Your referenced post is very well written...but I did notice one 'oddity'...
Today it is cheap, reliable and contains no moving parts. The older models used lasers but the latest ones directly measure mass acceleration.
It seems to me that any device designed to measures mass acceleration would have to include a moving part...the mass.
From wikipedia:
Quartz rate sensors
This system is usually integrated on a silicon chip. It has two mass-balanced quartz tuning forks, arranged "handle-to-handle" so forces cancel. Aluminum electrodes evaporated onto the forks and the underlying chip both drive and sense the motion. The system is both manufacturable and inexpensive. Since quartz is dimensionally stable, the system can be accurate.
As the forks are twisted about the axis of the handle, the vibration of the tines tends to continue in the same plane of motion. This motion has to be resisted by electrostatic forces from the electrodes under the tines. By measuring the difference in capacitance between the two tines of a fork, the system can determine the rate of angular motion.
Current state of the art non-military technology (2005) can build small solid state sensors that can measure human body movements. These devices have no moving parts, and weigh about 50 grams.
Solid state devices using the same physical principles are used to stabilize images taken with small cameras or camcorders. These can be extremely small (5 mm) and are built with MEMS (Microelectromechanical Systems) technologies.
ie the mass, a piece of silicon, quartz, whatever in modern accelerometers, isn't considered 'a moving part' in engineering terms even if it bends or oscillates a bit.
Commercial avionics is basically 'military technology'. The wikipedia description is for a 'consumer sensor' that you could buy for your remote control toy car.
Your prior post is interesting, detailed, and well-informed reading, but you fail to address an existing, published study stating that cellphone use on aircraft may be dangerous.
I'll address this again then.
The study says there is an 'increased risk', 'higher than was previously thought'. What they did, was find that more often than thought before people's cellphones were on during critical parts of flights. They also found that laptop wifi and bluetooth were emitting RF. All they actually did was log the spectrum from these emissions on some flights. That is all their research found.
Now, what they imply is that this is somehow more significantly dangerous then we previouly thought. My essay I think covered most of the things why this is not so dangerous.
However I want to stress here the fact that any potential emissions from consumer RF-devices in the cabin will have a hard time competing with all the structures and shielding between the device and the antenna outside the aircraft or inside in the avionics bay. And no such device can dream of competing the awesome power of the spectrum from a fairly common natural sources, such as static build-up and lightning, under which such avionics have to perform on a daily basis.
And if people are already leaving their cellphones and laptops on during flights by accident, where's the harm in allowing them to use them during flights in a controlled and tested environment. This might actually help people remember to turn them off more often during takeoffs and landings.
This "Cellphones in Airplanes" type of article appears periodically in/. and every time I have to rise from my grave to correct the false speculation about cellphones interfering with avionics.
Cellphones do not cause aircraft to crash and burn! There. Thank you.
Here's my longer explanation for those interested: Avionics ABC
Airlines offering the use of GSM cellphone services equip the cabin with a basestation similar to one used RF-secure buildings and underground facilities. It will handle all the calls within the cabin and connect to the phone network via satellite datalink. It's all compatible, safe and tested method that has been used for years now on business jets.
This is NOT "extension to USB"! - this is a proprietary technology that has nothing to do with the USB standard.
USB devices were never meant to be shared this way. Just because someone made 'a switch' that manages to reproduce and route the data between two different host machines at the hardware level doesn't solve anything. You will still have a hopeless guagmire of compatibility issues due to conflicting host software and drivers. Its hopeless because USB devices and software were never meant to work this way. Just because they show it works occationally on one or two devices, doesn't mean it'l work on your devices and with your software for them.
From their FAQ: "Keep in mind that USB provides a connecting technology and not a network. Since the USB MultiSwitch Hub is a standard USB 2.0 device, only one person can use a connected device at a time. For example, I plug in my MultiSwitch Hub-enabled laptop, share your printer and/or get what I need from an external USB hard drive and then, when you want it back, we switch the devices back to you. If we want to toggle back and forth, we can do that. But only one of us can access the desired USB device at a time."
This is non-news! Microsoft finished updating W2k long time ago (last one after SP4 was SR1 in 2005). There have been numerous bits of software and updates from MS that have only worked with XP for years now! Why is it now suddenly news that some Vista specific 'software' isn't going to work with W2k!?! And guess what! Millions of people around the world continue to use it - because it does what it supposed to do, it works, with or without this latest 'software'! Unbelievable, isn't it!
