H/T DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
Category: technology
They are Still Flying Camberras?
And it appears that they are crucial to the efforts in Afghanistan:
They’re 49 years old, ugly and owned by NASA, not the Pentagon. But two modified WB-57F Canberras are now among America’s most important warplanes. With anonymous-looking white paint jobs, the Canberras have been taking turns deploying to Afghanistan carrying a high-tech new radio translator designed to connect pretty much any fighter, bomber, spy plane and ground radio to, well, pretty much any other fighter, bomber, spy plane and ground radio. That makes the former Air Force reconnaissance planes, originally transferred to the space agency for science missions, essential hubs of the American-led war effort.
With the Battlefield Airborne Communications Node system, or BACN, the WB-57s act as Star Trek-style universal translators, passing data between planes and troops and finally bringing to life the Pentagon’s decades-old dream of speedy, information-propelled, networked warfare. “It orbits high up and basically receives various platforms’ datalink data, then translates all that data and redistributes it in a fused manner back to different platforms in the operating area,” Aviationintel’s Tyler Rogoway told ace aerospace blogger David Cenciotti.
“BACN bridges the gaps,” manufacturer Northrop Grumman boasted.
This is an artifact of how the Pentagon buys stuff.
You see, instead of trying to deal with a serious problem, lack of proper interoperability between systems, they come up with a ridiculously over ambitious system, the now canceled JTRS, that never had a realistic possibility of meeting its overambitious requirements.
So now we are resorting to cobbled together electronics on an airframe that first flew almost 70 years ago.
Sanity Breaks Out In IP
A federal judge just ruled that there is no legal obligation to secure your WiFi signal in order to prevent file sharing:
It looks like it might be hard for rights holders in various entertainment industries to sue individuals who have open Wi-Fi networks for copyright infringement done by guests, if the following court case is any indication. A California man whose open network was allegedly used to download a copyrighted video cannot be sued, according to a ruling by a federal judge.
The complaint filed in April of this year alleged that Hatfield was negligent because he didn’t secure his network, and therefore liable.
AF Holdings, who admitted in its case that it does not know the identity of the user who downloaded its video using BitTorrent, targeted Josh Hatfield with a lawsuit in federal court because it was downloaded via his unsecured home Internet connection. Hatfield moved for a dismissal on the grounds that the plaintiff failed “to state a claim” and that the claim “is barred by Section 301 of the Copyright Act and by immunity under the Communications Decency Act.”
U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton dismissed the claim last week. The Electronic Frontier Foundation planned on submitting an amicus brief on behalf of Hatfield if the case had gone forward.
I’m not surprised by the ruling, but I am surprised that it happened this early in the process.
I think that people are beginning to recognize just how f%$#ed up the current IP regime is, and they are no longer willing to treat potential offenders like they’ve robbed a gas station.
No Blogging for You!
No Soup For You!
I was unrooting my phone so that I could update, and I forgot to uncheck the “repartition” check box on ODIN, so I wiped my phone.
Thankfully, I regularly backup my contacts, and my web browser, and so it was just a matter of reinstalling the apps, which I had recorded in screen shots for just such an emergency.
Still have to fix the ringtones though.
BTW, I cannot recommend my contacts synching utility MyPhoneExplorer, highly enough. It allows one to sync, contacts, calendar, and notes via USB, Bluetooth, or WiFi. It can work with both its own PIM, or with Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.
APKWS Reaches Deployment
The US Marine Corps is planning to deploy the laser guided 2.75″ rocket to Afghanistan:
An unguided, Vietnam War-vintage missile with a dispersion pattern of up to 500 yards at medium ranges is being transformed into a precision air-to-ground weapon that already has been fired into a laser spot – about the size of a basketball – at a range of three miles.
The new weapon, with a warhead that can punch through a wall and then explode, is expected to be operational on U.S. Marine Corps helicopters in Afghanistan as early as this spring.
