Agiel

Rumours seem to indicate that the new Obi-Wan Star Wars movie is going to be a bit of a re-telling of the Seven Samurai.

A US Navy aviator I follow on Quora had this question put to him: His answer:

Metro: Exodus delayed into 2019. *Sadface*

It was called Cradle, and it did manage to come out. And in spite of my distaste for most games of that form, I quite enjoyed it and highly recommend it to everyone here.

As Jared and Ivanka were headlining the US Embassy's move to Jerusalem: 55 dead in Gaza protests as Israel fetes US Embassy move

Tonight's episode of Westworld? Ho boy. Best episode of the entire series thus far, but I may be biased as a big fan of Ed Harris. It looked promising to me, but I kept putting it off, so perhaps I'm partly to blame. Would seem at a glance that its ratings were rather mid-ling for a show that I would imagine was as expensive as something like Westworld or Game of Thrones (what it may lack in marquee actors its budget makes up in the SFX department).

Ty Cobb bowed out of the job representing Trump. I guess that gig is a bit like being the drummer for Spinal Tap.

Before you change your avatar, consider: https://i.imgur.com/1MPG3Ug.mp4

I'm not so sure that any variant of SA-10/SA-20 would be so decisively better than an SA-17 against another cruise missile attack, since the extendable mast means at most an additional 8nm extra coverage against something flying even 200ft above the deck that for the cost more SA-17s/22s would do them more good. There's also the fact that simply looking at a relief map of Syria and Lebanon and the location of most of Syria's air defence systems one can come to the conclusion that it's a cruise missile/low-level attack planner's wet dream and an IADS nightmare. This explains how Israel was able to perform open-heart surgery on Syria's IADS network back in 1982 and them largely having its way since 2011.

My own favourite Apocalypse Now scenes are typically the ones that are the most visually far-removed from reality, such as when Willard kills Kurtz and of course the Do Lung Bridge scene: While the action scenes of Heat are admittedly some of the best in cinema, I'm very much partial to the more dialogue-heavy portions: The final scene of the Thing is a near pitch perfect combination of scoring, cinematography, and terror-inducing dread: And of course this classic horror scene which cemented my love for the series (or at least the two good ones and one alright Assembly Cut):

McMaster and Commander, by Patrick Radden Keefe For those inclined to read editorial pieces in the New Yorker chronicling McMaster's tenure as National Security Adviser, if you had to burn one of your three free pieces a month on one article make it this one (no recreation here, due to copyright and length).

And the articles were quoting someone who was in a _leadership position_ of the _Russian military_, which means he should be very much acquainted with tactics, doctrines, and the technical capabilities of the service he was in. This is insider knowledge we're talking about here, not an analyst throwing darts with post-its on it. Signal power level is irrelevant for anti-jamming measures because jamming is _directional_. One of the more rudimentary means of defeating jamming is to simply ignore the direction the jamming signal is coming from, per James J. Kelly: Upon detection of jamming interference, part of the antenna pattern can be turned down, so the noise from that particular direction does not interfere with the rest of the system. That is called nulling the signal. "A null means that I will not look in the direction in space that the jammer is coming from," Kelly said. The electronics protect the receiver by eliminating the interference signal. One problem with this nulling technique, however, is that "as you eliminate jammers, you eliminate your ability to receive signals from the GPS satellites," he said. "You could have a nulling system that kills off the jammers, but you no longer have enough satellites available for you to navigate." The distributed nature of the satellites makes this possible. The receiver logic goes "Okay, I can't 'hear' the correct signal coming from this direction but that's okay; I have plenty of other satellites I can use to find out where I am." It's also one of the reasons Russia put its jammers on cell phone towers; it maximises the number of directions a jamming signal can potentially come from, which is where beamforming comes in: In this instance defeating the jamming measure is more a matter processing power, which is dependent on the size allowances of the platform it is on (probably why thus far GPS-jamming has only been effective against tiny RQ-11s and not on anything in the MQ-1 class). Well, quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur. You are seriously using the "dog ate my homework excuse." If the accusation is that the presented images are misleading then the burden of proof lay with the Russian MoD to provide even more credible images of a structure that was supposedly hit but is intact, time-stamped with the morning paper of the following day with a GPS reading down to the meter and prominent and recognisable structures or other features in the background to make geolocation possible. They have not done so, so by your standards they are even more guilty of misleading by omitting details that would have disproved their case. Also, the "they fell into the ocean" excuse doesn't work when the goal of GPS jamming, as stated in my last post, is to make the missiles less accurate, not make them fall out of the sky.

