We expect the world population will be in decline by mid century, due to the liberation of women, access to birth control, etc.
If you're even marginally believing in this, you're beyond naive. Poor people will continue to breed as much as they can. Religious people will do so as well. With power distribution in democratic countries being based on pure numbers, these will continue keeping most of Africa and central Asia exploding with people.
And of course, there's a significant threat of all Western democracies going the way of Israel. At the start, a small religious minority that breeds fast (10 children per woman) vs ~2 children for the rest. In a few generations, they start making so much gains, that democratic institutions and army become thoroughly infiltrated, and laws start to be passed favouring them, in turn allowing for easier conversions, and even higher birth rates. That is why modern Israel is no longer Israel of the 1980s with currently over 10% of population being religious extremist, and even their foreign minister is now one.
Easiest way to take over the democracy, is to outbreed the core population. Your calculations are based on naive assumption that people will accept material wealth over their beliefs and need to belong.
However, in terms of a 6 - so far as far as I can find, there is one known incident rating a 6 on the INES, and that is the Kyshtm disaster at the Mayak reprocessing facility. This disaster blew 70-80 tons of high level radioactive waste (with a significant portion being medium-lived fission products) into the air - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster. So how is Fukushima worse than this by a factor of 10, considering that the bulk of the Fukushima releases have been short-lived fission products with well established preventative measures in terms of human health effects?
Simple answer: it's not. Fukushima is significantly less dangerous. Most of the "radioactive material" released is mildly radioactive water and steam (h2o with some salts mixed in). When hitting the ocean, it's significantly less dangerous then toxic waste we keep pumping in it daily all around the world.
Not quite. The point is that even sitting in the nests that they're shown to be in, they have 360 horisontal and over 180 vertical clearance together.
Think of the picture linked above. Imagine that photographer is a speedboat or a low flying missile. You are currently in the front gun's field of fire. If you move to the left, you will eventually enter rear gun's field of fire, while still remaining in the front gun's. If you keep going to the left, you'll eventually exit front gun's field of fire, but remain in the rear gun's.
Together, in those nests they cover all approach paths to the ship.
It's worth noting that gunpowder was weaponised quite fast, problem was the state of metallurgy. Essentially people of that age simply didn't have methods to forge steel strong enough to withstand gunpowder-powered firearm.
First cannons were used around 13th century (same century as when Europeans gained knowledge of gunpowder), but they usually had only about the same range as catapults, lighter payload and only withstood a few shots before becoming useless due to explosive expansion warping the metal beyond repair.
The problem with current generation lasers is similar - our material knowledge is simply insufficient to build a laser simple and efficient enough. Same with building a sustainable fusion that generates energy. We need material breakthroughs similar to what happened through middle ages up to modern times.
On your point about rubber boats, navy ships are usually attacked by RIBs (rigid inflatable boat) which is essentially a metal hull with an inflatable "necklace" on top. This design is very seaworthy and extremely fast in comparison to pure rubber boat which is highly unstable and significantly slower.
And rigid parts of RIB have a decent radar cross section.
Apparently my initial post got lost somewhere. There is a really nice pic of a modern AEGIS destroyer (modern meaning about 30 year old design), that shows positions of two Phalanx CIWS that together cover 360/200ish. Take a look:
The white cylindrical radomes with spheric top are Phalanx CIWS units. They sit in nests that are elevated and pulled out of the superstructure, and have overlapping fields of fire in horizontal pane to ensure 360 degree horizontal coverage. Note that in spite of picture being taken from significant angle, we can still clearly see the rear gun, and while it probably wouldn't be able to fire at photographer's position, photographer would only need to move a few more degrees to be in firing range of both guns.
1. No ammunition limit Heat dissipation limits fire rate. Energy is limited by generators. Modern proximity and AA guns have essentially unlimited ammo (enough for long engagements with extreme ease of resupply).
2. No ammunition to blow up inside the ship (capacitors, but these can be left in a discharged state as needed) Heatsinks melting, entire installation melting through the ship, lenses going out of focus and burning the installation as well as the ship, power supply problems, energy spikes damaging other ship systems...