BAE Systems expects to deliver its next batch of low-rate production Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System (APKWS) missiles directly to the U.S. Marine Corps for shipment to operational units. The first 325 low-rate production missiles were delivered to the Navy Department in December, and the second lot of 600 will be dispatched in early fiscal 2012. With the end of operational testing in January, a full-rate production decision for about 1,000 missiles a year is expected to follow early in the year.
Particularly in a place like Afghanistan, where the opposition does not have heavy armor, it makes a lot more sense than something like the the Hellfire, which is too heavy and too expensive.
My other posts about this are here.
Cessna Jumps on the Diesel Band Wagon
They will be putting a diesel in the model 182 Sklylane: (Paid Subscription Required)
While avgas consumers and suppliers fret over the future of their leaded fuel, Cessna is partially weaning itself of that toxic brew by equipping its popular Model 182 Skylane with a Jet A-burning diesel engine. Others are likely to follow.
Unveiled at the Experimental Aircraft Association’s recent annual gathering in Oshkosh, Wis. (see p. 35), the Turbo Skylane JT-A (photo) is fitted with the new SR305-230E engine built by SMA, a subsidiary of Snecma of France. The four-cylinder, 227-hp powerplant is already certificated by both the European Aviation Safety Agency and FAA , and Cessna hopes to begin deliveries of its newest model in early 2013.
While Austria’s Diamond Aircraft has been producing aircraft powered by Austro Engine diesels for several years, the entry into that market by the much-larger Wichita aircraft maker with wide name recognition and a global support network is significant and likely to find favor, particularly in lesser-developed regions where avgas is scarce and expensive. Visitors at the Oshkosh introduction told Cessna personnel that the per-gallon price of 100LL avgas at some remote locations had topped $22.
Austro is a former Diamond Aircraft subsidiary (they spun it off) founded to replace the Thielert engine after that company’s implosion.
How to Know When You’ve Pissed off a Judge
One hint is when he asks if you are smoking crack:
Tempers boiled over in court this morning, with the judge in the case between Apple and Samsung flat out yelling at Apple for trying to book too many witnesses in its last few hours.
“I am not going to be running around trying to get 75 pages of briefings for people who are not going to be testifying,” U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh told Apple’s lawyer Bill Lee.
“I mean come on. 75 pages! 75 pages! You want me to do an order on 75 pages, (and) unless you’re smoking crack, you know these witnesses aren’t going to be called when you have less than four hours,” Koh said.
“Your honor, I can assure you, I’m not smoking crack,” Lee replied matter-of-factly.
It’s never good to piss off a judge, but the fact that it’s Apple playing bullsh%$ patent bully does infuse in me a bit of Schadenfreude.
Yes, the Pilots Choking is Really Solved This Time
They say that it’s just an overinflating pressure vest that is part of their G-suit:
The mysterious engineering problem causing F-22 Raptor pilots to choke in their cockpits has been solved, the Pentagon says. And it’s not the nearly $400 million aircraft’s fault after all.
The problem lies with a valve in the pressurized vest pilots wear as they fly the jet at high altitudes, Pentagon spokesman George Little said. The valve inflated the vest, limiting the pilots’ oxygen supply. It does not appear that the vest was affecting quality of the oxygen in the Raptor. The valve will be replaced; the garment’s use will be “suspended,” Little said.
Additionally, the Air Force has decided to remove a filter it placed in the jet to test the oxygen quality. Ironically, the filter ended up limiting the oxygen supply to the pilots. But the charcoal filter resulted in “no oxygen contamination,” Little told reporters at the Pentagon on Tuesday.
Accordingly, the Air Force will gradually take its premiere stealth jet off of the probation that the so-called “hypoxia” incidents — a term indicating problems with the oxygen in the cockpit — necessitated. Over an unspecified period of time, the F-22 will no longer be restricted to flying short missions at low altitudes near air bases. The first indication that the jet is off probation will be an imminent flight of an F-22 squadron over the Pacific to Kadena Air Force Base in Japan — which will occur at a “lower altitude,” Little said.
I’ll believe this if we don’t have any more incidents for at least 6 months.