Maybe this will allow you to rest a little easier tonight: Granted by this measurement we have about 5 more hours from time of this post when this might change.

It's quoting from a Russian source, the former deputy-CINC of the RuAF. You might object to this particular source, but DW used the same roughly the same quote (with slightly different wording, so in all likelihood it was a differing translation of a Russian-language source). And if the 50%+ Tomahawk failure rate story is only treated as gospel by RT which is Russia's own propaganda arm? Errr... well... Or, you know, Occam's Razor works too. Per a post from Sean O'Connor* on the matter a year ago: This is seriously the reason Tomahawk was invented. By its very nature GPS is a _LINE OF SIGHT_-based system. Receivers look at the position of satellites in geo-stationary orbit, compute the time it takes for them to be transmitted from the origin points to the receiver, then determines its location from that information, so to jam the missiles effectively the Russians would need continuous LOS on the missiles up until the moment of impact, which requires full knowledge of the flight path, assuming the platform doesn't have the kind of processing power to discern the jamming signal from the false ones (or any number of other means of defeating it), as no matter how powerful it is compared to GPS signals it does not magically destroy them. As I've banged on this before this is the main reason Russia's own jamming measures are on cell-phone towers: it maximises the range the jammers can "see" over the horizon. In fact the goal is not to cause the missiles to fall harmlessly out of the sky but to cause them to incur enough mistakes to miss by only a few meters: If indeed an aerial platform was used to overcome the horizon problem, then surely the Russian MoD would also release the radar track data it had on them so they knew where to place those aircraft. Also... I'm going to let you think for a moment on just how well that goes with this:

Since an Arleigh Burke-destroyer has an antenna mast height taller than all but two vessels in the entire Russian Navy (let alone the Black Sea Fleet), its surface search radar would detect any potential vessel at a greater distance than the jammer would be effective, so a flight path could simply be plotted well out of range of it. As a former deputy CINC of the RuAF said himself in response to why the SA-21 did not intercept the missiles, "[t]he Americans are [...] not idiots." So next time I have hint of back pain I should look up my symptoms on WebMD? Then when I go to my doctor I should tell him "Spare me your expertise; I want you to give me a corticosteroid injection for my lumbar herniated disc"? Yes, experts do sometimes come up short. That's because they are human beings and are fallible, and the scientific method exists to shore up theories when there are mistakes. You're a human being, as am I. Similar sources have confirmed this only for RQ-11 Ravens and not for anything in the class of the MQ-1. Not totally unsurprising, or even unexpected for such a small RPV when there's room for a rudimentary datalink and sensors and little else such as specifically hardened anti-jamming measures (and the cost is such that there is an assumption that it _will_ be neutralised by a peer or near-peer adversary, or at least disrupted, in one way or another) that's also flying fairly high and within LOS of any jamming measures. Your arguments also fail to reconcile with what's perhaps the biggest hole in the Russian MoD story: If the missiles were jammed, where are the dozens of airframes littered across the Syrian/Lebanese countryside? Plenty of photo evidence exists of cruise missiles laying in a field due to mechanical faults mid-flight from past campaigns. Given that if nothing else the Russian bombing campaign serves as a country-sized advertisement for the latest and greatest of Russian military hardware, surely parading a big piece of the airframe on RT would be a great propaganda coup.