As a workstation, W2k is stable, efficient and clean, all the major software vendors in the market continue to support it (Autodesk, NI, Adobe, Mathworks etc.) and the extra features that one might want off XP haven't for me personally justified the upgrade cycle, learning curve and bloat that come with it. Needless to say what I think of Vista.
And as for longevity of Sun's support policies, don't you people realize that Land Rover has even longer support policies and longer history of reliablity then unix! So maybe all you linux people should switch your servers to 'Pinkies'. Oh, what's that complaining I hear? It doesn't run the software you want to use! Well tought shit, get with the dogma, loosers!
All I can find is their list of publications and their 'Homeland Security' website. Apparently UM is very 'prepares' - or they've just made a bunch of lists with staff people's names on them.
Passive radar system uses ground-based stations to 'light up' the target and sometimes it's much better than active radar system, because you can't home on attacker using his own radar pulses as a target. Besides, multiple-source passive systems give tremendous advantages against stealth.... It's funny, but passive radar system are used on many homing missiles. But I guess that they are just too bulky for aircrafts.
Yes they are, passive radars by their idea, require enourmous antennas which can only be housed in ground platforms. And you are confusing terminology again - even if such a thing you described existed, the missile wouldn't be said to have "passive radar in it" - it would be called "indirect illumination homing missile" or something. And no such missile has been demonstrated which could track ground radar's illumination of a stealth aircraft. This is simply laws of physics. The little energy that a stealth aircraft would scatter of your illumination in the direction of the missile's receiving antenna's aperture is not enough to lock and and actively track it. You've better luck steering the missile via datalink from ground according to your ground based passive radar system (and such systems do exist!).
Of course, you can destroy ground-based radar stations, but it's not easy to do (they keep on moving, you know). And even if you destroy one then it's not a great military loss.
Haha, where do you get this stuff! "It's not easy to do", "Cause they keep 'moving'"! As soon as you turn on your 'illuminating' ground stations they will be wiped out. Have you noticed that like in the last wars, Iraq I, Balkans and Iraq II the first thing that was wiped out was the enemy's air defences. That is anything that was turned on or not hidden in a cave. What was left were the remnants that threatened not the overall operation.
Phased array is not just a way of feeding antennae (I'm a mathematician with a physicist background) and it's not easy to install it on an aircraft. But phased arrays can do a lot of tricks: work on many frequencies simultaneously, track many sources and you can even use them to create a 'stereoscopic' radar images.
You are jumbling terminology of which you have no practical experience of. A phased array is an antenna with 2 or more radiating elements fed in the appropriate phase for desired radiation pattern. What you are confusing this is the way some phased arrays are fed with multiple tranceivers whose phasing relationship can be altered in software. This allows for a dynamic radiation pattern etc. Your 'multi-tracking' feature can be implemented by any number of ways. And by 'stereoscopic' radar you probably mean 3D-radar which requires a bit more than just 'a phased array'. The 'many frequencies simultaniously' is a feature of the tranceiver not the antenna. Any number of antenna types can be made broadband for this purpose.
So please, stick to mathematics which I'm sure you know more about then me, while I, a military avionics technician, avionics teacher and electronic warfare NCO, perhaps know something more about those subjects.
And in the end, it's cheaper and more effective to build three F-16 than one JSF. JSF might be better suited for 'local wars' (read: then the enemy can't do a shit against your aviation) but in a war with a powerful nation it will be like T-34-85 against Panthers in WWII.
And with the life-span-cost of three F-16's one can man and equip a small army which can dig-in and hold an area indefinately against a superior force. Its all relative to what you want to do. As I pointed the F16s wont be replaced by JSFs for some time, indeed perhaps never because of the cost factor. However they are capable of missions, against a variety of enemies, which the three F16s arent nearly as good for. Don't know what superpower you think you mean to have a war in the future, but if y
3. Current stealth technologies (ALL of them) only protect from certain radio wavelength. For example, F117 can be detected using one-meter-wavelength radars (as it was demonstrated during the last Balkan war). But you need a fairly large antenna to transmit at such wavelengths, so fighter jets need to use either passive radar system or phased arrays.
1. So what? It has incremental improvements in engines and armaments. After all, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_launch_vehicle is still used today (though it was designed back in 60-s.
