I suspect that the effects of lasers are not strictly transitive, there are probably scattered counterexamples; but I suspect that if your laser is intended to kill aircraft, you don't really need to test it on humans...
Unless things have improved substantially since Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, I'd be more inclined to describe the performance as "surprisingly adequate job of it, with training, and offers a vaguely cellphone-esque interface for choosing the correct word when it fucks up".
It isn't comedically awful; and it likely beats typing with your stumps, or your eyelids, or whatever; but "pretty good" is being very generous.
(Again, unless things have improved markedly since then) the software works best when used interactively, which allows it to suggest corrections, and you to make them, in real time. It also helps if it has been trained to your voice beforehand. The results of using it non-interactively, on a recording of somebody that it hasn't been trained for, will produce results error-filled enough that you might actually find manual transcription faster than manual editing(or, if you don't mind your family sounding like they've suffered head trauma or exposure to Dadaism, you can just store the recordings, make do with the text, and re-run the process in the future, when the software is better).
No, don't worry. Because of how bloated Acrobat Reader already is, Adobe was able to fit a re-skinned copy of virtualbox, containing a minimal linux image running Evince, in a package smaller than the prior download.
This is how they managed to get a "sandboxed" PDF reader out in less than the usual absolutely glacial Adobe development timeframe...
If you are being hit by a laser of sufficient power, "99% reflective" becomes "Oh god! The burning!" fairly quickly. That isn't the same as being useless(if "you" are a missile, you are travelling very quickly toward something into which you are designed to crash and explode. As long as you make it there, damage received up to that point is irrelevant in the face of damage you will be sustaining in the immediate future. So, if a cheap coating of chrome, tech-level minimal, will give you an extra few seconds, it could easily be worth it).
Mirrors definitely wouldn't be a magic defense; but they(or perhaps some sort of ablative coating) could easily be more effective than Raytheon would like at buying a few extra seconds to either dodge, or successfully hit...
It would also be interesting to see if you could develop an ablative coating/missile geometry combination that functions as a fully passive automated dodging mechanism. If your missile has an ablative coating, and is struck by a laser, the coating will ablate, providing thrust, and changing the geometry of the missile in the ablated area. It would be interesting to see if, with the right shape, you could get a missile where any laser hit that isn't absolutely dead center would create thrust that pushes the missile out of the laser path...
I'm guessing that all kinds of expensive parts wear out faster than you would like in a truly high-powered laser such as this; but if it were a chemical fueled laser, rather than electrical, TFA probably would have mentioned it.
No idea the exact cost/minute of a beam out of one of these things; but definitely a unit with FRUs, not an FRU...
This(along with their fascination with railguns) is almost certainly why the navy has been doing a bunch of research on various bits and pieces that you would need for a very high performance ship electrical system...
That isn't really "asymmetric" in the usual sense. It would be two conventional army/navy/air force units hitting each other with the weapons of the day. Totally standard nation state stuff. Now, that said, it might be that such an encounter would be, for America's much prized and oh-so-very-expensive aircraft carriers, the equivalent of what happened to Battleships during WWII(where it was demonstrated, repeatedly, that the heaviest naval guns couldn't match the range of bombers and fighter/bombers, and that mounting a few perfunctory AA guns on your battleship couldn't do jack about that fact)... A few battleships survive as curiosities, or as comparatively cheap ways of bombarding basically supine near-shore targets; but they are basically all scrap, now.
An advance in missile technology that takes missiles well out of the targeting ability of phalanx guns could do the same for aircraft carriers, which would sort of demote the US navy from "scary" to "eh" in a few hours... Hence, presumably, the interest in lasers and railguns and suchlike exotic ultra-high-velocity stuff.
The more "asymmetric" possibility of anti-ship missiles would be that, if they can be built into suitably rugged and easy to use one-time-use packages, programmed just to hit the biggest ship in range, or the one closest to the direction it was pointed, when used, you open up all kinds of fascinating capabilities for whatever ragged non-state-actors you are using as puppets at the moment.... Missiles are more expensive than artillery; if you are going to be shooting lots and lots of them; but offer greater portability and one-time punch....
