As the other poster who replied to you mentioned, there's always that sniper-finding robot to counter the scenario you describe.
There's also a Phalanx gun, which can target and destroy an incoming projectile (like an RPG or missile) before it makes impact. I'm sure it could be modified to fit on a humvee in an automated supply convoy.
I thought about a similar approach using a direct-mount turbine-to-drivetrain system, but doubling the generator as an acceleration motor as well. So in addition to being able to tap the rotary motion of the turbine for power, you can add to it and accelerate it on a curve that more motorists would prefer. Then you could link the turbine directly to the drivetrain because of the high-torque assist of the electric motor enabling rapid acceleration, so you wouldn't convert to electricity (as it would be a lossy conversion) because you'd be able to overcome the acceleration issue (turbines with large masses or connected to large-mass drivetrains) of putting a turbine in an automobile as its main engine.
I was thinking the same thing some nine or ten months ago. It really is curious, especially with so many people doing DIYturbine-building and other people doing DIY power generation via the harnessing of rotary kineticmotion, well I guess it's just a matter of time-to-convergence, really.
I think the biggest challenge right now is mounting a turboshaft that can handle the stresses? It needs to be balanced and mounted with great precision. Also, you can't have an alternator spinning at 60,000 RPM because it'd have to be built such that it wouldn't fly apart at such speeds. The solution I've been able to come up to this issue is the idea of a worm gear reducer to turn the low-torque high-speed shaft motion into high-torque low-speed shaft motion to drive a large, slow (~2000 RPM), heavy PM generator or alternator.
Also, I think that the turbine and/or the worm gear arrangement might benefit greatly from some of this great NanoLub stuff. (although the crankcase inside a conventional piston engine is probably a much better place for it)
I have great faith in the eventual development of hybrid foil and magnetic bearings that could bear the multi-axis load of a turbine, giving us the 5million+ hour MTBF turbines we all want. Whether this sort of thing will ever be within the reach of the DIY consumer, well, remains to be seen.
Blue screen is a Windows thing but core dump is not.
Not quite true, unfortunately.
When a windows box bluescreens, or when a program crashes, a core dump can be created. On most systems this is a mini dump file but it can be configured otherwise.
I can understand how a poorly educated individual could identify the "bluescreen makes a core dump" and "linux makes a core dump" and put it together incorrectly as "linux bluescreened." I believe this is why he's making this statement.
Video is on this page but since it's on MSNBC, they bend you over and make you take it Internet Explorer style. Actually, I went ahead and opened it in IE and I'm stuck watching the Iams multicat commercial over and over because the advertisement stream keeps timing out just before the end and it just replays over and over again without letting me move on to the content.
Oop, there it goes. It's 21 seconds of video. And....I can't play it again. The "play" button on the embedded player is disabled after playing the stream once.
I tried to grab a screenshot but it didn't work. The embedded player's video acceleration doesn't draw to the screen bitmap but uses the overlay mode of the video card...
Well if you've got IE and you can put up with the headache required to see the video, it's there. The squid looks REALLY unusual and the 21 seconds of video are...hm, yeah, I'll say it's worth it.
of course if I had the $ and a good supply I'd never quit because marijuana gives me brilliant ideas and more creativity for my job.
I agree 100% with this statement. Lester Grinspoon MD, a former Harvard professor and all-around genius, has some things to say about his first experiences with marijuana, when he was in his 40s. He came to the conclusion that everything should be thought about both stoned and straight, in order to gain a great deal of perspective on any matter.
Marijuana effects everyone differently. Take into consideration as well that genetically, there are many different types ("strains") of Marijuana, which carry effects related to their genetic disposition. There are two main families of marijuana, Sativa and Indica. Sativa varieties are native to the equatorial regions in what would largely be considered tropical climates. North Africa, Vietnam, Thailand. Sativa varieties provide what is often called a "mental" high, a very uplifting and energetic feeling combined with inspirations and new ideas. Sativa varieties tend to be very tall and branchy with limited flower (bud, marijuana) production, which dramatically affects yields. Sativa connoisseurs however are always willing to sacrifice quantity for quality. Indica varieties are from places like Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, more mountainous regions with higher elevations. Indica varieties tend to grow short and fat, shaped like a christmas tree. Indica varieties produce more flowers than Sativa varieties. Indica varieties provide a "body" high, with amplification of physical sensation, it makes you sleepy, it makes you just want to sit still. Most commercial marijuana is hybridized between these two main types of Marijauna, optimized for high and yield.
