Bonnie Cha, senior editor for cell phones, joins the show today to fill in for Justin Yu. It's one of the few days Wilson and Jeff aren't worried about losing their jobs for something they shouldn't have said. And no, she is NOT Nicole Lee. What better day to have Ms. Cha on the show than following the weekend that the actual Google phone leaks!
The Google phone has been rumored for the last three or four years, and since the release of Google's Android operating system, the hoopla has died down considerably for an actual Google-branded phone. In typical Google fare, the company has decided on screwing its partners like Verizon and Motorola over by releasing an unsubsidized GSM phone called the Nexus One. No word yet on how much the unit will cost, but we do know that HTC designed the device. And that Google employees got the units over the weekend. Word on the street is that the device runs Android OS 2.1.
The mobile space is where all the spice is these days, and today is no different. News comes out that the venerable institution that is Playboy is jumping into the iPhone app fray with its own app. Because of Steve Jobs' no-porn rule, however, the app won't come with any outright nude pics. It will come with some scantily clad ladies and their interests. Per usual, it's all about the articles, not the pics.
(Credit:
Playboy)
In videogaming news, the Pentagon is buying up 2,200 PlayStation 3s. No, they aren't using it to train soldiers with "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2", while it may be a lot of fun. The military wants to use the gaming consoles to run simulations because the $299 machines can calculate 150 GFLOPS. At The 404, we really have no idea what that means, but it sounds impressive.
Finally, Green Day comes to Rock Band. The Beatles have come already, and while we're generally excited to have one of the best modern bands, we're not really excited to have every dude singing "Good Riddance (Time of Your Life)" at every single graduation party. This could be a very, very bad thing.
EPISODE 486
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One shot was all it took for the Pentagon to decommission with extreme prejudice a spy satellite that first failed to operate and then started on a steady descent toward Mother Earth.
A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) streaked skyward from the USS Lake Erie late Wednesday and whacked the satellite while it was still 130 or so miles up in space--and whizzing along at 17,000 miles per hour.
Defense Department officials quickly pronounced the mission a success, not just in hitting the satellite at all, but also in apparently rupturing its fuel tank. The rationale for the target shoot was the possibility that the satellite's 1,000 pounds of hydrazine, a hazardous substance, might be dispersed by a crash-landing in a populated area.
In a briefing Thursday morning, Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, cited three pieces of evidence: a fireball, a vapor cloud, and results from spectral analysis.
"We're very confident that we hit the satellite. We also have a high degree of confidence that we got the tank," Cartwright said.
The Pentagon has made several videos available so far, including the silent short "Missile Intercept." Another short (1 minute) version includes voice-over by Cartwright, and a much longer one (28 minutes) carries his full press conference.
The heat rays go marching one by one by...well, that's about it for now.
Raytheon said Tuesday that its Active Denial System 2 is now in the hands of the customer, the U.S. Air Force. Should it ever get beyond the evaluation stage, the ADS technology could be one of the very first directed-energy weapons fielded by the military. It looks like a satellite dish, works something like a microwave, and isn't supposed to cause any lasting harm.
Active Denial System 2 has been delivered to the U.S. Air Force.
(Credit: Raytheon)What it's intended to do is beam short bursts of millimeter waves (which are smaller than the better-known microwaves) at a suspicious or unruly target--a crowd gathered outside a U.S. embassy, say--and make make the recipients scatter because they can't stand the heat. Literally. The ADS, which operates at 95GHz, causes an intense but skin-deep burning sensation that lasts only as long as a person is in the way of the beam, which in tests so far has been a matter of just a few seconds at most.
Version 2 is an upgrade of the earlier system. It's bigger, more rugged and handles warmer atmospheric temperatures better, Raytheon says. And that version number is also pretty much the number of the systems that have been built so far: Raytheon has tallied up just one unit in each of the phases. ADS 0 was the initial technology demonstrator, and ADS 1 was mounted on a Humvee for further tests and for public demonstrations. ADS 2 is designed to be mounted on a variety of vehicles or to operate from a fixed site.
What happens next with ADS 2 is up to the Pentagon, specifically its Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program, for which the Air Force is the lead service. But the decisions on when, how and even whether to deploy are political as much as they are technical--ADS may be nonlethal, but the Pentagon surely isn't eager to see headlines like "U.S. fries protesters with energy weapon."
Raytheon, meanwhile, has a smaller version called Silent Guardian, at one-third the size and one-third the power, that it says is available to interested buyers. Better hurry, though. There's just one of these, too.
Force Protection's Cougar MRAPs ship out.
(Credit: Force Protection)The military-industrial complex is moving double-time to get tough new vehicles to troops in Iraq.
The MRAP (Mine Resistant Armored Protection) vehicles are on a mission to provide a better shield against roadside bombs. They achieve that protection in part through a V-shaped undercarriage that rides high off the ground. In terms of overall strength, they fall somewhere between up-armored Humvees (which were never intended to provide much in the way of armor) and the thicker-skinned M2 Bradley fighting vehicle.
While they can't defend against all types of explosives, they have proven effective against shaped charges designed to pierce armored vehicles.
"These large IEDs (improvised explosive devices) can destroy an Abrams tank," Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last week. "But I think the experience of the Marines in Anbar suggests that the MRAP, and particularly with the V-shaped hull, does provide significantly enhanced protection for the soldiers and Marines inside."
The Cougar 4x4
(Credit: Force Protection)One of the latest deliveries of MRAPs was airlifted to the Iraq theater of operations over the weekend, just a few days after a Defense Department panel recommended that the military procure as many of the vehicles as suppliers can crank out in the coming fiscal year. Typically, it can take 30 days to ship the vehicles by sea. The time needed for post-production work, such as rigging the MRAPs with communications gear, also usually takes about a month--but that has been trimmed by about a week.
"The department is embarking on an aggressive acquisition strategy to put as many of these armored vehicles into the field as fast as possible," Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, told Pentagon reporters Monday, according to the American Forces Press Service.
The weekend shipment was of an unspecified number of vehicles from Force Protection, of Ladson, S.C. The mainstay of the company's MRP line is the Cougar, which can be configured in either a 4x4 or 6x6 version, for duties ranging from troop transport to command and control to ambulance service. The larger model (weighing in at nearly 20 tons, plus a 13,000-pound payload) can carry up to 12 troops, while the smaller one (16 tons, plus a 6,000-pound payload), when assigned to bomb squad crews, can carry four troops and a large bomb-detection robot.
Both versions of the Cougar are equipped with a 330-horsepower Caterpillar C-7 diesel engine.
Force Protection says that to date it has received contracts for more than 1,800 MRAP vehicles. Production is scheduled to exceed 400 vehicles per month by February 2008, the company said in June.
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