Satellite Imagery 246
The NYT has a piece on the history and future of satellite imagery. Short but interesting.
Administration: An ingenious abstraction in politics, designed to receive the kicks and cuffs due to the premier or president. -- Ambrose Bierce
Military Might (Score:5, Funny)
Our tax dollars at work!
Re:Military Might (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Military Might (Score:5, Funny)
This reminds me of a story from Sweden.
They had installed very expensive surveillance equipment along the whole Swedish coast, to monitor the baltic sea. The system was operated by drafted personell which were supposed to be looking for signs of Soviet submarine activity.
When it was uncovered that most of the time spent monitoring with the very expensive surveillance system was used to monitor hot chicks on the Swedish beaches, there were heads rolling.
Re:Military Might (Score:2, Funny)
hot chicks on the Swedish beaches
Re:Military Might (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Military Might (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Military Might (Score:3, Interesting)
Small European countries are not in a simliar situation. Finland, for example, has no choice but to require every male of age (and healthy enough) to serve for 2 years. If the US and Russia fought, they would be ground zero. There simply aren't enough people to defend their country without mandatory conscription.
So it works out that basically every male has experince with rifles and camping out in Lappland, so t
Re:Military Might (Score:2, Interesting)
Scale is one of the huge advantages the USA enjoys. It helps us economically as well obviously. Smaller countries certainly have to make different choices. It is all in the Math.
I am an American and I have enourmous respect for Finland's performance in WW2. Finland was in one of the hardest positions of WW2. Forced to ally with Germany or become a Soviet republic. Finns danced with the devil and came out with an independent nation.
Re:Home of the Brewster Buffalo (Score:2)
Europeans stopped something else (Score:4, Insightful)
The "strange reason" is that European militaries stopped engaging in extraterritorial adventures. It makes perfect sense to use draftees to defend your own country, and you don't have to worry about "atrocities" either when your military is only defending your own territory.
But, you are right, for the kinds of actions the US military engages in, you do need a professional military; you couldn't do it with draftees. Draftees would not be well enough trained to handle it, and US voters wouldn't go along with wars like those in Iraq if they knew that their sons and daughters might just get drafted, sent over there, and killed.
Of course, if the conscript troops had spotted any submarines, the Swedish would have probably just blamed America.
To Europeans, US involvement in Europe was both a gamble and a mixed blessing. The gamble worked and resulted in great wealth and freedom for Europeans, but if it had failed, it would have turned Europe into a nuclear wasteland. To Americans, sitting comfortably in their living rooms thousands of miles away, that threat was much less immediate.
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:5, Insightful)
You are preoccupied with the only scenario that mattered to the Americans: a missile attack. What was a real threat to the Europeans was a ground war in Europe that did not involve any direct hostilities between the US and the USSR. And that was a fairly likely scenario: the US and USSR knew that it would have been the end of both countries to send off their missiles, but a ground war in Europe would have been acceptable to both.
along with the point that the USA repeatedly put its ass on the line for Europe, only to receive lukewarm thanks at best,
And why do you think the US did that? Out of nobility? Out of humanitarian instincts? I don't think so. The US got involved in Europe because if Europe had fallen to the Nazis or to the Soviet Union, the US would have been in very deep trouble, economically and politically.
While Americans have delusions of grandeur because of a huge military-industrial complex, the reality of it all is that the US needs Europe at least as much as Europe needs the US. And until American politicians and voters come to appreciate that, there will be a lot more "hostility" because 600 million Europeans don't like having their foreign and defense policy dictated to them by 300 million US voters. That was vaguely acceptable in the decades after WWII, but it is coming to an end now. You'll just have to deal with it.
Mod parent up (Score:2)
This is certainly not a troll.