The point I'm getting at with the above paragraph is that commercial pot is sometimes a crap shoot when it comes to the effect, and since the effect generated is one generated through hybridization, the mix of cannabinoids may (and often does) affect different people differently. I know people who can't think straight ("maintain") while influenced by marijuana, and then there's people like me who don't even miss a beat.
I find marijuana carries one detriment that I must acknowledge: my short-term memory does suffer in terms of capacity and recollection ability, but I have a voice recorder to compensate for that, leaving me with oodles of insight and perspective with few recognizable detrimental side-effects.
Well, most "small" generators that run on gasoline are piston engines, and are quite inefficient. A mid-sized generator that runs on natural gas might be a turbine-based system however, able to glean efficiencies up to 60% and higher. Just about any type of power conversion is better than "gasoline powered generators."
Yes, I totally agree with you, because the same people who come up with a plan to build a reinforced door cannot come up with an idea to build a toilet or a snack bar in the cockpit as well. Yep, those engineers, they're so thoughtless and without intellect!
Bitch has undergone quite an evolution. Once used to describe a spiteful or overbearing woman, it is also more and more commonly being used to refer to a man as weak or contemptible.
Even moreso though, rap culture has brought out a usage in common language, where "bitch" = "woman" -- in the sentence, "let's get some bitches up in here." This is something that those using it in this context don't really see any problem with using, in this context...
So it's not so much the typers that they needed to slow down, as it was the hammers doing the typing. The only way to do that which occured to the men making the decisions at the time, was to move the keys around to cause those who are operating the keys to not operate them with such great rapidity.
I mean, saying that the QWERTY layout was made to slow down typists isn't really off the mark, if slowing down typists was seen as the only solution to the hammer collision problem, by way of causality; slow typists will get you slow hammers.
I saw a statistic recently that says that of the 60,000+ employees, only about 8,000 of them are developers. I'm not pulling this from my ass either, I saw it on a few flyers for the Microsoft Company Meeting 2005 (I work on the MS campus as a contractor). It was a breakdown of where the company was in 1975 and where it is now in 2005, contrasting the number of people in sales/development/total employees to their current numbers. Something like 7600 are sales people currently. I'm curious about the rest.
(For the company meeting, MS rents the sports stadium in Seattle, Safeco Field, for the annual company meeting. Where else can you fit 60,000 people?)
I would hardly call that article enlightened. They compare the disaster response for Katrina to other hurricanes such as Hugo, Andrew, Dennis, and Iniki. Other hurricanes which didn't completely flood an entire city. It simply isn't a fair comparison at all.
"For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three."
Homestead, Florida wasn't under eight to twenty feet of feces-laden and diseased water. Not a fair contrast at all.
Enlightened folks don't compare apples and oranges.
With such a low userid, you're very well-practiced by now, no doubt.;)
Off topic, slightly ranty, but I have a point
on
Controlling Hurricanes?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Or if the Governor of Louisiana had specifically asked the federal government for certain kinds of assistance...
She said "We need your help, we need everything." but she did not specifically request federal military support. Her press secretary said that she believed that such a specific request was not necessary.
I'm pretty sure that there are rules which regulate the deployment of federal troops within state borders. I think that it is indeed something that must be formally and specifically requested.
CNN.com has free video now, but it's free video that you can't link to (hardly "free" if you ask me). Go to CNN's homepage and watch the clip "Miscommunication Delayed Response" to hear the governor say to her press secretary in what looks like a rehearsal or perhaps a moment that the governor believed the cameras were not yet recording. She said on Wednesday (to her press secretary in a whisper while being recorded): "I really need to call for the military, I should have started that in the first call." These are pretty damning words to be said on tape.
Katrina was indeed predicted, and one of the bureaucrats said "We need your help, we need everything you've got." which meant to her "send planes, trains, buses, boats, food, water, shelters, etc" but she did not communicate such requests specifically.
And let's not forget the fact that Louisiana's National Guard are mostly deployed over in Iraq. They were not even in place or ready to help the state cope with the disaster, because the Federal government thinks they can be put to better use overseas. Let's also not forget that since 2003, the levy budget has been but a pittance due to lack of contribution by the federal government because of, specifically, needing to fund the Iraq war.