I'm sorry but I have to keep correcting your ignorance. You cannot install passive radar systems in fighter aircraft. Passive radar systems are huge and heavy and most are composed of multiple geographicly spaced platforms. Again your use of the term phased array is naive. A phased array is merely a trivial way of feeding antenna elements - there are millions of types of antennas which are phased arrays. The idea of phased array has nothing whatsoever to do with countering stealth per-se.
Nor has anyone claimed, righly so, that stealth makes aircraft undetectable. They merely reduce the radar cross section to a certain extent - and such reduction is indeed variable upon frequency as you pointed out. However VHF-radars, which have been used to detect stealth aircraft are slow, innaccurate and highpower (indeed because of the long wavelenght) and thus vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles and other countermeasures. They are ancient technology. The incident in the Balkan war was an exception that proves the rule. The enemy was incapable of threathing the air-supremacy of NATO and its operations, for all aircraft with or without stealth, because of the wide use of electronic warfare and planning of air-corridors. Stealth merely allows one to use such air-corridores more effectively.
As for Soyuz, nobody is suggesting that we should abandon the wheel because JSF is going to replace all our technology. We are going to see aircraft such as F16s, F18s, B52s flying well into the next decade and beyong because they are useful and econmical platforms. The JSF offers new capabilities, in addition to all the tech we have now and will only be produced in quantity that is required to meet these new special missions.
Sorry I have not the time to wade through such rubbish. I only do this stuff for a living. I suggest you get some more reliable sources - start with JANE's literature on the subject.
This is not just about source code. In a system like that software, hardware and system integration are inseparable. You either give no information or have to give it all. These are the crown jewels of the platform. Revealing them also reveals any number of critical points for interested adversaries: thrust and manoeuvrability limits, reaction times, counter-measure schemes and logic, EMC-characteristics etc. all of which can be used to find weaknesses and design weapon systems to be more effective against it.
Also, since the UK is only conributing 10% of the development costs, its no wonder the US isnt keen sharing. Usually with mil-tech you only give a bad, incomplete user manual to the client so he can barely operate the thing and then wait for him to pay more for extra features that are already implemented by disabled in software or simply undocumented. You never ever allow the client to have exact specs, schematics or software which would allow him to reverse-engineer and develop his own extentions and applications to it.
Here in Finland we bought old C-model F18 Hornets. When the first upgrade cycle came, the US told us of these new fancy secure ground-to-air datalinks and avionics for combat close formation flying they wanted to sell us. We just told them we had developed our own by then, thankyouverymuch. But that was because the platform was getting old and most of the stuff in there was already open knowledge with multiple nations having purchased them years ago. Also with old-gen mil-aircraft there are a lot of avionics standards which were developed and adhered to during the cold-war to easy manufacturing, lower cost and allow inter-service operations. These JSFs will probably have special new-gen custom avionics to do with flight and weapon control, targeting, radar, stealth, communications and electronic warfare that the US definately wants to keep wrappers on.
electromagnetic hypersensitivity syndrome and other bullshit.
People want to believe in this stuff cause it sounds dangerous. Advocacy groups get funding, lawyers make money, politicians can scare people. Who's gonna listen to a bunch of boring Danish statistics?
Even the WHO subscribes to the 'precautionary principle'. Forget about it - its all futile!
"Imagine you're landing on an aeroplane and the automatic pilot's working," he suggests. "If it divides by zero and the computer stops working - you're in big trouble. If your heart pacemaker divides by zero, you're dead."
This is computer programming ABC: you DONT allow undefined behavious to occur in your program! (especially if your doing MIL-STD Ada for avionics etc.) This guys 'method' is just a form of exception handling that any programmer with half-a-brain could implement.
Fighting the symptoms is futile. Just like we started out with open sewers until cleaning drinking water became too difficult. We had to go to the source and stop water pollution in the first place. That's what has to happen with spam. You can no longer distinguish between spam and genuine email at the point of delivery, but you can easily distinguish machines in your network which are a source of outgoing spam. In fact already most spam is being blocked by DNSBLs. But these are not concerted efforts and have problems being run by small private companies.
What we need is international collaboration. TLD authorities need to be held accountable for controlling their domain spaces. For this we need a new standard for the procedure of blocking domain ranges that are soliciting spammers that is both flexible and transparent. Then we can start to demand national authorities to implement such measures. Russia and the African countries aren't going to comply with some vague request by Europe and the US to curb their spammer infested networks unless there is a clear non-biased procedure for this that has been defined in an international agreement and which is backed by enforcement by credible organization such as WTO.
