It could be for submarines that operate at shallower depths, and so they can use higher frequencies. Perhaps the antenna is buried, and what we are seeing is the disturbance on the surface?
More likely, though, is that these patterns are being used to calibrate satellites. A nice, easy to spot image in the middle of a sparsely populated desert? I would not be surprised if the US also had a few of these things lying around.
If it's not going to be profitable for twenty years, why not wait twenty years and develop it then?
Sorry, perhaps I should be more clear: some technologies require twenty years of development before they become profitable. If nobody is working on those technologies, they will never become profitable at all.
Gene sequencing systems come to mind, which is why I had mentioned them in my original post. The first small-scale gene sequencing technology only became feasible in 1979, and sequencing complete gnomes only became possible in 1995. Now it is 2011, and gene sequencing is only somewhat profitable and only as a very restricted form of the technology (full genome sequencing is very expensive and not very useful). Private industry tends to shy away from research that requires such long periods of time to become profitable, especially when that research is so expensive.
Imagine trying to build an iPhone in 1990. Sure, the first clunky models would be kind of cool even though they required you to drag a half-ton trailer around with you, but would also be utterly pointless until technology had improved enough in other areas to eliminate that half-ton truck.
How do you think technologies improve? Someone has to sit down and do the research, and that costs money. It is easy to assume that because profitable incremental improvements in computer technologies have led to substantial innovations that the same must be true in other fields, but that is not always the case. If the incremental steps are not profitable on their own, why would any for-profit operation undertake them?
The first gene sequencing technology was enormously expensive to use, and subsequent developments would not have been possible without it. Not every field is abstract like computer science, and this is not some Ayn Rand fantasy -- sometimes a large up-front cost is needed to pay for innovation, and private industry may be reluctant to pay for technologies that might become profitable 20 years down the road.
Yum is still pretty bad (disclaimer: I cannot get away from Fedora and I was once a Red Hat employee). Installing packages in a user's home directory is poorly supported (if you can even call it "support"), and removed packages that are not needed (e.g. libraries that are not dependencies of any other package and that do not need to be on the system) is still a giant pain. It is certainly better than plain RPM, and it beats the urpm system we saw in Mandrake/Mandriva, but there is a lot of work that will need to be done before we can be proud of it.
Some prosecutors in the United States have tried to put people in jail for possession of drugs in their blood. This is why the United States jails more of its citizens than Iran and China (and any other country; executions do not even come close to closing this gap).
As for the DEA being part of the DOJ, keep in mind that the FBI is also considered to be part of the intelligence community. These are law enforcement agencies with enormous intelligence gathering power and which have greatly expanded that power over the past decade. The fact that the DEA, a supposedly civilian law enforcement agency, has access to military resources (NORAD) is a troubling sign for our democracy.
The existence of such a powerful and heavily armed law enforcement agency is not a direct assault on civil liberties. However, the laws that agency is charged with enforcing are an attack on civil liberties, and always have been. Drug laws have been used as an excuse to deny people their freedom of association, their privacy rights, their freedom of speech (e.g. Alexander Shulgin, who was penalized for publishing books), their right to property (e.g. asset forfeiture), and to incarcerate large numbers of people (more than any other country, by orders of magnitude). The war on drugs has also been used to weaken our democracy: the Controlled Substances Act grants the attorney general's office the power to declare drugs to be illegal without any democratic process, a power that has been exercised twice this year (in practice, it is the DEA that exercises this power -- thus the DEA both makes the law and enforces it).
You had me at "big brother." The DEA is considered a member of the intelligence community and has been known to use NORAD to track airplanes. Authoritarian governments have gone as far as to demand that the DEA assist them in wiretapping their citizens in exchange for allowing the DEA to operate in their countries.
During Prohibition, alcohol was still commonly used, but there was the fear of the government finding out.
We are still living under prohibition, just not of alcohol, and other drugs are still widely used (and people fear the police finding out). Allow me to introduce you to one of the worst programs ever undertaken by the US government, which has resulted in the militarization of the police, the breaking down of separation of powers, and the widespread application of domestic propaganda:
Effort, plain and simple. To track a car by following someone around, the police must actually leave their desks, get into a car, and spend hours swapping shifts. It is a process that requires a substantial time and monetary commitment, which helps to ensure that it is only done when there is a good reason to do so. When all the police need to do is hide a device somewhere on your vehicle and then return to their desks and watch your movements, they are suddenly able to greatly amplify their ability to watch a person's movements.
I believe the line should be drawn at devices that assist in traditional surveillance methods. The police have been known to place a beacon on cars, which helps them locate and follow a suspect's vehicle. They still have to go out into the field and put some effort into it, and the device can help them continue to track a suspect worth getting off their asses to track.
