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Sit back and watch

And now with added low altitude desert “amphibians:”

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Before we go to unmanned combat aircraft, the F-35 is coming online. I’d speculate it may well be the last manned fighter we put into service. But, that’s not the point. It brings some incredible technology to the table, and will serve the USAF, USMC and Navy in three different modifications.

Specifically, the really interesting technology that “caught my eye” was this:

Designed for a “HUD-less” cockpit, the heads up display travels with the pilot’s head, yielding pictures like this to the occupant: Heck, not only will you be able to see vital info, regardless of where you position your head…you’ll be able to “talk” to the plane….Next: The development of the “sensitivity module” to detect when you are verbally abusing your ride….and the CDR thought alcohol abuse was a too intrusive issue…Moving pictures, that talk to you, about the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter:

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Some guys with lots of time on their hands, or a pressing need to complete their academic research papers have devised a way to make a projected image show correctly on a screen/surface at varied angles. Specifically, these smart people are: Johnny C. Lee, Paul H. Dietz, Dan Maynes-Aminzade, Ramesh Raskar, and Scott E. Hudson.

So, PowerPoint Rangers, no need to fret when the heads of the audience will absorb the light energy you desired to show on the screen! Just hang the projector so it has a boresight view of the screen.

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Find this intriguing? Here’s the technical paper in a .pdf

The SPOT Satellite Tracker. Bumped across this on eBay, but you can get it for $149 if you dig around, like here.

Good coverage in the areas where our troops are going. Doesn’t need an internet or cell phone tower connection. Service is $9.99/mo or $99 for the year. 911 mode, and has an “OK” button, to just let the folks back home know you’re OK. Extra service to link the user into Google Earth maps, with locations being transmitted every 10 minutes.

So what’s not to like about the “AA” battery powered, water proof, shock proof, 7.37 oz unit?

Oh, yeah…other services to tap you into international SAR resources…

Could it be that the massive production output system of Communist China may have been able to set up trojan horse programs on some external hard drives:

From a bulletin board post and confirmed at a second source:

Tainted Hard Disks with Trojans
I was planning to buy a new hard disk this thanksgiving. I researched a bit and came across this.. Scary..

FOCUSED ATTACK: Large-capacity hard disks often used by government agencies were found to contain Trojan horse viruses, Investigation Bureau officials warned
By Yang Kuo-wen, Lin Ching-chuan and Rich Chang
STAFF REPORTERS
Sunday, Nov 11, 2007, Page 2

Portable hard discs sold locally and produced by US disk-drive manufacturer Seagate Technology have been found to carry Trojan horse viruses that automatically upload to Beijing Web sites anything the computer user saves on the hard disc, the Investigation Bureau said.

Around 1,800 of the portable Maxtor hard discs, produced in Thailand, carried two Trojan horse viruses: autorun.inf and ghost.pif, the bureau under the Ministry of Justice said.

The tainted portable hard disc uploads any information saved on the computer automatically and without the owner’s knowledge to www.nice8.org and www.we168.org, the bureau said.

The affected hard discs are Maxtor Basics 500G discs.

The bureau said that hard discs with such a large capacity are usually used by government agencies to store databases and other information.

Sensitive information may have already been intercepted by Beijing through the two Web sites, the bureau said.

The bureau said that the method of attack was unusual, adding that it suspected Chinese authorities were involved.

In recent years, the Chinese government has run an aggressive spying program relying on information technology and the Internet, the bureau said.

The bureau said this was the first time it had found that Trojan horse viruses had been placed on hard discs before they even reach the market.

The bureau said that it had instructed the product’s Taiwanese distributor, Xander International, to remove the products from shelves immediately.

The bureau said that it first received complaints from consumers last month, saying they had detected Trojan horse viruses on brand new hard discs purchased in Taiwan.

Agents began examining hard discs on the market and found the viruses linked to the two Web sites.

Anyone who has purchased this kind of hard disc should return it to the place of purchase, the bureau said.

The distributor told the Chinese-language Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) that the company had sold 1,800 tainted discs to stores last month.