It's an ice desert here where polar bears have fled from because it was too cold. In fact its so cold that people write things like Linux just to get out of the country or invent mobile phones so that they can heat their brains with the radiation.
If you think your foreign policy sucks, well we don't have a foreign policy - we just agree with everybody. Our press and media is free in away - free to be utterly boring. And our country's economy and social well being are so strong that nobody really cares one way or the other anymore.
If only the Russians would attack us again so we could beat the hell out of somebody - sometimes its very therapeutic to have a fight...
PS: go to Sweden instead - they are very 'friendly' there...
Recently we have seen a flood of publicly available satellite imagery on the web and this
has greatly improved the possibilities of small NGO's and local communities to improve
their lives - who couldn't otherwise afford expensive geographic information services.
Unfortunately infrastucture projects such as roads, bridges, agricultural and water works
all need accurate elevation data rather than fancy looking satellite imagines. Areas with
no existing infrastucture could be provided for examaple with modern telecommunications
using low-cost radiolinks if the topography of the area was known well. Things like
irrigation and flood prevention could be planned by volunteers if such data was freely
available. Maps, aerial photos and satellites images get old very quickly and thus are a
waste of limited resources. Topographic information does not change in centuries and
would thus make a valuable one time investment for our global community.
Geographic information services (GIS) typically utilize a digital elevation model (DEM)
datasets which define a grid of elevation values over an area. On top of this one is then
able to lay down a map or image of any type using free publicly available software and
perform calculations in three dimentions typically involved in civil-engineering.
Currently the only publicly available global DEM is the GTOPO30 compiled during 1993-95
by an internation efford involving USGS, NASA and UNEP among others. GTOPO30 is a global
30-arc-second grid (rougly 1 kilometer squared) with a mean accuracy of about +-30 meters
in elevation but in many poor areas of the world much worse than this. This is way too
rough for most practical applications. More accurate datasets are commercial and
extremely expensive or simply impossible to obtain.
Much more accurate data should be available from numerous recently launched satellite
systems by government agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA) as well as commercial satellite vendors
(DigitalGlobe, Geoeye, Spot). If the right people would just talk to other right people,
the whole thing could be handled without exchange of huge monetary commitments. Selling
elevation data for these companies isn't a huge cash cow due to the longevity of the
datasets ones sold.
"It cost me AU$949. Since plugging it in, I have barely used my $3000 Windows desktop"
Pro: You have a choice of computers.
Con: Most people in the world don't have a telephone.
You don't get it, do you? This is/.! The home of the pinnacle of creation. Who cares about people who haven't got a telephone - they obviously didnt do well in life or simply chose to be born in the wrong country! They should get with the program, find a used PC among the scrap heaps we've charitably shipped to their countries and start making money producing open-source software.. eh, by providing support services for them. Then they can afford to buy the latest macs and ipods and deserve to join the rest of humanity here at/. where it's all happening! And who sais they don't have a choise of computers: they've got OLPC in all the candy colours !
Obesity leads to poor health which leads to diffuculty in concentration, stress, lower attention span etc. Also obese people are (statistically) less educated, with lower self-esteem etc. All of which correlate very well with the findings of this study. In otherwords obesity correlates well with doing badly in tests (IQ or any) for various reasons - it does not lower your IQ.
Any qualified sociologist could've made a fairly accurate hypothesis for the results of that study. But that's boring so people will want to see something in it...
Oh well..
Dr. Doh! (NIMNO)
National reseach Institute for the Mind Numblingly Obvious
I'm not really good at history, so I'm wondering if someone could explain why in 1966 the Americans had B-52 bombers flying over Spain carrying 4 nuclear bombs.
The B-52s were performing Airborne Nuclear Alert duty under the code-name "Chrome Dome" where bombers would loiter near points outside of the Soviet Union (see Dr. Strangelove).
During this program a mid-air collision between a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker aircraft occurred during aerial refueling over Palomares, Spain on the 17th of January, 1966.
Four megaton-range hydrogen bombs were lost. Two were recovered eventually fairly intact while the other two underwent a minor detonation of the conventional explosives that were an integral part of them. The safety fuses in them prevented a disastrous nuclear detonation. However dispersion of both plutonium and uranium material over several hundred hectares resulted in thousands of tons of contaminated radioactive soil having to be sent back to the USA. The USAF decided this was too expensive to risk again, and it ended that part of the airborne alert program.
