Quotulatiousness

July 18, 2011

Good news for (some) soldiers

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:15

David Pugliese reports on the US Army’s work on a new, significantly lighter, Squad Automatic Weapon:

“We are using cased telescoped ammunition which uses a strong plastic case instead of a traditional brass case,” said Kori Phillips, a systems management engineer with ARDEC.

Weight reduction for the weapon was achieved by designing the new weapon platform using the latest materials technologies as well as modeling and simulation to achieve minimal weight without compromising performance.

With a basic load of 1,000 rounds, the LSAT light machine gun and its cased telescoped ammunition is 20.4 pounds lighter than a traditional SAW with the same amount of standard, brass-cased ammunition.

[. . .]

“The cased telescoped ammo still provides the same muzzle velocity, range and accuracy as the brass-cased ammo,” Phillips said. “We’re not sacrificing lethality for weight. The plastic case does the same job.”

In addition to significant weight savings, the LSAT is designed to provide other advantages over the current SAW. With a rotating chamber design, the cased telescoped light machine gun improves reliability.

“We’ve avoided the common problem of failure to feed and failure to eject,” Phillips said. “In the current SAW system, that’s one of the places where you primarily have failures and malfunctions.”

Of course, if the new ammunition works well for the SAW, it’ll certainly be adapted for other small arms (in a hot combat zone, you never have “too much” ammunition available, but you often have “too little”).

July 17, 2011

Saudi Arabia upgrades their armoured forces

Filed under: Germany, Middle East, Military, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:49

Saudi Arabia will add a few hundred of the most up-to-date panzers to their defence forces:

Saudi Arabia is buying 244 Leopard 2A7+ tanks from Germany. Saudi Arabia is believed to have already ordered 44, and now has increased that order. It was only a year ago that German tank manufacturer KMW has revealed this, the latest version of its Leopard 2.

Two years ago, the German Army announced that it was going to upgrade 150 of its Leopard 2A6 tanks to the A7 standard. That would include more armor on the sides and rear (especially to protect against RPGs), more external cameras (so the crew inside could see anything in any direction, day or night), a remote control machine-gun station on top of the turret, better fire control and combat control computers and displays, more powerful auxiliary power unit and better air conditioning, and numerous other minor improvements. This would increase the weight of the tank to nearly 70 tons.

[. . .]

Saudi Arabia is concerned about Iran, which has a force of 1,500 much older tanks (most of them Russian T-72s and T-54/55s). Saudi Arabia has 1,300 tanks, most of them older American M-60s and French AMX-30s. But the Saudis also have 370 U.S. M-1s and 150 Russian T-90s. The 244 Leopards will increase the Saudi edge. The Saudis also have the money to buy spare parts for their modern tanks, and Western instructors to provide the best training. But the Iranians are better soldiers, so they might have an edge there.

Testing a new WordPress plug-in

Filed under: Administrivia, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:35

I’ve installed a new WordPress plug-in to display Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ buttons at the bottom of individual posts (not on the main page). If you have any problems using them, please let me know.

Update, 8 August: I had to turn it off, as it was interfering with the stylesheet for both comments and extended entries. In both cases, whatever it was doing was reducing the space between paragraphs to the same as the ordinary inter-line spacing, and treating bulleted lists as if they were just ordinary paragraphs.

Nice idea, needs either a better (less intrusive) implementation, or should only be used by bloggers who know much more about the innards of stylesheets than I do.

July 15, 2011

The continuing problems of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter

Filed under: Military, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:57

The Economist titles this piece “The last manned fighter”:

The latest cost estimates from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), published in May to coincide with a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the F-35 programme, were shocking. The average price of each plane in “then-year” dollars had risen from $69m in 2001 to $133m today. Adding in $56.4 billion of development costs, the price rises from $81m to $156m. The GAO report concluded that since 2007 development costs had risen by 26% and the timetable had slipped by five years. Mr Gates’s 2010 restructuring helped. But still, “after more than nine years in development and four in production, the JSF programme has not fully demonstrated that the aircraft design is stable, manufacturing processes are mature and the system is reliable”. Apart from the STOVL version’s problems, the biggest issue was integrating and testing the software that runs the aircraft’s electronics and sensors. At the hearing, Senator John McCain described it as “a train wreck” and accused Lockheed Martin of doing “an abysmal job”.

