http://slashdot.org/articles/04/11/13/1834228.shtml?tid=95&tid=103&tid=215&tid=198&tid=126&tid=98&tid=1

interesting...

See, Bush knew what he was talking about when he referred to the "internets".

yea...i heard about this a couple of years ago. when the program for the military's super tech soldier was first revealed, this was one of its major concepts. the new F-22 Raptors were designed to utilize this system as well. it appears that the military is completely moving into the digital age.

The Internet started out as a Department of Defense research project in the '70s. Ever here of DARPA (then known as ARPA), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. They created the ARPAnet which eventually evolved into the internet. The idea then was faster communication over greater distances. The military isn't moving into the digital age, it spawned the digital age and now that the technology has matured to a usable level they are taking advantage of the advances.

great, pilots can play "bejeweled" and any of the other 75 trillion flash games while in combat!

Funny thing about that though...

I work for an Army contracting company. The Army gets these baseline computers that they call the Common Hardware Platform (CHP). Basically every computer that they use for simulations and whatnot follows this baseline. DVD drives are conspicuously absent from them because they "don't want people watching movies on them". Meanwhile some of the terrain data we use for making maps for our game take up easily 100 CD's. We get them in huge boxes. Once we've processed them it drops to like 3 or 4 for a small area or about 10 for our largest area. We tell them "you should get DVD drives so you don't have to fuck around with all these CD's" and they say "nope, people will watch movies on them."

Right, nevermind the fact that a divx movie fits on a CD or two. Hopefully they get over the DVD aversion soon.

Every two or three years, just about every major military directorate, wing, brigade, etc., gets a new flag officer at the wheel. Usually whenever that happens, the technology thing takes a giant step in either the "employees are douches so let's keep them from doing anything cool at the expense of capability" or "fuck it, it's too much trouble, let's just trust them to police themselves" directions.
As an example, there's two sets of network connections at a library on my base, one by AFRL, the other is AFIT's. From one of them, you can read and post seek42 and fark, browse personals websites, and probably even download porn if no one else is in the room looking at you. From the other, Yahoo Mail is blocked because of an alert of "unauthorized personal activity (E-Mail, Web-based)." And you can forget about looking up Dilbert.
DOD has been on the ball with technology, though. Watch Mail Call on the History Channel sometime. Those guys in Iraq and Afghanistan have some really cool toys that, coincidentally, I'm working on making better.

Yea my dad works for the DOD at NGA in St. Louis so I am familiar with the Gov BS and it is never in short supply.

Is Al Gore inventing it?

I can see one of these uses as another method for the different flight trainers to interact. As of now, they are all connected via +T3 lines at the different training bases. Why do this you may ask? It's cheaper than having someone fly a real plane and crash it, or play war games together online (oh no, MS Flight Simulator Online). If anyone knows someone on one of these projects, have them do a little explaining about the systems involved. It is quite amazing.

T3? Why not use an OC1? The data transfer is faster (not greater bandwith (at least not for sure...) but the actual latency is less.)