The ILECS Suck
Yes, those relics of the Bell Telephone System, the incumbent local exchange carrier are a bunch of pig felching scum, and US telecommunications and data costs and performance will continue to lag behind the rest of the world until they are treated as rent seeking parasites, rather than valued participants in the process.
In the case of Verizon, it now appears that they are deliberately sabotaging its own DSL service and forcing its customers with which it colludes, with the hope that these people will be forced to move to (almost completely unregulated) wireless.
It has the additional “benefit” of moving their business from their unionized land line market to their non-unionized wireless division.
We also have AT&T reporting improved profits by deliberately and aggressively making their product worse:
AT&T reported their second quarter results today. According to this analysis, AT&T achieved better profitability by (a) dramatically limiting their broadband service; (b) discouraging consumers from upgrading their devices; and (c) figuring out new charges for consumers to enhance overall profit per customer.
I get that firms are supposed to maximize profit. But when every single incentive to profit maximization relies on providing less service for more money and discouraging people from using your service, something is seriously messed up. This is doubly true when usual trend in information technology is to drive prices down. And, more tellingly, it creates a real concern if we are relying on market incentives to ensure that providers do things like build out networks and provide us with better service and lower prices.
………
I’d be happy to concede the issue on metred pricing, except that there doesn’t seem to be any actual relationship between the price metering and the cost of provisioning. The idea of metering is that I want to provide you with more capacity because that way I make more profit. If this were bananas, I would have a fairly direct incentive to grow more bananas so I can sell more bananas. But AT&T doesn’t want to charge me for more bandwidth, which would arguably give it incentive to build better systems and sell me ever more capacity. It wants to sell me limited capacity and then stop, presumably so it can capture some imaginary and unspecified revenue on the the other side of the platform. That creates a fairly unfriendly incentive to create scarcity and avoid investment in the network.
It’s what economists call rent seeking behavior, where a company manipulates the social or political environment to extract money, as opposed to doing that icky, “out-competing the competition” thing.
Yes, a 60 Year Old Engine is NASA’s Future
I appreciate the contributions that Wernher von Braun, but the fact that NASA is looking at using the F-1 engine as the core of its future heavy lifter (paid subscription required) makes me wonder what the hell NASA has been doing since the Apollo program:
The powerful rocket engine developed in the 1960s to launch the first men to the Moon could be reprised in the 2020s as the powerplant for strap-on boosters that NASA hopes to use in heavy-lift human missions to Mars. Under a new NASA risk-reduction project, Dynetics Inc., a relative newcomer to space launch, will explore the idea for the U.S. agency in partnership with Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne.
Rocketdyne built the 1.5-million-lb.-thrust F-1 engine for NASA , which mounted five of the kerosene-fueled behemoths in the Saturn V first stage to propel the massive Saturn/Apollo stack off the launch pad.The F-1—19 ft. tall, with a nozzle 12.5 ft. across—epitomized the scale of the flight hardware and ground infrastructure NASA used to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon. If NASA decides to fly it again, it probably will be tested in the same stands built for the F-1 at the agency’s Marshall and Stennis field centers, stacked in the same 40-story Vehicle Assembly Building at the Kennedy Space Center used for Apollo and the space shuttle, and launched from one of the pads built for the Moon program.
Dynetics scored big in a $200 million NASA effort to reduce the risk on advanced boosters for the planned Space Launch System (SLS) that Congress ordered as a government-owned deep-space alternative to the commercial vehicles the agency wants to use for transport to the International Space Station. Last week NASA selected the company to negotiate for three of six 30-month study contracts designed to reduce risk on the twin boosters that will be needed to raise the SLS capability from an initial 70 metric tons to the 130 metric tons the agency believes will be needed for human missions beyond low Earth orbit.
………
If the Dynetics proposal to use the F-1 in the boosters is accepted, all of the engines on the SLS will have heritage in earlier human spaceflight missions, and all will already have been used for decades when deep-space human missions begin. The F-1 ran a full 2.5-min. test at Edwards AFB, Calif., in 1960 (see photo), before the A-1 and A-2 test stands at Stennis were built for it. NASA and Rocketdyne are testing the uprated J-2X variant of the Saturn V J-2 engine to power the SLS upper stage . And the main SLS engine will be a throw-away version of the reusable RS-25D space shuttle main engine, also built by Rocketdyne , once the 15 surplus shuttle engines are used up. Developed in the 1970s, it will be the newest basic engine design for what may one day be NASA ‘s newest human launchers.