If, for instance, anti-ship missiles, in a package large enough to crack a modern warship at least enough to require it to return to port for repair(and to cook off the onboard munitions, if lucky) and small enough to transport on a civilian truck or smallish boat, pretty much every modern navy in the world would have to triple the onboard laundry facilities to deal with all the shitting themselves... Near land, any dinky little shack with a seaward-facing window could pop a missile at any second. At sea, any civilian fishing boat in range is a potential threat(but you aren't allowed to just butcher them all). One of those fiberglass mini-subs that they use for drug running, which probably peanuts for a radar signature and can just quietly move around on electric engines, could pop up and fire at any moment. It would get ugly...
Presumably, the reason for replacing 20mm Gatling guns with lasers is, ultimately, about missiles. 20mm DU rounds, in quantity, move pretty fast compared to aircraft; but substantially less fast than one would like compared to decent missiles. Photons, while they lack the punch, are much zippier...
Now, since the only reason to adopt this(no doubt more expensive and power hungry) system is that offers hope against missiles, why testing against UAVs? Well, if I were an optimist, I would say that this is just one of the tests in the development process. If I were a pessimist, I would say that the fine folks at Raytheon are following in the time-honored tradition of anti-missile systems, and responding to the fact that the problem is hard by moving the goalposts until their system is up to the "task"...
Hopefully, well before deployment, it will see proper "red team"/"green team" type testing, where the opposing force, made up of the most devious and talented people at their disposal, is free to try every sneaky, optically confusing, silver plated, ablative armor protected, etc. hypothetical near future threat that they can come up with against the system. A very valuable learning exercise....
I'm less concerned about the cheesy term scaring away hardcore techies(they can always just mock it in the break room).
I'm concerned about managerial decisions, program planning, and the like. It is hard to think correct thoughts with broken language, and "cyberwarrior" is broken language(except, again, in the specific context of l33t black-ops haxx0rs for the NSA who play offense. They may or may not like the term; but they are at least structurally somewhat analogous to various flavors of elite-and-slightly-irregular forces that have been used in the past.)
My concern, essentially(in addition to the fact that "cyberwarrior" is an invitation to the quiet militarization of just about anything turing-complete and network connected, all in the name of "security") is that this sloppy use of language will(and already is) lead to sloppy, incorrect thinking on the part of politicians and planners and the like. You'll get roughly one of two outcomes:
Outcome one: The "guard the borders" interpretation. This is the analogy extension of "cyberwarrior" that anybody whose worldview is steeped in the classic American quasi-isolationism(that comes quite naturally from having an ocean on each side, and largely untroublesome borders) will come up with. Basically, civilians get to be the soft chewy center, and go about their business however they like, and the military stands guard at the edges and occasionally goes overseas and kills some nazis or communists.
This interpretation, will the better of the two, is largely useless. With modern internet interconnection, pretty much any sort of electronic attack will fly right past the border and into the ghastly mess that is civilian systems with ease. Even fairly petty criminals will not have much trouble, and some hostile nation's targeted attackers even less. Also, because of "COTS" fever, low-bidder private sector code will be all over military critical systems as well. Hurray.
Outcome two: Super sinister, and not necessarily much more useful than Outcome one. This is the bad analogy extension of "cyberwarrior" that will be arrived at by either retro "total war" theorists, or their contemporary counterparts who have been hitting the "9/11 changed everything, new kind of war, assymetric undefined battlefield, war on abstract concepts!!" pipe pretty hard. Here, the thinking will roughly be as follows: 1. There is a state of "cyberwar" 2. "Cyberwarriors" must be used to win the cyberwar. 3. All internet connected systems are strategic resources, and/or strategic targets, and are therefore under the just jurisdiction of the "cyberwarriors" until such time as the cyberwar should end(ie. never).