3.Instant impact / no flight time or costly tracking systems that blow up with the munition Tracking systems melt with the installation, useless in bad weather, useless in hot climate, useless during any atmospheric condition that distorts light, extreme cost of installation itself with added costs of all the power cabling, capacitors and cooling systems necessary. Essentially necessitates a nuclear power plant that adds massive cost to all lighter-then-cruiser ships, often doubling or more with the smaller ships.
4. No off-gases from a rocket motor or gun barrel Heat emitted by installation. Laser diode efficiency is still in lower 20 percentile at best, and powerful lasers are below 10%. You will need to dissipate over 90% of laser's energy on target on installation itself.
5. No corrosion of the barrel or launcher. Corrosion of all systems. Dirt and salt water accumulating on lenses dangerous to extreme. Lens cleaning is nightmarish due to extreme accuracy demands.
6. So there are cost savings involved. Upgrades to ship systems to maintain massive energy spikes caused by this kind of system alone puts you well into negative. Cost of the system itself is astronomical compared to a comparable output kinetic system. Upgrade to ship's power generation systems necessary to supply the laser system dwarfs all of above costs.
Laser does not usurp kinetic energy of projectile.
True, but it distorts the shape of the projectile, causing it to tumble and go off course.
Anyway, who cares about bullets being shot at a ship?
It's the missiles (both guided and "ballistic") that are packed with explosives and electronics that are really vulnerable to lasers.
Anti-ship missiles are far better
Except that ships have a fixed (and not very large) supply of missiles, but do have lots and lots of electricity for lasers.
Very famous legend among those that are unfamiliar with modern naval military. Ships have EXTREMELY limited supply of elictricity in combat, so low that US Navy toyed with idea of supplying zumwalt-class with a nuke power plant. In fact, one of the major issues with zumwalt has been supplying it with enough electricity in combat, as their new SPY-3 radar on full power used too much power to keep all other ship systems powered at the same time in the initial design (according to very persistent rumors and jane's analysts in their weekly).
Why? Modern fire control radar eats several megawatts each ALONE and that is going up as their capabilities keep on increasing. There was a nice article on the issue on navy's own.mil website (you can probably find link to it by browsing my post history, I had to bring it up when same system was "successful" at shooting down a drone and we had a similar discussion on slashdot. It's about a year old.)
Long story short, every megawatt counts even on a cruiser. Destroyers, or even corvettes? Forget about even thinking of installing high energy weapon systems, they barely have enough to power all of their low energy kinetic and missile weapons and their support systems when radars are in full power mode in a combat situation.
Who says you lase it at close range? Burn that bastard as soon as it comes over the horizon.
Horizon isn't that far away, and sea water with its everpresent vapour will dissipate a whole lot of laser energy. Not to even mention that your laser is countered by simply installing a high-albedo nose on a missile. Or that nasty weather condition called "rain". Or fog. Or any other atmospheric effect that causes optical distortions.
First of all, with laser you have MORE rather then less worries of hitting something else, as your guidance will be horribly slow (no shells to track and auto-correct), and most harbours are in warm climates with updrafts causing optical disturbances in the air wreaking unpredictable havoc on your laser's trajectory.
Laser is not only not a solution, it adds a host of new problems to such scenario while not solving a single problem (except potential deniability, since you just vaporise potential victims).
Outfitting carrier with a laser system makes a whole lot less sense. Besides the obvious energy feed problems, carrier is not a ship that is designed to defend itself from a direct attack, and as such typically carries only small set of anti-air weaponry (with really crappy field of view due to lack of elevated spots to place them into).
If your carrier has any contact with "swarming boats", that means your perimeter defense ships are dead or totally overwhelmed. Carrier shooting back is akin to general having to go for his pistol.
Actually, not only have I "thought about it", I'm actually something of an armchair expert in the subject.
1. Tracking is done either automatically with a radar, or manually by a gunner. Radar guidance generally scans surface, locks on, does calibrated targeting (i.e. points gun in the general direction of the target) and starts firing. Then it radar tracks the relation of shells' trajectory to targets location and auto-corrects.
This is why pretty much all of the ship-based close range AA is usually an autonomous system of a short range radar paired with a gatling, that "just works". You activate it, tell it to engage anything that isn't sending IFF signal, and woe is anything in range that isn't.
2. Normal ships carry two anti-air close range weapons, typically either in elevated spots in front and read, or left and right. Larger ships that cannot position these guns like that, like aircraft carriers, carry them in nests on sides of the ship with meaningful vertical clearance.