This is f%$#ing depressing.
Ouch!
I am not sure that I want to win an IP case with this verdict:
Samsung won a victory over Apple in the UK high court as part of its world-spanning battle over intellectual property and design after a judge ruled the design of its Galaxy Tab isn’t cool enough to be confused with an iPad.
The ruling, by Judge Colin Birss, means that Apple cannot stop the import or sale of the Galaxy Tab 10 under claims it has made that the designs are too close to those of the iPad.
Instead, Judge Birss ruled that Samsung’s designs did not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design: “They are not as cool.”
He noted distinctions such as the thickness and details on the backs of the devices in his ruling. “The informed user’s overall impression of each of the Samsung Galaxy Tablets is the following,” he said in his ruling. “From the front they belong to the family which includes the Apple design; but the Samsung products are very thin, almost insubstantial members of that family with unusual details on the back. They do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design. They are not as cool. The overall impression produced is different.”
This is a definition of a “win” of which I was previously unaware.
H/t Kevin Drum
Another Defense Procurement Fail
The US Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) was billed as a modern replacement for the frigate.
It combines the size of a frigate with the firepower of the (smaller) corvette, with the (alleged) advantages of greater flexibility, through the use of swappable mission modules, and a smaller crew. (They also go like scorched cats, topping out at over 40 kts)
As I’ve noted earlier, the mission modules don’s fit as well as they should, and now the navy has realized that they cannot run the ships at their current crewing levels, and they are increasing crewing levels by 50%:
Years after sailors and planners realized the crew size of littoral combat ships was too small, the U.S. Navy has decided to increase the number of sailors on the ships.
The changes will be made on the first LCS, the Freedom, starting in July — in time to beef up the crews for next year’s 10-month deployment to Singapore.
Twenty additional berths will be permanently installed onboard Freedom — two for officers, two for chief petty officers and 16 for other enlisted — but the final manning plan has yet to be decided, Rear Adm. Thomas Rowden, the director of surface warfare, said during a June 26 interview at the Pentagon. The ship right now has a core crew of 40, but because there is no manning plan, it’s still unclear how many sailors will be added to the crews.
The added billets “will run the gamut, from support to engineering to operations to boatswain’s mates,” Rowden said. “We’ve got to get the right skill set and the right seniority.”
Among the known manning deficiencies is the need for more junior sailors, Rowden said. LCS crews tend to be more senior, reflecting the need for sailors with multiple qualifications in a small ship.
So, the latest whiz bang navy idea appears to have failed to achieve every one of its goals.
China Doesn’t Need Spies
Because our defense contractors are eager to sell them our defense secrets. It’s kind of ironic, they are outsourcing their espionage to us:
United Technologies and two of its subsidiaries sold China software enabling Chinese authorities to develop and produce their first modern military attack helicopter, U.S. authorities said June 28.
At a federal court hearing in Bridgeport, Conn., United Technologies and its two subsidiaries, Pratt & Whitney Canada and Hamilton Sundstrand, agreed to pay more than $75 million to the U.S. government to settle criminal and administrative charges related to the sales.
As part of the settlement, Pratt & Whitney Canada agreed to plead guilty to two federal criminal charges – violating a U.S. export control law and making false statements. The charges were in connection with the export to China of U.S.-origin military software used in Pratt & Whitney Canada engines, which was used to test and develop the new Z-10 helicopter.
Also as part of the deal, United Technologies and Hamilton Sundstrand admitted to making false statements to the U.S. government about the illegal exports.
Hamilton Sundstrand and Pratt & Whitney Canada also admitted that they had failed to make timely disclosures, required by regulations, to the U.S. State Department about the exports.