Basically, this outcome will mean massive militarization(and some super-juicy contractor food) of previously civilian areas; because, there is a cyberwar on, so if you are on the internet, you are territory...
The fact that we are using the ridiculous term "cyberwarrior" suggests that, at the very least, the people writing the PR playbooks don't have a fucking clue.
In addition to being corny as hell, "cyberwarrior" implies a dangerously literal application of traditional military doctrines(ie. you have the civilians, who do whatever, and then you have an army that stands between them and the bad guys and blows things up) to computer security. With networked computers, aside from the specific case of DOD sysadmins, virtually all of "computer security" is about making sure that the (overwhelmingly civilian) software and systems are properly designed and built. That isn't something that you are going to do by having a few "cyberwarriors" to hack through the enemy's code walls, or whatever. That is only doable by, more or less, massively increasing the status(and cost, sorry MBAs...) of programmers, software engineers, sysadmins, etc.
Obviously, there will be some need for near-black-hats to spook around hostile networks in the service of various sinister three letter agencies; but the vast majority of "computer security" is much closer to being analogous to a civil engineering or public health question than it is to being a military one. Trying to solve "cybersecurity" with a relatively small number of "elite cyberwarriors" is rather like trying to keep a population from dying of cholera by building a few world-class research hospitals(with bed space for like 1% of the cases), rather than having civil engineers knock together a water system...
Slightly; but not hugely. Particularly now that LCDs, from laptop size up to 100+inches(sorry plasma fans) are the de-facto standard for video watching, gaming, and other casual social activities, the majority of the market is made up of people who value, or at least don't oppose) broad viewing angles(plus, for larger screen sizes, you actually need good viewing angles just so that the edges of the screen don't look weird for a viewer aligned with the center of the screen).
This leaves the market for "screens with deliberately sucky viewing angles" as a reasonably small set of laptop users who work on modestly sensitive stuff in public. Thus, they get the aftermarket screen protector, representing zero change to panel or laptop design processes, and everybody else gets the default.
Given how much AT&T and Apple love each other right now(ie. not-at-all-divorced-but-can't-afford-to-move-out), I'd say that it is only sensible to assume that both parties are, independently, gathering data hand over fist, by the methods open to them.
AT&T has the cell site stuff, which implies location, call termination, and unencrypted data, while Apple has the OS, which has to go a little more lightly on the GPS, for battery life reasons; but otherwise rules the show in terms of data collection...
Given that that only requires using some program that requires them, it isn't really very comforting.
In effect, Apple has decided that, any time you decide to trust any program with location access, you get to trust them as well. That might count as "opt-in" under some especially dystopic reading of the term; but not in any useful sense.
But then they wouldn't get the external IP of one of your commonly used wifi networks... Er, I mean, sending that heavy, heavy, extra data over AT&T's delicate network would be bad...
It would be twice as evil as it would be nervy; but if you've set the situation up like that, where anybody who wants to look has to face the entire courtroom staring at them like a dirty paedo, you could use just about any picture you wanted...
I wonder if that attorney was ever tempted to "accidentally" put a wholly innocuous picture on the table(with the real one in reserve, just in case), just because he could?
There's also the basic "under-promise, over-deliver" consideration. Someone who meets stated minimum spec but has lousy experience will be quite unhappy. Someone who doesn't mean minimum spec but has an acceptable experience will be pleased. Therefore you can(to a point) maximize the total happiness state of your customers by modestly overstating the required specs. Not enough to drive a bunch of people away; but enough that more people feel like they are "doing better than promised" rather than "have been lied to".
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that the effects of lasers are not strictly transitive, there are probably scattered counterexamples; but I suspect that if your laser is intended to kill aircraft, you don't really need to test it on humans...
Unless things have improved substantially since Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, I'd be more inclined to describe the performance as "surprisingly adequate job of it, with training, and offers a vaguely cellphone-esque interface for choosing the correct word when it fucks up".