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
Man, you're really out out touch. It's France and Germany that are out of touch with the rest of Europe, not the other way around. Their power is waning, they don't like it one bit, and they just wanted to show off to the world that they're not irr
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
It was not obvious to the population in Europe that the USSR would bow to that pressure like it had for for the Cuba missile crisis. Maybe Reagan had top-notch intelligence that was telling him that his course of action was safe, b
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
A worse villain, huh? Great. Thanks.
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
In the case of the cold war there were two warring parties none of which had any other interest in mind than their own. Both were willing to lay waste to any part of the world as long as it furthered their interest, and they did too. Both were aggressive and ru
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
With respect, they are different for the people living in the respective country, but they are the same if you happen to be oppressed by either. The European (both Eastern and Western) got a very good deal compared to other parts of the world. Try reading the non-US news sometimes. Would you have liked to be a Vietnamese in the 60's? Would it have been appreciately different to being an Afghani in the 80's?
May I remind you what happened in Chile on Tuesday the 11th
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
Re:Europeans stopped something else (Score:2)
What planet are you from? The US is $2.7 trillion in debt [observer.co.uk] to the rest of the world, much of it to Europe and Japan. The entire US economy is built on foreign debt and foreign investments.
And the US is one of the stingiest nations when it comes to foreign aid, to the po
Google Partner Link (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Google Partner Link (Score:1, Insightful)
As often as I see news.google display slashdot stories and as often as slash links to both google and the NYT site I am still blown away by the fact that there is no
Re:Google Partner Link (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Google Partner Link (Score:1)
username: plasticuser
password: plastic
Compliments of http://www.plastic.com (slashdot like site)
Re:Google Partner Link (Score:2, Flamebait)
Short but interesting. (Score:4, Insightful)
Kinda like the Slashdot article, just leave out the interesting part. C'mon guys, can maybe we get a bit verbose about what you choose to put up on /.?? Maybe a little cut and paste of an interesting piece of the article? Or maybe a little more witty repartee by the editors.
Re:Short but interesting. (Score:1)
If they want to get witty, they can use the comment system and open themselves up to moderation like everyone else. Most people read this site for the news*, not so they can see what CmdrTaco thinks about the news.
*Okay, so most people actually read this site for the trolls. But no one is reading it for michael's commentary on satellite imagery.
Re:Short but interesting. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Short but interesting. (Score:2)
Re:Short but interesting. (Score:2, Funny)
It's the typo reduction system. It left out the misspelled words.
WMD (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:WMD (Score:1, Insightful)
Just because we haven't found any yet (or possibly because the government isn't ready to revel the information) doesn't mean that they don't exist.
Give us time, and I assure you that we'll discover that they had them, and they probably also moved them to other countries.
"Us conservatives?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:WMD (Score:5, Insightful)
You have got to be kidding. If the goverment had that information it would be rammed down our throats 24/7 for the next month as justification for the war in the first place.
and they probably also moved them to other countries
Yeah I can just see the head of some bananna republic thinking to himself that despite the fact that Sadam was universally hated in both east and west and the most powerful army in the world will invade on the even the assumption of possession of these weapons why not hide then for him. What harm could it do eh ?
Did Iraq have limited chemical weapon capability yes, probably developed from Antrax sold to them by the US. This is where the US certainty come in. They 'know' because they provided the foundation.
Did Iraq they have WMD? more than likely not. Does it matter? NO the US has access to the Oil, all else is irrelevant now.
Re:WMD (Score:3, Insightful)
The flaw in your argument is that the US also had access to any iraqi oil fields it wanted in 1991, but didn't take it.
Re:WMD (Score:2)
This was the same Iran which he'd perviously been attacking for 10 years in the Iran-Iraq war.
Iran said "yes" and hid his ariforce for him.
(Oh, they then refused to hand any of them back afterwards, though
It is far from impossible that he woudl have successfully had other nations (who are sympatheti
Re:WMD (Score:2, Funny)
Irony courtesy of The Daily Show.