Have you ever shot a living thing? It is not exactly a pain-free way to kill an animal, and I can assure you that hunted meat is not up to the hygiene standards of halal, kosher, or industrial slaughter. I seriously doubt that bans on kosher or halal meat are about health more than about making life hard for Jews and especially Muslims (given what I know of the politics of Holland and that fact that observant Muslims will eat kosher meat if halal meat is unavailable). I would accept the health argument if rather than ban the meat, they government simply refused to certify its safety (but still left open the option of buying it).
Probably because we do not believe that Jesus fulfilled any prophecies, and to be honest I have my doubts that the Jesus described in the New Testament ever actually existed. It would be as if I asked you why you do not believe any of the hundreds of apocryphal books that were not canonized by the early Church.
The only thing worse than someone who claims that I am a terrible person because their deity says so is a person who claims their own terrible acts are permitted by their deity, and therefore OK.
I am surprised that SDMI is not listed. It was a complete failure and is utterly pointless now, yet many CDs still have SDMI watermarks and CD players still check.
Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?
People do not know how to use their computers, that's why. Prior to Google Groups most people have no idea how to access Usenet, and most still have no idea that half the groups they access via Google are on Usenet. Listservs annoy people because they have no idea how to create message filters and their webmail client (probably Gmail) has some horribly broken method of displaying threaded discussions. Decent IRC clients require some time to learn, and using something like Pidgin makes IRC seem even worse than it really is (and let's be honest, IRC is just terrible).
These thing were developed by highly sophisticated users, to be used by other sophisticated users. In an age where the most common help desk resolution is, "Is it plugged in?" is there any surprise that these systems are so obscure?
Slashdot Mirror
It could be for submarines that operate at shallower depths, and so they can use higher frequencies. Perhaps the antenna is buried, and what we are seeing is the disturbance on the surface?
More likely, though, is that these patterns are being used to calibrate satellites. A nice, easy to spot image in the middle of a sparsely populated desert? I would not be surprised if the US also had a few of these things lying around.
So someone buys youruniversity.xxx and puts a bunch of porn there. Unless they can somehow profit from that
I think it is practically guaranteed to turn a profit, especially for big name schools.
...the legislation should then direct US-based ISP's to block...
If it's not going to be profitable for twenty years, why not wait twenty years and develop it then?
Sorry, perhaps I should be more clear: some technologies require twenty years of development before they become profitable. If nobody is working on those technologies, they will never become profitable at all.
Gene sequencing systems come to mind, which is why I had mentioned them in my original post. The first small-scale gene sequencing technology only became feasible in 1979, and sequencing complete gnomes only became possible in 1995. Now it is 2011, and gene sequencing is only somewhat profitable and only as a very restricted form of the technology (full genome sequencing is very expensive and not very useful). Private industry tends to shy away from research that requires such long periods of time to become profitable, especially when that research is so expensive.
Imagine trying to build an iPhone in 1990. Sure, the first clunky models would be kind of cool even though they required you to drag a half-ton trailer around with you, but would also be utterly pointless until technology had improved enough in other areas to eliminate that half-ton truck.
How do you think technologies improve? Someone has to sit down and do the research, and that costs money. It is easy to assume that because profitable incremental improvements in computer technologies have led to substantial innovations that the same must be true in other fields, but that is not always the case. If the incremental steps are not profitable on their own, why would any for-profit operation undertake them?
The first gene sequencing technology was enormously expensive to use, and subsequent developments would not have been possible without it. Not every field is abstract like computer science, and this is not some Ayn Rand fantasy -- sometimes a large up-front cost is needed to pay for innovation, and private industry may be reluctant to pay for technologies that might become profitable 20 years down the road.
Yum is still pretty bad (disclaimer: I cannot get away from Fedora and I was once a Red Hat employee). Installing packages in a user's home directory is poorly supported (if you can even call it "support"), and removed packages that are not needed (e.g. libraries that are not dependencies of any other package and that do not need to be on the system) is still a giant pain. It is certainly better than plain RPM, and it beats the urpm system we saw in Mandrake/Mandriva, but there is a lot of work that will need to be done before we can be proud of it.
As I said, the number of executions in China does not come close to closing the gap in how many prisoners we have.
Can you imagine if you _did_ live in Iran and they had this technology?
Is there some reason to believe that the Iranians are more committed to the war on drugs than the United States?
Some prosecutors in the United States have tried to put people in jail for possession of drugs in their blood. This is why the United States jails more of its citizens than Iran and China (and any other country; executions do not even come close to closing this gap).
What is happening? Lots of posts were just modded down...is this a bug in Slashdot or is it tinfoil time?