It isn't comedically awful; and it likely beats typing with your stumps, or your eyelids, or whatever; but "pretty good" is being very generous.
(Again, unless things have improved markedly since then) the software works best when used interactively, which allows it to suggest corrections, and you to make them, in real time. It also helps if it has been trained to your voice beforehand. The results of using it non-interactively, on a recording of somebody that it hasn't been trained for, will produce results error-filled enough that you might actually find manual transcription faster than manual editing(or, if you don't mind your family sounding like they've suffered head trauma or exposure to Dadaism, you can just store the recordings, make do with the text, and re-run the process in the future, when the software is better).
No, don't worry. Because of how bloated Acrobat Reader already is, Adobe was able to fit a re-skinned copy of virtualbox, containing a minimal linux image running Evince, in a package smaller than the prior download.
This is how they managed to get a "sandboxed" PDF reader out in less than the usual absolutely glacial Adobe development timeframe...
If you are being hit by a laser of sufficient power, "99% reflective" becomes "Oh god! The burning!" fairly quickly. That isn't the same as being useless(if "you" are a missile, you are travelling very quickly toward something into which you are designed to crash and explode. As long as you make it there, damage received up to that point is irrelevant in the face of damage you will be sustaining in the immediate future. So, if a cheap coating of chrome, tech-level minimal, will give you an extra few seconds, it could easily be worth it).
Mirrors definitely wouldn't be a magic defense; but they(or perhaps some sort of ablative coating) could easily be more effective than Raytheon would like at buying a few extra seconds to either dodge, or successfully hit...
It would also be interesting to see if you could develop an ablative coating/missile geometry combination that functions as a fully passive automated dodging mechanism. If your missile has an ablative coating, and is struck by a laser, the coating will ablate, providing thrust, and changing the geometry of the missile in the ablated area. It would be interesting to see if, with the right shape, you could get a missile where any laser hit that isn't absolutely dead center would create thrust that pushes the missile out of the laser path...
Yup, they probably will...
I'm guessing that all kinds of expensive parts wear out faster than you would like in a truly high-powered laser such as this; but if it were a chemical fueled laser, rather than electrical, TFA probably would have mentioned it.
No idea the exact cost/minute of a beam out of one of these things; but definitely a unit with FRUs, not an FRU...
This(along with their fascination with railguns) is almost certainly why the navy has been doing a bunch of research on various bits and pieces that you would need for a very high performance ship electrical system...
That isn't really "asymmetric" in the usual sense. It would be two conventional army/navy/air force units hitting each other with the weapons of the day. Totally standard nation state stuff. Now, that said, it might be that such an encounter would be, for America's much prized and oh-so-very-expensive aircraft carriers, the equivalent of what happened to Battleships during WWII(where it was demonstrated, repeatedly, that the heaviest naval guns couldn't match the range of bombers and fighter/bombers, and that mounting a few perfunctory AA guns on your battleship couldn't do jack about that fact)... A few battleships survive as curiosities, or as comparatively cheap ways of bombarding basically supine near-shore targets; but they are basically all scrap, now.
An advance in missile technology that takes missiles well out of the targeting ability of phalanx guns could do the same for aircraft carriers, which would sort of demote the US navy from "scary" to "eh" in a few hours... Hence, presumably, the interest in lasers and railguns and suchlike exotic ultra-high-velocity stuff.
The more "asymmetric" possibility of anti-ship missiles would be that, if they can be built into suitably rugged and easy to use one-time-use packages, programmed just to hit the biggest ship in range, or the one closest to the direction it was pointed, when used, you open up all kinds of fascinating capabilities for whatever ragged non-state-actors you are using as puppets at the moment.... Missiles are more expensive than artillery; if you are going to be shooting lots and lots of them; but offer greater portability and one-time punch....