Re:WMD (Score:5, Interesting)
Your willingness to belive an obvious lie is stunning. I'm as happy as anyone to see Saddam's reign over, but he did not have WMD, had no connection to Bin Laden (or to any international terrorisim, beyond funds for PLO bombers families), and was not planning to suddenly rise up and destroy the U.S.
P.S. The 9/11 bomers all came from Saudi Arabia.
Re:WMD (Score:2)
Re:WMD (Score:2)
I heard Tony Blair say that they had AL-LOO-MIN-EE-UM centrefuges, which, as everyone knows, are MUCH WORSE that the garden variety AL-UM-IN-UM ones. Nasty stuff, that AL-LOO-MIN-EE-UM.
8-)
Re:WMD (Score:2)
Saddam's regime freely admitted to having certain quantities of WMDs after Gulf War I. The regime could not account for even those it admitted to having previously. Essentially, they said "what we had we destroyed, but we forget what we did with the destroyed stuff." I find that suspicious. Don't you?
Re:WMD (Score:2)
Give us time, and I assure you that we'll discover that they had them, and they probably also moved them to other countries.
Jeez, someone mod this "hilarious."
Was the war meant to prevent the use of these Weapons of Mass Destruction by terrorists to whom Saddam threatened to give them? Seems to me I recall Bush telling me it was... If waging the war has prompted the weapons to be neatly scurried across the border into Iran or Syria, how exactly does that prevent them from reaching the hands of terroris
"PR Problem" != undermining US foreign policy (Score:2)
When, as a US President, you go about explicitly undermining the UN, saying it'll be irrelevant if it doesn't rubber-stamp your own controversial, aggressively unilateral policies, that's more serious than a "PR problem." There's a colossal difference between the domestic take on this issue and the international one. "PR" doesn't adequately describe the damage.
In world opinion, the que
Re:WMD (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:WMD (Score:5, Funny)
OK, here ya go! [tigersweat.com]
Re:WMD (Score:3, Funny)
Re:WMD (Score:2)
The images are created by sampling an evanescent photon field about 22 times per second and recording those images using AR coated optics onto a specially treated cellulose material. Those images are then digitized into a proprietary format, encoded using a 54 bit encryption scheme, and disseminated to the populace at large. I do believe the imag
Re:WMD (Score:1)
Re:WMD (Score:4, Insightful)
The best technology is worthless in the hands of people who are willing to lie to get what they want. Remember the farce that was Colin Powel going to the UN, satelite photos of tractor trailers, and warehouses.... can't image any country that was tractor trailers! They must be producing wepaons with them..
Re:WMD (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:WMD (Score:2)
Re:WMD - the real story (Score:2)
Obviously the satellite imagery isn't that good... (Score:1, Funny)
Sorry couldnt resist
"Short but interesting" (Score:3, Funny)
In the future... (Score:3, Funny)
Fabricated (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Fabricated (Score:1)
Re:Fabricated (Score:3, Offtopic)
Another test you can do is to stand at about sea level and observe a ship. Then travel away from the ship on the ground and it will slo
Re:Fabricated (Score:2)
Re:Fabricated (Score:2)
Shhhhh! What you really need to be suggesting is that the moon is made out of money!
Damn it that green patch is not my dope! (Score:5, Funny)
Latitude: 45 53S. Longitude: 170 30E
Thank you.
Re:Damn it that green patch is not my dope! (Score:3, Informative)
The problem with spy satellites is predictability. (Score:4, Insightful)
They have their uses. But you will always get higher resolution using aircraft (they are closer to the ground). Not to mention aircraft can actually be easily directed to a target.
Re:The problem with spy satellites is predictabili (Score:1)
Re:The problem with spy satellites is predictabili (Score:2)
Just for the sake of argument...
If the US government had such capabilities, hypothetically, do you think they would demonstrate them?
When did we first start hearing lots of speculation about stealth aircraft, and when were they first flying?
