Hmm... and a bit more googling reminds me: The FSF's stated position recognizes that regardless of what meaning they find "natural", the phrase Open Source does not mean merely that you can see the source.
The people who define "open source" to mean "you can see the code" are proprietary software vendors who want to market on Open Source's name without actually holding up their end of that bargain. Well, them and know-it-alls who throw the term around without knowing what it means and then want to blame the term for not meaning what they thought.
I'm aware that the FSF likes to claim the natural meaning of "open" is merely "you can see it". I disagree; but really it doesn't matter. The definition of the phrase is set by the movement that coined it; your, or anyone else's, ignorance of that history does not magically cause the meaning to revert to what you consider more "natural".
If you can't deal with the fact that phrases have more specialized meanings than the words that make them up, then you don't belong in a discussion of technical matters.
Why would my assertiveness about the properties of mirrors have anything to do with my experience with lasers? Nor am I claiming any special knowledge of mirrors; merely the ability to do a little research before latching on to sci-fi fantasies about defense systems. If I'm wrong, you'd think someone with a great deal of mirror expertise would be arguing with me; instead all we've got is a bunch of people who don't even know the basics saying "but couldn't there be something you don't know about?".
On second thought, I don't care what you think of my tone, so moving on...
The question isn't whether there can be any effective countermeasure. The question is whether that countermeasure will be a simple matter of making your aircraft reflective (I refer you to the OP in this thread). And the answer is no. Making your aircraft as reflective as you can possibly make it will neither be a "simple" matter, nor do anything to protect the aircraft.
If you could make a reflective layer that only absorbs 10% of the energy without itself being damaged by that 10% of the energy, then the laser would have to be 10 times as strong. In reality, absorbing 1/10 of the energy from a laser weapon is going to cause the mirror to rapidly degrade, and the aircraft will soon be taking on almost all of the energy from the laser. Keeping a substance 90% reflective isn't easy.
But go on suspecting I don't know. As I've said elsewhere, if I'm wrong the headlines will bear that point out soon enough.
Yes, I did do my googling; and I still stand by my original statement. The statement you seem to dislike was that no material of any kind can maintain sufficient reflectivity under combat conditions to survive a laser weapon. (Note this is not the same as saying that no material can survive this weapon; the point is that it will not be due to reflection of energy that it survives.)
The key phrase in the case of this patent is under combat conditions. You can read my softer phrasing in the above post as allowing some uncertainty if you like, but again I am standing by this as a statement of fact: You cannot maintain a precision polish on the skin of an aircraft in combat. In fact, never mind combat - you cannot maintain a precision polish on the skin of an aircraft in flight.
'This sort of "why bother" and "the rubes can't tell" attitude'
Feel better? I hope so; seeing as that's not what I said, you haven't accomplished anything else.
My point has nothing to do with how red-eye reduction "should" be done. It has nothing to do with how a software project should implement the feature; it has nothing to do with how a consumer "should" want it to be done.
My point is, given two tools - one that does it "right" but has a UI the common user doesn't want to deal with, and another that uses a hack for red-eye reduction but is embraced by the common customer for its usability - the latter is the one that will get user acceptance, and there is absolutely nothing "stupid" about Ubuntu choosing the tools that are accepted by their users.
Yes, they may have dropped from the default install the only tool that does red-eye "right"; and that fact is completely moot unless there's wide-spread use of that tool in their user community.
I'd say the patent is missing some key figures for evaluating suitability for use as a shield, but the biggest problem is that to be reflective this type of mirror has to be highly polished (mentinoed several times in the patent). It does not seem realistic to think you're going to keep the surface of an aircraft "highly polished" during use.
I suppose "they're being word-weasles" is one guess.
Combining the "no hard drives" rule with the "every app is a web app" rule, I'm more inclined to think they really do mean "no local random-access persistant mass storage devices"; they want this to be a client for their cloud services.
How do you know what frequency laser they're going to fire at you?
Best case, if somehow the dialectric doesn't absorb any energy, I'd expect the reflective layers to burn up one by one, like peeling an onion. Very quickly peeling an onion.
Also, how sturdy would this layered material be mechanically and thermally speaking? Can it even survive being the skin of an airplane?
Christ, moderators, you can see from my other posts that I think parent is painfully uninformed, but that is not what Troll means. Get with the program.
Well, as long as I'm here I might as well abuse parent a bit more.
So approaching from the opposite angle as my previous post, this time I'm going to pretend that the reflective layer might somehow survive being hit by the laser, because it's moot.
