Compare it to sending people in a evacuated tube at multiple times the speed of sound where any defect could cause them to crash into the walls and burst into flames.
Hah! Shows what you know. There are no flames in a VACUUM (at least, not for long, anyway) =P
Sigh...I rather suspect you are trolling, but here goes, anyway.
You guys always point to reality...as a defense for your delirious mental illness about space. Doesn't work that way.
Ummm...yeah. What do you want people to point to instead? The Starship Enterprise? That's kind of the the point. You say that ${futuristicConcept} can't be done because of insurmountable technical obstacles. Other people point to ${formerFuturisticConceptThatIsNowReality} as a counter-example of something once thought impossible, but now taken for granted. For years, people said it was impossible to fly in a heavier-than-air, powered aircraft...then our friends Wilbur and Orville (or Glen Curtiss, depending upon who's revisionist history you choose to subscribe) did it. People thought that rockets couldn't "fly" in a vacuum because there was "nothing to push against." Then the Russians launched Sputnik. All (or at least "many") experts said we will never exceed the speed of sound...then Gen. Yeager did it. The point of all of these examples is that people thought a number of various things were impossible...until someone figured out a way to get around the obstacles that people thought were "insurmountable." Griping that pointing "to reality" to argue that things are only impossible until someone accomplishes those things is, in fact, the way it works.
Those things were built because they were able to build them...
True statement is true, yes. Your point?
What you are blatantly ignoring is that people didn't think those things were possible -- exactly as you don't think various things are possible now. The problem wasn't that things were intrinsically impossible; it's that people were approaching the problem from pre-conceived notions based upon the limitations of existing technology. In what way are the things you currently say are impossible merely limited by our current understanding of physics? This may come as a shock to you, but...(wait for it)...we don't know EVERYTHING yet. Therefore, we can't predict what "impossible" things will become possible when some "Eureka!!!" moment shows that something we all thought we understood gets shattered wide open by a new discovery. When we get that insight, things that we thought were impossible might suddenly become trivial.
We've had a cooler-than-average summer in Anchorage, where I live. Nevertheless, there have been a couple of warm days, and on one of them, the sidestand on my motorcycle melted into the asphalt in my driveway, leaving a one inch deep by one inch wide by two inch long divot:/ However, I wouldn't point to that single incidence as proof that temperatures this summer were warmer than average (since I know they aren't, based upon the fact that I've still got the insulated lining in my motorcycle jacket, and I'm still wearing the Thinsulate lined gloves rather than the vented gloves, like I normally use this time of year). Even during a cooler-than-average summer, you can still have a couple of spectacular outliers.
Great. Which war are we currently in? The "War on Drugs?" The "War on Terror?" I was under impression that the war in Iraq was over, and offhand, I'm not entirely sure if Afghanistan was officially declared a war...
the basis for your opinion, a common invalid opinion, unfortunately, is that just because the government has this power, something is wrong. except that the government, any government, will always have this power. so that is why your opinion is invalid
Ummm...no.
The government is claiming the power to seize and control communications facilities. Answer this one question for me, in a way that doesn't require me to abandon common sense, and I'll concede your point: for what purpose would the government require this ability if it never had any intention of doing so? The problem is, as Lord Byron stated once, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Another quote that might be relevant: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Taken together, the path to tyranny lies by ceding our rights and freedoms to the government under the naive assumption that our government will only usurp those rights when it has a Really Good Reason (tm) to do so. History suggests otherwise, however. *Cough* Kim Dotcom *cough*
If you think the D's are any less intrusive, any less offensive or any less evil than the R's, then you really haven't been paying attention for the last four years. Obama has only expanded upon the crap that Bush started.
The only substantial difference between D's and R's is the method they want to use to control you. D's want to control you financially so they can take care of everyone; R's want to dictate your morals. Neither is acceptable to a free man.
So....how's that "Hope and Change" working out for you?
Well...I'm still "hoping" things will "change." But since both major political parties seem to be trying to one-up each other on the fascist dictator scale, I'm not holding my breath.