What horrified the senators most was not the cost of buying F-35s but the cost of operating and supporting them: $1 trillion over the plane’s lifetime. Mr McCain described that estimate as “jaw-dropping”. The Pentagon guesses that it will cost a third more to run the F-35 than the aircraft it is replacing. Ashton Carter, the defence-acquisition chief, calls this “unacceptable and unaffordable”, and vows to trim it. A sceptical Mr McCain says he wants the Pentagon to examine alternatives to the F-35, should Mr Carter not succeed.

How worried should Lockheed Martin be? The F-35 is the biggest biscuit in its barrel, by far. And it is not only Mr McCain who is seeking to knock a few chocolate chips out of it. The bipartisan fiscal responsibility and reform commission appointed by Mr Obama last year said that not all military aircraft need to be stealthy. It suggested cancelling the STOVL version of the F-35 and cutting the rest of its order by half, while buying cheaper F-16s and F-18s to keep numbers up. If America decided it could live with such a “high-low” mix, foreign customers might follow suit.

July 13, 2011

A potential down side to ubiquitous 3D printing

Filed under: Humour, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 16:02

Original at http://xkcd.com/924/

Anonymous decides they’re against Ethical Oil

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

I guess all the popular targets have already been hit, so the rumour is that Anonymous is going to be going after companies working in the oilsands:

In related news, Anonymous said it planned to attack oil firms and banks supporting the controversial extraction of oil from sand in Alberta, Canada. Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Canadian Oil Sands, Imperial Oil, and the Royal Bank of Scotland have been put on notice that they are likely to be targeted in Anonymous’ latest operation, dubbed Project Tarmageddon.

Anonymous began with attacks on the Church of Scientology in early 2008 before it made headline news last year with attacks on financial service firms that blocked donation to WikiLeaks following the release of controversial US diplomatic cables. Another long-running campaign has targeted entertainment industry firms that hassled file sharers or console modders, most notably Sony.

July 12, 2011

An amusing copyright tale (for a change)

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 16:06

Jesse Brown has the most entertaining copyright story I’ve read in quite a while:

But some of the hooligans exposed on Youtube found a clever way to get the video removed—copyright claims. Under Youtube’s “Notice and Takedown” policy, all you need to do is claim you own the rights to a video and demand that it be removed, and Youtube will remove it. The video’s uploader will be informed of the allegation and then have a chance to challenge it.

But here’s the rub: in order to claim ownership of a video’s copyright, you have to identify yourself. And when Youtube informs the uploader that they’re being accused of a copyright violation, they have to tell them who their accuser is. So rioters are indirectly handing their names over to the very people who were trying to identify them.

Dealing with irritations: two varieties

Filed under: Books, Education, Media, Randomness, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 14:38

First up, Charles Stross is questioned about his “credentials” by a budding scholar:

From: numpty#@gmail.com

     Hello, I’m citing your work for a debate article I’m using about space colonization and how it is improbable. I do need credentials however, and I’ve yet to find them online. If you could reply with your credentials that’d be great.

     (I assume he’s talking about this; it’s all over the internet, triggered a firestorm, and I keep getting gimme emails from content farms asking to reprint it.)

From: me

     I’m a novelist, not an academic. If you want credentials, go look me up in wikipedia.

From: numpty#@gmail.com

     Your time is clearly very valuable, as you would rather argue with me over this than simply take a minute or two to state your credentials. Furthermore, I have no need to know the extent of your writings, I simply need to know if you are indeed certified to be considered a credible source on the topic. For instance, if your credible knowledge is on the topic of slaads and borrowing from George R. R. Martin, you are not considered a credible source on space colonization. So let me just ask you this, why should I believe your article has any rational basis, when for all I know now is your true expertise lies in the githyanki.

And in another instance, Dark Water Muse has to deal with a clueless telephone solicitation:

I had the privilege today of being phoned by fraudsters phishing for access to my computer. This is the second time I’ve received this type of call and I’ve used the same response in both cases. Try it, it’s fun.

[The phone rings. callee answers the phone.]

Callee: Hello?