There have been several reports of contamination remaining in the area in recent years and currently U.S and Spanish governments have agreed to investigate the need for further clean up, this time sharing the costs.
Interestingly the search efford for the missing bomb out at sea was performed using the Bayesian search theory. Eventually the bomb was recoved with the help of a local fisherman, who then claimed salvage rights from it under the high seas (usually a reward of a few percent of the actual value). But not before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had publicly stated a value of no less than two billion U.S. dollars for it. The Air Force settled out of court.
I wonder why Herbert never thought of having some Fremen just crash a few comets into the planet to at least provide some selected portion of it with water.
Because he didn't want for it to be boring like the Mars trilogy crap. He was a very intellegent author who wanted to create a realistic alternate universe to the extent very much like Tolkien did. Above all he was an ecologist who respected the wonders of nature and reality over the humanistic technobabble you get in most so-called 'scifi'. Human kind isn't destined for the starts - its still just a bunch of monkeys with or without the fancy toys. The Bene Gesserit saw this and seeked to direct it. They were horrified when they discoved how far the Fremen had taken the development from the Zensunni Wanderers...
(ie. you better read the series again...)
"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive."
- Frank Herbert, Dune
Slashdot Mirror
ie the mass, a piece of silicon, quartz, whatever in modern accelerometers, isn't considered 'a moving part' in engineering terms even if it bends or oscillates a bit.
Commercial avionics is basically 'military technology'. The wikipedia description is for a 'consumer sensor' that you could buy for your remote control toy car.
well I did't know what kazoo was either.
I'll address this again then.
The study says there is an 'increased risk', 'higher than was previously thought'. What they did, was find that more often than thought before people's cellphones were on during critical parts of flights. They also found that laptop wifi and bluetooth were emitting RF. All they actually did was log the spectrum from these emissions on some flights. That is all their research found.
Now, what they imply is that this is somehow more significantly dangerous then we previouly thought. My essay I think covered most of the things why this is not so dangerous.
However I want to stress here the fact that any potential emissions from consumer RF-devices in the cabin will have a hard time competing with all the structures and shielding between the device and the antenna outside the aircraft or inside in the avionics bay. And no such device can dream of competing the awesome power of the spectrum from a fairly common natural sources, such as static build-up and lightning, under which such avionics have to perform on a daily basis.
And if people are already leaving their cellphones and laptops on during flights by accident, where's the harm in allowing them to use them during flights in a controlled and tested environment. This might actually help people remember to turn them off more often during takeoffs and landings.
This "Cellphones in Airplanes" type of article appears periodically in /. and every time I have to rise from my grave to correct the false speculation about cellphones interfering with avionics.
Cellphones do not cause aircraft to crash and burn! There. Thank you.
Here's my longer explanation for those interested: Avionics ABC
Airlines offering the use of GSM cellphone services equip the cabin with a basestation similar to one used RF-secure buildings and underground facilities. It will handle all the calls within the cabin and connect to the phone network via satellite datalink. It's all compatible, safe and tested method that has been used for years now on business jets.
Hello blatant product advertisement!
This is NOT "extension to USB"! - this is a proprietary technology that has nothing to do with the USB standard.
USB devices were never meant to be shared this way. Just because someone made 'a switch' that manages to reproduce and route the data between two different host machines at the hardware level doesn't solve anything. You will still have a hopeless guagmire of compatibility issues due to conflicting host software and drivers. Its hopeless because USB devices and software were never meant to work this way. Just because they show it works occationally on one or two devices, doesn't mean it'l work on your devices and with your software for them.
Told you so! Haha!
You are so wrong.
You do not need a laptop to 'USB-charge'
You can pick up a USB Mains Charger for as little as 5 USD.
This is non-news! Microsoft finished updating W2k long time ago (last one after SP4 was SR1 in 2005). There have been numerous bits of software and updates from MS that have only worked with XP for years now! Why is it now suddenly news that some Vista specific 'software' isn't going to work with W2k!?! And guess what! Millions of people around the world continue to use it - because it does what it supposed to do, it works, with or without this latest 'software'! Unbelievable, isn't it!
As a workstation, W2k is stable, efficient and clean, all the major software vendors in the market continue to support it (Autodesk, NI, Adobe, Mathworks etc.) and the extra features that one might want off XP haven't for me personally justified the upgrade cycle, learning curve and bloat that come with it. Needless to say what I think of Vista.