Re:But the problem with aircraft. . . (Score:2)
Pfff! You do realize that that was 43 years ago, yes? Saying that's the problem with reconnaisance aircraft is like saying that the problem with guns on fighter aircraft is that they shoot their own propeller off.
Re:But the problem with aircraft. . . (Score:2)
And their planes, missiles and computers haven't gotten any better.
Re:But the problem with aircraft. . . (Score:2)
And their planes, missiles and computers haven't gotten any better.
First of all, that Navy EP-3E wasn't "shot down", it was hit by a jackass chinese fighter jock. He was playing Tough Guy and trying to scare them by disturbing the airflow over the wing by pulling up in front of it and got caught in the prop. Besides, I never said anything
U-2 still in use... (Score:2)
I presume that the Global Hawk will replace it at some stage. Similar sort of plane, really - take pictures from very high altitudes, except no pilot. If it gets shot down, it's not nearly as big a deal - and it can do duty cycles way longer than any human pilot could.
Re:U-2 still in use... (Score:2)
True, the U-2R is essentially the same airframe. The point I was trying to make (somewhat unclearly, I admit) was that Powers was shot down because the DOD/CIA/whomever assumed that the U-2 flew so high it was invincible. Like the first guy to shoot his own propellor off in a biplane, yo
Ethical Issues (Score:3, Insightful)
For example, imagine if we could trace back the steps of the 9/11 terrorists right up to the point where they entered the country, I am sure that would give valuable information.
Nevertheless I am strong advocate for privacy (aren't we all?) therefore, its best that we put the laws in place before its been abused.
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:4, Informative)
In a few years there will be 300 million people in the United States with roughly a 140 million autos on 6.7 million km of roads and nearly 15,000 airstrips.
There is no way that in a few years there will be any way anyone can track the movements of all those people and vehicles.
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:1)
Ofcourse this would require extreme amounts of storage space, but I do not think technology will be the barrier..
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:1)
Plus theres the problem that Keyhole can't see through clouds, so then you deal with lower resolution Lacrosse SAR imaging.
It'd take hundreds or thousands of birds in low earth orbit over the US to cover everything from every angle, plus in urban centers it would be next to worthless, so then you have to cover them with UAVs. I'd expect LA would take a couple hundred UAVs to cover completely.
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:2)
Just the "bad guys".
Given the current average of 2 "bad guys" to every
1000 people in the US (The other 998
people, hereafter known as the "moral majority"),
that shouldn't be a problem. The logistical
problems of tracking 600,000 "bad guys"
throughout the U.S. will be a aided by the
introduction of mandatory "Neighbourhood watch"
schemes. (Brown shirts will be optional).
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:2)
What are you, some sort of commie? We spell it neighborhood in the free world.
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:2)
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:2)
Re:Ethical Issues (Score:2)
That might be doable, but what's the point really? It just puts law enforcement at a serious disadvantage, when any private-secotor indvidual can get all of that information with a few bucks, no need for a court order... Quite troubling when these satellites are privately owned and have no regulations what-so-ever.
Soon we'll find out that they all have infra-red cameras as well,
Privacy vs. Technology (Score:1)
news.google url (Score:2, Informative)
real-time satellite imagery analysis? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's say you have a (currently non-existant) 1mm imaging platform on a satellite. 1mm per pixel of resolution allows you to identify most things fairly well, but you still might have trouble reading a newspaper's body clearly. Headlines would come through okay - keeping in mind, of course, that you have to make the shot obliquely to get some sort of an angle on it - straight down doesn't help here. Now take a picture of a square 200km by 200km. How many pixels is that? Let's say you take that picture with 24 bits per pixel denoting colour (and not, say, the way you would do it which is with more than three bands... but I digress). How many bits is that?
It's easier, by far, to do things like fly over the area you want at a less sexy height, like 20,000 feet, with a high-end remote imaging and sensing platform mounted inside your medium-to-low end plane. 500TB cartridges store a good amount of images, and you can jack them directly into your central machine back home while the computers go to work analysing the data they contain.