One more thing we can't forget is that a man can make a phone call and order thousands of people to be killed instantly by napalm, but that same man cannot make a phone call and order thousands of water bottles dropped on a city ravaged by a hurricane? Think about this one real carefully: We can more quickly and capably kill our purported enemies than we can help our own citizens. Is that the kind of nation you want to be a part of?
We do not need to control hurricanes, we need to control our government.
The movie operated on the premise that an electromagnetic weapon was used which caused a chain-reaction in the core (to stop said core) that could not be reversed using the same method which initiated it. They needed a certain proximity to various regions in the core in order to use nuclear weapons to churn the core up again and get it spinning.
People knock that movie left and right but I considered it thought-provoking. I enjoyed the part where they're in the mantle in their little tunneling train thing and they have to dodge the giant diamonds in their path because their tunneling laser cannot cut them. I also liked the notion of "unobtanium" -- a material which becomes stronger the more force you exert upon it. A similar idea was used in a recent episode of Stargate SG-1, where an energy shield was able to derive its power from the kinetic energy used in trying to destroy it, actually enabling the field to grow in size and encompass an entire planet (after, of course, being bull-headedly nuked, which provided 70% of the power it needed)
The notion of materials which increase in strength as they're put under stress is not totally unimaginable. I'm told actually that attempting to separate a quark pair would require a vast amount of energy because the attraction between the two quarks becomes exponentially stronger as you attempt to break them apart, to the point where enough energy would be present between the two quarks that two new quarks would be spontaneously created from that energy, leaving you with two new quark pairs. Is it possible to do more than just pair up quarks? Triplets, quadruplets, and so on? New forms of matter are just around the corner in this day and age...
The notion that the Earth's mantle is filled with diamonds the size of a Volkswagen is also not unreasonable. The mantle is a place of intense temperature and pressure where carbon would definitely be able to crystallize into diamond.
The movie takes a lot of criticism but is filled with a lot of interesting ideas.
Terrorism is influencing the actions of a people through fear and terror.
I consider losing my civil rights to be something which I fear and I would consider an attempt to usurp my civil rights as terrorization.
The head of MI5 is proposing that in order to protect the people from terrorists, the government must terrorize its populace? Seriously, pardon my french here, but what the hell kind of crazy fucked-up shit is that?
I think Benjamin Franklin put it best, nearly 250 years ago: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
What kind of qualifications did you need to get your foot in the door, so to speak? I've been doing Perl scripting (automation/batch processing) and Perl CGI work (dynamic websites, DB driven or otherwise) for about five years now, but I don't have a degree. Is the lack of a degree going to hold me back when it comes to government programming jobs? I've heard that not having a degree makes it difficult to gain employment with the government, but once you're employed it's your employment with a given division that matters more than the degree you may or may not have. Do you have any input on that? Also, if you don't mind, what is your position title?
Are you on the general schedule (GS) pay scale? Do you get yearly raises and nice benefits? I've often considered working for the government in a technical role.
Stop looking at the symptom and look at the problem: WHY did 72,000 people buy narcotic pain medication (illegally) from a spammer? Could it be because they're addicted? 72,000 people with a Vicodin addiction is not hard to imagine.
I think we'd be much better off if the FDA became a recommendations and guidelines agency and the entire concept of regulating what one can or can not put in their body was done away with. Then one could buy their vicodin over the counter, and they wouldn't need to get involved with a seedy spammer fella and his black-market crew.
You need to consider that selling vicodin through spam is only profitable because people are paying higher prices because of scarce or controlled supply. If the supply became less scarce (ie, you could buy anything without a prescription), the demand would be quenched and prices would fall, hopefully to the point where a spammer can no longer make money selling us anything because we can already get it with greater availability and guaranteed purity at the corner store.
Not to mention how much money the government can make by literally taxing pleasure. Everybody wins.
If you'll notice (speaking of being uninformed) I was talking about power generation in terms of kilowatts. You know, thousand-watt units. So even if 150W is the output power of this laser as you suppose, if it took 150,000 watts to generate that pulse, these engines are still up to the challenge.
Slashdot Mirror
As the other poster who replied to you mentioned, there's always that sniper-finding robot to counter the scenario you describe.
There's also a Phalanx gun, which can target and destroy an incoming projectile (like an RPG or missile) before it makes impact. I'm sure it could be modified to fit on a humvee in an automated supply convoy.
Thanks for that tip re:SafePeer.