And as for longevity of Sun's support policies, don't you people realize that Land Rover has even longer support policies and longer history of reliablity then unix! So maybe all you linux people should switch your servers to 'Pinkies'. Oh, what's that complaining I hear? It doesn't run the software you want to use! Well tought shit, get with the dogma, loosers!
All I can find is their list of publications and their 'Homeland Security' website. Apparently UM is very 'prepares' - or they've just made a bunch of lists with staff people's names on them.
Yes they are, passive radars by their idea, require enourmous antennas which can only be housed in ground platforms. And you are confusing terminology again - even if such a thing you described existed, the missile wouldn't be said to have "passive radar in it" - it would be called "indirect illumination homing missile" or something. And no such missile has been demonstrated which could track ground radar's illumination of a stealth aircraft. This is simply laws of physics. The little energy that a stealth aircraft would scatter of your illumination in the direction of the missile's receiving antenna's aperture is not enough to lock and and actively track it. You've better luck steering the missile via datalink from ground according to your ground based passive radar system (and such systems do exist!).
Haha, where do you get this stuff! "It's not easy to do", "Cause they keep 'moving'"! As soon as you turn on your 'illuminating' ground stations they will be wiped out. Have you noticed that like in the last wars, Iraq I, Balkans and Iraq II the first thing that was wiped out was the enemy's air defences. That is anything that was turned on or not hidden in a cave. What was left were the remnants that threatened not the overall operation.
You are jumbling terminology of which you have no practical experience of. A phased array is an antenna with 2 or more radiating elements fed in the appropriate phase for desired radiation pattern. What you are confusing this is the way some phased arrays are fed with multiple tranceivers whose phasing relationship can be altered in software. This allows for a dynamic radiation pattern etc. Your 'multi-tracking' feature can be implemented by any number of ways. And by 'stereoscopic' radar you probably mean 3D-radar which requires a bit more than just 'a phased array'. The 'many frequencies simultaniously' is a feature of the tranceiver not the antenna. Any number of antenna types can be made broadband for this purpose.
So please, stick to mathematics which I'm sure you know more about then me, while I, a military avionics technician, avionics teacher and electronic warfare NCO, perhaps know something more about those subjects.
And with the life-span-cost of three F-16's one can man and equip a small army which can dig-in and hold an area indefinately against a superior force. Its all relative to what you want to do. As I pointed the F16s wont be replaced by JSFs for some time, indeed perhaps never because of the cost factor. However they are capable of missions, against a variety of enemies, which the three F16s arent nearly as good for. Don't know what superpower you think you mean to have a war in the future, but if y
I'm sorry but I have to keep correcting your ignorance. You cannot install passive radar systems in fighter aircraft. Passive radar systems are huge and heavy and most are composed of multiple geographicly spaced platforms. Again your use of the term phased array is naive. A phased array is merely a trivial way of feeding antenna elements - there are millions of types of antennas which are phased arrays. The idea of phased array has nothing whatsoever to do with countering stealth per-se.
Nor has anyone claimed, righly so, that stealth makes aircraft undetectable. They merely reduce the radar cross section to a certain extent - and such reduction is indeed variable upon frequency as you pointed out. However VHF-radars, which have been used to detect stealth aircraft are slow, innaccurate and highpower (indeed because of the long wavelenght) and thus vulnerable to anti-radiation missiles and other countermeasures. They are ancient technology. The incident in the Balkan war was an exception that proves the rule. The enemy was incapable of threathing the air-supremacy of NATO and its operations, for all aircraft with or without stealth, because of the wide use of electronic warfare and planning of air-corridors. Stealth merely allows one to use such air-corridores more effectively.
As for Soyuz, nobody is suggesting that we should abandon the wheel because JSF is going to replace all our technology. We are going to see aircraft such as F16s, F18s, B52s flying well into the next decade and beyong because they are useful and econmical platforms. The JSF offers new capabilities, in addition to all the tech we have now and will only be produced in quantity that is required to meet these new special missions.
Sorry I have not the time to wade through such rubbish. I only do this stuff for a living. I suggest you get some more reliable sources - start with JANE's literature on the subject.EOR (End-of-rant)
This is not just about source code. In a system like that software, hardware and system integration are inseparable. You either give no information or have to give it all. These are the crown jewels of the platform. Revealing them also reveals any number of critical points for interested adversaries: thrust and manoeuvrability limits, reaction times, counter-measure schemes and logic, EMC-characteristics etc. all of which can be used to find weaknesses and design weapon systems to be more effective against it.