Your argument about shedding a stealth layer is that it doesn't matter, as the stealth layer is no longer useful once you've been hit because clearly you've been spotted anyway. That's not how it works. Radar stealth isn't "all or nothing". Just because the enemy knows you're present doesn't mean he can hit you with his fancy radar-guided weapons. Nor, if you're fast-moving, does it mean that he can keep track of you if you're able to maintain your stealth properties. Sure, shedding a layer of anti-radar protection would be better than being destroyed outright, but lets not pretend it's not a tactical cost.
So you're hit by a laser, the unobtanium coating that renders you radar-invisible burns away cleanly, your magic mirror reflects the laser, and two seconds later an anti-aircraft missile knocks you out of the sky. If somehow you survive that, another laser strike hits the part of the mirror that was destroyed by the missile, and you're toast anyway.
No, I wouldn't happen to work for Boeing. I would happen to have taken basic physics, though.
For the sake of argument, I'm going to pretend that your idea of shedding a stealth layer would work, because it's moot. You can call my statements "mighty assumptions" all you want, but I'll stand by them. If I'm wrong, we'll surely see the headline that proves it soon enough.
As for this: "A laser weapon designed to fry a plane that absorbs 70% or more of it should be less than effective if the said plane absorbs only 5%."
Wrong. The 5% is only the initial amount of energy that gets through. That's enough to destroy the mirror so fast that you'll never notice any of the laser reflecting away. From that point forward, the target receives close to 100% of the laser's energy and is destroyed quite effectively.
And, that 5% is a very optimistic figure. Again, that's for a clean, flawless, perfectly maintained mirror made for lab use and kept under lab conditions.
I know it's much easier to bitch about lack of citations then to do, say, a google or wikipedia search on reflectiveness of mirrors, but I'm just gonna leave that as your problem.
Actually, 10% probably isn't enough to destoy the target. However, 10% is enough to quickly destroy the mirror, whereupon the target will start receiving more like 100% of the energy - and that is enough to destroy the target.
Moderators: Parent may not understand the answer to his/her question, but that doesn't make parent a troll. WTF?
Parent: The mirror won't reflect 90% for very long. Not long enough for it to matter where the reflected energy goes, I expect. Perhaps collateral damage to other mirrors in the area; or, more seriously, I suppose it could damage the vision of anyone who was looking at the target from the wrong angle.
"You can actually accomplish that with plated layers of reflective material and dialectric material. However, all I then have to do is count on the explosion of the topmost dialectric layer to destroy the reflective layers beneath it.
Because the risk of collateral damage is less with a laser than with a projectile that might miss?
Because the expensive parts of a missile are spent when you fire it, while only fuel is spent when you fire a laser?
Besides, GP's supposition is that an aircraft might be too hard to hit with a missile, unless in an attempt to make itself laser-proof it makes itself easier to hit with a missile. As noted in many other comments, though, this is way off target; making an aircraft reflective (and therefore less stealthy) will not protect it from a laser anyway. If anything, you want to maximize stealth to hope that the laser's targeting system can't find you. Best block, no be there.
Optical vs. radio is just a choice of wavelengths. Whatever wavelength you pick to be shiny, can be used to detect you. Whatever wavelength you choose to be "not shiny", can be used to destroy you.
I wish GP hadn't bothered to mention the problem of stealth, because it's diverting attention from the point that matters - no material of any sort can be kept sufficiently reflective under combat conditions that the laser wouldn't destroy it. So really, even whatever wavelength you pick to be shiny, can still be used to destroy you.
That won't work. The problem starts at step 2. If the top layer isn't reflective, then as it "boils away" it will convert incoming energy from the laser into heat efficiently enough to destroy any reflective layer that might be under it.
Even if that weren't the case, you'd still have a problem at step 3, because your reflective surface will still absorb too much energy. An expensive mirror that's new, clean, and in perfect condition would still absorb 5% of the energy hitting it in lab conditions. In the air, in combat conditions, coated with goo from the stealth paint that just got burned off of it, the reflective layer wouldn't last even a measurable fraction of a second.
Even in urban combat, you can't fly low enough that a ground-based laser that misses your aircraft would hit most buildings. This is actually a pretty good weapon for that scenario, because unlike a projectile it won't fall to Earth if it does miss.
And, I'm betting the chance of a miss is relatively low.
Intelligent people who want to "solve the problem themselves" will do so by clicking on the install package for GIMP and be right where they'd have been if this hadn't been done. You're the one complaining like a spoiled child, which means presumably you're affiliated with the GIMP project. Meanwhile, the majority of Ubuntu users who don't care either way will go on about their business, noting that there are several MB of tools they actually find useful in the default install where GIMP had previously displaced them.
