nathaniel

Yeah but on the other hand we do get Monday off =) Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

> No you don't. All you have to do is put out enough power to swamp the original signal. You could do it with a spark gap transmitter and LC filter with enough power. (1900's technology.) Swamp is an ambiguous word that I think hides part of the issue. It's not quite as simple as just talking louder than the GPS signal-- there are techniques that civilian GPS could use and military GPS surely uses that make it so the interference needs to be (several) orders of magnitude stronger than the GPS signal--to the extent that powering the devices over long periods of time becomes a real issue. Notwithstanding the fact that radio sources like GPS jammers are humongous "hit me" signs. With GPS it's more than just a question of signal power, it's also a question of the physical source of the interference signal. Airborne interference sources imitating a satellite's relative spatial position don't need to be as strong as ground-based interference, but I would place the airborne route out of Iraq's playbook. Key words in your point are "enough power", which IMO Iraq does not have in a war with the US scenario. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I don't think he's totally wrong. Such a technique would work against civilian GPS. Certainly the military uses civilian GPS receivers in addition to military grade ones. Nathaniel if you want technical detail about the civilian side I encourage you to read the .pdf I posted a link to above. It has a whole appendix on the vulnerabilities of civilian GPS, natural and man-made. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Bomb accuracy / effectiveness is a bit like Zeno's paradox. The last few meters are the most important, but the hardest to get. If you can get your bombs on target more often, you can use fewer bombs and / or smaller bombs to get the same job done. "Force multiplier" blah blah blah. Also, the better the guidance system the further away a friend needs to be from the delivery mechanism. Inertial guidance has been around since around (pre?) WWII, but has drawbacks. For instance, small errors tend to accumulate over time / distance into big errors. German V1 + V2 bombs had almost no military value in WWII despite being fairly big since they were totally inaccurate. Modern inertial guidance systems are better but still not as good as we would like. GPS bombs are usually inertial guidance bombs (like someone posted above) except every once in a while they reset the inertial guidance system with GPS. This reduces the cumulative effects of inertial guidance errors. Satellite constellations are like the holy grail of planet-wide navigation. When they work, anyway. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Some satellites you talk to with regular antennas. Think vacuum vs TV. GPS is typically in this category so you don't have to keep track of the (non-geosynchronous) orbits of the 20 or so satellites. One of the neat parts of GPS is that all satellites broadcast on the same frequency but they encode their signals in such a way that receivers can pick them apart. The Russians made a half-hearted attempt at their own satellite navigation system called GLONASS http://www.rssi.ru/SFCSIC/english.html that sucked b/c they can't share a frequency and the Russians basically didn't allocate enough of the spectrum..not to mention not funding the project. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