Also, since the UK is only conributing 10% of the development costs, its no wonder the US isnt keen sharing. Usually with mil-tech you only give a bad, incomplete user manual to the client so he can barely operate the thing and then wait for him to pay more for extra features that are already implemented by disabled in software or simply undocumented. You never ever allow the client to have exact specs, schematics or software which would allow him to reverse-engineer and develop his own extentions and applications to it.
Here in Finland we bought old C-model F18 Hornets. When the first upgrade cycle came, the US told us of these new fancy secure ground-to-air datalinks and avionics for combat close formation flying they wanted to sell us. We just told them we had developed our own by then, thankyouverymuch. But that was because the platform was getting old and most of the stuff in there was already open knowledge with multiple nations having purchased them years ago. Also with old-gen mil-aircraft there are a lot of avionics standards which were developed and adhered to during the cold-war to easy manufacturing, lower cost and allow inter-service operations. These JSFs will probably have special new-gen custom avionics to do with flight and weapon control, targeting, radar, stealth, communications and electronic warfare that the US definately wants to keep wrappers on.
What have you done! Thousends of /. geeks will have clicked on that link and have had to change their pants! :P
This is exactly what I meant - now we need the male version - as seen in THX-1138...
and other bullshit.
People want to believe in this stuff cause it sounds dangerous. Advocacy groups get funding, lawyers make money, politicians can scare people. Who's gonna listen to a bunch of boring Danish statistics?
Even the WHO subscribes to the 'precautionary principle'. Forget about it - its all futile!
Am I the only one with visions of attachments like these developing to the extreme. The sex industry only has to copy THX-1138 and make millions!
This is computer programming ABC: you DONT allow undefined behavious to occur in your program! (especially if your doing MIL-STD Ada for avionics etc.) This guys 'method' is just a form of exception handling that any programmer with half-a-brain could implement.
Fighting the symptoms is futile. Just like we started out with open sewers until cleaning drinking water became too difficult. We had to go to the source and stop water pollution in the first place. That's what has to happen with spam. You can no longer distinguish between spam and genuine email at the point of delivery, but you can easily distinguish machines in your network which are a source of outgoing spam. In fact already most spam is being blocked by DNSBLs. But these are not concerted efforts and have problems being run by small private companies.
What we need is international collaboration. TLD authorities need to be held accountable for controlling their domain spaces. For this we need a new standard for the procedure of blocking domain ranges that are soliciting spammers that is both flexible and transparent. Then we can start to demand national authorities to implement such measures. Russia and the African countries aren't going to comply with some vague request by Europe and the US to curb their spammer infested networks unless there is a clear non-biased procedure for this that has been defined in an international agreement and which is backed by enforcement by credible organization such as WTO.
The news is, the terrorists have already won.
how to get rich:
(also: waste taxpayers money, get employees killed, lose the war etc.)
See the documentary
Source: iraqforsale.org
Repeat a few tunes from Batman? ha!
The Lyrebird of Australia is practically a living tape recorder (<= google video)
Finland Sucks!
Don't come to Finland
It's an ice desert here where polar bears have fled from because it was too cold. In fact its so cold that people write things like Linux just to get out of the country or invent mobile phones so that they can heat their brains with the radiation.
If you think your foreign policy sucks, well we don't have a foreign policy - we just agree with everybody. Our press and media is free in away - free to be utterly boring. And our country's economy and social well being are so strong that nobody really cares one way or the other anymore.
If only the Russians would attack us again so we could beat the hell out of somebody - sometimes its very therapeutic to have a fight...
PS: go to Sweden instead - they are very 'friendly' there...
Dream a little...
Recently we have seen a flood of publicly available satellite imagery on the web and this has greatly improved the possibilities of small NGO's and local communities to improve their lives - who couldn't otherwise afford expensive geographic information services. Unfortunately infrastucture projects such as roads, bridges, agricultural and water works all need accurate elevation data rather than fancy looking satellite imagines. Areas with no existing infrastucture could be provided for examaple with modern telecommunications using low-cost radiolinks if the topography of the area was known well. Things like irrigation and flood prevention could be planned by volunteers if such data was freely available. Maps, aerial photos and satellites images get old very quickly and thus are a waste of limited resources. Topographic information does not change in centuries and would thus make a valuable one time investment for our global community.