Power and efficiency do not require a craptastic user interface. That argument only comes from those who can't do UI design and don't want to admit it's a limitation in their skillset.
Your movie quotes apply to how we present ourselves, not how we present the things we make. The makers of Ubuntu are making it for users; they want it to be used, so they care what the users think - even the ones you think are idiots for not agreeing with your views on what is good software.
Meanwhile, you sound awfully bitter that GIMP isn't loved enough to keep its precious spot on the Ubuntu default install CD.
But you know what, have it your way. If you want to believe that Ubuntu is the project that will suffer as a result of caring about user experience, rather than seeing that GIMP is at this moment suffering for failing to do so, go ahead. Too bad I won't get to hear your excuses when we see this in hindsight a few years from now.
Great idea... except I know a lot of people who's uninformed objection to using Linux is "I need to edit Office-type documents", which can be overcome by pointing out OpenOffice, while I know none who's objection is "I don't know how I'll do advanced image manipulation".
It's not about which tool is cooler in its space. It's about which tool does more to address the needs of the target audience as a whole. Stuff used by more people is 0 clicks away; stuff used by fewer people - even if it's really useful for those who use it - is 1 click away.
Technical feature superiority doesn't matter. What matters is: does the common user care?
Does the common user think that GIMP is the better tool for red-eye reduction? If so, many would be using it for that. If they're not, then either (1) they don't know or care about the difference in how red-eye reduction is done, or (2) they maybe kind of like the way GIMP does red-eye reduction, but not enough to overcome disadvantages (like usability) of GIMP vs. whatever tool they actually are using.
I use GIMP for some tasks. Red-eye isn't one of them (unless it's in an image I'm already editing in GIMP). None of them are things I expect typical desktop users to do. I see no reason why putting GIMP one click away is even close to stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
...because nobody looking at a patch could possibly be tipped off as to what that patch does.</sarcasm>
Hmm... and a bit more googling reminds me: The FSF's stated position recognizes that regardless of what meaning they find "natural", the phrase Open Source does not mean merely that you can see the source.
The people who define "open source" to mean "you can see the code" are proprietary software vendors who want to market on Open Source's name without actually holding up their end of that bargain. Well, them and know-it-alls who throw the term around without knowing what it means and then want to blame the term for not meaning what they thought.
I'm aware that the FSF likes to claim the natural meaning of "open" is merely "you can see it". I disagree; but really it doesn't matter. The definition of the phrase is set by the movement that coined it; your, or anyone else's, ignorance of that history does not magically cause the meaning to revert to what you consider more "natural".
If you can't deal with the fact that phrases have more specialized meanings than the words that make them up, then you don't belong in a discussion of technical matters.
Why would my assertiveness about the properties of mirrors have anything to do with my experience with lasers? Nor am I claiming any special knowledge of mirrors; merely the ability to do a little research before latching on to sci-fi fantasies about defense systems. If I'm wrong, you'd think someone with a great deal of mirror expertise would be arguing with me; instead all we've got is a bunch of people who don't even know the basics saying "but couldn't there be something you don't know about?".
On second thought, I don't care what you think of my tone, so moving on...
The question isn't whether there can be any effective countermeasure. The question is whether that countermeasure will be a simple matter of making your aircraft reflective (I refer you to the OP in this thread). And the answer is no. Making your aircraft as reflective as you can possibly make it will neither be a "simple" matter, nor do anything to protect the aircraft.
If you could make a reflective layer that only absorbs 10% of the energy without itself being damaged by that 10% of the energy, then the laser would have to be 10 times as strong. In reality, absorbing 1/10 of the energy from a laser weapon is going to cause the mirror to rapidly degrade, and the aircraft will soon be taking on almost all of the energy from the laser. Keeping a substance 90% reflective isn't easy.
But go on suspecting I don't know. As I've said elsewhere, if I'm wrong the headlines will bear that point out soon enough.
Yes, I did do my googling; and I still stand by my original statement. The statement you seem to dislike was that no material of any kind can maintain sufficient reflectivity under combat conditions to survive a laser weapon. (Note this is not the same as saying that no material can survive this weapon; the point is that it will not be due to reflection of energy that it survives.)