3. There are no "dead angles" on a properly built military ship that's a corvette or heavier class. If there are, it's a really bad ship design or a ship not designed for close range combat (i.e. some supply ships). In general, 2 properly positioned anti aircraft cannons can attack anything in 360(horisontal)/200ish(vertical) with only dead spots being in close proximity of the ship covered from gun by ship's hull. Remember that close range AAA is designed as a last step anti-air measure and as such covers all approach angles in both panes (i.e. missiles that come hugging the water as well as those that "pop-up" and hit the ship vertically in terminal phase.
Finally most ships designed for skirmishes carry similarily configured close range guns (like aforementioned 40mm bofors, which while being a WW2 design is an excellent autocannon still in wide use on anything from spectre gunships to ship perimeter defense).
Relevant search terms: naval anti-air gun, kashtan, goalkeeper, phalanx. If you wish to specifically search for non-AA specified perimeter defence guns, then 40mm bofors alone has so many various naval turret + guidance configurations that you'd have to pick up a brochure just to get a list.
Bullets become significantly more deadly if they are molten. Laser does not usurp kinetic energy of projectile. Anti-ship missiles are far better to be intercepted outside laser/kinetic gun/other close range AA range, where they usually are in terminal guidance mode and are running at mach3+ with jammers going all out.
Those who climbed Everest differ from those flying out of pressurised plane in the following:
1. Speed. Everest climbers don't endure 900km/h winds. 2. Temperature. Everest is much warmer due to presence of a surface which absorbs some portion of the sun rays. 3. Clothing and protective gear. Everest climbers have significantly more layers of clothing and specialized protective gear. 4. Pressurization: Everest climbers de-pressurize slowly. Those flying out of the plane de-pressurize explosively.
Pointless. A simple 40mm bofors (cheap as hell) or a properly set up AA Gatling will do the job far, FAR better against boat swarms. At the same time they are far cheaper, integrate into system with self-auto corrective targeting based on radar signature of gun's own shells, do not require a heavy supply of energy and have significantly fewer points of failure.
This is essentially a theoretical "possible future weapon" exercise - it has nothing to do with actual, realistic modern combat. AT ALL. In the current material technology levels, a laser that would be at least on par with a modern (actually never mind, let's talk on par with a WW2-aged so we don't get too depressed) kinetic gun is at least as far away as commercial fusion.
In other words, it's a huge waste of taxpayers money, that is validated because people that know nothing of actual weapon technology and how it needs to work go "woo, laser cannons, I saw that in the movies!". Sad really.
Not sure if it's relevant, but some of the latest nvidia drivers have been atrocious, and in general, driver quality has nosedived. Great example is when an AAA title that every major gfx card manufacturer got to test ages before release doesn't work on nvidia cards says a lot. I'm talking about dragon age 2 in case you lived under the rock last couple of months.
Before it used to be ATI that failed with drivers, and nvidia was the trusty one. Now, it's the other way around. Funnily, ATI's drivers are still v8.
That makes no sense. A much better approach would be a dedicated GPU paired with general CPU.
In this regard, the "multi-core" issue is visible even on PC - it's much better to have a dedicated chip for each task then a general CPU handling everything. Add to that the fact that more efficient chips will likely be configured to use less energy for their dedicated task, and be powered off or go into minimal power mode when not used, battery life of such a device would be worlds ahead of "general quad core CPU" one.
I honestly believe that single core cpu paired with a decent DSP and GPU is a best solution for a mobile phone until batteries improve in a drastic fashion. I can somewhat understand dual core as well, but quad is definitely an overkill for most things done on a mobile phone, and is likely to be too much of a power hog for tasks that this much power will be needed for. Tasks that will likely be better left to a laptop or home PC for a time being, or put into the cloud.
There is even worse thing to come with this: add-on compatibility.
As it stands now, for many like myself the only reason to use FF over chrome lies in vastly superior add-ons. But every time a major version upgrade comes, a good half of add-ons remain broken for .