I thought about a similar approach using a direct-mount turbine-to-drivetrain system, but doubling the generator as an acceleration motor as well. So in addition to being able to tap the rotary motion of the turbine for power, you can add to it and accelerate it on a curve that more motorists would prefer. Then you could link the turbine directly to the drivetrain because of the high-torque assist of the electric motor enabling rapid acceleration, so you wouldn't convert to electricity (as it would be a lossy conversion) because you'd be able to overcome the acceleration issue (turbines with large masses or connected to large-mass drivetrains) of putting a turbine in an automobile as its main engine.
I was thinking the same thing some nine or ten months ago. It really is curious, especially with so many people doing DIY turbine-building and other people doing DIY power generation via the harnessing of rotary kinetic motion, well I guess it's just a matter of time-to-convergence, really.
I think the biggest challenge right now is mounting a turboshaft that can handle the stresses? It needs to be balanced and mounted with great precision. Also, you can't have an alternator spinning at 60,000 RPM because it'd have to be built such that it wouldn't fly apart at such speeds. The solution I've been able to come up to this issue is the idea of a worm gear reducer to turn the low-torque high-speed shaft motion into high-torque low-speed shaft motion to drive a large, slow (~2000 RPM), heavy PM generator or alternator.
Also, I think that the turbine and/or the worm gear arrangement might benefit greatly from some of this great NanoLub stuff. (although the crankcase inside a conventional piston engine is probably a much better place for it)
I have great faith in the eventual development of hybrid foil and magnetic bearings that could bear the multi-axis load of a turbine, giving us the 5million+ hour MTBF turbines we all want. Whether this sort of thing will ever be within the reach of the DIY consumer, well, remains to be seen.
You mean: blacks, mexicans, asians, indians, the poor, the children.
The "ordinary" (read: white. middle-class.) people usually get left alone.
I'm not saying I agree with this, I'm just saying that's how it is.
Blue screen is a Windows thing but core dump is not.
Not quite true, unfortunately.
When a windows box bluescreens, or when a program crashes, a core dump can be created. On most systems this is a mini dump file but it can be configured otherwise.
I can understand how a poorly educated individual could identify the "bluescreen makes a core dump" and "linux makes a core dump" and put it together incorrectly as "linux bluescreened." I believe this is why he's making this statement.
ah, yes. I suppose I jumped the gun and endured msnbc hell for no reason. Still, the clip was novel and the squid interesting.
Video is on this page but since it's on MSNBC, they bend you over and make you take it Internet Explorer style. Actually, I went ahead and opened it in IE and I'm stuck watching the Iams multicat commercial over and over because the advertisement stream keeps timing out just before the end and it just replays over and over again without letting me move on to the content.
Oop, there it goes. It's 21 seconds of video. And....I can't play it again. The "play" button on the embedded player is disabled after playing the stream once.
I tried to grab a screenshot but it didn't work. The embedded player's video acceleration doesn't draw to the screen bitmap but uses the overlay mode of the video card...
Well if you've got IE and you can put up with the headache required to see the video, it's there. The squid looks REALLY unusual and the 21 seconds of video are...hm, yeah, I'll say it's worth it.
of course if I had the $ and a good supply I'd never quit because marijuana gives me brilliant ideas and more creativity for my job.
I agree 100% with this statement. Lester Grinspoon MD, a former Harvard professor and all-around genius, has some things to say about his first experiences with marijuana, when he was in his 40s. He came to the conclusion that everything should be thought about both stoned and straight, in order to gain a great deal of perspective on any matter.
Marijuana effects everyone differently. Take into consideration as well that genetically, there are many different types ("strains") of Marijuana, which carry effects related to their genetic disposition. There are two main families of marijuana, Sativa and Indica. Sativa varieties are native to the equatorial regions in what would largely be considered tropical climates. North Africa, Vietnam, Thailand. Sativa varieties provide what is often called a "mental" high, a very uplifting and energetic feeling combined with inspirations and new ideas. Sativa varieties tend to be very tall and branchy with limited flower (bud, marijuana) production, which dramatically affects yields. Sativa connoisseurs however are always willing to sacrifice quantity for quality. Indica varieties are from places like Afghanistan, Turkey, Pakistan, more mountainous regions with higher elevations. Indica varieties tend to grow short and fat, shaped like a christmas tree. Indica varieties produce more flowers than Sativa varieties. Indica varieties provide a "body" high, with amplification of physical sensation, it makes you sleepy, it makes you just want to sit still. Most commercial marijuana is hybridized between these two main types of Marijauna, optimized for high and yield.