If, for instance, anti-ship missiles, in a package large enough to crack a modern warship at least enough to require it to return to port for repair(and to cook off the onboard munitions, if lucky) and small enough to transport on a civilian truck or smallish boat, pretty much every modern navy in the world would have to triple the onboard laundry facilities to deal with all the shitting themselves... Near land, any dinky little shack with a seaward-facing window could pop a missile at any second. At sea, any civilian fishing boat in range is a potential threat(but you aren't allowed to just butcher them all). One of those fiberglass mini-subs that they use for drug running, which probably peanuts for a radar signature and can just quietly move around on electric engines, could pop up and fire at any moment. It would get ugly...
Presumably, the reason for replacing 20mm Gatling guns with lasers is, ultimately, about missiles. 20mm DU rounds, in quantity, move pretty fast compared to aircraft; but substantially less fast than one would like compared to decent missiles. Photons, while they lack the punch, are much zippier...
Now, since the only reason to adopt this(no doubt more expensive and power hungry) system is that offers hope against missiles, why testing against UAVs? Well, if I were an optimist, I would say that this is just one of the tests in the development process. If I were a pessimist, I would say that the fine folks at Raytheon are following in the time-honored tradition of anti-missile systems, and responding to the fact that the problem is hard by moving the goalposts until their system is up to the "task"...
Hopefully, well before deployment, it will see proper "red team"/"green team" type testing, where the opposing force, made up of the most devious and talented people at their disposal, is free to try every sneaky, optically confusing, silver plated, ablative armor protected, etc. hypothetical near future threat that they can come up with against the system. A very valuable learning exercise....
I'm less concerned about the cheesy term scaring away hardcore techies(they can always just mock it in the break room).
I'm concerned about managerial decisions, program planning, and the like. It is hard to think correct thoughts with broken language, and "cyberwarrior" is broken language(except, again, in the specific context of l33t black-ops haxx0rs for the NSA who play offense. They may or may not like the term; but they are at least structurally somewhat analogous to various flavors of elite-and-slightly-irregular forces that have been used in the past.)
My concern, essentially(in addition to the fact that "cyberwarrior" is an invitation to the quiet militarization of just about anything turing-complete and network connected, all in the name of "security") is that this sloppy use of language will(and already is) lead to sloppy, incorrect thinking on the part of politicians and planners and the like. You'll get roughly one of two outcomes:
Outcome one: The "guard the borders" interpretation. This is the analogy extension of "cyberwarrior" that anybody whose worldview is steeped in the classic American quasi-isolationism(that comes quite naturally from having an ocean on each side, and largely untroublesome borders) will come up with. Basically, civilians get to be the soft chewy center, and go about their business however they like, and the military stands guard at the edges and occasionally goes overseas and kills some nazis or communists.
This interpretation, will the better of the two, is largely useless. With modern internet interconnection, pretty much any sort of electronic attack will fly right past the border and into the ghastly mess that is civilian systems with ease. Even fairly petty criminals will not have much trouble, and some hostile nation's targeted attackers even less. Also, because of "COTS" fever, low-bidder private sector code will be all over military critical systems as well. Hurray.
Outcome two: Super sinister, and not necessarily much more useful than Outcome one. This is the bad analogy extension of "cyberwarrior" that will be arrived at by either retro "total war" theorists, or their contemporary counterparts who have been hitting the "9/11 changed everything, new kind of war, assymetric undefined battlefield, war on abstract concepts!!" pipe pretty hard. Here, the thinking will roughly be as follows: 1. There is a state of "cyberwar" 2. "Cyberwarriors" must be used to win the cyberwar. 3. All internet connected systems are strategic resources, and/or strategic targets, and are therefore under the just jurisdiction of the "cyberwarriors" until such time as the cyberwar should end(ie. never).
Basically, this outcome will mean massive militarization(and some super-juicy contractor food) of previously civilian areas; because, there is a cyberwar on, so if you are on the internet, you are territory...
The fact that we are using the ridiculous term "cyberwarrior" suggests that, at the very least, the people writing the PR playbooks don't have a fucking clue.