[several seconds pass before the background noises of a busy call centre can be heard]

Caller [affected by a thick South Asian accent]: Hello?

Callee: Hello??

Caller: can I speak to Mr…uhhh…Goon…please?

Another end-run around privacy expectations

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

Julian Sanchez thinks the government has stopped caring whether you are innocent or guilty online:

Thanks to an unwise Supreme Court decision dating from the 70s, information about your private activites loses its Fourth Amendment protection when its held by a “third party” corporation, like a phone company or Internet provider. As many legal scholars have noted, however, this allows constitutional privacy safeguards to be circumvented via a clever two-step process. Step one: The government forces private businesses (ideally the kind a citizen in the modern world can’t easily avoid dealing with) to collect and store certain kinds of information about everyone — anyone might turn out to be a criminal, after all. No Fourth Amendment issue there, because it’s not the government gathering it! Step two: The government gets a subpoena or court order to obtain that information, quite possibly without your knowledge. No Fourth Amendment problem here either, according to the Supreme Court, because now they’re just getting a corporation’s business records, not your private records. It makes no difference that they’re only keeping those records because the government said they had to.

Current law already allows law enforcement to require retention of data about specific suspects — including e-mails and other information as well as IP addresses — to ensure that evidence isn’t erased while they build up enough evidence for a court order. But why spearfish when you can lower a dragnet? Blanket data requirements ensure easy access to a year-and-a-half snapshot of the online activities of millions of Americans — every one a potential criminal.

July 11, 2011

Can the government force you to provide your password?

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:37

Declan McCullagh discusses a potentially precedent-setting case in Colorado that may determine whether the 5th amendment applies to your personal passwords:

The Colorado prosecution of a woman accused of a mortgage scam will test whether the government can punish you for refusing to disclose your encryption passphrase.

The Obama administration has asked a federal judge to order the defendant, Ramona Fricosu, to decrypt an encrypted laptop that police found in her bedroom during a raid of her home.

Because Fricosu has opposed the proposal, this could turn into a precedent-setting case. No U.S. appeals court appears to have ruled on whether such an order would be legal or not under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, which broadly protects Americans’ right to remain silent.

I’d hope that the protections against self-incrimination would apply in this case, but government power has been expended so far in the last ten years that it would not surprise me if the courts gut this right in their deference to the executive (just like every other time, it seems).

The long, quiet development of weaponry

Filed under: History, Military, Technology, Weapons — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:20

Strategy Page titled this one as “Four Decades To Become An Overnight Sensation”:

Wonder weapons, in general, aren’t. Those spiffy and seemingly magical new “wonder weapons” tend to be old weapons designs that finally got to the point where they lived up to the original hype. Take smart bombs. They were invented, and used quite successfully, during World War II. But these were radio controlled, and required skilled operators to succeed. Expensive as well, and no one wanted to spend the money to train effective operators in peacetime. In wartime, price was no object, and experience was easy to get.

Thus the U.S. dropped smart bombs from their arsenal after World War II, and didn’t revive them until the 1960s, when lasers (developed a decade earlier) were used to bounce their light off a target. A bomb was equipped with a seeker that could home on the reflected laser light, and a guidance kit (battery and motors to operate small wings) to hit the target without an operator. This was cheaper and more effective than the earlier smart bombs. The next big jump, in the 1990s, was the GPS guided bomb, which finally perfected the smart bomb. Thus this wonder weapon took four decades to become an overnight sensation.

Other examples are helicopters, which became iconic of the Vietnam War: first flown in 1904, used sparingly by both sides in World War II, but not in wide use until the 1950s.

While many of these systems are called “wonder weapons,” they aren’t. That’s because every new weapon quickly produces new tactics and combat techniques that reduce the improved capabilities of the new weapons. This is often ignored by historians. Self-preservation is a great motivator, and in the face of new weapons, the enemy will quickly find ways to diminish the wonder.

A need for speed in 1955 still has lingering influence

Filed under: History, Science, Technology, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:01

Richard Black discusses the start of commercial nuclear power:

An experimental US reactor called EBR-1 generated the first nuclear electricity at its home in Argonne National Laboratory, sending current through a series of lightbulbs in 1951.

But the US did not open the world’s first civilian nuclear power station; that honour went to the USSR, whose tiny Obninsk reactor opened in 1953.