This boils it down to one very important decision: If you could only use --A SINGLE ONE-- of those location services, which one would give you the best possible chance at landing that $4.5 million drone the safest way possible, possibly hundreds of miles away?
IME, there is not a single, static answer to that question. You are building a drone for use in combat. Therefore, it is plausible that either 1) you have a system malfunction or 2) you are under electronic attack. In airliners, you tend not to have two or more independent systems fail simultaneously, therefore redundant systems often operate on a voting system: if two agree, and a third is outside the error bounds, then discard all data from that third system. If you are in combat, and both of your radio navigation systems start showing wide discrepancies with INS (TACAN is jammed and GPS is working, but showing a significantly different position than INS) then it is probably safe to say that it is not a systems failure but an attack. Once you have made that determination, then I would strongly disagree that it is unsafe to rely on "'internally' calculated values." Rather, if it is probable that you are under a jamming/spoofing attack, internally calculated values are almost certainly the *only* values you can trust.
Also, like I said, a compass is one of the most reliable navigation instruments ever devised. If ten minutes ago, you were at a known-good waypoint, 120 miles from your base, and now GPS says you are at the initial approach fix for landing, then there is no way you are back at base unless your drone is capable of supersonic flight -- that's what I mean by "sanity checking." If at time "A" you know that you were at waypoint "B", then does it make any kind of logical sense that just a few minutes later, you are very, very far away from that checkpoint (with "very, very far" being defined by the capabilities of the aircraft -- "very, very far" for an SR-71 at cruise is significantly different than "very, very far" for a quadcopter, for example)? Once you have determined that your navigation systems are suspect, fail back to the one most likely to be correct. Which one gives a result that is within a reasonable distance from your last known good point? Which direction does the compass tell you will return you to base from the last known good point? Do those agree? Cool -- turn to that heading and get the flock out of Dodge.
Good points, and you are correct that INS has a cumulative error that can eventually lead you way, way off target. However, that was why I mentioned the last known good way point. If you want to slowly lead the drone off-target by jamming and spoofing signals, that will take time. So, what if you set up your mission profile so that a drone is never on-target long enough for the cumulative error to reach a degree of significance? Jamming and spoofing will be a localized phenomenon, so you could start a timer as soon as you start detecting interference on your radio navigation signals. Also cross-check your GPS and INS with a compass -- it's one of the simplest, and therefore most reliable -- navigation instruments ever devised. If your INS is showing you off-course, and your GPS is telling you that you need to turn 40 degrees west to return to base, but the compass shows that you actually need to turn 130 degrees east to return to base (based upon your last known-good position and possible deviation based upon time-on-target), then trust the compass until you are clear of the jamming and can rely on radio navigation again.
Additionally, while I agree that the more redundant navigation systems you build, the less payload you can carry, have you looked at what consumer-grade sensors are available lately? I've bought a number of sensors (temperature, pressure, etc.) for my Arduino, and most of them are 1 inch square PCBs with less than a half-dozen SMT components and one or two chips -- weight is *maybe* an ounce. I don't think I've bought a compass sensor yet, but it looks to be the same size. So no, you don't want to just add system after system after system to a drone -- especially some of the smaller, hand-launched drones -- but I daresay it is entirely plausible to build a system that offers sufficient redundancy without overly impacting payload.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but JFK, Jr. was a marginally trained, marginally experienced pilot with way too complex an airplane for his skill level, flying a difficult route (relatively speaking) in poor weather and, IIRC, while suffering a medical condition (wasn't his ankle broken or something?). Over water, at night, with low ceilings and poor visibility with very little night or bad weather experience is an accident waiting to happen...and it did.