In addition to being corny as hell, "cyberwarrior" implies a dangerously literal application of traditional military doctrines(ie. you have the civilians, who do whatever, and then you have an army that stands between them and the bad guys and blows things up) to computer security. With networked computers, aside from the specific case of DOD sysadmins, virtually all of "computer security" is about making sure that the (overwhelmingly civilian) software and systems are properly designed and built. That isn't something that you are going to do by having a few "cyberwarriors" to hack through the enemy's code walls, or whatever. That is only doable by, more or less, massively increasing the status(and cost, sorry MBAs...) of programmers, software engineers, sysadmins, etc.
Obviously, there will be some need for near-black-hats to spook around hostile networks in the service of various sinister three letter agencies; but the vast majority of "computer security" is much closer to being analogous to a civil engineering or public health question than it is to being a military one. Trying to solve "cybersecurity" with a relatively small number of "elite cyberwarriors" is rather like trying to keep a population from dying of cholera by building a few world-class research hospitals(with bed space for like 1% of the cases), rather than having civil engineers knock together a water system...
At least the attempt is more creative than the common American custom of "Finding Jesus" shortly before one goes to meet the parole board...
There are plenty of ebooks in the same state, they just don't tend to show up on sales figures... Arr matey, so to speak...
AT&T's approximate privacy stance can be summarized by the following picture:
Your world delivered(to the NSA)...
Slightly; but not hugely. Particularly now that LCDs, from laptop size up to 100+inches(sorry plasma fans) are the de-facto standard for video watching, gaming, and other casual social activities, the majority of the market is made up of people who value, or at least don't oppose) broad viewing angles(plus, for larger screen sizes, you actually need good viewing angles just so that the edges of the screen don't look weird for a viewer aligned with the center of the screen).
This leaves the market for "screens with deliberately sucky viewing angles" as a reasonably small set of laptop users who work on modestly sensitive stuff in public. Thus, they get the aftermarket screen protector, representing zero change to panel or laptop design processes, and everybody else gets the default.
Given how much AT&T and Apple love each other right now(ie. not-at-all-divorced-but-can't-afford-to-move-out), I'd say that it is only sensible to assume that both parties are, independently, gathering data hand over fist, by the methods open to them.
AT&T has the cell site stuff, which implies location, call termination, and unencrypted data, while Apple has the OS, which has to go a little more lightly on the GPS, for battery life reasons; but otherwise rules the show in terms of data collection...
Given that that only requires using some program that requires them, it isn't really very comforting.
In effect, Apple has decided that, any time you decide to trust any program with location access, you get to trust them as well. That might count as "opt-in" under some especially dystopic reading of the term; but not in any useful sense.
But then they wouldn't get the external IP of one of your commonly used wifi networks... Er, I mean, sending that heavy, heavy, extra data over AT&T's delicate network would be bad...
It would be twice as evil as it would be nervy; but if you've set the situation up like that, where anybody who wants to look has to face the entire courtroom staring at them like a dirty paedo, you could use just about any picture you wanted...
I wonder if that attorney was ever tempted to "accidentally" put a wholly innocuous picture on the table(with the real one in reserve, just in case), just because he could?
There's also the basic "under-promise, over-deliver" consideration. Someone who meets stated minimum spec but has lousy experience will be quite unhappy. Someone who doesn't mean minimum spec but has an acceptable experience will be pleased. Therefore you can(to a point) maximize the total happiness state of your customers by modestly overstating the required specs. Not enough to drive a bunch of people away; but enough that more people feel like they are "doing better than promised" rather than "have been lied to".
If only someone would invent some sort of "secure hash algorithm"...
Sometimes, a few millimeters of lift can make a real difference...
Perusal of medical textbooks really makes one wonder how "natural theologians" ever lasted as long as they did, as an intellectual movement...
Y'know, man, fuck. I don't even think I want a cheezburger anymore.
Umm... If Hitler had to face Rotten.com, he would be deeply confused. He would be submitting half the stuff, and banning the other half as decadent...