It's not far fetched to me that GPS-interference seeking devices could be available soon if not already. GPS operates via radio waves, and we already have lots of different radio-wave-emitter seeking weapons. True, an opponent could deploy lots of GPS-denial equipment, but the more he allocates to fancy equipment the less bullets and food for his army... And the greater his logistical nightmare trying to power them all... and not forget EMP weapons. GPS is a line-of-site signal too. With a little effort and a directional antenna or four I bet we could make it very difficult to interfere with a GPS tracking device--not that I perceive it would be worthwhile in a cost-benefit sense due to other drawbacks in GPS-jam scenarios. Ultimately tho, I'm no military scientist, and I don't work for the gov't...I can't prove to you that it is not feasible to jam GPS, but without more information and given the tendencies of the American media I think you can forgive me for being a sceptic. In military terms it's my perception that outside the US / western Europe collateral damage means close to nil... I fully expect the US would employ GPS "jamming" by degrading or turning off the GPS signal should iraq bombard the continental US with GPS guided bombs... What's the avg density of people per square mile in the US? Even in densely-populated areas, any military would (should?) put its own operational effectiveness ahead of that of civilians in any serious conflict--serious as in possible it would lose. GPS has many non-guided bomb uses too, eg, navigation for people planes cars and boats, time synchronization (useful in some cryptographic scenarios), of which it would be advantageous to deny an enemy. Summary 1. I am a sceptic 2. Anyone facing a GPS -equipped foe would use such a device if they had it (or had something that claimed to be a GPS jammer) 3. I doubt it would have a significant impact on a US military operation in iraq ( see #1 ) Nathaniel finally, there is a paper floating around the NIST web server on the vulnerability of civilian assets to GPS denial. It specifically mentions transportation, finance, and one other sector it decided was vulnerable. I'll post a link if I can re-discover it / wasn't taken down post 9/2001. --edit-- wasn't the nist, oops. here's the part about the transportation sector http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/archive/2001/Oct/FinalReport-v4.6.pdf here's the page I got that link from if you can't sleep tonight http://www.navcen.uscg.gov/gps/geninfo/default.htm links to discussion of same topic on sci.military.moderated http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&th=b7d227ecee977fc8&seekm=B9B92C05.1BE6A%25rkeeter%40earthlink.net#link1 http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&th=1f0f60af4354cc60&seekm=F5x76u.246%40law7.daytonoh.ncr.com&frame=off My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I imagine it would be pretty hard to hide a GPS jammer of the scale necessary to screw with military GPS... Turn it on for longer than N seconds it will be another target. Since bombs these days only need intermittent GPS sync to get most of the advantage, you'd need to continuously block gps sync to get a good defensive benefit... IMO it will be mostly useless since either 1) it is turned off 2) it isn't anymore Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Amen. I left out the iraqi lives from the costs b/c they are dying in large numbers under Hussein too--whose fault this is depends on what you believe. It didn't feel right to me to try to compare war deaths vs Hussein deaths. But they would be shifted in large part from the weak / infirm to the male and young... IMO it's a hard question to answer whether more people will die by leaving Hussein there (with sanctions and all) vs bombing him out of power. Depends on what happens afterward. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I disagree with your assessment. War with iraq appears on both sides of your equation. You don't need war to spend money on upgrading or increasing stocks of weapons. IMNSHO spending money on defense industries has a limited monetary supply effect anyway, esp with the balanced-budget mindedness of the current political people. Running up taxes is anathema to these guys, so it's unlikely to me that tax - and - spend is part of their argument. It is true that moving more money around in the economy can improve some situations, but this is called lowering the Fed Rate and is the job of the Federal Reserve, not the Chiefs of Staff / Rumsfeld / Bush. I understand that the Fed Rate has currently bottomed out, and that many economists expect the fed rate to stay unchanged or even increase this year. http://www.forbes.com/markets/currencies/newswire/2003/01/02/rtr835780.html I don't think you need talk about money supply to explain why war with Iraq could be good for the economy in the long run...imagine if some of the money made from selling currently embargoed Iraqi oil to the world would be spent on American goods, like Britney Spears, GE warplane parts, cars, computers (after embargoes lifted, etc). Iraq right now is a huge untapped market that is untapped for political reasons. The argument goes that you would see a Pareto improvement by opening trade, and the only way Bush feels he can open trade is by replacing the current Iraqi gov't ... putting the war in there ruins the Pareto argument but Bush probably thinks it's a good idea anyway Summary: benefits: increased demand for american goods increased supply of raw materials for american industry (ie oil) costs: handful of american / westerners lives war costs Of course, this is just the economic side...there are big political issues going on here too. "Good for the economy" could just be some bogus spin by Bushie... Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

That's bad, but it could be worse. A former employer of mine makes a habit of sending out more offer letters than positions (ie, dollars) available. At least once they hired a guy on an H1B visa only to can him 3 weeks after he started. H1B = must work or be in school to stay in the country, if you lose your job you have to find another in like 2 weeks or you become INS fodder needless to say I don't work there anymore... Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

common ancestors? Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

NB. Our "day" is not a fixed unit of measurement, the notion of a "day" itself is a measuement of the appearance of the sun, and due to various small factors building up over time is not a constant as you and I perceive it to be. Currently the day is approx 86400 seconds--seconds are a fixed unit of time--but every year or two (based on observation, didn't happen last year) a leap second is inserted into a day to account for irregularity in the earth's rotation. Due to the action of the moon on the Earth's tides, the earth's rotation is gradually decreasing. The sun also slows the earth's rotation, but to a lesser extent than the moon. Thousands of years ago the earth day was shorter, and sometime in the far off future there will be no more days since the earth will stop rotating (actually, the sun will expand and by the time the earth is no longer rotating the earth will actually be /inside/ the sun....how about that!) Whoever came up with the 7 days thing in the christian holy book skipped out on physics class... Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/troll.html troll 1. v.,n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream "trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT. 2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand - they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, "Oh, ignore him, he's just a troll." Compare kook. 3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners. Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter. The use of `troll' in either sense is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning "Do not feed the troll" as part of a followup to troll postings. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Hey! my company still uses telnet / rsh / rlogin / rcp and we just inherited a bunch of AS / 400's. It's actually part of my job to get people to stop using cleartext protocols... we have a software component named "router" and it was named that before we had things called routers that trafficked in IP...it causes all kinds of namespace confusion. We still use X.25 links all over the place (9600 baud baby), and even though some of it has been ported to IP / T1 most of it is experimental. no joke Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