The point I'm getting at with the above paragraph is that commercial pot is sometimes a crap shoot when it comes to the effect, and since the effect generated is one generated through hybridization, the mix of cannabinoids may (and often does) affect different people differently. I know people who can't think straight ("maintain") while influenced by marijuana, and then there's people like me who don't even miss a beat.
I find marijuana carries one detriment that I must acknowledge: my short-term memory does suffer in terms of capacity and recollection ability, but I have a voice recorder to compensate for that, leaving me with oodles of insight and perspective with few recognizable detrimental side-effects.
Well, most "small" generators that run on gasoline are piston engines, and are quite inefficient. A mid-sized generator that runs on natural gas might be a turbine-based system however, able to glean efficiencies up to 60% and higher. Just about any type of power conversion is better than "gasoline powered generators."
Yes, I totally agree with you, because the same people who come up with a plan to build a reinforced door cannot come up with an idea to build a toilet or a snack bar in the cockpit as well. Yep, those engineers, they're so thoughtless and without intellect!
</sigh>
Bitch has undergone quite an evolution. Once used to describe a spiteful or overbearing woman, it is also more and more commonly being used to refer to a man as weak or contemptible.
Even moreso though, rap culture has brought out a usage in common language, where "bitch" = "woman" -- in the sentence, "let's get some bitches up in here." This is something that those using it in this context don't really see any problem with using, in this context...
So it's not so much the typers that they needed to slow down, as it was the hammers doing the typing. The only way to do that which occured to the men making the decisions at the time, was to move the keys around to cause those who are operating the keys to not operate them with such great rapidity.
I mean, saying that the QWERTY layout was made to slow down typists isn't really off the mark, if slowing down typists was seen as the only solution to the hammer collision problem, by way of causality; slow typists will get you slow hammers.
I saw a statistic recently that says that of the 60,000+ employees, only about 8,000 of them are developers. I'm not pulling this from my ass either, I saw it on a few flyers for the Microsoft Company Meeting 2005 (I work on the MS campus as a contractor). It was a breakdown of where the company was in 1975 and where it is now in 2005, contrasting the number of people in sales/development/total employees to their current numbers. Something like 7600 are sales people currently. I'm curious about the rest.
(For the company meeting, MS rents the sports stadium in Seattle, Safeco Field, for the annual company meeting. Where else can you fit 60,000 people?)
Close. It's "capeesh" in English, "capisce" in Italian.
It means "Understand."
I would hardly call that article enlightened. They compare the disaster response for Katrina to other hurricanes such as Hugo, Andrew, Dennis, and Iniki. Other hurricanes which didn't completely flood an entire city. It simply isn't a fair comparison at all.
"For instance, it took five days for National Guard troops to arrive in strength on the scene in Homestead, Fla. after Hurricane Andrew hit in 2002. But after Katrina, there was a significant National Guard presence in the afflicted region in three."
Homestead, Florida wasn't under eight to twenty feet of feces-laden and diseased water. Not a fair contrast at all.
Enlightened folks don't compare apples and oranges.
Such is slashdot.
;)
With such a low userid, you're very well-practiced by now, no doubt.
Or if the Governor of Louisiana had specifically asked the federal government for certain kinds of assistance...
She said "We need your help, we need everything." but she did not specifically request federal military support. Her press secretary said that she believed that such a specific request was not necessary.
I'm pretty sure that there are rules which regulate the deployment of federal troops within state borders. I think that it is indeed something that must be formally and specifically requested.
CNN.com has free video now, but it's free video that you can't link to (hardly "free" if you ask me). Go to CNN's homepage and watch the clip "Miscommunication Delayed Response" to hear the governor say to her press secretary in what looks like a rehearsal or perhaps a moment that the governor believed the cameras were not yet recording. She said on Wednesday (to her press secretary in a whisper while being recorded): "I really need to call for the military, I should have started that in the first call." These are pretty damning words to be said on tape.
Katrina was indeed predicted, and one of the bureaucrats said "We need your help, we need everything you've got." which meant to her "send planes, trains, buses, boats, food, water, shelters, etc" but she did not communicate such requests specifically.