And the world’s first commercial-scale nuclear station was the UK’s Calder Hall, opened the following year.

The race for nuclear power — and with it, political influence — was underway.

“[Soviet President Nikita] Khrushchev… recognised that achievements in nuclear power made it possible to compete with the United States in the world arena — to say ‘our system, the socialist system, is the best — look who is first in areas of science and technology’,” relates Soviet historian Paul Josephson.

“You see a rebirth of hope that there will be a glorious communist future, perhaps a nuclear-powered future.”

All of these early reactors used different designs, with everyone except US scientists forced to work with natural uranium rather than the enriched variety developed during the Manhattan Project.

July 8, 2011

Oh, it’s not really “censorship”, say Apple fans

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 14:01

Even if Apple is silently censoring their MobileMe email messages:

Writing on the Cult of Mac, John Brownlee reports that Apple applies silent, unpublished content-filters to outgoing MobileMe Email messages, sometimes deleting the messages you send without notifying you. This doesn’t appear to be in Apple’s published terms of using the service, and while an Apple spokesperson has confirmed that this goes on, she disclaims that it is political in nature. The comments on Brownlee’s post are a study in cognitive dissonance from Apple fans, with responses ranging from, “I don’t send politically charged messages so it doesn’t matter,” to “It didn’t happen when I tried it, so it’s not true,” to “All spam filters work this way” (they don’t), and so on.

It’ll be hard to find a way to make this sound nice to folks who aren’t already fully paid-up members of the Apple Fanboy Club.

Oh Noes! My delivery has been intercepted!!!!

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

An urgent email to my account tells me that my “parcel from UPS COURIER SERVICE” has been intercepted by the “UNITED STATES POSTAL INSPECTION SERVICE”:

This is to notify you that we have intercepted your parcel from UPS COURIER SERVICE is making the delivery and we have stopped the delivery process for some security reasons stated below:

Our scanning system has detected that your parcel contains a confirmable CARD to the tune of US$1,500,000.00 USD.Such parcel coming from African /Europe/Asia is been verified by the postal inspection service.

Also for the Delivery of the Parcel to continue, you are in obligation to obtain from Spain, a Duly Sworn Affidavit from Spanish High Court which cost only but $320 which will back up the Origin of Fund. This is in line with the Anti-Terrorist Campaign which the USA Government has embarked on recently to protect our Territory from future attacks. You should therefore contact the sender of the CARD or the UPS Courier Agent in Madrid Spain to get the Sworn Affidavit for you while we wait to receive from you the Affidavit File Number to enable us forward your CARD to your address.

I’m so relieved that the US Postal Service is so dedicated to stamping out this sort of thing that it can intercept parcels from Spain to Canada! Of course, the last thing I bought from Spain was some wine through the Ontario government’s monopoly LCBO, so why someone from that country would be sending me a “confirmable CARD to the tune of US$1,500,000.00 USD” is a little bit of a mystery.

July 6, 2011

“Scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service”

Filed under: Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 14:55

Facebook really, really doesn’t want you leaving for Google+ — in fact, they don’t even want you looking too closely at your friends’ personal data:

With the introduction of Google+ last week, the search/ad giant is finally in direct competition with Facebook. Or it will be, once Google gets over the opening week willies and reopens the service to allow the teeming hordes inside.

The biggest barrier to Google+’s success? All the time and effort we’ve already put into building our Facebook posses. Personally I am too old and cranky to start over from scratch. I just want to be able to click a button and automatically add everyone from Facebook to Google+.

That is, of course, exactly what Facebook does not want you to do, as an open source developer named Mohamed Mansour just discovered.

[. . .]

As Mansour noted (on his Google+ page, naturally):

     “This is what happens when your extension becomes famous :sigh: Facebook just removed the emails from their mobile site. They implemented a throttling mechanism that if you visit your ~5 friends in a short period of time, it will remove the email field.

     “No worries, a new version is on the making … I am bloody annoyed now, because this proves Facebook owns every users data on Facebook. You don’t own anything! If I were you, I would riot this to the media outlets again.”

It turns out that scouring your own Facebook profile for information your friends shared with you is in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Nice, eh?

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