It also costs signficantly less.
Re:real-time satellite imagery analysis? (Score:5, Interesting)
First of all, a lot of these images are shot of hostile territory, and we can't fly over them. Think N. Korea, China, Russia, etc.
Second, if 1mm pixel resolution existed, why would you use it to shoot an area 200km x 200km? If you needed that much detail, you'd zoom in. If you wanted an overview, you'd zoom out. What technology you'd use doesn't affect that.
If you used a plane to shoot a 200km x 200km area at 1mm resolution, it'd take up just as much space, although bandwidth is more abundant at the lower altitudes. Even with that, at 3 bytes/ pixel * 200km * 200km * 1,000,000 mm/km *1,000,000 mm/km * 1 pixel/mm^2, that's a big number, 120,000 Terabytes! So you could use 240 500TB cartridges to take these pictures at a 1mm resolution. That amount of data of unwieldy at any altitude!
Finally, as far as using satellite photos of pedestrian locations (LAX, Washington DC, etc) that we could image using airplanes, I think it's more a matter of cost and convenience. For one-time site surveys, an airplane is clearly the way to go. But for sites that need to be re-imaged daily (highway and building construction, coastal erosion, etc), satellite imaging is probably both easier and cheaper.
Question: (Score:2)
Just kind of curious, b/c what if North Korea (somehow) managed to shoot down an American sattelite, and then claimed it was in their airspace... Are there international treaties/laws (that only some nations have signed) that dictate this, or is it just common sense (which doesn't hold any legal ground at all)?
Re:Question: (Score:2)
Well, one interpretation from the US FCC (Federal Communications Commission) is 50km. That figure is probably based on ITU (International Telecommunications Union) resolutions. That's the altitude at which the priviledges of my Amateur Radio License peter out. Operation higher than 50km puts you in the Amateur Space Service.
Privacy Violation (Score:5, Funny)
The growth of the technology-enabled police state is shocking. You can't even kidnap a guy anymore without worrying the victim might violate your privacy by hiding some beeper up his butt. We better think long and hard before letting this genie out of it's bottle.
Re:Privacy Violation (Score:2)
Re:Privacy Violation (Score:2)
Satellite Imagery at Home (Score:4, Interesting)
Spy on you your neighbors. Check out the 6 pixels representing the car you owned 5 years ago. Really cool.
Canadian Images (Score:2)
Like this one for Mac OS X, Terrabrowser. [apple.com]
So anyone have any ideas about Canadian cities?
Re:Canadian Images (Score:2)
too many secrets (Score:2, Interesting)
"or possibly because the government isn't ready to revel the information"
I can't remember who said it exactly (any fellow slashdotters out there who can help me out with that?) but in reply to some conspiracy nut who was ranting and raving about how the US Government didn't have the right to keep secrets from him, he said words to the effect of, "The US Government isn't in the habit of keeping secrets from it's people. They keep secrets from enemies of the state. Now if only the US population could keep
Games to play with surveillance (Score:3, Funny)
But in order to prevent satalight spy cams from seeing you, there is a hightech solution known as an umbrella that's quite effective.
Didn't satellite surveillance captured Bin Laden? (Score:2)
Re:Karma Whoring (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not simply help Michael out by giving the summary he could have made? Such as, "As technology advances the chances for government's foul use grow. Satallite imagery is beginning to be used for spying on common citizens without a warrant. This could be used to track down terrorists or those pesky hackers. For once I agree with Judge Scalia's position..." or something along these lines. For gosh sakes, don't try to karma whore and then not add anything to the discussion or do more work than Michael did.
Re:Karma Whoring (Score:2, Funny)
Re:wang (Score:3, Funny)
It's only 1 px/mm. I don't think that's fine enough for an AC's...