It said it had pulled 1,500 discs from shelves, while the remaining 300 had been sold by the stores to consumers.

Seagate’s Asian Pacific branch said it was looking into the matter.
__________________

There you have it. Subcontractors (see the Mobile Mag link) knowing to not do it to all the units, just ones you think might be large enough to be purchased regularly by government agencies.

Think about it: Get the enemy to pay to send you their data filesand even to connect you directly into their computers….pretty clever!  Now that’s a novel idea for technology enhanced digital commuting…and it saves on creating gren house gases, too!

It seems there’s a new trouble in Blogging City, so says Lorelle VanPossen in her post “Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content.” Thanks to the digital age of programs, this is an excepot from the article to explain this phenomena:

[…]
Master Copyright Expert, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today, an adviser and contributor to the Blog Herald, investigated this and wrote in Protecting Your Content From the Spinning Spammers about this new trend in site scraping.

Jonathan calls them “Spinning Spammers”, and they are using Plugins and utilities for synonymized scraping of your blog. The process scrapes your blog feed and then “translates” your content using synonyms to replace recognizable words.
[…]

Your words may be out there already, replete with synonymous alternatives to your choices. If you get that deja vu feeling while surfing all over again, you may be correct!

Toss in my amazement that we have “experts” in plagarism to add to my surprise!

H/T: My WordPress Dashboard

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We’re running out of petroleum?

I don’t think so. It’s just we’ve managed to get the easy to find and extract from the earth reserves. I’m no geologist, but I dod some unintentional reading once in a while on this topic. I know we’re actually progressed past the “easy” to get oil, and have developed techniques to go back to “old” fields and use methods, like hot water/steam to tease the entrained oil out of the surrounding soil so we can have that, too.

Just the other day, Brazil found a huge reserve of oil. From Forbes:

11.09.07, 2:27 PM ET SAO PAULO, Brazil –

A monster offshore oil discovery and promising fields near the find could help Brazil join the ranks of the world’s major exporters, but full-scale extraction is unlikely until 2013 and will be very expensive.

The “ultra-deep” Tupi field off the coast of Rio de Janeiro could hold as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable light crude, and initial production should exceed 100,000 barrels daily, though experts believe the amount will then go much higher.
[…]

So, what’s the deal? Isn’t this post about technology?

Yep. Hang in here. Notice the words “ultra-deep?”

[..]
Though tapping the Tupi field will be expensive, Petrobras is flush with cash for strategic investments because of growing production and high international oil prices.

The Tupi field lies under 2,140 meters (7,060 feet) of water, more than 3,000 meters (almost 10,000 feet) of sand and rocks, and then another 2,000-meter (6,600-foot) thick layer of salt.
[…]

Kinda sounding like Bruce Willis andf his crew trying to get to the 800 feet on the asteroid, doesn’t it, but without the zero gravity?

Obviously, it can be retrieved. It’s because we have discovered similar deposits in the Gulf of Mexico, but they are….a little bit deeper….to the tune of 30,000 ft down. From Wired:

[…]
Siegele has reason to be giddy. He works for Chevron, and his team is sitting on several new record-breaking discoveries in the Gulf, a region that many geologists believe may have more untapped oil reserves than any other part of the world. On this trip, the 48-year-old vice president for deepwater exploration has come to a rig called the Cajun Express to oversee final preparations before drilling begins on the company’s 30-square-mile Tahiti field.
[…]
A drill is plunging down through 4,000 feet of ocean and more than 22,000 feet of shale and sediment — a syringe prodding Earth’s innermost veins. That 5-mile shaft will soon give Chevron the deepest active offshore well in the Gulf. Some land drills have gone deeper, but extracting oil from below miles of freezing salt water and unyielding sediment creates a set of technical problems that far exceed those faced on terra firma.
[…]

And, the challenges are many and varied. Farther in the article, they discuss the drilling “platform” is actually a ship, based on the technology of the Glomar Explorer. It is a ship, not a fixed rig; it is not anchored, it hovers, using 4 large thrusters and a GPS feed to keep the ship above the pipe to the ocean floor, built of 90 ft sections. Top that off with the oil, being as deep as it in the earth’s mantle, is hot and therefore very thin in terms of fluidity. When it gets to the piping exposed to the ocean on it’s trip to the surface, it’s all of a sudden surrounded by not much over 32 degree water, causing a dramatic change in viscosity. Again from the Wired article:

[…]
Dropping a drill down through more than 1 mile of water and 4 miles of earth isn’t easy either. The drill string is composed of hundreds of 90-foot sections known as joints that are dropped into the water by an automated mechanical arm and successively screwed into each other. It took more than three days to assemble all the joints in the drill string that pierced the Jack field.