The key phrase in the case of this patent is under combat conditions. You can read my softer phrasing in the above post as allowing some uncertainty if you like, but again I am standing by this as a statement of fact: You cannot maintain a precision polish on the skin of an aircraft in combat. In fact, never mind combat - you cannot maintain a precision polish on the skin of an aircraft in flight.
'This sort of "why bother" and "the rubes can't tell" attitude'
Feel better? I hope so; seeing as that's not what I said, you haven't accomplished anything else.
My point has nothing to do with how red-eye reduction "should" be done. It has nothing to do with how a software project should implement the feature; it has nothing to do with how a consumer "should" want it to be done.
My point is, given two tools - one that does it "right" but has a UI the common user doesn't want to deal with, and another that uses a hack for red-eye reduction but is embraced by the common customer for its usability - the latter is the one that will get user acceptance, and there is absolutely nothing "stupid" about Ubuntu choosing the tools that are accepted by their users.
Yes, they may have dropped from the default install the only tool that does red-eye "right"; and that fact is completely moot unless there's wide-spread use of that tool in their user community.
I'd say the patent is missing some key figures for evaluating suitability for use as a shield, but the biggest problem is that to be reflective this type of mirror has to be highly polished (mentinoed several times in the patent). It does not seem realistic to think you're going to keep the surface of an aircraft "highly polished" during use.
If you ask MS, sure.
If you ask, say, the people who coined the term, not so much.
Here's the definition.
And once they've released the source, they will enforce these no hard drive / approved hardware only rules... how?
Is this some MS-esque definition of "releasing the source"?
You hadn't heard? Everything since the 80's has just been an extended dream sequence...
I suppose "they're being word-weasles" is one guess.
Combining the "no hard drives" rule with the "every app is a web app" rule, I'm more inclined to think they really do mean "no local random-access persistant mass storage devices"; they want this to be a client for their cloud services.
How do you know what frequency laser they're going to fire at you?
Best case, if somehow the dialectric doesn't absorb any energy, I'd expect the reflective layers to burn up one by one, like peeling an onion. Very quickly peeling an onion.
Also, how sturdy would this layered material be mechanically and thermally speaking? Can it even survive being the skin of an airplane?
Christ, moderators, you can see from my other posts that I think parent is painfully uninformed, but that is not what Troll means. Get with the program.
Well, as long as I'm here I might as well abuse parent a bit more.
So approaching from the opposite angle as my previous post, this time I'm going to pretend that the reflective layer might somehow survive being hit by the laser, because it's moot.
Your argument about shedding a stealth layer is that it doesn't matter, as the stealth layer is no longer useful once you've been hit because clearly you've been spotted anyway. That's not how it works. Radar stealth isn't "all or nothing". Just because the enemy knows you're present doesn't mean he can hit you with his fancy radar-guided weapons. Nor, if you're fast-moving, does it mean that he can keep track of you if you're able to maintain your stealth properties. Sure, shedding a layer of anti-radar protection would be better than being destroyed outright, but lets not pretend it's not a tactical cost.
So you're hit by a laser, the unobtanium coating that renders you radar-invisible burns away cleanly, your magic mirror reflects the laser, and two seconds later an anti-aircraft missile knocks you out of the sky. If somehow you survive that, another laser strike hits the part of the mirror that was destroyed by the missile, and you're toast anyway.
No, I wouldn't happen to work for Boeing. I would happen to have taken basic physics, though.
For the sake of argument, I'm going to pretend that your idea of shedding a stealth layer would work, because it's moot. You can call my statements "mighty assumptions" all you want, but I'll stand by them. If I'm wrong, we'll surely see the headline that proves it soon enough.
As for this: "A laser weapon designed to fry a plane that absorbs 70% or more of it should be less than effective if the said plane absorbs only 5%."
Wrong. The 5% is only the initial amount of energy that gets through. That's enough to destroy the mirror so fast that you'll never notice any of the laser reflecting away. From that point forward, the target receives close to 100% of the laser's energy and is destroyed quite effectively.
And, that 5% is a very optimistic figure. Again, that's for a clean, flawless, perfectly maintained mirror made for lab use and kept under lab conditions.
I know it's much easier to bitch about lack of citations then to do, say, a google or wikipedia search on reflectiveness of mirrors, but I'm just gonna leave that as your problem.
Actually, 10% probably isn't enough to destoy the target. However, 10% is enough to quickly destroy the mirror, whereupon the target will start receiving more like 100% of the energy - and that is enough to destroy the target.
Moderators: Parent may not understand the answer to his/her question, but that doesn't make parent a troll. WTF?