I don't mean to be derogatory, so please don't take it that way, but your question reminds of that scene in "The Net" where the bad guys hack the pilot's navigation system, and even though the weather is severe clear, the pilot flies his airplane into the chimney of a factory. If you are flying IFR (in bad weather, where you can't see obstacles outside in time to avoid them), you aren't going to have a single system of navigation, and you will be comparing those nav systems against each other. In an airliner, that means pilotage, GPS and VOR/DME at a bare minimum, possibly INS as well. There's also a really good chance that anyone flying IFR will be under radar surveillance and guidance from air traffic control. If you are flying in good weather, spoofed GPS isn't going to fly your airplane into an obstacle unless you are asleep at the wheel because you can see what's outside.
Keep in mind that this is/. There is a greater-than-average collection of people who do computer security day-in and day-out here. I'm not saying that the/. collective is necessarily brighter than those tasked with building and maintaining military drones, but, well, here's an anecdote for you: I was talking to an Army guy around Christmas who was describing what he does to get computer systems "functional" for his squad after the techies send them new desktops and/or laptops. If someone in my organization did the things he says he did, I'd make it my mission in life to get him fired for violating our security policies. Young, inexperienced, well-meaning guy with some degree of computer skills but no real-world experience with computer security + overly restrictive security policies = disabled security policies. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this happens with drones, too.
Point being: not everyone is as security-conscious as those of us who do computer security for a living and have done so for long enough to understand the "why" as well as the "how." Consequently, some things that are "duh" to us might not even occur to a guy in the field who just graduated from high-school six months ago and is now trying to get a drone functional before his squad marches into a potential firefight.
I pretty much agree with everything you said above (well-written and insightful, IMHO, and I absolutely agree with your conclusion). However, one part doesn't quite make sense to me:
The full Iranian claim was that they jammed all of the communications to the drone and then spoofed GPS. Aka, there were multiple navigation sources, and it lost them.
Okay, I don't design, build, fly or repair military drones (or even civilian ones...yet). I am, however, a fixed-wing pilot in my off-hours. In civilian airplanes, we use multiple navigation methods too, and I would presume that many of these navigation systems are applicable to drones as well as Cessnas. For example, it's probably safe to assume that drones use GPS just like I do. Military drones probably also use TACAN, which essentially is just the military equivalent of civilian VOR/DME (navigation using fixed, ground-based radio stations). Either of those systems are susceptible to attack as you've described above. However, larger civilian airplanes, like business jets and airliners, have also used a navigation system called INS, or "Inertial Navigation System," which uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to compute the moral equivalent of dead reckoning ("it's been 23 minutes since I passed my last waypoint, so with an estimated speed of 110 knots, that means I should be reaching my next waypoint in five...four...three...two...one...turn left to heading 070 degrees and descend to 2500 feet MSL..."). INS should be pretty much immune to spoofing or jamming of radio signals, since it is completely internal. Therefore, I would expect that INS should be more than capable of providing a sanity check and fail-over against GPS or TACAN radio navigation. Even better, install multiple INS systems, and if they all agree within a sane margin of error, while your radio navigation systems are either jammed or showing that you are a hundred miles away from your computed location and/or your most recent known-good position, then assume your navigation signals are being attacked and fail-over to INS until/unless you reach a point where all navigation systems agree again.
Apparently, I'd better not quit my day job to become a comedian...
Incidentally, I did enjoy the short story in your original link -- had a similar feel to some of Arthur C. Clark's short stories, I thought. Well done, sir!
...and I don't see any space for noticeable improvement.
Perhaps that is because you are not a visionary? I guarantee you that eventually someone will out-Google Google.
If I had a dollar for every time I saw something and could see no way to improve upon it -- until someone else improved upon it -- I'd be able to quit my job and retire in the Bahamas (okay, that's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point).
Slashdot Mirror
...things get much more awkward when you want to build a giant tube across an ocean.
Yep. *cough* tectonic plates *cough* vacuum tunnels *cough*
...enough [money] to buy each human being currently in the USA a midrange bizjet.
Oooh! Then I choose option "B." I've always wanted my own Lear Jet! Wait...do I have to pay for the fuel for it, or is that included?
Compare it to sending people in a evacuated tube at multiple times the speed of sound where any defect could cause them to crash into the walls and burst into flames.