In this regard, it would be much better if major version revisions were more RARE rather then more common. While this change will not drive me to competing browsers, I will likely end up staying with 3.6.x for a long time in large part because of it. Other issue being the retarded interface and added bloat that I do not want, just like parent. Heck, I didn't want most of the features that came in various upgrades to 3 (personas was quite possibly the dumbest thing to actually force down everyone's throats - what was wrong with keeping it as an add-on?). And I end up disabling stuff like awesome bar, and if I ever upgrade to 4.x I will absolutely require a way to rearrange tabs in the way I like them (i.e. 3.6.x way).
Which doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense. Much of religious dogma, which is based on basics makes a lot of sense. If you look at Islam in ~600-700, much of its teachings were revolutionary in terms of social sciences. For example it advocated realistic selflessness through alms (one of five basic pillars of Islam), gave women right for the first time ever, which is something most people don't realize - Islam's way of treating women was very progressive and daring for its times, as it actually gave women some enshrined rights, such as the right to have half of a power of a man testifying in court, meaning they could no longer simply be dismissed by judges as it happened before. Islam also enshrined rights for minorities in its dogma which was very exceptional for its times.
The main problem is, what was progressive back then is hopelessly conservative now, and large religions tend to have a critical mass of conservative people who do not want to change no matter how far the times go past them. But to claim that religion's basic dogma are "basic human societal norms" is false. Islam had to fight for every inch when it was created, as no one wanted such a progressive set of beliefs in the middle east back then.
In this regard, Islam is mostly waiting for its Luther to come and clean out the conservative trash and update religion to modern age. I guess all the bloodshed that came with it to Christianity will have to repeat with Islam as well...
Shame that you have to go AC to state something that's that obvious. Looking at Christians about 600 years ago, they're pretty much a carbon copy of modern islam, with witch hunts and having women basically as home slaves on one end (compare woman headdress from 600 years ago in catholic heartland of Italy and modern islamic woman headdress), and killing off scientists and seeking political control on other.
Considering that Islams roots are in the same religion as Christianity, and that the main difference is that they were born 600 years later... yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
We expect the world population will be in decline by mid century, due to the liberation of women, access to birth control, etc.
If you're even marginally believing in this, you're beyond naive. Poor people will continue to breed as much as they can. Religious people will do so as well. With power distribution in democratic countries being based on pure numbers, these will continue keeping most of Africa and central Asia exploding with people.
And of course, there's a significant threat of all Western democracies going the way of Israel. At the start, a small religious minority that breeds fast (10 children per woman) vs ~2 children for the rest. In a few generations, they start making so much gains, that democratic institutions and army become thoroughly infiltrated, and laws start to be passed favouring them, in turn allowing for easier conversions, and even higher birth rates. That is why modern Israel is no longer Israel of the 1980s with currently over 10% of population being religious extremist, and even their foreign minister is now one.
Easiest way to take over the democracy, is to outbreed the core population. Your calculations are based on naive assumption that people will accept material wealth over their beliefs and need to belong.
However, in terms of a 6 - so far as far as I can find, there is one known incident rating a 6 on the INES, and that is the Kyshtm disaster at the Mayak reprocessing facility. This disaster blew 70-80 tons of high level radioactive waste (with a significant portion being medium-lived fission products) into the air - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyshtym_disaster. So how is Fukushima worse than this by a factor of 10, considering that the bulk of the Fukushima releases have been short-lived fission products with well established preventative measures in terms of human health effects?
Simple answer: it's not. Fukushima is significantly less dangerous. Most of the "radioactive material" released is mildly radioactive water and steam (h2o with some salts mixed in). When hitting the ocean, it's significantly less dangerous then toxic waste we keep pumping in it daily all around the world.
What's quite funny is that your post made me cringe more then all the scaremongering in the article.
Not quite. The point is that even sitting in the nests that they're shown to be in, they have 360 horisontal and over 180 vertical clearance together.
Think of the picture linked above. Imagine that photographer is a speedboat or a low flying missile. You are currently in the front gun's field of fire. If you move to the left, you will eventually enter rear gun's field of fire, while still remaining in the front gun's. If you keep going to the left, you'll eventually exit front gun's field of fire, but remain in the rear gun's.
Together, in those nests they cover all approach paths to the ship.
It's worth noting that gunpowder was weaponised quite fast, problem was the state of metallurgy. Essentially people of that age simply didn't have methods to forge steel strong enough to withstand gunpowder-powered firearm.
