Robotic systems can’t replace a pilot’s gut instinct
BY COL. JAMES JINNETTE, USAF
Unmanned combat systems have fundamental limitations that can make their technology a war-losing proposition. These limitations involve network vulnerabilities, release consent judgment and, most importantly, creative capacity during air combat and close air support (CAS) missions. Although futurists might assume these problems away with grand ideas of technologies yet to be developed, during the next few decades these limitations will remain critical constraints on our ability to provide airpower in the joint fight.
AIR FORCE COL. JAMES JINNETTE is director of the Air Force Element at the Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a recent Army War College graduate. Prior to his current posting, Jinnette was an F-15E squadron commander. He has completed three close air support deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Google showed Thursday it's getting more serious about privacy when it launched a tool called Google Dashboard that aims to give you more control over your personal data stored on Google's servers. From your Google Dashboard you can view the company's privacy policies, easily access your most recent activity for each Google service you use, and manage settings for those services.
Phi Beta Iota: Google has never provided privacy and it never well. Google Enterprise devices are Trojan Horses, and anything Google touches goes into the Google Cloud forevermore. This is why Phi Beta Iota believes that we must move to bottom-up clouds in which the individual and their device are both infrastructure-independent (localized clouds) and able to control all rules for content they create at the point of creation. John Chambers refuses to offer Application Oriented Network services in this fashion, so perhaps Nokia will steal a march on him and recognize that a cell phone CPU AON and Haggle would be totally cool and *very* disruptive.
A contest planned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will challenge contestants to use the Internet to locate the 10 large red weather balloons the agency will place across the continental United States, DARPA officials announced last week. DARPA will put the balloons in publicly accessible locations and display them for one day during daylight hours. The first participant to identify the latitude and longitude of all the balloons will receive the $40,000 cash prize. The balloons will be positioned Dec. 5, DARPA officials said Oct. 29.
Phi Beta Iota: Our most trusted alter ego flagged this for attention, and we love it. We have ordered the book on Visual Language and hoping the author will soon publish on Information Mapping. This is sheer genius, not least for its human sensitivity and its grasp of the brain-eye-hand-touch loop. We are blown away by this, it buries the visual design phenoms of the past, while clearly being relevant to Collective Intelligence and Conscious Evolution.
At first glance, this little yellow giraffe looks like a lot of other kids’ bath toys. But Stella is made from Renuva, a little-known material that could change for the better the way hundreds of things, from upholstery to airplane wings, are made.
The story of how Stella came to be made from this material, a soy-based alternative to polyurethane (which is typically petroleum-based), provides a model for how stuff can be better designed in the future.
Phi Beta Iota: While folks focus on the Al Gore show and the important but isolated challenge of reducing our carbon footprint, the avant guarde is way down the road with sustainable design, green chemistry, zero waste, and so on. It's all connected, we need to get truth on the table, and we need to do the right things righter. Stella is a poster child for a new paradigm of ecological economics, natural capitalism, and conscious evolution. Learn more about Renuva from Dow below.
Unfinished Windows 7 feature turns laptops into Wi-Fi hotspots
Ben Franklin-Funded Company, Nomadio, Finds a Windows 7 Niche
Free app lets iPhones, other devices connect to Internet via software-based router
By Gregg Keizer
October 29, 2009 06:22 PM ET
Computerworld – A Philadelphia developer has rooted out an unfinished feature of Windows 7 that turns any laptop into a wireless access point, allowing other Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share the connection without special software.
“The 10,000 km (6,200 mile) long Unity fiber optic cable, funded by Google and five East Asian communication companies, left Japanese shores on November 1st to be laid along the northern Pacific Ocean floor. The Japanese end of the cable is expected to be fused to the American end sometime around November 11th. The cable, which was announced in February of 2008 at a cost of around $300 million USD, has the theoretical capacity of 7.68 Tbps, but will be set at a capacity of about 4.8 Tbps (supposedly equivalent to about 75 million simultaneous phone calls) during its initial use. When Unity begins full operation sometime early next year, it is projected to increase internet traffic capacity between the two regions by over 20%, a wonderful boost to transpacific relations!”
Phi Beta Iota: We've never understood the American obsession with satellites, absent the corrupt fascination with screwing the taxpayer while leaving all US communications open to being fried by the Chinese. Latency matters. From where we sit, for the cost of one Lockheed rocket exploding on the launch pad you can get a serious fiber line down. That makes a lot more sense to us.