Screw all that, just jump with me =) I'm 6'2" 140. I'm not particularly good at gaining speed either, but here's what I've learned so far (60 jumps): jumpsuit material and tight fit makes a world of difference. cotton bad. nylon good. if you haven't already, get yourself a skin-tight custom jumpsuit. Usually they come with spandex on the back so you can still breathe =) pretend you are playing wheelbarrow, get your legs way up there. weights help don't bother reaching if you start floating up when docking, back off and try again. if you reach, you'll probably end up flipping over your partners' back. good luck Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

New jumpsuit came in... who knows a place to buy shoo goo in Chicago? Also, how noxious is the stuff, can I apply it indoors? Light grey body, orange knees and forearms. Charcoal booties. Orange stripes up the side... Charcoal / orange grippers... Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

My cat likes to eat the legs off of centipedes. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

OK, I'll bite. There's no more USSR...in order to have a world war, or a detente that avoids a world war, you need to have more than one superpower. consequence #1: Despite your (and my) worst post-9/11 paranoid delusions, there aren't too many things that countries and factions in the Middle East can do to the US. (or most other regions, for that matter, excepting China and Russia...) The USSR tried its best for decades, and they were certainly more disciplined than this imaginary "middle-eastern bloc". Blowing up a couple buildings is dramatic, but ultimately it backfires for the same reason, imho. Think infrastructure. Releasing smallpox would be dramatic too, but it's a bad idea for terrorists for the same reason it was for the USSR: after it got out it would hurt smaller, weaker entities like the Taliban far worse than the US (which group of people is best prepared to deal with worldwide outbreak?). consequence #2: there's no-one to reach a detente with. It is clear to me that terrorists will irritate the US if it nukes Iraq or not. Even if Bush had a hotline direct to Mullah Omar, do you think his word is worth spit? Even if there was a single entity Terrorists, Inc that we were up against, a relativist approach in this case is a one-way street that would not work. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

There was a place near where I grew up in Brooklyn called Lung Fat. There's a mattress store not too far from me in Chicago called Mattress Discount, and until recently the lights behind the "unt" were burnt out... Hey! Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

A bunch of demo mains were at Chicagoland this weekend, Safire-2's and Crossfire-2's of most sizes and a couple of cross-braced handkerchiefs...I understand they are making their way across the country. Very nice, after a couple jumps I'm pretty much set on a Safire-2. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

welcome, friend. you will not be disappointed. i'm a systems analyst. before anyone asks what a systems analyst does, i literally analyze systems. many companies only hire qualified computer people ( if at all ) after they've set up their network+servers and when they realize it is harder than they thought. systems analysts are like mcguyver (good ones) or dorf (bad ones) for computer networks. it alternates between the evil and the good sides of technology: what is and what could be. completely boring compared to skydiving... but i think jumping on the weekend helps me put work in perspective. nathaniel

Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot What do they all have in common? In addition to being ruthless, genocidal dictators, they were all "atheists" or at least called themselves that. I think the problem isn't religion so much as fanaticism. Fanaticism isn't quite the right word, since it seems to imply religion...but I haven't heard a better word for it... It starts when people try to make rational* decisions based on irrational* beliefs. Religion has certainly given lots of people the inspiration to do horrible deeds, but this distinction belongs not exclusively to organized faith. Disorganized "faith" will do the trick too. * I don't mean irrational in a derogative context...just a descriptive context. Maybe a better way to put it would be decisions of non-trivial worldly consequence vs trivial. Surely no person in his or her right mind is purely rational. My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

hafta admit tho, it's the first time I've seen a banner ad enticing me to send a box of 12 premium anars to india

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?art_id=20514379 This one caught my eye...imho would be very risky to do it this way tho. Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?

I dunno about skysurfing. I think one of my instructors from AFF put it best, "skydiving is exciting enough as-is. you don't really add much to the sport with a three foot piece of plywood." ...but maybe he was just trying to keep me kosher Nathaniel My advice is to do what your parents did; get a job, sir. The bums will always lose. Do you hear me, Lebowski?