The government said that the $75 million settlement breaks down into roughly $20.7 million in criminal fines, forfeitures and other penalties to be paid to the Justice Department and roughly $55 million in payments to the State Department as part of a consent agreement resolving more than 500 administrative export control violations.
About $20 million of the fines will be suspended, to be used by the company for continuing to improve its export control procedures, and for hiring an independent monitor, United Technologies said.
As part of the agreement, the U.S. State Department also will impose a partial debarment of Pratt & Whitney Canada for new export licenses, although the company can request licenses on a case-by-case basis. The debarment does not affect United Technologies or Hamilton Sundstrand, and the Canadian unit can request full reinstatement in one year.
A law enforcement source familiar with the case said investigators believe United Technologies and its subsidiaries deliberately set out to provide the embargoed military technology to China to ingratiate themselves with Chinese authorities, hoping to win them entree into China’s lucrative civilian helicopter market, worth an estimated $2 billion.
To quote Karl Marx, “The last capitalist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.”
H/t my Dad.
Scotus Slaps Down FCC
Roll George Carlin!
I agree with the outcome of the ruling, but it’s too limited for my taste:
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Federal Communications Commission failed to give two television networks, FOX and ABC, advance notice of standards before punishing them for broadcasts in which outbursts of expletives and brief nudity were aired.
“The Commission failed to give Fox or ABC fair notice prior to the broadcasts in question that fleeting expletives and momentary nudity could be found actionably indecent,” said Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the unanimous court.
The ruling does not affect the FCC’s policy banning indecency in TV broadcasting.
The court said that it did need not to address the First Amendment implications of the FCC’s indecency policy nor did it need to reconsider its prior indecency ruling in a 1978 decision regarding prolonged recitation of vulgar words.
The 1978 decision was bad, and vague, and they didn’t clear it up.
They took a very narrow ruling, and invalidated the fines because the FCC was arbitrary and capricious, and did not rule on the basic underlying issue. Ruth Bader Ginsberg felt the same way, and noted so in her concurring opinion.
Consumer Protection Theater
The DoJ is investigating to see if cable companies blocking videos from competitors is illegal anti-competitive behavior.
Of course it is. Their goal is to keep raping their customers:
The Justice Department is conducting a wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video, according to people familiar with the matter.
Justice Department officials have spoken to several online video providers, including Netflix Inc. and Hulu LLC, those people said. Investigators have also questioned Comcast Corp., Time Warner Cable Inc. and other cable companies about issues such as setting data caps, limits to the amount of data a subscriber can download each month, these people said.
Representatives of all those companies and the Justice Department declined to comment on the investigation.
Cable companies provide both television channels and high-speed Internet access for many consumers in the U.S. With broadband Internet, consumers can watch individual programs or channels through online video services like Netflix, Hulu or Amazon, bypassing the cable company’s traditional bundles of channels.
Having invested billions of dollars building their networks, some pay-TV companies have shown little inclination to get out of the business of packaging television channels and become mere conduits for other companies’ data. Some major entertainment companies also have an interest in preserving the current model of television viewing because they want cable companies to take bundles of their channels, rather than just cherry-picking the most popular ones.
It’s an election year, and so nothing is going to come of this.
It’s just political posturing from an administration that sees corrupt incumbents as partners in the process.
If I Ever Direct a Pr0n Movie, I now Have a Title
HP Lays Off 27,000
They say that it will save $3½ billion annually, but less than a year ago, they dropped more than $10 billion on stock buybacks.
In America investing in your business is for punks. You buy back stock, and fire people, and use the stock bounce to justify your outsize year end bonus.
It’s f%$#ing how quickly sales weasels and financial types can destroy a business previously run on technology and innovation.
H/t Atrios.
Just Lovely
India is looking to start MIRVing its nuclear missiles:
Agni-V, India’s most powerful missile with a strike range of over 5,000 kms, is set to get substantially higher destruction capabilities with plans to equip it with multiple warheads.
“We are working in this area. It will take time for us to develop but our work is on,” DRDO Chief Dr V K Saraswat told the news agency when asked whether the agency is developing capabilities to produce a variant of Agni-V missile which can hit multiple targets.