Hah! Shows what you know. There are no flames in a VACUUM (at least, not for long, anyway) =P
You guys always point to reality...as a defense for your delirious mental illness about space. Doesn't work that way.
Ummm...yeah. What do you want people to point to instead? The Starship Enterprise? That's kind of the the point. You say that ${futuristicConcept} can't be done because of insurmountable technical obstacles. Other people point to ${formerFuturisticConceptThatIsNowReality} as a counter-example of something once thought impossible, but now taken for granted. For years, people said it was impossible to fly in a heavier-than-air, powered aircraft...then our friends Wilbur and Orville (or Glen Curtiss, depending upon who's revisionist history you choose to subscribe) did it. People thought that rockets couldn't "fly" in a vacuum because there was "nothing to push against." Then the Russians launched Sputnik. All (or at least "many") experts said we will never exceed the speed of sound...then Gen. Yeager did it. The point of all of these examples is that people thought a number of various things were impossible...until someone figured out a way to get around the obstacles that people thought were "insurmountable." Griping that pointing "to reality" to argue that things are only impossible until someone accomplishes those things is, in fact, the way it works.
Those things were built because they were able to build them...
True statement is true, yes. Your point?
What you are blatantly ignoring is that people didn't think those things were possible -- exactly as you don't think various things are possible now. The problem wasn't that things were intrinsically impossible; it's that people were approaching the problem from pre-conceived notions based upon the limitations of existing technology. In what way are the things you currently say are impossible merely limited by our current understanding of physics? This may come as a shock to you, but...(wait for it)...we don't know EVERYTHING yet. Therefore, we can't predict what "impossible" things will become possible when some "Eureka!!!" moment shows that something we all thought we understood gets shattered wide open by a new discovery. When we get that insight, things that we thought were impossible might suddenly become trivial.
Excellent observation, good sir. In fact, perhaps we could take things one step further and rename Pluto to Grumpy...or Sleepy...or perhaps Dopey?
We've had a cooler-than-average summer in Anchorage, where I live. Nevertheless, there have been a couple of warm days, and on one of them, the sidestand on my motorcycle melted into the asphalt in my driveway, leaving a one inch deep by one inch wide by two inch long divot :/ However, I wouldn't point to that single incidence as proof that temperatures this summer were warmer than average (since I know they aren't, based upon the fact that I've still got the insulated lining in my motorcycle jacket, and I'm still wearing the Thinsulate lined gloves rather than the vented gloves, like I normally use this time of year). Even during a cooler-than-average summer, you can still have a couple of spectacular outliers.
Quartering laws are legal when at war.
Great. Which war are we currently in? The "War on Drugs?" The "War on Terror?" I was under impression that the war in Iraq was over, and offhand, I'm not entirely sure if Afghanistan was officially declared a war...
the basis for your opinion, a common invalid opinion, unfortunately, is that just because the government has this power, something is wrong. except that the government, any government, will always have this power. so that is why your opinion is invalid
Ummm...no.
The government is claiming the power to seize and control communications facilities. Answer this one question for me, in a way that doesn't require me to abandon common sense, and I'll concede your point: for what purpose would the government require this ability if it never had any intention of doing so? The problem is, as Lord Byron stated once, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Another quote that might be relevant: "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Taken together, the path to tyranny lies by ceding our rights and freedoms to the government under the naive assumption that our government will only usurp those rights when it has a Really Good Reason (tm) to do so. History suggests otherwise, however. *Cough* Kim Dotcom *cough*
If you think the D's are any less intrusive, any less offensive or any less evil than the R's, then you really haven't been paying attention for the last four years. Obama has only expanded upon the crap that Bush started.
The only substantial difference between D's and R's is the method they want to use to control you. D's want to control you financially so they can take care of everyone; R's want to dictate your morals. Neither is acceptable to a free man.
So....how's that "Hope and Change" working out for you?
Well...I'm still "hoping" things will "change." But since both major political parties seem to be trying to one-up each other on the fascist dictator scale, I'm not holding my breath.