First cannons were used around 13th century (same century as when Europeans gained knowledge of gunpowder), but they usually had only about the same range as catapults, lighter payload and only withstood a few shots before becoming useless due to explosive expansion warping the metal beyond repair.
The problem with current generation lasers is similar - our material knowledge is simply insufficient to build a laser simple and efficient enough. Same with building a sustainable fusion that generates energy. We need material breakthroughs similar to what happened through middle ages up to modern times.
On your point about rubber boats, navy ships are usually attacked by RIBs (rigid inflatable boat) which is essentially a metal hull with an inflatable "necklace" on top. This design is very seaworthy and extremely fast in comparison to pure rubber boat which is highly unstable and significantly slower.
And rigid parts of RIB have a decent radar cross section.
Apparently my initial post got lost somewhere. There is a really nice pic of a modern AEGIS destroyer (modern meaning about 30 year old design), that shows positions of two Phalanx CIWS that together cover 360/200ish. Take a look:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/61/USS_Arleigh_Burke_Mediterranean.jpg
The white cylindrical radomes with spheric top are Phalanx CIWS units. They sit in nests that are elevated and pulled out of the superstructure, and have overlapping fields of fire in horizontal pane to ensure 360 degree horizontal coverage. Note that in spite of picture being taken from significant angle, we can still clearly see the rear gun, and while it probably wouldn't be able to fire at photographer's position, photographer would only need to move a few more degrees to be in firing range of both guns.
Notably, zero missing. 4. should say "dissipate 900% on installation".
1. No ammunition limit
Heat dissipation limits fire rate. Energy is limited by generators. Modern proximity and AA guns have essentially unlimited ammo (enough for long engagements with extreme ease of resupply).
2. No ammunition to blow up inside the ship (capacitors, but these can be left in a discharged state as needed)
Heatsinks melting, entire installation melting through the ship, lenses going out of focus and burning the installation as well as the ship, power supply problems, energy spikes damaging other ship systems...
3.Instant impact / no flight time or costly tracking systems that blow up with the munition
Tracking systems melt with the installation, useless in bad weather, useless in hot climate, useless during any atmospheric condition that distorts light, extreme cost of installation itself with added costs of all the power cabling, capacitors and cooling systems necessary. Essentially necessitates a nuclear power plant that adds massive cost to all lighter-then-cruiser ships, often doubling or more with the smaller ships.
4. No off-gases from a rocket motor or gun barrel
Heat emitted by installation. Laser diode efficiency is still in lower 20 percentile at best, and powerful lasers are below 10%. You will need to dissipate over 90% of laser's energy on target on installation itself.
5. No corrosion of the barrel or launcher.
Corrosion of all systems. Dirt and salt water accumulating on lenses dangerous to extreme. Lens cleaning is nightmarish due to extreme accuracy demands.
6. So there are cost savings involved.
Upgrades to ship systems to maintain massive energy spikes caused by this kind of system alone puts you well into negative. Cost of the system itself is astronomical compared to a comparable output kinetic system. Upgrade to ship's power generation systems necessary to supply the laser system dwarfs all of above costs.
Laser does not usurp kinetic energy of projectile.
True, but it distorts the shape of the projectile, causing it to tumble and go off course.
Anyway, who cares about bullets being shot at a ship?
It's the missiles (both guided and "ballistic") that are packed with explosives and electronics that are really vulnerable to lasers.
Anti-ship missiles are far better
Except that ships have a fixed (and not very large) supply of missiles, but do have lots and lots of electricity for lasers.
Very famous legend among those that are unfamiliar with modern naval military. Ships have EXTREMELY limited supply of elictricity in combat, so low that US Navy toyed with idea of supplying zumwalt-class with a nuke power plant. In fact, one of the major issues with zumwalt has been supplying it with enough electricity in combat, as their new SPY-3 radar on full power used too much power to keep all other ship systems powered at the same time in the initial design (according to very persistent rumors and jane's analysts in their weekly).
Why? Modern fire control radar eats several megawatts each ALONE and that is going up as their capabilities keep on increasing. There was a nice article on the issue on navy's own .mil website (you can probably find link to it by browsing my post history, I had to bring it up when same system was "successful" at shooting down a drone and we had a similar discussion on slashdot. It's about a year old.)