Known as Multiple Independently Targeted Re-entry Vehicle (MIRV), the missile would be capable of carrying multiple warheads to destroy several targets.
Asked about the plans in that regard, he said, “Basic vehicle (missile) will remain the same. The first three stages will also remain the same and only the kill vehicle or the payload delivery system will need changes.”
Terming it as a “force multiplier”, the DRDO chief said, “If I am able to do force multiplication with this… where I was using four missiles, I may use only one missile. So it becomes a force multiplier given the damage potential.”
It also destabilizes the the situation with Pakistan, because it allows multiple warheads to be taken out in a single strike.
Not good news.
Pilots Refusing to Fly F-22 “Super Jet”
In all the discussions of the relative merits of the F-22 Raptor vs. the F-35 Lightning II, one of the assumptions is that the F-22 actually works the way it’s supposed.
It appears that it doesn’t, and it’s bad enough that pilots are refusing to fly it:
While I was unable to attend this (30 April) morning’s briefing at Joint Base Langley-Eustis down in Hampton, Virginia, press reports from the event indicate that the US Air Force is admitting that a “small number” of Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor pilots are refusing to fly the jet.
“Obviously it’s a very sensitive thing because we are trying to ensure that the community fully understands all that we’re doing to try to get to a solution,” says Air Combat Command chief Gen Mike Hostage as quoted by the Associated Press.
The USAF has not found the root cause of 11 hypoxia-like cases since the Raptor fleet returned to flight in September after a near five-month stand-down. The F-22 fleet has flown about 12,000 times since then.
What’s more, there is currently no clear indication as to what is causing the problem: (paid subscription required)
The U.S. Air Force is narrowing its focus on new combinations of factors as it explores hypoxia events that claimed the life of one F-22 pilot and plagued the fleet for more than a year.
Service officials remain frustrated, that a “smoking gun” for the cause is still elusive despite an extraordinary effort to enlist scientists, the medical profession and fighter experts in a quest for answers.
The Lockheed Martin F-22 is the Air Force’s premier, twin-engine, stealthy fighter. It cost more than $200 million per copy to produce, including R&D. It entered service in 2005, and the 188th and final unit was delivered on May 2.
The problem came to light after a November 2010 crash that claimed the life of a pilot. The fleet was grounded for four months last year as officials scrambled to find a cause; flights resumed in September. Since then, Air Combat Command (ACC) officials say there have been 11 hypoxic events. The unknown nature of the incidents has rattled the service. “There is no startling similarity [in the incidents] other than . . . hypoxic-like indications,” says Gen. Mike Hostage, ACC commander.
………
Additionally, pilots are wearing a pulse oximeter to monitor oxygen-saturation levels during flight ; if it dips below 85%, they are required to return to base immediately (the data are downloaded after landing and not dispatched in real time).
Lyon acknowledges an impact on the training hours that pilots can achieve. Hostage adds that the incidents have prompted some pilots to decline flying the Raptor , though he says these incidents are the exception. He notes that any guidance, such as returning to base with a low oxygen-saturation level, can be waived in the event of an operational requirement for F-22 use.
In the meantime, the Air Force acknowledged first to Aviation Week that F-22s have been deployed to the Middle East. The aircraft are operating out of Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates.
So, they don’t know what is causing this, they have to require pilots to wear a blood oxygen sensor, and they are (finally) deploying some of them overseas.
My guess would be that they won’t be deploying to the 65,000 foot ceiling.
I’m Not the Only One Who Thinks Google’s Upgrades Suck
John Aravosis of Americablog has seen the new blogger update, and it has him planning to move the whole blog to WordPress:
Welcome to my own personal hell. Welcome to the new Blogger content management system, created by Google, that is incompatible with iPhones or iPads, and whose iphone app is a complete and utter disaster.
They’ve gotten similar responses about their changes to Gmail (here’s a hint, go with the high contrast theme to make it bearable)
I’m beginning to wonder if they are intentionally screwing the pooch.