Geographic information services (GIS) typically utilize a digital elevation model (DEM) datasets which define a grid of elevation values over an area. On top of this one is then able to lay down a map or image of any type using free publicly available software and perform calculations in three dimentions typically involved in civil-engineering. Currently the only publicly available global DEM is the GTOPO30 compiled during 1993-95 by an internation efford involving USGS, NASA and UNEP among others. GTOPO30 is a global 30-arc-second grid (rougly 1 kilometer squared) with a mean accuracy of about +-30 meters in elevation but in many poor areas of the world much worse than this. This is way too rough for most practical applications. More accurate datasets are commercial and extremely expensive or simply impossible to obtain.
Much more accurate data should be available from numerous recently launched satellite systems by government agencies (NASA, ESA, JAXA) as well as commercial satellite vendors (DigitalGlobe, Geoeye, Spot). If the right people would just talk to other right people, the whole thing could be handled without exchange of huge monetary commitments. Selling elevation data for these companies isn't a huge cash cow due to the longevity of the datasets ones sold.
USGS hosted GTOPO30:o po30.html
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/gt
USGS Full specification of GTOPO30:A DME.html
http://edc.usgs.gov/products/elevation/gtopo30/RE
Sincerely
Miikka Raninen
"It cost me AU$949. Since plugging it in, I have barely used my $3000 Windows desktop"
Pro: You have a choice of computers.
Con: Most people in the world don't have a telephone.
You don't get it, do you? This is /.! The home of the pinnacle of creation. Who cares about people who haven't got a telephone - they obviously didnt do well in life or simply chose to be born in the wrong country! They should get with the program, find a used PC among the scrap heaps we've charitably shipped to their countries and start making money producing open-source software.. eh, by providing support services for them. Then they can afford to buy the latest macs and ipods and deserve to join the rest of humanity here at /. where it's all happening! And who sais they don't have a choise of computers: they've got OLPC in all the candy colours !
Obesity leads to poor health which leads to diffuculty in concentration, stress, lower attention span etc. Also obese people are (statistically) less educated, with lower self-esteem etc. All of which correlate very well with the findings of this study. In otherwords obesity correlates well with doing badly in tests (IQ or any) for various reasons - it does not lower your IQ.
Any qualified sociologist could've made a fairly accurate hypothesis for the results of that study. But that's boring so people will want to see something in it ...
Oh well..
Dr. Doh! (NIMNO)
National reseach Institute for the Mind Numblingly Obvious
The B-52s were performing Airborne Nuclear Alert duty under the code-name "Chrome Dome" where bombers would loiter near points outside of the Soviet Union (see Dr. Strangelove).
During this program a mid-air collision between a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker aircraft occurred during aerial refueling over Palomares, Spain on the 17th of January, 1966.
Four megaton-range hydrogen bombs were lost. Two were recovered eventually fairly intact while the other two underwent a minor detonation of the conventional explosives that were an integral part of them. The safety fuses in them prevented a disastrous nuclear detonation. However dispersion of both plutonium and uranium material over several hundred hectares resulted in thousands of tons of contaminated radioactive soil having to be sent back to the USA. The USAF decided this was too expensive to risk again, and it ended that part of the airborne alert program.
There have been several reports of contamination remaining in the area in recent years and currently U.S and Spanish governments have agreed to investigate the need for further clean up, this time sharing the costs.
Interestingly the search efford for the missing bomb out at sea was performed using the Bayesian search theory. Eventually the bomb was recoved with the help of a local fisherman, who then claimed salvage rights from it under the high seas (usually a reward of a few percent of the actual value). But not before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had publicly stated a value of no less than two billion U.S. dollars for it. The Air Force settled out of court.
Because he didn't want for it to be boring like the Mars trilogy crap. He was a very intellegent author who wanted to create a realistic alternate universe to the extent very much like Tolkien did. Above all he was an ecologist who respected the wonders of nature and reality over the humanistic technobabble you get in most so-called 'scifi'. Human kind isn't destined for the starts - its still just a bunch of monkeys with or without the fancy toys. The Bene Gesserit saw this and seeked to direct it. They were horrified when they discoved how far the Fremen had taken the development from the Zensunni Wanderers...
(ie. you better read the series again...)
"Beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive."
- Frank Herbert, Dune