Long story short, every megawatt counts even on a cruiser. Destroyers, or even corvettes? Forget about even thinking of installing high energy weapon systems, they barely have enough to power all of their low energy kinetic and missile weapons and their support systems when radars are in full power mode in a combat situation.
Who says you lase it at close range? Burn that bastard as soon as it comes over the horizon.
Horizon isn't that far away, and sea water with its everpresent vapour will dissipate a whole lot of laser energy. Not to even mention that your laser is countered by simply installing a high-albedo nose on a missile. Or that nasty weather condition called "rain". Or fog. Or any other atmospheric effect that causes optical distortions.
First of all, with laser you have MORE rather then less worries of hitting something else, as your guidance will be horribly slow (no shells to track and auto-correct), and most harbours are in warm climates with updrafts causing optical disturbances in the air wreaking unpredictable havoc on your laser's trajectory.
Laser is not only not a solution, it adds a host of new problems to such scenario while not solving a single problem (except potential deniability, since you just vaporise potential victims).
Outfitting carrier with a laser system makes a whole lot less sense. Besides the obvious energy feed problems, carrier is not a ship that is designed to defend itself from a direct attack, and as such typically carries only small set of anti-air weaponry (with really crappy field of view due to lack of elevated spots to place them into).
If your carrier has any contact with "swarming boats", that means your perimeter defense ships are dead or totally overwhelmed. Carrier shooting back is akin to general having to go for his pistol.
Actually, not only have I "thought about it", I'm actually something of an armchair expert in the subject.
1. Tracking is done either automatically with a radar, or manually by a gunner. Radar guidance generally scans surface, locks on, does calibrated targeting (i.e. points gun in the general direction of the target) and starts firing. Then it radar tracks the relation of shells' trajectory to targets location and auto-corrects.
This is why pretty much all of the ship-based close range AA is usually an autonomous system of a short range radar paired with a gatling, that "just works". You activate it, tell it to engage anything that isn't sending IFF signal, and woe is anything in range that isn't.
2. Normal ships carry two anti-air close range weapons, typically either in elevated spots in front and read, or left and right. Larger ships that cannot position these guns like that, like aircraft carriers, carry them in nests on sides of the ship with meaningful vertical clearance.
3. There are no "dead angles" on a properly built military ship that's a corvette or heavier class. If there are, it's a really bad ship design or a ship not designed for close range combat (i.e. some supply ships). In general, 2 properly positioned anti aircraft cannons can attack anything in 360(horisontal)/200ish(vertical) with only dead spots being in close proximity of the ship covered from gun by ship's hull.
Remember that close range AAA is designed as a last step anti-air measure and as such covers all approach angles in both panes (i.e. missiles that come hugging the water as well as those that "pop-up" and hit the ship vertically in terminal phase.
Finally most ships designed for skirmishes carry similarily configured close range guns (like aforementioned 40mm bofors, which while being a WW2 design is an excellent autocannon still in wide use on anything from spectre gunships to ship perimeter defense).
Relevant search terms: naval anti-air gun, kashtan, goalkeeper, phalanx. If you wish to specifically search for non-AA specified perimeter defence guns, then 40mm bofors alone has so many various naval turret + guidance configurations that you'd have to pick up a brochure just to get a list.
Bullets become significantly more deadly if they are molten. Laser does not usurp kinetic energy of projectile. Anti-ship missiles are far better to be intercepted outside laser/kinetic gun/other close range AA range, where they usually are in terminal guidance mode and are running at mach3+ with jammers going all out.
Those who climbed Everest differ from those flying out of pressurised plane in the following:
1. Speed. Everest climbers don't endure 900km/h winds.
2. Temperature. Everest is much warmer due to presence of a surface which absorbs some portion of the sun rays.
3. Clothing and protective gear. Everest climbers have significantly more layers of clothing and specialized protective gear.
4. Pressurization: Everest climbers de-pressurize slowly. Those flying out of the plane de-pressurize explosively.
Pointless. A simple 40mm bofors (cheap as hell) or a properly set up AA Gatling will do the job far, FAR better against boat swarms. At the same time they are far cheaper, integrate into system with self-auto corrective targeting based on radar signature of gun's own shells, do not require a heavy supply of energy and have significantly fewer points of failure.