Parent: The mirror won't reflect 90% for very long. Not long enough for it to matter where the reflected energy goes, I expect. Perhaps collateral damage to other mirrors in the area; or, more seriously, I suppose it could damage the vision of anyone who was looking at the target from the wrong angle.
"You can actually accomplish that with plated layers of reflective material and dialectric material. However, all I then have to do is count on the explosion of the topmost dialectric layer to destroy the reflective layers beneath it.
Fixed.
Because the risk of collateral damage is less with a laser than with a projectile that might miss?
Because the expensive parts of a missile are spent when you fire it, while only fuel is spent when you fire a laser?
Besides, GP's supposition is that an aircraft might be too hard to hit with a missile, unless in an attempt to make itself laser-proof it makes itself easier to hit with a missile. As noted in many other comments, though, this is way off target; making an aircraft reflective (and therefore less stealthy) will not protect it from a laser anyway. If anything, you want to maximize stealth to hope that the laser's targeting system can't find you. Best block, no be there.
Optical vs. radio is just a choice of wavelengths. Whatever wavelength you pick to be shiny, can be used to detect you. Whatever wavelength you choose to be "not shiny", can be used to destroy you.
I wish GP hadn't bothered to mention the problem of stealth, because it's diverting attention from the point that matters - no material of any sort can be kept sufficiently reflective under combat conditions that the laser wouldn't destroy it. So really, even whatever wavelength you pick to be shiny, can still be used to destroy you.
That won't work. The problem starts at step 2. If the top layer isn't reflective, then as it "boils away" it will convert incoming energy from the laser into heat efficiently enough to destroy any reflective layer that might be under it.
Even if that weren't the case, you'd still have a problem at step 3, because your reflective surface will still absorb too much energy. An expensive mirror that's new, clean, and in perfect condition would still absorb 5% of the energy hitting it in lab conditions. In the air, in combat conditions, coated with goo from the stealth paint that just got burned off of it, the reflective layer wouldn't last even a measurable fraction of a second.
Not all combat is urban.
Even in urban combat, you can't fly low enough that a ground-based laser that misses your aircraft would hit most buildings. This is actually a pretty good weapon for that scenario, because unlike a projectile it won't fall to Earth if it does miss.
And, I'm betting the chance of a miss is relatively low.
Oh, cry me a river.
Intelligent people who want to "solve the problem themselves" will do so by clicking on the install package for GIMP and be right where they'd have been if this hadn't been done. You're the one complaining like a spoiled child, which means presumably you're affiliated with the GIMP project. Meanwhile, the majority of Ubuntu users who don't care either way will go on about their business, noting that there are several MB of tools they actually find useful in the default install where GIMP had previously displaced them.
Power and efficiency do not require a craptastic user interface. That argument only comes from those who can't do UI design and don't want to admit it's a limitation in their skillset.
Your movie quotes apply to how we present ourselves, not how we present the things we make. The makers of Ubuntu are making it for users; they want it to be used, so they care what the users think - even the ones you think are idiots for not agreeing with your views on what is good software.
Meanwhile, you sound awfully bitter that GIMP isn't loved enough to keep its precious spot on the Ubuntu default install CD.
But you know what, have it your way. If you want to believe that Ubuntu is the project that will suffer as a result of caring about user experience, rather than seeing that GIMP is at this moment suffering for failing to do so, go ahead. Too bad I won't get to hear your excuses when we see this in hindsight a few years from now.
Great idea... except I know a lot of people who's uninformed objection to using Linux is "I need to edit Office-type documents", which can be overcome by pointing out OpenOffice, while I know none who's objection is "I don't know how I'll do advanced image manipulation".
It's not about which tool is cooler in its space. It's about which tool does more to address the needs of the target audience as a whole. Stuff used by more people is 0 clicks away; stuff used by fewer people - even if it's really useful for those who use it - is 1 click away.
Technical feature superiority doesn't matter. What matters is: does the common user care?
Does the common user think that GIMP is the better tool for red-eye reduction? If so, many would be using it for that. If they're not, then either (1) they don't know or care about the difference in how red-eye reduction is done, or (2) they maybe kind of like the way GIMP does red-eye reduction, but not enough to overcome disadvantages (like usability) of GIMP vs. whatever tool they actually are using.
I use GIMP for some tasks. Red-eye isn't one of them (unless it's in an image I'm already editing in GIMP). None of them are things I expect typical desktop users to do. I see no reason why putting GIMP one click away is even close to stupid.
To be fair, maybe GP is one of those people who access the ISO on a shiney little disc, rather than downloading it over the intertubes.