Back in AF, pilots in training would be obsessed with their iPhones playing X-Plane. It actually is a fantastic simulator considering that many of these pilots could very possibly be flying your commercial jet someday :) My buddy who went the cargo AF pilot route is a heavy iPhone user, but I guess the rest of the military doesn't consider the AF a real branch and call it the "Air Farce." The AF is going towards the UAV route, so pilots in the service are less and less.
Link bait headline distracts from content of article, as usual.
(As a pacifist I wouldn't contribute to this project, but your comment doesn't really address the substance of the article, which is very interesting and makes some interesting statements about the sort of smartphone technology being used in warfare.)
Pretty good article. For one that works directly with the troops as well as building tools for the R&D department for my company. We are building and showing off tools just like what is explained in this article to try and win contracts just like this.
We are always looking for more things and ways to help the troops out. This article does a good job of actually telling the public what the private sector builds for the troops.
For all the flack vets/servicemen get, it's not their war. Policymakers such as Bush determined what servicemen would do. Servicemembers can save lives in Katrina, and they may be ordered to carry out bombing missions--a lot of people were commissioned/enlisted during 9/11 after being moved by the collapse of the twin towers: it is a case of bait and switch, when we were sold the falsehoods of the "War on Terror."
What the military does is not a binary answer. The public chooses the commander in chief and the policy (Congress). It's a system that has endured for the last three centuries. You have the power to change it, and if you don't like it and don't speak up, remember V for Vendetta: "If you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror."
I sometimes remember the story of my girlfriend's grandpa: He was a Japanese soldier drafted in the Second World War. Around the same time, my maternal grandmother was serving as a provincial administrator of the Republic of China version of the IRS as one of the first college educated female accountants. She had to dress up as a man, cut her hair short to avoid being summarily raped and shot in Nanjing, then-capital of China. So now you know I'm of Chinese ethnicity dating a Japanese girl. My girlfriend's grandpa on a China mission was ordered by his commander to shoot one of the prisoners. If he refused, he would most likely be shot (most militaries allow this; the UCMJ allows this in combat). It was a choice between his life or somebody else's. If you watched Dark Knight, you know it's never a black or white answer. It's always a cruel decision to make. Just ask any Vietnam vet who saw combat. If my girlfriend's grandpa didn't shoot the man, my girlfriend might not exist. If he did, he would be a conscientious objector at the expense of his life, and I would not meet my girlfriend. All the while it's awful 40 million Chinese people lost their lives to the Japanese. There are your obvious offenders, the ones that do enjoy raping and killing people, but they are not normal and are present even in civilian society. A lot of them are likely decent people, and would secretly free Chinese prisoners if they had the opportunity.
I wish we could all be pacifists, but should we eliminate the military? I'm sure that's a resounding no, and I realize my sentiment may not be the most popular on HN, but we would be looking at anarchy without the men manning the silos too.
War is awful and thankfully the Internet seems to be eliminating 99.9% of armed conflicts. There is no point in senseless loss of life. But we still need a good defense--maybe not as much power as we have now, bur nonetheless something to protect the border.
How many did the Chinese communist party get killed with hunger in the sixties and during the culture revolution?
>>War is awful and thankfully the Internet seems to be eliminating 99.9% of armed conflicts.
I think that is more of the democratic peace theory -- democracies don't fight wars with each others (-: not even USA :-). In the rest of the world, we really hope that China stays stable and go democratic...
One problem with releasing your code as open source is it can get used in ways that you don't approve of, eg weapon systems by the military or crapware by the carriers.
And if you sell chalk, it might get used on the chalkboards for the Manhattan Project...
I don't think it's a problem at all that you can't enforce morality. I'd be much more offended by licenses that tried to enforce some sort of morality by forbidding redistribution to particular groups, whether it be the military, Amnesty International, Saddam Hussein ( http://www.google.com/search?q=saddam+hussein+playstation ), or even the Situation from Jersey Shore.
Theo De Raadt put it best:
But software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
Do you realize governments can appropriate any technology, closed or open, for whatever purpose they see fit, and you're entitled to just "reasonable compensation"?
In the US, congress has been extending the terms of copyrights quickly enough that they effectively do last forever, despite an explicit "limited times" requirement in the constitution (which the supreme court unfortunately made meaningless).
Then they would have to share it with the contractor under the terms of the GPL. The contractor could then release it further. More likely though, the contractor would be brought in to work on the project and the military would argue that it wasn't distributing the code.
Unless the contract said that they couldn't. And even if a specific contract didn't stop a given contractor from redistributing some GPL technology, how many contractors are going to risk being banned from future contracts because they redistributed?
That's one of the things about classified systems. They might violate your patents and your copyright, but how would you know if you don't even know they exist?
This isn't hard realtime systems. Nobody is going to die because it takes a few seconds extra for them to download updates (the human brain takes a lot longer to process it anyway).
And JIT compiled java can be faster than native code, even in situations where you would not expect it (such as signal handling code).
Macho. But a phone is exactly where you want a VM. In fact, I would love to be able to push vm images for my phone from my desktop machine. Wake up, plug phone, push image. Security upgrades, new GPS data, my downloaded podcasts, news, emails, etc. I want to be able to come home with a new handset, plug it, and have my "phone" back.
Totally different use of the term "virtual machine". You're talking about a virtualised execution environment, or hardware virtual machine (as executed by virtualbox, xen or whatever); he's talking about a runtime virtual machine (like the CLR, JVM, or Dalvik).