Associate with communi^H^H^Hwikileaks? You are a suspect.
I'd be interested in seeing evidence on your wiretapping claims.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/26/world/26wikidrugs.html?ref=drugenforcementadministration
As for the DEA being part of the DOJ, keep in mind that the FBI is also considered to be part of the intelligence community. These are law enforcement agencies with enormous intelligence gathering power and which have greatly expanded that power over the past decade. The fact that the DEA, a supposedly civilian law enforcement agency, has access to military resources (NORAD) is a troubling sign for our democracy.
The existence of such a powerful and heavily armed law enforcement agency is not a direct assault on civil liberties. However, the laws that agency is charged with enforcing are an attack on civil liberties, and always have been. Drug laws have been used as an excuse to deny people their freedom of association, their privacy rights, their freedom of speech (e.g. Alexander Shulgin, who was penalized for publishing books), their right to property (e.g. asset forfeiture), and to incarcerate large numbers of people (more than any other country, by orders of magnitude). The war on drugs has also been used to weaken our democracy: the Controlled Substances Act grants the attorney general's office the power to declare drugs to be illegal without any democratic process, a power that has been exercised twice this year (in practice, it is the DEA that exercises this power -- thus the DEA both makes the law and enforces it).
big-brother style
DEA
You had me at "big brother." The DEA is considered a member of the intelligence community and has been known to use NORAD to track airplanes. Authoritarian governments have gone as far as to demand that the DEA assist them in wiretapping their citizens in exchange for allowing the DEA to operate in their countries.
During Prohibition, alcohol was still commonly used, but there was the fear of the government finding out.
We are still living under prohibition, just not of alcohol, and other drugs are still widely used (and people fear the police finding out). Allow me to introduce you to one of the worst programs ever undertaken by the US government, which has resulted in the militarization of the police, the breaking down of separation of powers, and the widespread application of domestic propaganda:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_drugs
Effort, plain and simple. To track a car by following someone around, the police must actually leave their desks, get into a car, and spend hours swapping shifts. It is a process that requires a substantial time and monetary commitment, which helps to ensure that it is only done when there is a good reason to do so. When all the police need to do is hide a device somewhere on your vehicle and then return to their desks and watch your movements, they are suddenly able to greatly amplify their ability to watch a person's movements.
I believe the line should be drawn at devices that assist in traditional surveillance methods. The police have been known to place a beacon on cars, which helps them locate and follow a suspect's vehicle. They still have to go out into the field and put some effort into it, and the device can help them continue to track a suspect worth getting off their asses to track.
Funny how hunting is not banned:
http://southholland.angloinfo.com/countries/holland/hunting.asp
Have you ever shot a living thing? It is not exactly a pain-free way to kill an animal, and I can assure you that hunted meat is not up to the hygiene standards of halal, kosher, or industrial slaughter. I seriously doubt that bans on kosher or halal meat are about health more than about making life hard for Jews and especially Muslims (given what I know of the politics of Holland and that fact that observant Muslims will eat kosher meat if halal meat is unavailable). I would accept the health argument if rather than ban the meat, they government simply refused to certify its safety (but still left open the option of buying it).
Probably because we do not believe that Jesus fulfilled any prophecies, and to be honest I have my doubts that the Jesus described in the New Testament ever actually existed. It would be as if I asked you why you do not believe any of the hundreds of apocryphal books that were not canonized by the early Church.
The only thing worse than someone who claims that I am a terrible person because their deity says so is a person who claims their own terrible acts are permitted by their deity, and therefore OK.
Rightly so? He was physically attacking her for downloading music...does that not seem just a little bit over-the-top to you?
...and you will probably be charged for soliciting the picture.
SDMI was not deployed, I was thinking of a different system (Macrovision). Time for that afternoon coffee (nap?).
You can always download the music in a different format.
FTFY
I am surprised that SDMI is not listed. It was a complete failure and is utterly pointless now, yet many CDs still have SDMI watermarks and CD players still check.
There is very little sense in wasting resources to tackle piracy by those who will never buy their product.
Thus explaining why the RIAA sued so many college students.
Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?
People do not know how to use their computers, that's why. Prior to Google Groups most people have no idea how to access Usenet, and most still have no idea that half the groups they access via Google are on Usenet. Listservs annoy people because they have no idea how to create message filters and their webmail client (probably Gmail) has some horribly broken method of displaying threaded discussions. Decent IRC clients require some time to learn, and using something like Pidgin makes IRC seem even worse than it really is (and let's be honest, IRC is just terrible).
These thing were developed by highly sophisticated users, to be used by other sophisticated users. In an age where the most common help desk resolution is, "Is it plugged in?" is there any surprise that these systems are so obscure?