Once the rotating drill bit begins its journey down through miles of sediment and pierces the seafloor, it encounters another set of problems caused by the changing terrain. The test well for the Jack field drilled through nearly a dozen geological layers — ranging from hard bedrock to sandy sediment to empty voids. These rapid shifts from one level of pressure to another can disturb the rotations of the drill, causing it to get stuck or veer off course. Pressure is good — it’s what naturally forces the liquid crude up the length of the well and into the barges and pipelines that send it back to shore. (The layer of shale over the oil-bearing sands acts like a brick on top of a water balloon — the fluid wants to surge upward.) But, at the very bottom, farther below sea level than Mount Everest is above it, there’s enough pressure to implode a human head — or, more pertinently, to crack iron casings.

Moreover, the closer you get to Earth’s core, the higher the temperature of the rocks. At 20,000 feet below seabed, the oil is hot enough to boil an egg. At 30,000 feet, it can reach more than 400 degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to cook off into natural gas and carbon dioxide. Meanwhile, the water at the bottom of the deep sea is at near-freezing temperatures — between 32 and 34 degrees — creating a dangerous interaction: When the boiling-hot oil hits the freezing-cold water, it could solidify and block the flow, rupturing the pipes. The machinery on the seafloor, therefore, has to be well insulated. Engineers on the Cajun Express have been relying on a fairly primitive method — pumping the casing and substations with antifreeze — but much more sophisticated systems are in the works.
[…]

So…there is oil to be taken from the Earth, above and beyond what we thought, because now we can go deeper to get it. With the cost of a barrels of oil hovering about the high $90s, to $100, it makes this a good investment of money to figure out the technology to get this oil to market. I also hopes it puts some pressure on the market,as the supply expands.

Interesting stuff.

“Popular opinion is the greatest lie in the
world.”
-Thomas Carlyle

Technology, in and of itself, like money, is morally neutral. It’s all in how we use it. For instance, ValOUR-IT, using the computer technology brought to us by the space race, has been lightened and miniaturized to the point that our wounded troops can use it to communicate. The fund drive is still on…donate (button at the top of the page to help you out).

Anyhow, a few years back, I posted about data ports being put into vehicles. Those ports have become much more used than just for the shop to run diagnostics on your car….sit back, do a little reading and see what I mean.

Anyhow, technology, like legislation, also has it’s “unintended consequences” in our daily lives.

Update: Just found this info on EZ-Pass and privacy.

BTW, Fred Fry International is a great site for current maritime (meaning other than naval) news!

Don’t even think about it, Navy/Coast Guard team!

This weekend is to do the work the big bloggers (John, Matt, Jimbo and Mrs G) won’t do – taking it to the streets.

They must just sit about, sipping coffee drinks with odd names, dreaming of victory (except for Mrs G, who might have not had her coffee and has fallen asleep at the wheel, like John the Zoomie did last year).

So, find some brew that appears to resemble the mid-watch coffee, get a full mug (borrow one from your CPO’s Mess is you’ve lost yours) and hit the bricks. Talk ValOUR-IT up something fierce, get them to nod and say (using the “repeat back” method of reinforcement): “I will go home, log on the net and contribute to our wounded service members, via the Navy/Coast Guard team.” Make them say it, without errors, three times in a row (it’s a memory thing) before you let them out of your vicinity.

Bring it home for Navy/Coast Guard!

End note: No “complaining” and whining. Get on with it. You know you’ll feel better when Monday’s number show it’s worth your effort…

Tracked back @: Steeljaw Scribe