre treatment of the military in a major press publication. Excellent treatments by reporters come by once a decade, and then only in book form, being months or years late for the original press time. More commonly, the articles are agressively awful in their accuracy, erring in the most basic facts. By analogy, it would be like reading an article about the 2.4 kernel release, only to gradually realize that the reporter who wrote it thought Linux was something that one folded from sheets of paper.
o British company invents a product. They patent it and start selling it.
o American company steals idea, and patents it in the US...
o Infringment Court case opens in the US. Being a US Judge, with a US Company, and the congressman suitably "funded", the judge rules in the US Companies favour.
o Theft of the product is complete...
Please provide the best three recent examples of this occuring. Be specific, please, with company and product names and cites to the court cases.
The details have changed, but entire carrier battle groups still can and do "lose" themselves at sea. For all the wonderful air, satellite, and ground-based surveillance we have today, the challenge of tracking and identifying ships and aircraft at sea remains a daunting one. Oceans are big. It's hard to appreciate just how difficult a task it is until you've stood watch as Force Over the Horizon Targeting Coordinator (FOTC) for a battle group. The fog clears, and you realize that no matter how perfectly they may have been executing Soviet battle tactics and formation, the "Orange" (exercise enemy) task force that you just had half the air wing WASEX (blow away) was really an Icelandic fishing fleet. [True story, Northern Wedding '89]. But then you take comfort in realizing that the neither the Orange fleet nor the Red (real) Bear-D's have found you, either, as you approach the relative safety of the Vestfjord.
Nor is it all that hard to sneak aircraft past radar. For just one example, send 'em through in welded-wing formation, in the dark, on the expected track of a commercial flight, and there's a very good chance you'll get in and out before anyone wakes up.
Twelve years later, results are found only "far to[o] close to the margin of error for comfort"???? There is another term for such results, that never do emerge from the statistical weeds: failure to reproduce. Therein lie an arbitrarily large number of purported phenomena, none more credible than the others. That doesn't mean that these phenomena don't exist. It does means that the most parsimonious, objective explanation is that they don't exist. It means that they are not science. And there we have the boundary between science and other forms of belief. That boundary may at times be fuzzy, but cold fusion is well clear of that fuzziness.
Ah, no. Hanson *is* either guilty or innocent, regardless of what may ever be proven. The correct answer is that, in legal proceedings, there is a guiding principle that the accused is entitled to a *presumption* of innocence until proven guilty. Perhaps this is not being done; however, Slashdot wouldn't be the place to check.
Sorry, but that isn't even wrong. Combat ID is much, much more difficult than that. We're just about at the technology point where we can do effective networking of a few dozen devices, within feet of each other, in a benign electronic environment.
Now try it with thousands of air and surface platforms, over hundreds of miles, while minimizing electronic signature, in the face of active electronic opposition.
JTIDS (Link 14) is the least bad form of air-to-air networking we have, and it's nowhere near being sufficient to prevent manned aircraft from hosing friendlies.
Another serious limitation of unmanned aircraft is vision. In air-to-air and air-to-ground combat, we remain a long way from replacing the acquisition and identification capabilities of the human eye, optic nerve, and brain. Electro-optics have their place, but also their limits.
Past the Tragic Kingdom, outside Dismal World, away from the architectural atrocities of the Swan and Dolphin hotels, beyond the dozens of parasitics and tourist traps, outside the Zone of Total Destruction in far southwest, past I-Drive, lies a very nice city and the most beautiful state in the Union, not quite all of which has yet been paved. It's too bad that so many visitors to Orlando never see it. Disney only ruined a small part.
>Does any SlashDot regular consider VB a real programming language?
Meaningless question. Turing-machine code is "a real programming language."
>Would you just love the opportunity to program in VB 8+ hours a day?
I do. It's a fine language (though I do prefer Perl). The reusable code-base, in the form of VBX/OCXs, is enormous. And it's awfully easy to write your own extensions, either in VB or using a lower-level tool such as PowerBasic.
The sheer prevalence of Basic in overall business programming effort (by any reasonable measure) has been an open secret since at least the late 1980s, when an MS survey surprised even them with the numbers for usage of what was then QuickBasic.
Like a moped, it's uncool, but it works.