And let's not forget the fact that Louisiana's National Guard are mostly deployed over in Iraq. They were not even in place or ready to help the state cope with the disaster, because the Federal government thinks they can be put to better use overseas. Let's also not forget that since 2003, the levy budget has been but a pittance due to lack of contribution by the federal government because of, specifically, needing to fund the Iraq war.
One more thing we can't forget is that a man can make a phone call and order thousands of people to be killed instantly by napalm, but that same man cannot make a phone call and order thousands of water bottles dropped on a city ravaged by a hurricane? Think about this one real carefully: We can more quickly and capably kill our purported enemies than we can help our own citizens. Is that the kind of nation you want to be a part of?
We do not need to control hurricanes, we need to control our government.
The movie operated on the premise that an electromagnetic weapon was used which caused a chain-reaction in the core (to stop said core) that could not be reversed using the same method which initiated it. They needed a certain proximity to various regions in the core in order to use nuclear weapons to churn the core up again and get it spinning.
People knock that movie left and right but I considered it thought-provoking. I enjoyed the part where they're in the mantle in their little tunneling train thing and they have to dodge the giant diamonds in their path because their tunneling laser cannot cut them. I also liked the notion of "unobtanium" -- a material which becomes stronger the more force you exert upon it. A similar idea was used in a recent episode of Stargate SG-1, where an energy shield was able to derive its power from the kinetic energy used in trying to destroy it, actually enabling the field to grow in size and encompass an entire planet (after, of course, being bull-headedly nuked, which provided 70% of the power it needed)
The notion of materials which increase in strength as they're put under stress is not totally unimaginable. I'm told actually that attempting to separate a quark pair would require a vast amount of energy because the attraction between the two quarks becomes exponentially stronger as you attempt to break them apart, to the point where enough energy would be present between the two quarks that two new quarks would be spontaneously created from that energy, leaving you with two new quark pairs. Is it possible to do more than just pair up quarks? Triplets, quadruplets, and so on? New forms of matter are just around the corner in this day and age...
The notion that the Earth's mantle is filled with diamonds the size of a Volkswagen is also not unreasonable. The mantle is a place of intense temperature and pressure where carbon would definitely be able to crystallize into diamond.
The movie takes a lot of criticism but is filled with a lot of interesting ideas.
I beg to differ. Aircraft carriers and nuclear submarines would be the first...
This is getting out of hand.
Terrorism is influencing the actions of a people through fear and terror.
I consider losing my civil rights to be something which I fear and I would consider an attempt to usurp my civil rights as terrorization.
The head of MI5 is proposing that in order to protect the people from terrorists, the government must terrorize its populace? Seriously, pardon my french here, but what the hell kind of crazy fucked-up shit is that?
I think Benjamin Franklin put it best, nearly 250 years ago: "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
What kind of qualifications did you need to get your foot in the door, so to speak? I've been doing Perl scripting (automation/batch processing) and Perl CGI work (dynamic websites, DB driven or otherwise) for about five years now, but I don't have a degree. Is the lack of a degree going to hold me back when it comes to government programming jobs? I've heard that not having a degree makes it difficult to gain employment with the government, but once you're employed it's your employment with a given division that matters more than the degree you may or may not have. Do you have any input on that? Also, if you don't mind, what is your position title?
Are you on the general schedule (GS) pay scale? Do you get yearly raises and nice benefits? I've often considered working for the government in a technical role.
Stop looking at the symptom and look at the problem: WHY did 72,000 people buy narcotic pain medication (illegally) from a spammer? Could it be because they're addicted? 72,000 people with a Vicodin addiction is not hard to imagine.
I think we'd be much better off if the FDA became a recommendations and guidelines agency and the entire concept of regulating what one can or can not put in their body was done away with. Then one could buy their vicodin over the counter, and they wouldn't need to get involved with a seedy spammer fella and his black-market crew.
You need to consider that selling vicodin through spam is only profitable because people are paying higher prices because of scarce or controlled supply. If the supply became less scarce (ie, you could buy anything without a prescription), the demand would be quenched and prices would fall, hopefully to the point where a spammer can no longer make money selling us anything because we can already get it with greater availability and guaranteed purity at the corner store.
Not to mention how much money the government can make by literally taxing pleasure. Everybody wins.
If you'll notice (speaking of being uninformed) I was talking about power generation in terms of kilowatts. You know, thousand-watt units. So even if 150W is the output power of this laser as you suppose, if it took 150,000 watts to generate that pulse, these engines are still up to the challenge.