He's a PhD and expert in a technical field who is sharing his expertise in that field, and you, Mr. Coward, are asking what value he brings to /.?
This boils it down to one very important decision: If you could only use --A SINGLE ONE-- of those location services, which one would give you the best possible chance at landing that $4.5 million drone the safest way possible, possibly hundreds of miles away?
IME, there is not a single, static answer to that question. You are building a drone for use in combat. Therefore, it is plausible that either 1) you have a system malfunction or 2) you are under electronic attack. In airliners, you tend not to have two or more independent systems fail simultaneously, therefore redundant systems often operate on a voting system: if two agree, and a third is outside the error bounds, then discard all data from that third system. If you are in combat, and both of your radio navigation systems start showing wide discrepancies with INS (TACAN is jammed and GPS is working, but showing a significantly different position than INS) then it is probably safe to say that it is not a systems failure but an attack. Once you have made that determination, then I would strongly disagree that it is unsafe to rely on "'internally' calculated values." Rather, if it is probable that you are under a jamming/spoofing attack, internally calculated values are almost certainly the *only* values you can trust.
Also, like I said, a compass is one of the most reliable navigation instruments ever devised. If ten minutes ago, you were at a known-good waypoint, 120 miles from your base, and now GPS says you are at the initial approach fix for landing, then there is no way you are back at base unless your drone is capable of supersonic flight -- that's what I mean by "sanity checking." If at time "A" you know that you were at waypoint "B", then does it make any kind of logical sense that just a few minutes later, you are very, very far away from that checkpoint (with "very, very far" being defined by the capabilities of the aircraft -- "very, very far" for an SR-71 at cruise is significantly different than "very, very far" for a quadcopter, for example)? Once you have determined that your navigation systems are suspect, fail back to the one most likely to be correct. Which one gives a result that is within a reasonable distance from your last known good point? Which direction does the compass tell you will return you to base from the last known good point? Do those agree? Cool -- turn to that heading and get the flock out of Dodge.
Good points, and you are correct that INS has a cumulative error that can eventually lead you way, way off target. However, that was why I mentioned the last known good way point. If you want to slowly lead the drone off-target by jamming and spoofing signals, that will take time. So, what if you set up your mission profile so that a drone is never on-target long enough for the cumulative error to reach a degree of significance? Jamming and spoofing will be a localized phenomenon, so you could start a timer as soon as you start detecting interference on your radio navigation signals. Also cross-check your GPS and INS with a compass -- it's one of the simplest, and therefore most reliable -- navigation instruments ever devised. If your INS is showing you off-course, and your GPS is telling you that you need to turn 40 degrees west to return to base, but the compass shows that you actually need to turn 130 degrees east to return to base (based upon your last known-good position and possible deviation based upon time-on-target), then trust the compass until you are clear of the jamming and can rely on radio navigation again.
Additionally, while I agree that the more redundant navigation systems you build, the less payload you can carry, have you looked at what consumer-grade sensors are available lately? I've bought a number of sensors (temperature, pressure, etc.) for my Arduino, and most of them are 1 inch square PCBs with less than a half-dozen SMT components and one or two chips -- weight is *maybe* an ounce. I don't think I've bought a compass sensor yet, but it looks to be the same size. So no, you don't want to just add system after system after system to a drone -- especially some of the smaller, hand-launched drones -- but I daresay it is entirely plausible to build a system that offers sufficient redundancy without overly impacting payload.
What if you spoof the GPS signal and jam the C^2 channel as well?
Not to speak ill of the dead, but JFK, Jr. was a marginally trained, marginally experienced pilot with way too complex an airplane for his skill level, flying a difficult route (relatively speaking) in poor weather and, IIRC, while suffering a medical condition (wasn't his ankle broken or something?). Over water, at night, with low ceilings and poor visibility with very little night or bad weather experience is an accident waiting to happen...and it did.
No.