I'll go to bat for Far Cry 2. There were definite strands of Chaos Theory DNA in it (unsurprising, given that it was directed by Clint Hocking as well) and I think the repetitiveness it got criticised for probably had more to do with lack of time if anything, something that also seems to be reflected by much of the voice acting that just screams "placeholder" to me. Plus, if I ever decided to pick up Far Cry 5 at some point, I'm going to miss all the gross healing animations Far Cry 2 had: Let's also hear it for this post in the comments for that video:

So a private company that stakes its reputation on its analysis (and would likely provide further proof to potential clients that are not convinced by their publicly available content) gets picked apart, yet one can take on faith a claim made almost purely for domestic consumption to placate the most misinformed hardliners and is corroborated by zero evidence? Pretending as if FHSS and ECCM doesn't exist; a Hollywood actress figured it out in the 1940s for the purpose of defeating jamming efforts against radio-guided torpedoes after all. The placement of GPS jammers on cell-phone towers is also critically useful against cruise missiles that have some form of GPS guidance due to the elevation giving it maximum line of sight against a low-flying target. Thus if a missile were to pass through a "communications denied environment" the INS guidance kicks in until it passes through, the GPS guidance kicks back on, and it continues as normal.

I think with Deathspell Omega, Antaeus, Blut Aus Nord, and this I'm more likely to associate Black Metal with France than Scandinavia.

Wonder if the "You look great" gag was a dig at people who maligned Chewbacca's CGI in the new trilogy.

Yeah, they didn't show 44 hits though, they showed some hits at high resolution, and a low res set of circles on a zoomed out image covering 2-3 km that you can't tell anything about, because it's too low res. If they provided the high res images they (supposedly) had for all 44, then there would be no argument, but they provide proof for a number consistent with the Russian version, consistency with the US version is solely on their say so, not on the evidence they provide. I suppose this is what Tom Nichols meant when he bemoaned "the death of expertise". Perhaps with that thing in your car, but whether or not they can jam a hardened signal is up for debate. It's telling that for the purposes of defending their own airspace Russia is resorting to planting jammers on 250,000 cell-phone towers just for the hope of making potential cruise missile strikes less accurate, which suggests that such measures are likely limited by LOS against cruise missile targets and are perhaps wanting in overall technical sophistication (the sheer number seems to indicate that in its current form an individual jammer does not account for frequency hopping). I find it doubtful that: a.) They've installed such devices for what is supposed to be a fairly limited involvement in such short a time. b.) They had any more than a vague idea of the flight paths (because it's fairly standard practice to plan approaches from multiple axis). c.) They could re-position their own jammers quickly enough to make a significant dent in a potential attack, particularly when it was out of their neck of the woods.

Yeah, had that out last time. The satellite images released showed nowhere near 59 hits, and were a mix of decent resolution images showing definite hits and a zoomed out master image with circles drawn where you can't tell what is circled let alone whether it was damaged at the resolution supplied. The US military itself only cited those pics as proof, and they actually show ~23 hits on ~17 structures, consistent with the Russian claim. It was easy to prove the right number of hits by showing hi res images of the other claimed areas of damage instead of just three (one of which was a single building), but we never got them. It also didn't help that other US claims around it were inconsistent; Mattis claimed 20% of an air wing destroyed, then 20% of the whole Syrian airforce; the first was likely accurate, the second literally impossible- 20% of the SyAF ain't even stationed there- unless they counted derelict MiG17s, of which there are a lot around Shayrat. Plus of course the base was back in action literally the next day. GPS spoofing or other ECM while over water could easily take out one destroyer's tomahawk quota, they have a known weakness when they cannot use terrain mapping. Did you not read the part in that link that said this? Double targeting is very much common practice, particularly if one target is high priority, such as an ammo storage bunker that may or may not contain chemical weapons, in which case even more munitions may be allocated to guarantee total destruction. As for the inconclusive battle damage assessment as I've said before it was all a Kabuki dance; Trump wanted to appear decisive where Obama wasn't, but it would seems he doesn't want entangling the US much more in Syria, particularly if it could escalate into a full-scale shooting war that could turn ugly (uglier for some, but ugly for both parties nonetheless). Overall damage to the Syrians was mitigated because of the advance warning provided to the Russians. As for GPS spoofing (which I highly doubt came into play, even if they were powerful enough to spoof them), you are aware that many GPS-guided munitions have back-up INS systems that come into play, right?