This is essentially a theoretical "possible future weapon" exercise - it has nothing to do with actual, realistic modern combat. AT ALL. In the current material technology levels, a laser that would be at least on par with a modern (actually never mind, let's talk on par with a WW2-aged so we don't get too depressed) kinetic gun is at least as far away as commercial fusion.
In other words, it's a huge waste of taxpayers money, that is validated because people that know nothing of actual weapon technology and how it needs to work go "woo, laser cannons, I saw that in the movies!".
Sad really.
Not sure if it's relevant, but some of the latest nvidia drivers have been atrocious, and in general, driver quality has nosedived. Great example is when an AAA title that every major gfx card manufacturer got to test ages before release doesn't work on nvidia cards says a lot.
I'm talking about dragon age 2 in case you lived under the rock last couple of months.
Before it used to be ATI that failed with drivers, and nvidia was the trusty one. Now, it's the other way around. Funnily, ATI's drivers are still v8.
That makes no sense. A much better approach would be a dedicated GPU paired with general CPU.
In this regard, the "multi-core" issue is visible even on PC - it's much better to have a dedicated chip for each task then a general CPU handling everything. Add to that the fact that more efficient chips will likely be configured to use less energy for their dedicated task, and be powered off or go into minimal power mode when not used, battery life of such a device would be worlds ahead of "general quad core CPU" one.
I honestly believe that single core cpu paired with a decent DSP and GPU is a best solution for a mobile phone until batteries improve in a drastic fashion. I can somewhat understand dual core as well, but quad is definitely an overkill for most things done on a mobile phone, and is likely to be too much of a power hog for tasks that this much power will be needed for. Tasks that will likely be better left to a laptop or home PC for a time being, or put into the cloud.
There is even worse thing to come with this: add-on compatibility.
As it stands now, for many like myself the only reason to use FF over chrome lies in vastly superior add-ons. But every time a major version upgrade comes, a good half of add-ons remain broken for .
In this regard, it would be much better if major version revisions were more RARE rather then more common. While this change will not drive me to competing browsers, I will likely end up staying with 3.6.x for a long time in large part because of it.
Other issue being the retarded interface and added bloat that I do not want, just like parent. Heck, I didn't want most of the features that came in various upgrades to 3 (personas was quite possibly the dumbest thing to actually force down everyone's throats - what was wrong with keeping it as an add-on?). And I end up disabling stuff like awesome bar, and if I ever upgrade to 4.x I will absolutely require a way to rearrange tabs in the way I like them (i.e. 3.6.x way).
TFA is wrong. "Unused copper wires" belong to people who laid them. Digging them out of the ground is theft.
Which doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense. Much of religious dogma, which is based on basics makes a lot of sense. If you look at Islam in ~600-700, much of its teachings were revolutionary in terms of social sciences. For example it advocated realistic selflessness through alms (one of five basic pillars of Islam), gave women right for the first time ever, which is something most people don't realize - Islam's way of treating women was very progressive and daring for its times, as it actually gave women some enshrined rights, such as the right to have half of a power of a man testifying in court, meaning they could no longer simply be dismissed by judges as it happened before. Islam also enshrined rights for minorities in its dogma which was very exceptional for its times.
The main problem is, what was progressive back then is hopelessly conservative now, and large religions tend to have a critical mass of conservative people who do not want to change no matter how far the times go past them. But to claim that religion's basic dogma are "basic human societal norms" is false. Islam had to fight for every inch when it was created, as no one wanted such a progressive set of beliefs in the middle east back then.
In this regard, Islam is mostly waiting for its Luther to come and clean out the conservative trash and update religion to modern age. I guess all the bloodshed that came with it to Christianity will have to repeat with Islam as well...
Agreed. Scum like you should be "cleaned off the internet".
Quite a bit of basic dogma does make sense. Don't kill, don't steal, etc.
Shame that you have to go AC to state something that's that obvious. Looking at Christians about 600 years ago, they're pretty much a carbon copy of modern islam, with witch hunts and having women basically as home slaves on one end (compare woman headdress from 600 years ago in catholic heartland of Italy and modern islamic woman headdress), and killing off scientists and seeking political control on other.
Considering that Islams roots are in the same religion as Christianity, and that the main difference is that they were born 600 years later... yeah.
Which is a bad thing, because it causes people to lose faith, as you get to see just how little sense most of the christian dogma makes?