I don't mean to be derogatory, so please don't take it that way, but your question reminds of that scene in "The Net" where the bad guys hack the pilot's navigation system, and even though the weather is severe clear, the pilot flies his airplane into the chimney of a factory. If you are flying IFR (in bad weather, where you can't see obstacles outside in time to avoid them), you aren't going to have a single system of navigation, and you will be comparing those nav systems against each other. In an airliner, that means pilotage, GPS and VOR/DME at a bare minimum, possibly INS as well. There's also a really good chance that anyone flying IFR will be under radar surveillance and guidance from air traffic control. If you are flying in good weather, spoofed GPS isn't going to fly your airplane into an obstacle unless you are asleep at the wheel because you can see what's outside.
This is plane wrong.
ROFL! Oh...you mean that wasn't supposed to be a pun? :P
^^^This^^^
/. There is a greater-than-average collection of people who do computer security day-in and day-out here. I'm not saying that the /. collective is necessarily brighter than those tasked with building and maintaining military drones, but, well, here's an anecdote for you: I was talking to an Army guy around Christmas who was describing what he does to get computer systems "functional" for his squad after the techies send them new desktops and/or laptops. If someone in my organization did the things he says he did, I'd make it my mission in life to get him fired for violating our security policies. Young, inexperienced, well-meaning guy with some degree of computer skills but no real-world experience with computer security + overly restrictive security policies = disabled security policies. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that this happens with drones, too.
Keep in mind that this is
Point being: not everyone is as security-conscious as those of us who do computer security for a living and have done so for long enough to understand the "why" as well as the "how." Consequently, some things that are "duh" to us might not even occur to a guy in the field who just graduated from high-school six months ago and is now trying to get a drone functional before his squad marches into a potential firefight.
The full Iranian claim was that they jammed all of the communications to the drone and then spoofed GPS. Aka, there were multiple navigation sources, and it lost them.
Okay, I don't design, build, fly or repair military drones (or even civilian ones...yet). I am, however, a fixed-wing pilot in my off-hours. In civilian airplanes, we use multiple navigation methods too, and I would presume that many of these navigation systems are applicable to drones as well as Cessnas. For example, it's probably safe to assume that drones use GPS just like I do. Military drones probably also use TACAN, which essentially is just the military equivalent of civilian VOR/DME (navigation using fixed, ground-based radio stations). Either of those systems are susceptible to attack as you've described above. However, larger civilian airplanes, like business jets and airliners, have also used a navigation system called INS, or "Inertial Navigation System," which uses accelerometers and gyroscopes to compute the moral equivalent of dead reckoning ("it's been 23 minutes since I passed my last waypoint, so with an estimated speed of 110 knots, that means I should be reaching my next waypoint in five...four...three...two...one...turn left to heading 070 degrees and descend to 2500 feet MSL..."). INS should be pretty much immune to spoofing or jamming of radio signals, since it is completely internal. Therefore, I would expect that INS should be more than capable of providing a sanity check and fail-over against GPS or TACAN radio navigation. Even better, install multiple INS systems, and if they all agree within a sane margin of error, while your radio navigation systems are either jammed or showing that you are a hundred miles away from your computed location and/or your most recent known-good position, then assume your navigation signals are being attacked and fail-over to INS until/unless you reach a point where all navigation systems agree again.
People that don't have much can become really creative with what they do have.
For some reason, that makes me think of the Sardaukar or the Fremen.
Apparently, I'd better not quit my day job to become a comedian...
Incidentally, I did enjoy the short story in your original link -- had a similar feel to some of Arthur C. Clark's short stories, I thought. Well done, sir!
Moderated "Troll?" Really? I would have moderated him "Insightful" myself...
Doesn't Fender already have a trademark on that term? :P
Even nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
Now get off my lawn!
...and I don't see any space for noticeable improvement.
Perhaps that is because you are not a visionary? I guarantee you that eventually someone will out-Google Google.
If I had a dollar for every time I saw something and could see no way to improve upon it -- until someone else improved upon it -- I'd be able to quit my job and retire in the Bahamas (okay, that's probably a bit of an exaggeration, but you get my point).